When Labor came to power federally after almost a decade in opposition, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek pledged to turn around Australia’s worsening environmental woes, from extinctions to land clearing to climate change.

While the government has made progress on climate action, protecting biodiversity hasn’t got out of the starting blocks.

In the latest example of inaction, proposed laws to create an independent environmental regulator, Environmental Protection Australia, appear stalled in the Senate. Labor needs the backing of the Coalition or the Greens to push the reform through. At the time of writing, no deals looked likely.

This is a real problem. A stream of audits and reviews have shown Australia’s environmental laws are not fit for purpose. Change is possible – but hard. Keeping the status quo is far easier, no matter how dysfunctional it is.

Pushback in and out of parliament

The latest impasse stems from efforts to overhaul Australia’s ageing and feeble national environment laws, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

The failings of the law are no secret. In 2020, an independent review by Graeme Samuel delivered blunt findings: the laws were simply not protecting nature.

Labor drafted stronger laws, but developers and miners quickly pushed back.

So Labor changed tack. It pivoted to a staged reform process – with the full-scale revamp delayed indefinitely.

This week, Labor attempted to pass at least some change – a bill to create an independent environmental regulator, Environmental Protection Australia. But it ran into major roadblocks.

Mining companies such as Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and Rio Tinto pushed for the regulator to be stripped of its powers in a private letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

And Coalition and Greens senators delivered stinging critiques, arguing variously that the regulator would be too strong or too weak.

Crossbenchers and the Greens say to win their support, Labor must end native forest logging nationally and require consideration of climate damage when assessing projects such as new coal mines for approvals.

How did we get into this mess?

In 2000, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act came into force, superseding a patchwork of previous laws.

The laws focused on threatened species and ecosystems but did not mention damage done by climate change.

Almost a quarter of a century later, we still have the same set of laws, described as ineffective or little enforced in audits and reviews.

Every year since the act came into force, Austalia’s threatened species populations have actually fallen 2-3%.

When development, agriculture and infrastructure projects do get assessed under these laws, about 99% are approved.

Experts have found the laws permit ongoing destruction of critical habitat for threatened species.

Why? While the environment minister of the day is required to consider environmental impacts of a proposal, they can essentially rule any way they like – even if it goes against the opinion of independent environmental experts, or their own bureaucrats.

Why is change so hard?

The 2020 Samuel review recommended new “national environmental standards” be enforced. These would mean explicitly defining what outcomes for nature we are aiming for, and making sure a development proposal met that standard.

For example, one proposed standard would disallow “unacceptable or unsustainable impacts” on matters of national environmental significance. These matters include internationally important wetlands and nationally threatened species. Other standards include preservation of Australia’s natural world heritage sites, such as the Great Barrier Reef.

In late 2022, Plibersek released Labor’s official response in the form of the Nature Positive Plan.

The plan seemed promising. It recognised the dire state of Australia’s species and ecosystems and labelled the current laws “ineffective”. It promised national environmental standards.

Plibersek vowed to consult on further changes. This led to a proposal to replace the EPBC Act with stronger laws, and create a new regulator – Environment Protection Australia.

As initiailly proposed, this independent agency would have power to make development decisions and ensure compliance. It would only grant approval to a project if it was consistent with national environmental standards. The minister could still step in, but had to give public reasons for doing so, and take advice from the regulator.

However, major lobby groups opposed the proposed overhaul of the laws.

In response, Plibersek changed tactics. She announced environmental reform would be in three stages.

The first was the Nature Repair Market, which passed Parliament late last year. The second stage involved the laws now before the Senate: creating Environment Protection Australia in a weaker form (without the restrictions on discretion in the initial proposal) and a data and monitoring agency, Environment Information Australia.

If passed, these bills would create a protection agency – but one which could only enforce the same weak approval laws and be subject to the same broad discretion for the decision-maker. For the agency to have teeth, the government would need to pass stage three, which would reduce discretion, introduce stronger environment laws and create legally binding National Environmental Standards.

Unfortunately, Labor has now deferred these indefinitely.

Stalled at stage two

The government is clearly struggling to pass its stage two reforms.

Conservationists are increasingly worried by the delays, while Western Australia’s mining companies have come out strongly against the EPA.

This is a problem for Labor. Western Australia was instrumental in the party’s election win in 2022 and it needs to shore up seats in the mining-heavy state ahead of the next federal election.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has pledged to be the mining sector’s best friend if elected, by cutting “green tape”, fast tracking resource projects and defunding the Environmental Defenders Office.

And the Greens are showing little sign of compromise on their demands.

All this is bad news for our threatened species and sick ecosystems. We know what needs to be done. But our government is showing worrying signs of letting industry and developers control their environmental agenda.

Justine Bell-James, Associate Professor in Environment and Property Law, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia is no stranger to extreme weather. From heatwaves and droughts to flooding rains, hailstorms or fire weather, our continent experiences it all.

To help Australians prepare for these hazards, the Bureau of Meteorology regularly briefs emergency services and governments, along with providing forecasts and advanced warnings for the public when severe weather approaches.

The latest spring and summer briefing shows the rest of this year is likely to be warmer than normal, with more extreme heat events possible.

We need to prepare for fire risks and severe storms. There’s also every chance the nation could experience multiple extreme events at any one time – concurrently or in rapid succession – in different parts of the country. Here’s what we expect to see.

Our most severe weather usually starts in October

Australia’s severe weather season is really from October to April.

But in the past few weeks, we’ve seen extreme heat across most of the country, severe winds in the southeast, floods in Tasmania, and even damaging hail in parts of Victoria.

With those unusually extreme events already happening across much of Australia, many people will be worried about the next few months.

The Bureau of Meteorology monitors current conditions and the drivers of Australian climate, then forecasts weather for the coming days and climate conditions for the coming months.

On Friday, the bureau’s general manager for environmental prediction, Matt Collopy, presented this outlook below at the National Situation Room in Canberra.

What will the rest of 2024 look like?

Australia’s climate and the likelihood of severe weather varies depending on the behaviour of climate drivers, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole. This is particularly true at this time of year, when the connections between these drivers and Australian weather and climate are strongest.

At the moment, we have neutral conditions in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but a higher-than-normal likelihood of a La Niña developing. Without strong climate drivers, the seasonal outlook for Australia is less certain than if we had established El Niño/La Niña or positive/negative Indian Ocean Dipole events in place.

Nevertheless, with a higher chance of La Niña, a slightly wetter-than-normal outlook, and above-average rates of runoff already flowing into some eastern Australian rivers, the chance of river flooding is higher than normal for the next few months, particularly in Tasmania. On the plus side, wetter than average soils across much of eastern Australia reduces the risk of dust storms in coming months.

Western and Central Victoria, on the other hand, have had a dry few months and river flows are below average. Drought is continuing and there’s not a strong signal for either wet or dry conditions in the seasonal outlook for this region.

The risks of a very warm spring

Having just experienced the warmest August on record, it is perhaps no surprise that Australia is likely to have another very warm spring. This is accompanied by a heightened chance of extreme heat events.

Continued high temperatures in the seas around Australia raise the chance of marine heatwaves, particularly in the Tasman Sea this spring.

With the warmer conditions and a lack of a strong rainfall signal in the forecast, there is a raised risk of bushfires this spring across much of northeastern Australia, as well as in the drought-affected areas of Victoria and southeastern South Australia. A summer bushfire outlook will come in November.

The bureau is also warning people in and around Canberra to beware of thunderstorm asthma, in which storms induce breathing difficulties. But these events are hard to forecast this far out from October-December, when such events are most frequent.

Similarly, while tropical cyclones are a major weather hazard across northern Australia, it is hard to make useful forecasts for the summer and early autumn season at this stage. The bureau will publish its tropical cyclone outlook next month.

Preparing for more extremes

With so much potential for extreme weather and significant risks to lives and livelihoods, it’s useful to know what lies ahead.

The outlook helps Australians prepare for the severe weather on the horizon. As the climate varies from one year to the next, the likelihood of different types of severe weather changes. This is happening on top of background trends related to the warming of the planet.

In the future, with continued global warming, Australians will experience more extreme heat and there will more often be a heightened risk of bushfires.

In Australia’s southwest and southeast, we expect droughts to worsen too, while increases in short-duration extreme rainfall are on the cards for most of us.

Forecasting of extreme weather will continue to improve, helping us prepare for some hazards. But reducing greenhouse gas emissions will also help to limit rises in the frequency and intensity of these extreme weather events.

Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s not easy finding food at sea. Seabirds often stay aloft, scanning the churning waters for elusive prey. Most seabirds take fish, squid, or other prey from the first few metres of seawater. Scavenging is common.

But there are other tactics. Frigatebirds, skuas, and gulls rely on the success of other seabirds. These large, strong birds chase, harry, and attack their targets until they regurgitate or drop the prey they’ve just caught. They’re the pirates of the seabird world, stealing hard-earned meals from other species. This behaviour is known as kleptoparasitism, from the Ancient Greek word kléptēs, thief.

