The Guardian

• Dangerous temperatures forecast for parts of Europe as heatwave moves east

  Red warnings issued in Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Balkans, with authorities urging people to stay indoors

  Parts of central, eastern and southern Europe sweltered on Monday as the “heat dome” behind last week’s record-breaking temperatures shifted east, bringing dangerous conditions to a new swathe of the continent.

  Budapest is forecast to exceed 40C on Tuesday, according to models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

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• New campaign urges public to reduce water use as UK emerges from heatwave

  Exclusive: £75m publicity drive will ask people to treat water as precious resource and cut daily use by 28 litres

  The biggest ever campaign to encourage the public to reduce their water use will launch this week, as the UK emerges from record temperatures attributed to the climate crisis.

  The £75m publicity drive, called Let’s Save Water, will advise and encourage people to treat water as a precious resource and has a target for everyone to cut their daily use by 28 litres – or two large buckets – from the current average use of about 140 litres a day.

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• ‘Literally growing the future’: volunteers help save Scottish rainforest by collecting 11m seeds

  Teams painstakingly combed endangered Atlantic habitat over several years, helping to grow 8m native trees

  A small band of volunteers has helped to grow nearly 8m native trees in Scotland, crucial to efforts to restore lost parts of the Atlantic rainforest, after collecting 11m seeds by hand.

  About 100 volunteers, including retired teachers and doctors, office workers and young families, have spent tens of thousands of hours venturing into often remote woods in the western Highlands and islands to search out seed-bearing trees.

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• ‘We’re up against forces that have all the money in the world’: Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres

  In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global

  When Erin Brockovich woke to find 30 emails from people from the same town, she realised something was going on. People email Brockovich all the time because of what happened in 1993, when she was instrumental in suing Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) on behalf of residents of the town of Hinkley, California, whose groundwater had been contaminated. The case resulted in a settlement of $333m – then the largest ever payout for a direct-action lawsuit. When she was immortalised by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, she became the hero we didn’t know we needed, a modern day Joan of Arc. She had won against PG&E with no formal legal training.

  The emails she received a few weeks ago were about datacentres. In April, she put a callout on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied. Tech companies have needed datacentres to power their technology “for ever”, she says, but the new ones being built to power AI? “This feels like Hinkley on steroids.”

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• ‘British food will disappear’: trade deal after Brexit is hitting UK farmers hard

  Home-grown food may become a niche product for wealthy in our supermarkets as British farmers’ incomes plummet

  For Liz Webster, who farms 647 hectares (1600 acres) in Wiltshire, south west England, the latest impact of Brexit has been particularly brutal. About £400 per animal has been wiped off the price she can get for her beef cattle, a hefty blow at a time when all the inputs – feed, energy, fertiliser – are going through the roof.

  The fall in price, on livestock that typically fetch £2,000 to £3,000 per animal, is the result of a flood of cheaper meat arriving from Australia, the result of one of the new trade deals the government has signed since the UK left the European Union. Prices for beef in the supermarkets have remained broadly the same, but farmers have seen their income plummet.

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