The strategy is brutal, effective, and a core behaviour for these important seabirds. But as our new research shows, it comes with major risks for the thieves. The new strain of avian flu is killing birds by their millions – and we found kleptoparasitism could spread the virus very easily.

Food thieves at sea

It’s not that frigatebirds, skuas, and gulls can’t hunt. They can and do catch their own food. But hunting fish and squid is hard work. It’s much easier to use extortion tactics to win the food from other seabirds.

These tactics have made these birds very successful as foragers. They hang around the breeding sites of birds such as gannets and terns waiting for a tired parent to return from the sea with a crop of food.

For the seabirds being targeted, these kleptoparasitic birds are just one more threat. The world’s 362 species of seabird can be found across every ocean and many islands. At sea, they prey on fish and squid. When they nest or rest on islands, their nutrient-rich guano shapes soil and plant communities, defining entire ecosystems.

But they are not doing well. Just under half of all seabird species (155) are now classified between “near threatened” and “critically endangered” on the world’s list of threatened species, the IUCN Red List. Of those with known trends, 56% have populations in decline.

The threats they face are daunting. Invasive predators such as mice and rats eat eggs or chicks on breeding islands. Many are caught by fishing boats as accidental bycatch, while overfishing depletes their prey. Then there’s climate change, habitat loss, and many other threats, including disease.

Seabirds are generally long-lived. They often raise only one chick every one or two years. Many species breed in only a few locations. They take many years to mature. Put together, these traits make recovery from population declines slow.

Of parasites and viruses

Three years ago, a more lethal strain of avian influenza virus emerged. This HPAI H5N1 2.3.4.4b strain has spread around the world, killing at least 280 million wild birds. The strain can also infect and kill marine mammals such as seals.

“HPAI” stands for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, meaning the virus can more readily cause severe disease and death. The strain has become an animal pandemic (formally, a panzootic). It’s made it to Antarctica, but not yet to Australia or the rest of Oceania.

We know seabirds are particularly at risk. Our new research has shown kleptoparasites are at an even higher risk relative to other seabirds.

During the 2022 northern hemisphere summer, the virus killed roughly half of the world’s great skua (Stercorarius skua).

Food-stealing behaviour can enable the virus to spread. When a great skua harasses a gannet and makes it regurgitate food, the skua gets a fish meal – coated in saliva. If the gannet is infectious, its saliva will likely have a high viral load.

Once infected, these pirate birds can drive spread faster. Skuas, frigatebirds and gulls can cover great distances across polar regions and the tropics. They can transmit the disease to their mates, chicks, and other seabirds.

This means we could see outbreaks in new populations or places, hundreds or even thousands of kilometres apart. We have already seen signs of this in skua populations in the northern and southern hemispheres, with brown (Stercorarius antarcticus) and great skuas being some of the first detected H5N1 infections at new locations.

Skuas more often steal food from other seabirds when away from their breeding sites – including when they’re migrating back to these areas. If skuas get infected en route, they could bring the disease to their breeding sites and then beyond.

Frigatebirds are known for the red pouches on the necks of the males, which they inflate during breeding season. But they have other remarkable traits, such as travelling tens of thousands of kilometres across oceans outside breeding season. These travels are often broken up by “island-hopping”, where they will encounter and potentially infect other seabirds.

Frigatebirds and skuas have already suffered mass deaths from this strain of avian influenza.

While the virus is now almost everywhere, it hasn’t reached Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, and parts of Antarctica and the subantarctic. We can monitor skuas, frigatebirds and gulls for signs of illness to give us early warning that the virus has arrived.

By itself, avian influenza is a major threat to seabirds. But the outlook is even more dire when this is compounded with further human-caused threats. Identifying, managing, and reducing these threats is critical for their conservation, and the health of our islands and oceans.

Simon Gorta, PhD Candidate in ecology, UNSW Sydney; Richard Kingsford, Professor, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW Sydney, and Rohan Clarke, Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia has debated and studied high-speed rail for four decades. The High Speed Rail Authority has begun work on a project that could finally deliver some high-speed rail in the 2030s.

The Albanese government set up the authority in 2022. It also committed A$500 million to plan and protect a high-speed rail corridor between Sydney and Newcastle. This corridor was prioritised due to significant capacity constraints on the existing line, among other reasons.

The ultimate plan is for a high-speed rail network to connect Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and regional communities across the east coast. The network would help Australia in its urgent task to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. These continue to increase even as emissions from other sectors fall.

The authority has now publicly outlined plans for the first stage of this east coast network. After a history of failed proposals dating back to 1984, the new plans provide some cause for optimism that Australia could have some high-speed rail by 2037.

What is high-speed rail and why do we need it?

The International Rail Union of Railways defines high-speed rail as new lines designed for speeds of 250km/h or more and upgraded lines for speeds of at least 200km/h.

High-speed rail could greatly reduce transport emissions by replacing air travel in particular.

For example, the 7.92 million passengers flying between Melbourne and Sydney in 2023-24 produced about 1.5 million tonnes of emissions. Including travel to and from airports and other flight routes along the corridor (Sydney or Melbourne to Canberra, Albury etc), this adds up to about 2% of annual domestic transport emissions.

A Sydney–Melbourne high-speed rail link could cut emissions to a fraction of those from air and road transport. If Australia is to achieve net zero by 2050, a shift to rail will be essential.

High-speed city-to-city rail services will be needed to become an attractive alternative to air travel.

What is the authority working on?

Early this year the High Speed Rail Authority gained a new CEO, Tim Parker, with extensive experience in delivering mega-projects. In late August, the authority outlined its plans at an industry briefing in Newcastle.

The authority has commissioned eight studies, including a business case for a Sydney–Newcastle line. Significantly, it will include the cost of future highway upgrades if high-speed rail does not proceed. This study, along with a report on how high-speed rail will proceed along Australia’s east coast, is due by the end of this year.

Also under way is a geotechnical study that includes drilling 27 boreholes. It will help determine the proposed depths of two long rail tunnels and guide decisions on crossing the Hawkesbury River and the route to the Central Coast and on to Newcastle.

All going well, including land acquisition and agreements with the New South Wales government (which could include funding), work could start in 2027 and be completed by 2037.

Many questions remain

Given the time and money required to deliver a Sydney–Newcastle line, bipartisan support will be needed. However, the federal opposition is yet to make a clear commitment to high-speed rail.

There are other uncertainties too. Will the trains be operated by the public or private sector? The latter was the intention for projects that were scrapped decades ago, such as the CSIRO-proposed Very Fast Train (VFT) linking Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, and the Sydney–Canberra Speedrail.

And how will the engineering projects be delivered? The new authority must learn from the project management problems in delivering the Inland Rail freight line. The project is running late and costs have blown out.

Some major federally funded government projects have worked well. These include upgrades of the national highway system (by state road authorities and contractors) and the new Western Sydney International Airport, which is nearing completion.

And what about a full Sydney–Melbourne line?

The big question is when work will start on a Sydney–Melbourne high-speed rail service. In 2019, International High-Speed Rail Association chairman Masafumi Shukuri estimated building this line could take 20 years.

The present line is 60km longer than it should be as the route dates back to the steam age. It also has far too many tight curves. This means train travel on this line is slower than cars and trucks.

As former NSW State Rail chief Len Harper said in 1995, this railway was already “inadequate for current and future needs” even back then.

When the VFT was proposed in 1984, questions were raised as to whether our population was big enough for such a project. Now, more than 15.5 million people live in NSW, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. Melbourne–Sydney is the world’s fifth-busiest flight route.

Advocacy group Fastrack Australia has called for a Sydney–Melbourne track built to high-speed standards and able to carry freight. The estimated travel time is four hours.

This group and the Rail Futures Institute propose the line be built in stages, with priority given to the section from near Macarthur to Mittagong in NSW. This would reduce the current line’s length by about 18km and allow for better Sydney–Canberra train services.

Urgent action is needed to protect the rail corridor from encroaching urban development.

Australia needs to catch up

In June 2023, when the new authority started work, I observed that Australia must surely hold the world record for studies into high-speed rail with no construction.

In stark contrast, this October marks the 60th anniversary of the world’s first dedicated high-speed rail line, the Tokaido Shinkansen in Japan linking Tokyo to Shin-Osaka. The network has since grown in stages to about 3,000km of lines.

Today, high-speed rail operates in 21 countries over about 60,000km of lines – China has about 40,000km. Indonesia’s high-speed rail service between Jakarta and Bandung started running last year. India and Thailand are in the advanced stages of delivering high-speed rail. It’s also under construction in another 11 countries.

Australia could finally join them in the next few years if it starts building the Sydney–Newcastle line.

Philip Laird, Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For people in southeast Australia, springtime means soaking up the sun and getting our vitamin D levels back to baseline. But we’re not the only ones likely to be basking. Snakes are getting out and about, too.

A flurry of snake sightings in southern states during spring is nothing new. Snakes emerge from their winter hiding holes when the weather warms.

But we are often asked: will climate change lead to more encounters with our scaly neighbours? It’s a fair question.

Evidence suggests climate change could make snakes come out of hiding earlier. But it’s also likely to cause population declines or shifts in the long run, as snakes adjust to the new conditions.

So what conditions do snakes like?

Snakes are “ectotherms”. This means their internal body temperature depends on the surrounding environment and varies throughout the day and the season. People, on the other hand, are endotherms. We maintain a constant body temperature around 37°C.

Many snakes prefer a lower body temperature of 28–32°C. Cooler-climate species like to keep their bodies cooler still. But even then, they aren’t really “cold-blooded” if they can help it.

Unless it’s really hot, snakes need to chase the heat as soon as they wake up. This enables them to rapidly raise their body temperature to the optimal level so they can go about their daily or nightly routine. They can’t cool themselves by panting or sweating, so they need to shelter from the heat if it’s too hot.

In Australia, snake activity follows distinct patterns in the tropical north and more temperate south.

In the north, where temperatures are consistently warm, snakes avoid the harsh heat and are most active during early mornings, night time, and following the wet season (April to June).

In the south, snakes go into hiding during the cooler months. They slow their metabolism to almost zero and essentially sleep (or “brumate”) through the winter.

These southern snakes get ready to hunker down in autumn as the days begin to shorten. Sensing shorter days in winter keeps them asleep, preventing them from using fat stores or eating food they will not be warm enough to digest. That’s why even a warm sunny day in the middle of winter may not wake them up.

A combination of daily temperatures and daylight hours in spring then triggers southern snakes to wake up and begin the breeding season.

How will climate change modify snake activity?

Australia is likely to warm up to 5°C by the end of this century under a high-emissions scenario. What would that mean for snake activity?

When wild tiger snake body temperatures and activity were measured in Perth’s spring, the snakes only emerged from shelter once their bodies reached 16°C – provided it wasn’t raining. An increase in daily temperatures would mean these tiger snakes start (and end) their days earlier. They may also, at least initially, emerge earlier in the season.

Studies around the world have found snakes becoming active for more days of the year, and feeding more as daily average temperatures increase.

Does this mean we should be concerned about increasing snake populations?

No. The increase in temperatures means most snakes should be avoiding the peak summer heat and we may see less of them. We may also find more snakes become nocturnal.

Even if we do see more snakes, this may not mean the snake population has increased – perhaps the opposite. As snakes generally don’t want to be seen, increased visibility could indicate snakes are stressed. This may be an early warning sign of population decline.

Does climate change threaten Australian snakes?

Ten years ago, one study assessed the potential impact of climate change on Australian elapids (front-fanged venomous snakes) — the most common family of snakes in Australia. The range of most (65%) species was expected to shrink. A smaller proportion (13%) of species was predicted to expand their range, these being the semi-arid and arid-zone species.

Among commonly encountered species, red-bellied black snakes and tiger snakes were expected to suffer range contractions under four different models and scenarios. But the eastern brown snake could go either way.

Climate change is also increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires across the globe. While many Australian animal species are adapted to fire, some already on the brink might be pushed over the edge by climate change-driven shifts in fire regimes. For example, the Black Summer fires razed more than 70% of the endangered broad-headed snake’s habitat. These fires caused population crashes of 26–34% in this imperilled snake species.

Ultimately, snakes may become active earlier but may suffer declines in the long run as they adjust to the new climate.

What does this mean for snake bite risk in Australia?

If changes in climate do increase encounters between humans and snakes – and the jury is still out at this stage – there is always the possibility this could lead to more snake bites.

But we can influence the outcome by choosing how to behave around snakes. If we’re vigilant — alert but not alarmed — when we’re in snake habitat, the chances of a bite are low (just make sure you know first aid).

A snake seen and left alone poses little threat to humans. If we wish to avoid bites, we must also supervise children and pets (and keep dogs on leads, and cats indoors). Raise children to become snake smart as early as possible. Remember to look where you are stepping, listen, and leave snakes alone.

Damian Lettoof, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Wildlife Ecotoxicology, CSIRO; Chris J Jolly, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in behavioural ecology and evolution, Macquarie University, and Timothy N. W. Jackson, Research Fellow and Co-head, Australian Venom Research Unit, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The goal of the 2021 Global Methane Pledge is bold: cut methane emissions by 30% by the end of the decade. This is to buy us vital time to work on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Over 150 nations have now signed up to the pledge – representing more than half of the world’s emissions of an extremely potent but short-lived greenhouse gas.

To put the pledge into action, many leaders announced policies to cut methane. However, the latest research shows global methane emissions are still rising rapidly. Atmospheric concentrations are now growing faster than at any other time since global record-keeping began about 40 years ago.

These findings are published today in our fourth global methane budget, in a paper and pre-print research undertaken through the Global Carbon Project, with contributions from 66 research institutions around the world.

Natural sources of methane include decaying organic matter in wetlands. But humans have supercharged methane emissions. We tracked changes in all major sources and sinks of this potent greenhouse gas and found humans are now responsible for two-thirds or more of all global emissions.

This is a problem, but we can improve upon it. Cutting methane emissions is one of the best and only short-term levers we can pull to slow the rate of climate change.

Why is methane so important?

After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to human-driven global warming.

Although human activities emit much less methane than carbon dioxide in real terms, methane has a hidden punch – it’s 80 times as effective as CO₂ in trapping heat in the first two decades after it reaches the atmosphere.

Since the pre-industrial era, the world has heated up by 1.2°C (taken as an average of the past 10 years). Methane is responsible for about 0.5°C of warming, according to the latest reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the atmosphere, methane rapidly mixes with oxygen and converts into carbon dioxide and water. By contrast, carbon dioxide is a much more stable molecule and will stay in the atmosphere, trapping heat, for thousands of years until absorbed by ocean and plants.

The combination of short lifespan and extreme potency make methane an excellent candidate for efforts to rapidly tackle climate change.

Methane is not slowing

In the early-to-mid-2000s, methane emissions growth rates actually fell. Analyses suggest it was driven by a combination of reduced fossil fuels emissions and chemical changes in the atmosphere’s capacity to destroy methane.

Since then, however, methane has surged. Methane emissions from human activities increased by 50-60 million tonnes per year over the two decades to 2018-2020 – a 15-20% increase.

This doesn’t mean atmospheric methane goes up by the same amount, as methane is constantly being broken down.

During the 2000s, an extra 6.1 million tonnes of methane entered the atmosphere each year. By the 2010s, the rate of growth was 20.9 million tonnes. In 2020, growth hit 42 million tonnes. Since then, methane has been added even more rapidly. Growth rates are now higher than any previously observed year.

Where does the methane come from?

Human activities such as farming livestock, coal mining, extracting and handling natural gas, growing rice in paddies, and putting organic waste in landfills contribute about 65% of all methane emissions. Of this, agriculture (livestock and rice paddies) contributes 40%, fossil fuels 36%, and landfills and wastewater 17%.

Methane emissions from fossil fuels are now comparable to livestock emissions. The fastest growing contributors are from landfill and fossil fuels (think natural gas escaping during extraction and processing).

Our impact is even higher when we account for indirect emissions such as the leaching of organic matter into waterways and wetlands, the construction of reservoirs, and the impacts of human-driven climate change on wetlands.

In 2020, human activities led to emissions of between 370 and 384 million tonnes of methane.

The remaining emissions come from natural sources, primarily the decomposition of plant matter in wetlands, rivers, lakes, and water-saturated soils. Tropical wetlands are particularly large emitters. The world’s large areas of permafrost (permanently frozen ground) also produce methane, but at relatively low rates. As permafrost melts due to higher temperatures, this is changing.

Regional contributions and trends

Who emits most? By volume, the top five nations in 2020 were China (16%), India (9%), the United States (7%), Brazil (6%) and Russia (5%). The fastest-growing areas are China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

European nations have begun to lower their emissions over the last two decades, due to efforts to cut emissions from landfill and waste, followed by smaller cuts in fossil fuels and farming. Australia may also be lowering emissions mainly from farming and waste.

What does this mean for net zero?

Unchecked methane emissions are bad news. Recent observed atmospheric concentrations of methane are consistent with climate scenarios with up to 3°C of warming by 2100.

To keep global temperatures well-below 2°C – the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement – means cutting methane emissions as rapidly as possible. Methane has to be cut almost in half (45%) by 2050 to achieve that goal.

It’s not an impossible problem. We now have have methods of rapidly cutting methane for every sector.

The oil and gas sector could cut their emissions 40% at no net cost, according to the International Energy Agency.

In agriculture, we can achieve rapid reductions by feed additives to reduce methane belched from cows, sheep, goats and buffalo, and by mid-season drainage in rice paddies.

Capturing landfill methane and using it for energy production or heat is now well established.

Three years ago, the world committed to slash methane emissions. Our findings show that we need to rapidly accelerate solutions across the globe to address and reduce methane emissions.

Pep Canadell, Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Environment; Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO; Marielle Saunois, Enseignant-chercheur, Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l’environnement (LSCE), Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) – Université Paris-Saclay , and Rob Jackson, Professor, Department of Earth System Science, and Chair of the Global Carbon Project, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s now very likely Australia will be announced as the host of the COP31 global climate talks in 2026 alongside Pacific nations. This would be a very big deal. The talks run for a fortnight and draw tens of thousands of delegates. It would be the largest diplomatic summit Australia has ever held, with satellite events in Pacific nations.

A decision – made by other countries in our United Nations regional grouping – is expected in November. Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane have already signalled interest in hosting.

Hosting these talks can boost national fortunes. When the United Kingdom hosted the talks in 2021, it was their biggest international success after the pain of Brexit, winning friends and influence.

The talks would bring global attention – and heighten expectations. Playing host would cement Australia’s place in the emerging net-zero economy, galvanise the federal government’s green industry plans and rapidly build the trade and diplomatic ties needed to develop new markets for clean energy goods.

In a Climate Council and Smart Energy Council report released today, we lay out how important these talks would be to shift Australia away from fossil-fuel exports, switch from mining dirty to mining clean, rebuild our position in the acutely climate-aware Pacific and secure new economic opportunities in Asia.

A talkfest – but a vital one

Critics of these talks often frame them as a bloated international talkfest where nothing actually happens.

But consider the problem. Almost 200 countries with very different interests send representatives. Island nations in the Pacific don’t profit from fossil fuel sales, but face the loss of their land to the sea and their reefs to the heat. Major fossil fuel exporters, however, have an incentive to go slow.

As extreme weather and marine heating intensify, the climate crisis is becoming more visible everywhere. People are being forced from their homes in Tuvalu and Lismore alike. A third of Australians worry extreme weather may force them to permanently relocate. We all have a shared interest in going fast.

Progress is finally happening. After the crucial 2015 Paris Agreement, COP talks have been characterised by negotiation over how to cut greenhouse gas emissions and shift away from fossil fuels. At these talks, countries also assess progress toward their shared goals and wealthier nations may pledge support to help developing countries deal with climate impacts.

But they are more than this. They are also a de facto global trade fair, bringing together major players in clean energy industries and providing a platform to attract global investment in local projects. As host, Australia could shape the agenda for important informal discussions alongside the formal meetings.

There’s already interest from Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney in hosting the talks.

Major sporting events such as the Commonwealth Games often require custom-built facilities. But the COP talks just need good conference centres, hotels and transport. Hosting the UN talks could deliver the chosen city a windfall of between A$100-210 million, equivalent to about four AFL grand finals. Hosting the 2021 talks added an estimated A$1 billion to the overall UK economy.

All signs suggest the Australia/Pacific bid is likely to be chosen. The 2026 COP host will be decided by countries in the ‘Western Europe and Other’ regional grouping at the UN (COP hosting is rotated among regions). There’s already public support from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland and Canada. The other bidder, Türkiye, does not currently have public backing.

Australia’s bid has widespread domestic support. A recent Lowy poll found 70% of Australians are supportive. Business groups are also supportive, while major banks are already working to unlock private sector investment in anticipation.

What would it mean for Australia-Pacific relationships?

Pacific island countries see climate change as their “single greatest” threat. Leaders see climate change impacts — stronger cyclones, devastating floods, rising seas, dying reefs and ocean acidification — as more tangible and immediate threats than geopolitical manoeuvring.

Pacific nations have long worked together at COP talks to drive global climate action. They have earned a reputation for sticking to the science, and were instrumental in securing landmark climate deals like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

On climate, Australia can now bring more to the table. Already, 40% of the main grid runs on clean energy. That figure will likely reach 80% by 2030. Australia is funding a range of Pacific climate adaptation programs.

A key tension remains, however. Pacific island nations have urged major powers to phase out fossil fuel production, while Australia has recently emerged as one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters.

Co-hosting COP31 could help this tension by signalling Australia’s shift from fossil fuel heavyweight to clean energy powerhouse.

New economic opportunities in Asia (and beyond)

Global demand and investment is shifting from fossil fuels to clean energy commodities.

To reach net zero, the International Energy Agency suggests fossil fuels will drop from 80% of total energy supply in 2022 to 20% by 2050. Demand for coal, oil and gas is now expected to decline this decade.

Japan, China and South Korea buy over two-thirds of Australia’s coal and gas exports. But Japan and Korea now plan to double clean energy generation by 2030, while China commissioned as much solar in 2023 as the whole world did in 2022.

These shifts have huge implications. Last week, the Climate Change Authority released modelling showing Australia’s fossil fuel exports would fall 60% by 2050 if we and our trading partners take strong climate action – while our other mineral and metal exports would surge by 65%.

If the Australia/Pacific COP bid gets up as expected, the federal government must begin shaping the agenda now.

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the climate changes, large parts of southern Australia are projected to get drier. Extreme rains are also becoming more common.

For farmers, these changes pose big risks. What can we do to manage changes already locked in? One adaptation is ensuring water soaks into spongy soils rather than evaporates or runs off into waterways.

This is where biochar comes in. You might be familiar with the use of this charcoal-like substance to store more carbon in soil. But biochar has another very useful property: it’s often highly porous. If you add it to soils, it can store water from rain or irrigation until plants draw it out. It can also help unlock soil nutrients and restore soils degraded from overuse.

This year, biochar experts released a farmers’ guide covering how to use biochar to boost drought resilience, maximise crop yields and increase disease resistance.

But how do you make it sustainably and at scale? Our new research has found one answer – use green waste from our gardens and also mix it with other suitable sources.

What’s so good about biochar?

Biochar looks like traditional charcoal. But charcoal comes from wood and is used for fuel. Demand for charcoal drives deforestation in some countries.

Biochar can be made from everything from food waste to wastewater biosolids, to forestry waste or agricultural waste such as wheat straw and nut shells. It’s made by heating organic matter in low oxygen, a process called pyrolysis.

Pyrolysis typically produces more energy than it uses, meaning biochar manufacturing can also produce bioenergy. Pyrolysis has far lower carbon emissions than if the waste was incinerated or left to decompose in landfill.

Biochar came to global notice as a promising way to combat climate change. In 2018 it was recognised for the first time as a possible negative emissions technology.

This is because the biochar process locks up its existing carbon and adds to it by increasing soil carbon. If scaled up, biochar could store substantial amounts of carbon which cannot be lost to wildfires or microbial breakdown.

But biochar has another key benefit: it can store a surprisingly large volume of water. A single kilo of biochar can store up to 4 litres of water.

When rain falls or when farmers irrigate, biochar-improved soil holds water for longer. In sandy soils where water drains quickly, biochar can hold it for more than ten days and slowly release it as crop roots need moisture.

When we add good quality biochar to soil, we make soil more porous. This provides space to hold water, for soil microbes to colonise, and for air to circulate. In turn, this improves access to soil nutrients for plants.

What are the downsides? At present, we don’t know enough about whether pyrolysis removes all chemicals of concern, or if some risks outweigh the benefits over the long-term. So-called “forever chemicals” may not be completely destroyed by pyrolysis. And if pyrolysis is not designed properly, toxic dioxins can form.

In some circumstances, biochar could nudge soil microbes to produce chemicals that are not beneficial. Biochar could also add salts, trace metals or other toxins to the soil if contaminated organic waste is used.

These issues can largely be avoided with careful design of biochar engineering processes and testing.

Different feedstocks materials?, different biochar

Earlier this year, we published research confirming good quality biochar stores carbon for hundreds of years.

The choice of raw materials for biochar makes a big difference. When manufacturers used woody materials, we found the biochar was highly stable. But biochar from biosolids (solids derived from wastewater) was less stable.

A particularly good type of biochar is made from wood, branches and grasses. This biochar boosts access to potassium and calcium in loamy or sandy soils, tackles salty soils and gives plants better access to nitrogen. Using biochar doesn’t mean you stop using fertilisers – but it can help farmers get more out of soil additives. It also has a very high water-holding capacity of up to 60% of its volume.

Using certified biochar is a good way to ensure you’re getting a high quality product.

If used well, biochar has real promise. Our new life cycle assessment found by spreading around 58 million tonnes of biochar on our farms would remove the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of every Australian household (68 million as of 2017) for a year.

Perfecting biochar

There are ways to optimise how we make biochar. For instance, aging biochar for a year enables it to hold more water.

Different particle sizes suit different soils. Recent research shows fine-grained biochar works best for clay soils, while coarser biochar is best for sandy soils.

Biochar availability and use is growing. The global market next year is forecast to reach almost A$5 billion. Larger biochar production facilities can maximise the benefits of the heat energy released, and also control any risky emissions. But you can make biochar in your garden with a simple setup.

There’s work to do figuring out the best biochar, soil and microbe interactions for plants, and adding biochar to broader sustainable farming practices.

The world is full of good ideas that don’t get traction. What makes biochar more likely to succeed is the fact it can work for farmers and for the planet. 

Sirjana Adhikari, Associate Research Fellow in Mineral Processing, Deakin University; Ellen Moon, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Engineering, Deakin University, and Wendy Timms, Professor of Environmental Engineering, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s no secret Australia has abundant and cheap renewable energy, especially wind and solar power. But yes, there are times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. We need energy storage to get us through those still nights and dreary days.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) reports investment in storage capacity continues to increase, filling gaps left by retiring coal-fired power stations. But it warns sufficient storage is needed to ensure electricity supply is reliable throughout the transition.

Energy storage is the special sauce that makes renewables work anytime, anywhere and everywhere. Being able to send this stored renewable energy back to the grid on demand makes the most of the existing electricity network, including transmission lines.

We need both short- and long-duration storage to maintain energy security. This will enable renewable energy to be collected, stored and dispatched when needed. AEMO forecasts reliability levels can be maintained over most of the next ten years if programs and initiatives already established are delivered on time and in full. But we can’t afford any delays.

Storage on the grid

Old-fashioned power stations burning coal tend to run continuously, which helps make the electricity grid stable and reliable. In contrast, renewables need to be backed with storage such as batteries to provide a continuous supply of electricity.

The modern electricity network is being designed to handle the power produced when the sun is shining brightly and the wind is blowing hard, at the same time. But this only happens about 25% of the time.

Similarly, transmission lines are being built to a maximum capacity. But we could get by with fewer transmission lines if we store more solar and wind power for later. That’s why many renewable generation projects include storage on site or nearby, and why it also makes sense to have batteries in our homes or communities.

Australia has some of the world’s biggest batteries

The 300 megawatt Victorian Big Battery, near Geelong, is the biggest in Australia and one of the biggest in the world. It can store enough energy to power more than a million homes for 30 minutes.

The federal government is also funding six large-scale batteries through the Capacity Investment Scheme. This includes a 350MW energy storage system on the site of the Jeeralang Power Station, near Morwell in the Latrobe Valley. But the title of the nation’s biggest battery will soon be handed to the 850MW Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales.

What’s next?

Other emerging battery systems could power the future. For example, new lithium-sulphur batteries deliver more energy per gram and last longer than existing lithium-ion batteries. This has been achieved simply by adding sugar.

Australia has all the critical minerals needed to make batteries (lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt). But about 90% of the batteries we currently use come from China.

The 2024 National Battery Strategy vision is for Australia is a globally competitive producer of batteries and battery materials by 2035.

Battery booster scheme needed

Australia has the policy settings and incentives about right for building grid-scale storage systems. But almost half the effort in getting to 82% renewables by 2030 will come from consumers – mainly rooftop solar systems, backed by home and business battery storage.

We have just passed the point at which the payback period for small-scale batteries falls within the product’s lifetime, making the upfront cost worthwhile.

But government incentives are still needed to make it more affordable to install small-scale solar batteries. This would help families and businesses reduce their power bills, gain better control of when and how they produce energy, and build a more resilient energy system.

More than 300,000 solar power systems are installed on Australian homes and businesses each year. The total reached more than 3.7 million systems at the start of this year. With the right ambition and policy settings, we could have similar rates of uptake in home batteries – going from about 250,000 at the moment to more than one million by 2030.

What’s more, electric vehicles are essentially large “batteries on wheels”. They can be plugged in at home to provide backup power in blackouts, or at times of peak demand.

Government incentives are also needed here to drive the further uptake of electric vehicles in the domestic, commercial and industry sector. The upfront price of an EV is too high for many Australians. Perverse incentives such as the diesel rebate are also slowing the switch in some sectors such as mining.

Australia is already a world leader in rooftop solar. With the right policy levers, we can also lead the world in home energy storage.

The energy storage toolkit

Batteries alone aren’t enough. As the penetration of renewables increases, the importance of long duration energy storage technologies will increase. In general, these technologies provide more than eight hours of energy storage using various electrochemical, mechanical, thermal and mechanical means.

Beyond batteries, other energy storage solutions include pumped hydro such as Snowy 2.0, “green gravity” using mine shafts, green hydrogen and concentrated solar thermal power plants.

Get smart about storage

Many energy storage options are readily available now and could be manufactured in Australia. We have the technology to empower communities, create thousands of new jobs and help save the planet.

If we’re smart about it, we can even get by with fewer transmission lines and less bulky electricity infrastructure.

Scott Hamilton, Adjunct associate professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Freshwater turtles live in farm dams, creeks and wetlands across Australia. They often travel over land when these wetlands or farm dams dry up, or during breeding season.

But when a turtle encounters a fence, they can get stuck on one side, become entangled, overheat or even die.

We wanted to test how different fence types influence turtle movement patterns. In our latest research, we attached GPS tracking devices to 20 adult eastern long-neck turtles in Armidale, New South Wales. Each week, we located the turtles and recorded how far they had moved, what habitat they were in, and how many fences they had encountered.

We found turtles often encountered fences. Sometimes they had to walk long distances, for days, before finding a suitable place to cross. Here we recommend some simple, cheap ways to make fences more turtle-friendly – and help other wildlife too.

Active in agricultural lands

The eastern long-neck turtle is one of Australia’s most widespread turtle species, but populations may be in decline. As a result, their conservation status could soon be upgraded to “vulnerable”.

Its range includes the Murray-Darling, Australia’s longest river system and most intensive agricultural area.

Long-neck turtles are also among the most active turtles on land, often travelling kilometres to find water. So they frequently encounter fences.

We found all sorts of farm fences in our 1,000 hectare study area, stretching over 95km in total. Fencing materials included:

• plain or barbed wire
• “hinge joint” wire (grid pattern)
• single-strand electric wire
• chicken wire
• corrugated iron.

We classified the different types of fences as turtle-friendly, or not. In turtle-friendly fences, the mesh or wire spacing is greater than the body size of the turtle. Unfriendly fences, in contrast, have mesh or wire spacing smaller than turtle, barring their passage.

Our turtles encountered fences 120 times in the ten months of the study, from November 2022 to September 2023. Most of the time they managed to get through. But in some cases, turtles had to walk up to four times further before finding a suitable gap or fault in the fence.

Some fences at our study site were damaged. Broken wire, gaps or holes from fallen trees or burrowing wildlife actually turned an unfriendly fence into a turtle-friendly fence. So turtles were able to walk along the fence and locate a suitable gap or fault that allowed them to cross.

However, this meant turtles had to walk up to four times further along unfriendly fences before finding suitable passage. Turtles were walking an additional 1,000 metres over the course of nine days in some cases.

The search for a gap or hole potentially exposed turtles to predators, excessive heat and dehydration.

In Armidale, adult eastern long-neck turtles are smaller than in other parts of its range. This means they fit through fences more easily than larger eastern long-necks from other regions, or other larger turtle species.

So, while turtle-friendly fences were abundant in our study, many of these would have been unfriendly fences for larger turtles living elsewhere.

How to make farm fences more wildlife-friendly

Replacing millions of kilometres of farm fencing around the world is not feasible, so we recommend a range of targeted and realistic tactics.

Species-specific wildlife gates allow wildlife such as bettongs and wombats to travel in and out of fenced areas. These gates can be installed in places where wildlife are most likely to encounter fences, such as wildlife corridors, rather than randomly throughout a property.

Other strategies are more simple and cost effective, such as clipping one vertical bar of hinge joint fencing to make the mesh gap twice as large. This creates a “turtle gate” that allows larger turtle species to move through the fence.

Similarly, ensuring the bottom of the fence is at least 50mm above the ground can help facilitate movement by small animals.

Where possible, chicken wire style fencing should be avoided because the mesh diameter is too small to allow turtles and many other wildlife species to pass through.

For more tips on building your own turtle-friendly fence and information on other turtle projects, check out our downloadable fencing brochure.

Reducing the harm of fences

Although fences are useful for managing livestock, protecting crops and keeping out predators, they can have unintentional and harmful effects on other species such as turtles.

Fence design, location and upkeep should be more carefully considered, with wildlife in mind.

Eco-friendly fence designs (for turtles, mammals, or any other wildlife) should be used whenever possible, to help wildlife travel through their now-fragmented habitat.

Eric Nordberg, Senior Lecturer (Applied Ecology and Landscape Management), University of New England; Deborah Bower, Associate Professor in Zoology and Ecology, University of New England, and James Dowling, PhD Student, Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The destruction of nature is a global crisis. Establishing protected areas of forest is a common policy governments use to tackle the problem.

Indeed most countries, including Australia, have signed a global agreement to protect 30% of land by 2030. But to what extent do protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves, actually preserve forests?

My new research examined this question. The findings are the first global-scale estimate of where protected areas are succeeding and failing.

Alarmingly, I found protected areas fail to prevent forest loss in many parts of the world. Clearly, we must make these areas more effective to conserve the remaining diversity of Earth’s plants and animals.

Probing protected areas

Forests are often destroyed through human activity such as logging with chainsaws or the deliberate use of fire. The aim is usually to extract timber, or to clear land for agriculture, roads, housing or other human purposes.

Natural bushfires can also damage forests. In some cases, ecosystems are so badly burnt they cannot recover. There’s a link to human activity here too, because human-caused climate change is leading to more severe, frequent, and wider-ranging bushfires in places such as Australia.

I wanted to know how well protected areas prevent forests from being lost.

To work this out, I first took a map that covers the precise boundaries of about 300,000 of the world’s protected areas. I overlaid it with high-resolution satellite data from between 2001 and 2022 showing forest loss just inside and just outside these boundaries.

This method assumed if forest loss was much higher just outside the boundary of a protected area than inside, the protection was working.

Conversely, if forest loss was relatively similar inside and outside the boundary, that shows the protection did not have a strong effect.

This idea can apply even if forest loss on both sides of the boundary is low – because it suggests the area is remote or otherwise not sought-after for human activity. In these cases, we have no evidence that protection is effective, because the forest probably would have been retained even if the protection wasn’t in place.

What I found

I found protected areas prevent an average 30% of forest loss that would have occurred if the policy was not in place. Forest loss occurred in protected areas in all countries – including Australia – but less frequently than in unprotected forest.

The 30% figure is discouragingly low. But it does indicate protected areas are effective to some degree. And effectiveness varies significantly across countries, as the below graphic shows.

The policy is almost completely ineffective in many countries, including Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia, Venezuela, Madagascar, Russia and Gabon. Several of these countries house vast amounts of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Most, but not all, are developing economies.

In the case of forest loss due to fire, protected areas in advanced economies were also ineffective in some cases.

Australia is a good example. Protected areas here were fairly effective from 2001 to 2018. But the horrific 2019–20 Black Summer fires burned indiscriminately through large swathes of protected forest.

In better news, protected areas were highly effective in some areas, such as New Zealand, Canada, Scandinavia and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).

What this all means

My research illustrates the large improvements needed in many protected areas across the globe to genuinely conserve forests. More research is also needed to understand the best policies to achieve this, before it’s too late.

Developing countries clearly need help to protect their forests. Corruption, political instability, and a lack of resources can make it difficult for governments in these nations to enforce forest conservation laws. Government indifference can also play a role.

How do we turn this around? Schemes such as REDD+, which pays local communities to conserve forest that may otherwise be cleared, could be scaled up.

Foreign aid for forest conservation, from countries such as Australia, can also help. And non-government organisations such as African Parks can put rangers on the ground to help patrol and enforce the integrity of protected areas.

Technology such as real-time deforestation alerts from satellite data can also help.

My findings also highlight the threat climate change poses to forest ecosystems in Australia and elsewhere. Obviously, fire does not respect the boundaries of a national park or other protected area.

So yes, it’s great to see governments around the world signing up to protect 30% of their land. But my work shows attention is needed to make sure those protected areas are working.

Timothy Neal, Senior lecturer in Economics / Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trade in “exotic” pets from foreign countries is a global multibillion-dollar industry. Australian species are highly sought after.

Australia banned the commercial export of all live native animals in 1982. But once wildlife is taken out of the country, these laws no longer apply. Many species can be legally traded without restrictions once they are beyond our borders.

In our new research, we found 163 Australian reptile species and seven frogs traded as pets overseas. That’s more than one in six (16%) of all Australian reptile species – and around 3% of Australian frogs.

While many species may be bred in captivity to supply the pet trade, seizure records show some are still illegally taken from the wild. We need to deploy more sophisticated methods to monitor the booming online trade. Australia must also enlist the support of other countries to monitor the wildlife trade and identify those species most at risk for greater protection.

What we did and what we found

We scoured the web for evidence of online trade in Australian reptiles and amphibians worldwide. This included monitoring online stores and forums, including classified advertisements. We probed both the surface web – the pages readily available to the general public such as pet stores, public forums and public social media – and the deep web, which can’t be searched by standard search engines. It includes private forums and password-protected or special-access social media sites.

Web scrapers automated our data collection and machine learning helped sift through the data for relevant information.

We also extracted data from published papers, trade databases and seizure records.

We found Australian species being sold on 152 websites and 27 social media pages, particularly in the United States and Europe.

The most commonly traded species were bearded dragons, goannas such as the ridgetail monitor, and a range of geckos including barking and knob-tail geckos.

Wildlife smugglers

As species become rarer, their value to smugglers goes up. A species with only a few hundred individuals left in the wild can command very high prices. Unscrupulous traders often attempt to get around the law and smuggle rare and unique reptiles out of Australia.

A police bust in New South Wales this year found more than 250 lizards destined for illegal export, worth up to A$1.2 million.

But this is not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Years of seizure records show ongoing smuggling of Australian wildlife. Some species, such as the shingleback skink, are routinely targeted by poachers and smugglers, while others may be victims of opportunity.

Our research found smugglers have tried to take 58 reptile and three frog species out of Australia since the export ban was introduced. It’s likely many more have never been caught.

Regulating global trade

The main international approach to regulating trade in wildlife is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES.

This is an agreement between 184 governments to ensure international trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten species’ survival.

For a species to be covered under this agreement, it has to be added to one of three lists (known as Appendix I, II, and III), according to the degree of protection needed. Appendix I species have the highest level of protection.

In 2022, Australia added 127 lizard species to Appendix III.

It was the first big listing of Australian reptiles in the convention’s history. But at the time of the listing, there had been no comprehensive study of Australian reptiles and frogs in global trade. It is unclear how those species were selected.

Appendix III is used for monitoring trade rather than restricting it. Australian authorities can watch to see if trade is threatening any of these species and upgrade the listing if so.

Just over half of the Australian species we identified in our study are now covered by the convention. Most (64%) of these were added in 2022.

That means a large portion of Australian reptiles (and all Australian frogs) remain unregulated and unmonitored in the international market. We recommend the Australian government consider listing these remaining species in Appendix III. We specifically recommend listing gecko species in the Diplodactylidae family, which make up the largest group of species in trade. We also recommend listing any species classified as threatened or endangered.

Improving surveillance

Our study also showcases emerging online trade surveillance methods through the use of web scrapers.

As the online pet trade grows, these methods will improve and become more effective for capturing trade, including trade that has circumvented the convention and other regulations. We found almost 90% of traded Australian reptiles and frogs have been advertised online at some point.

Protect Australian reptiles and frogs

Australia banned native wildlife from commercial export to protect species from exploitation. Yet seizure records show some are still being illegally harvested from the wild.

Given the covert nature of this illegal trade, there is no way of determining exactly how many animals are poached or which species are targeted. But by monitoring trade beyond Australian borders, we can uncover patterns and determine if trade poses a threat to any native Australian species.

Our study provides the first comprehensive overview of trade in Australian reptiles and frogs worldwide. Ongoing monitoring is needed to ensure this trade poses no threat to survival of these species.

We encourage the Australian government to list more species under the convention and deploy more sophisticated online surveillance methods. Now we know which species are traded overseas, we need to ensure the trade is sustainable.

Sebastian Chekunov, PhD Candidate, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide and Phill Cassey, Australian Research Council Industry Laureate Fellow, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The birds that fill our mornings with songs and our parks and gardens with colour are disappearing from our cities, our new study has found.

We examined 82 bird species across 42 landscape types in Brisbane. The range of landscapes encompassed parks, bushland reserves, and industrial and residential areas.

Our findings were clear: urbanisation, particularly the increase in built infrastructure and the loss of green spaces, was linked to a decline in the bird communities we find most attractive. In other words, many of the colourful birds with sweet songs are leaving or dying out. They include many smaller species that are among the most affected by increasing urbanisation.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but previous research has shown species with bright colours, contrasting colour patterns and melodious calls are perceived as attractive. Seeing and hearing them can enhance our mood. As cities expand and we cram more people into existing urban areas, we risk losing the vibrant natural birdlife that helps make urban life enjoyable.

What’s causing the loss of these species?

A range of factors is driving the decline of small, colourful and melodious birds. The many pressures on these species include habitat loss and fragmentation as land is cleared for buildings and roads.

Competition from aggressive birds, such as noisy miners (Manorina melanocephala), also has a particularly severe impact on small, forest-dependent species. They include many of the birds we consider most atttractive.

Vulnerable species in Brisbane include the white-throated gerygone (Gerygone olivacea). Known for its striking colours and distinctive calls, it’s one of the species being squeezed out of our cities. Also vanishing from the most urbanised areas we studied are delicate species such as the scarlet honeyeater (Myzomela sanguinolenta) and the golden whistler (Pachycephala pectoralis).

Landscapes with low numbers of species still support some species with traits that people consider “attractive”. They include the rainbow lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus) and the willie wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys). Larger urban-adapted species, such as the pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) and the Australian magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen), also have melodious calls that give us joy.

But poor urban design means our cities are losing the rich diversity of beautiful bird songs and colours that residents once enjoyed.

It’s not just beauty we’re losing

Cities across Australia are growing. South-east Queensland, where we did our research, is forecast to gain an extra 2.2 million people by 2046.

When poorly planned, urban expansion reduces and fragments habitats. It means vibrantly colourful nature is replaced by dull, dreary greys.

The presence of diverse bird species in urban areas is crucial for biodiversity conservation. Our cities are home to a great variety of species, including surprisingly large numbers of threatened species.

Conserving these attractive bird species could also strengthen connections between people and nature. Losing these unique, colourful species with their unique calls means missing opportunities to experience the full beauty of nature.

The absence of diverse bird species in cities also points to a broader issue: the loss of the essential ecological and cultural services these species provide. These birds pollinate plants, disperse their seeds and control pests. These services are vital for the health of ecosystems in our cities.

Losing these birds could also result in a shifting baseline where we, and future generations, become accustomed to seeing only a limited snapshot of nature. The result could be an “extinction of experience”, as reduced daily encounters with nature lead to an emotional disconnection from the natural world.

How can we bring this natural joy in cities?

Urban planning has the power to bring back vibrant, colourful birdlife to our cities. In this way, it can enrich our daily lives and connections with nature in the places we live and work.

Thoughtful urban designs can prioritise biodiversity and habitat protection. Our research shows this can foster more diverse and attractive bird communities, even in densely built areas.

Maintaining urban bushland reserves that preserve native vegetation is important, but we can also help in other ways. Simple actions such as planting a variety of shrubs and trees in gardens and parks can create pockets of native habitat that allow colourful and melodious birds to thrive. Beyond beautifying our urban spaces, these actions create “green corridors” that support the movement of wildlife, thereby helping to maintain biodiversity.

The way people perceive and interact with nature is very personal. Urban-resilient species such as magpies and butcherbirds are valuable in their own right and play a vital role in urban ecosystems. However, careful design of our cities can open the door to experiencing a wider variety of astonishing birdlife.

It is not just about preserving what we have, but actively enhancing our urban spaces to welcome back the species that fill our lives with colour, song and joy.

Andres Felipe Suarez-Castro, Research Fellow, Ecological Modelling, Griffith University and Rachel Oh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trade in “exotic” pets from foreign countries is a global multibillion-dollar industry. Australian species are highly sought after.

Australia banned the commercial export of all live native animals in 1982. But once wildlife is taken out of the country, these laws no longer apply. Many species can be legally traded without restrictions once they are beyond our borders.

In our new research, we found 163 Australian reptile species and seven frogs traded as pets overseas. That’s more than one in six (16%) of all Australian reptile species – and around 3% of Australian frogs.

While many species may be bred in captivity to supply the pet trade, seizure records show some are still illegally taken from the wild. We need to deploy more sophisticated methods to monitor the booming online trade. Australia must also enlist the support of other countries to monitor the wildlife trade and identify those species most at risk for greater protection.

What we did and what we found

We scoured the web for evidence of online trade in Australian reptiles and amphibians worldwide. This included monitoring online stores and forums, including classified advertisements. We probed both the surface web – the pages readily available to the general public such as pet stores, public forums and public social media – and the deep web, which can’t be searched by standard search engines. It includes private forums and password-protected or special-access social media sites.

Web scrapers automated our data collection and machine learning helped sift through the data for relevant information.

We also extracted data from published papers, trade databases and seizure records.

We found Australian species being sold on 152 websites and 27 social media pages, particularly in the United States and Europe.

The most commonly traded species were bearded dragons, goannas such as the ridgetail monitor, and a range of geckos including barking and knob-tail geckos.

Wildlife smugglers

As species become rarer, their value to smugglers goes up. A species with only a few hundred individuals left in the wild can command very high prices. Unscrupulous traders often attempt to get around the law and smuggle rare and unique reptiles out of Australia.

A police bust in New South Wales this year found more than 250 lizards destined for illegal export, worth up to A$1.2 million.

But this is not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Years of seizure records show ongoing smuggling of Australian wildlife. Some species, such as the shingleback skink, are routinely targeted by poachers and smugglers, while others may be victims of opportunity.

Our research found smugglers have tried to take 58 reptile and three frog species out of Australia since the export ban was introduced. It’s likely many more have never been caught.

Regulating global trade

The main international approach to regulating trade in wildlife is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES.

This is an agreement between 184 governments to ensure international trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten species’ survival.

For a species to be covered under this agreement, it has to be added to one of three lists (known as Appendix I, II, and III), according to the degree of protection needed. Appendix I species have the highest level of protection.

In 2022, Australia added 127 lizard species to Appendix III.

It was the first big listing of Australian reptiles in the convention’s history. But at the time of the listing, there had been no comprehensive study of Australian reptiles and frogs in global trade. It is unclear how those species were selected.

Appendix III is used for monitoring trade rather than restricting it. Australian authorities can watch to see if trade is threatening any of these species and upgrade the listing if so.

Just over half of the Australian species we identified in our study are now covered by the convention. Most (64%) of these were added in 2022.

That means a large portion of Australian reptiles (and all Australian frogs) remain unregulated and unmonitored in the international market. We recommend the Australian government consider listing these remaining species in Appendix III. We specifically recommend listing gecko species in the Diplodactylidae family, which make up the largest group of species in trade. We also recommend listing any species classified as threatened or endangered.

Improving surveillance

Our study also showcases emerging online trade surveillance methods through the use of web scrapers.

As the online pet trade grows, these methods will improve and become more effective for capturing trade, including trade that has circumvented the convention and other regulations. We found almost 90% of traded Australian reptiles and frogs have been advertised online at some point.

Protect Australian reptiles and frogs

Australia banned native wildlife from commercial export to protect species from exploitation. Yet seizure records show some are still being illegally harvested from the wild.

Given the covert nature of this illegal trade, there is no way of determining exactly how many animals are poached or which species are targeted. But by monitoring trade beyond Australian borders, we can uncover patterns and determine if trade poses a threat to any native Australian species.

Our study provides the first comprehensive overview of trade in Australian reptiles and frogs worldwide. Ongoing monitoring is needed to ensure this trade poses no threat to survival of these species.

We encourage the Australian government to list more species under the convention and deploy more sophisticated online surveillance methods. Now we know which species are traded overseas, we need to ensure the trade is sustainable.

Sebastian Chekunov, PhD Candidate, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide and Phill Cassey, Australian Research Council Industry Laureate Fellow, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Kamilaroi Country lies in far northwest New South Wales, past Tamworth and crossing over the Queensland border. Here, the bunyip bird (Australasian bittern, Botaurus poiciloptilus), and the brolga (Grus rubicunda or burraalga in Kamilaroi) have been part of life, lore, spirit, dance and culture with Country for thousands of generations.

In this Country, these two species are now rare. Kamilaroi people want to turn this around. But to do that, we come up against a gap between Western conservation laws and culturally significant species/entities.

Under Australia’s conservation laws, a species is considered threatened when its numbers fall so low, or its distribution shrinks so much, it might not recover. But the threatened species legal protections – and any recovery funding it provides – are focused on the Western approach of countable nature, not the Indigenous focus on nature-with-culture.

We are not splitting hairs. The difference is momentous, as we document in recent research. It determines whose environmental research and management is considered legitimate and resourced, and the terms on which knowledge is shared and exchanged.

Understanding this helps find common ground between ecological and Indigenous priorities. It will also be crucial to the now-delayed major overhaul of Australia’s nature laws.

Threatened species on Country

To list a species as threatened under federal and New South Wales law, two things must be determined.

The first is how many animals or plants of a given species are still in their habitat and how consistent this is over generations.

Second is how widespread the species is compared to the past, and how much habitat is left.

This formula – abundance plus distribution – determines if the species is in decline and if it needs urgent attention.

Kamilaroi Country is home to the Gwydir wetlands, an immensely sacred place where brolgas and bunyip birds were once present in great numbers.

Brolgas are known for their elaborate mating dances, and embodying their spirit is an important Indigenous dance. With long legs and necks, Brolgas are this continent’s largest water bird. But their presence has fallen sharply in southern Australia. These days, brolgas appear in the Kamilaroi wetlands less often.

It’s also rarer to see or hear the well-hidden bunyip bird. The Kamilaroi believe the bittern’s’ booming cry signals the presence of the bunyip, a creature from ancestral times whose songs and stories keep people away from sacred water holes.

Buruuugu (Dreaming) stories passed down from the old people connect these birds with Kamilaroi people and freshwater life, encompassing culture, lore, language, dance, meaning and existence.

The brolga is listed as vulnerable in New South Wales and the bunyip bird is endangered. Both species have been found or their presence predicted in regions close to Kamilaroi Country.

Because these species are present close by, it makes it harder for Kamilaroi people to access Country, government funding, resources and protections for these species.

The problem is worse where culturally significant species / entities are generally abundant, but on a shrunken range. Species important to Indigenous people may be lost entirely from Country where they belong, yet government programs offer very few options for protection or resources.

When one plus one does not equal two

There is a growing openness among ecologists, governments and Western land managers to foreground and include Indigenous knowledge in decision making, Indigenous people are ready and waiting. This respectful knowledge exchange is often called two-way learning.

It’s common to think of these different value sets as additive: ecological values plus Indigenous values equals better conservation. At times, reports on threatened species will include a section on Aboriginal people’s cultural values. And Indigenous caring for Country is seen as a vital tool in the toolkit for recovering threatened species.

But Kamilaroi knowledge is not just a management tool. And these species are not separate from the people who care for them. For Kamilaroi, the brolga and the bunyip bird are culture and kin. This is not nature plus culture, two categories alongside each other, but nature with culture – a transformation rather than an addition.

Typically these two categories are divided for study and management, as in the natural and social sciences. But Country weaves nature and culture together and focuses on which relationships are important and why. From this viewpoint, ecological species and habitats become folded into Country, which also includes its people.

So what do we suggest?

Our current conservation policies look for ways for Indigenous peoples to fit in with biodiversity conservation approaches. Instead, we need to find protections and resources to support Indigenous people’s knowledge and relationships with Country. The significant growth of Indigenous Protected Areas is a start, as these large areas of land and sea are managed by Indigenous groups and rangers.

But we need our environmental laws, reporting frameworks and levels of resourcing to include support for Indigenous governance across their systems. These matters go well beyond protected area boundaries.

It could mean writing laws to recognise and invest in culturally significant species under Indigenous guidance. It could mean programs supporting Indigenous peoples to set their own priorities and measures of success for Country and culture, and set the terms of how knowledge about Country is used and exchanged.

And it could mean flipping governance so conservation is increasingly led by Indigenous people, to be the voice for and with responsibilities to Country – the enfolded relationships of brolga and bunyip bird and Kamilaroi people – at the fore rather than an afterthought.

When the migrating brolga arrives in the Gwydir Wetlands to perform its hopping, swooping dance, to nest and mate, you get an ecological outcome: a vulnerable species is breeding. But you can also witness how and why the world’s oldest living culture keeps brolgas close, as kin.

The authorship order for citing this article is Moggridge, Weir, Morgain and Moon.

Bradley J. Moggridge, Professor of Science, University of Technology Sydney; Jessica K Weir, Associate Professor, Culture and Society, Western Sydney University; Katie Moon, Senior Lecturer in Conservation and Social Science, UNSW Sydney, and 󠁡​​Rachel​ ​Morgain, Senior Research Fellow in Social and Political Science, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica is the world’s largest feeding ground for baleen whales – species like humpbacks that filter tiny organisms from seawater for food. In the 20th century, whalers killed roughly 2 million large whales in the Southern Ocean. Some populations, like the Antarctic blue whale, were reduced by more than 99% and have been struggling to recover, even though most nations ended commercial whaling in the mid-1980s.

Today a new threat is emerging: industrial fishing for Antarctic krill – tiny swimming crustaceans, roughly 2 inches (60 millimeters) long. In a newly published study, colleagues and I found that competition with this burgeoning fishery may impede whales’ recovery.

I first learned about this issue in early 2022, when a colleague working aboard a cruise ship told me that he had seen approximately 1,000 fin whales feeding on krill near the South Orkney Islands, just north of Antarctica. This was probably the largest aggregation of baleen whales seen since the 1930s, at the peak of industrial whaling.

My friend also reported that four enormous fishing boats were weaving among the huge group of whales, with large nets deployed. Like the whales, they were fishing for Antarctic krill.

Because the Southern Ocean is so remote, few people realized that krill fishing was competing directly with whales. Together with colleagues from Stanford and the University of Washington, we wrote about this observation in 2023 to draw attention to the potential threat to recovering populations.

We were soon contacted by Sea Shepard Global, a nonprofit organization that works to protect marine wildlife and had been monitoring this situation for several years. They reported that direct overlap between foraging whales and active fishing operations was common.

Now, krill fishing is on the verge of expanding. Along the Antarctic Peninsula, the fishing industry has proposed increasing the catch limit fourfold, from 155,000 tons to 668,101 tons annually.

Nearly all of this catch is used to make two products: fish meal for aquaculture, and omega-3 dietary supplements. Most of the fish meal feeds farmed salmon, which develop their familiar pink color from consuming the food.

Meanwhile, whales are competing with fishing boats for the animals’ sole food supply. Whales feed for roughly 100 days out of each year; depending on the species, an adult whale may consume 1 to 6 tons of krill in a day.

Most baleen whales use a strategy called lunge feeding: They swim rapidly toward a swarm of krill, opening their enormous mouths at the exact right moment. Then they close their jaws and force the seawater out through the bristly baleen plates in their mouths, filtering the krill from the water.

This behavior consumes a lot of energy, so the whales target large, dense swarms of krill – and so do fishing boats. From 2021 through 2023, four humpback whales died after becoming entangled in krill fishing nets.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international organization that manages use of the Southern Ocean, is required to ensure that whales and other krill-dependent populations are not harmed due to fishing. However, the commission operates by consensus, so if one member state opposes an action, nothing changes.

Member states have stalled proposals to create marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean and regulate krill fishing more tightly. A coalition is pressing for stricter limits, but Russia and China have resisted. Our work shows that if Antarctic krill fishing expands without strict guardrails to protect wildlife, baleen whales’ fragile comeback could be halted or even reversed.

Matthew Savoca, Research scientist, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s now very likely Australia will be announced as the host of the COP31 global climate talks in 2026 alongside Pacific nations. This would be a very big deal. The talks run for a fortnight and draw tens of thousands of delegates. It would be the largest diplomatic summit Australia has ever held, with satellite events in Pacific nations.

A decision – made by other countries in our United Nations regional grouping – is expected in November. Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane have already signalled interest in hosting.

Hosting these talks can boost national fortunes. When the United Kingdom hosted the talks in 2021, it was their biggest international success after the pain of Brexit, winning friends and influence.

The talks would bring global attention – and heighten expectations. Playing host would cement Australia’s place in the emerging net-zero economy, galvanise the federal government’s green industry plans and rapidly build the trade and diplomatic ties needed to develop new markets for clean energy goods.

In a Climate Council and Smart Energy Council report released today, we lay out how important these talks would be to shift Australia away from fossil-fuel exports, switch from mining dirty to mining clean, rebuild our position in the acutely climate-aware Pacific and secure new economic opportunities in Asia.

A talkfest – but a vital one

Critics of these talks often frame them as a bloated international talkfest where nothing actually happens.

But consider the problem. Almost 200 countries with very different interests send representatives. Island nations in the Pacific don’t profit from fossil fuel sales, but face the loss of their land to the sea and their reefs to the heat. Major fossil fuel exporters, however, have an incentive to go slow.

As extreme weather and marine heating intensify, the climate crisis is becoming more visible everywhere. People are being forced from their homes in Tuvalu and Lismore alike. A third of Australians worry extreme weather may force them to permanently relocate. We all have a shared interest in going fast.

Progress is finally happening. After the crucial 2015 Paris Agreement, COP talks have been characterised by negotiation over how to cut greenhouse gas emissions and shift away from fossil fuels. At these talks, countries also assess progress toward their shared goals and wealthier nations may pledge support to help developing countries deal with climate impacts.

But they are more than this. They are also a de facto global trade fair, bringing together major players in clean energy industries and providing a platform to attract global investment in local projects. As host, Australia could shape the agenda for important informal discussions alongside the formal meetings.

There’s already interest from Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney in hosting the talks.

Major sporting events such as the Commonwealth Games often require custom-built facilities. But the COP talks just need good conference centres, hotels and transport. Hosting the UN talks could deliver the chosen city a windfall of between A$100-210 million, equivalent to about four AFL grand finals. Hosting the 2021 talks added an estimated A$1 billion to the overall UK economy.

All signs suggest the Australia/Pacific bid is likely to be chosen. The 2026 COP host will be decided by countries in the ‘Western Europe and Other’ regional grouping at the UN (COP hosting is rotated among regions). There’s already public support from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland and Canada. The other bidder, Türkiye, does not currently have public backing.

Australia’s bid has widespread domestic support. A recent Lowy poll found 70% of Australians are supportive. Business groups are also supportive, while major banks are already working to unlock private sector investment in anticipation.

What would it mean for Australia-Pacific relationships?

Pacific island countries see climate change as their “single greatest” threat. Leaders see climate change impacts — stronger cyclones, devastating floods, rising seas, dying reefs and ocean acidification — as more tangible and immediate threats than geopolitical manoeuvring.

Pacific nations have long worked together at COP talks to drive global climate action. They have earned a reputation for sticking to the science, and were instrumental in securing landmark climate deals like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

On climate, Australia can now bring more to the table. Already, 40% of the main grid runs on clean energy. That figure will likely reach 80% by 2030. Australia is funding a range of Pacific climate adaptation programs.

A key tension remains, however. Pacific island nations have urged major powers to phase out fossil fuel production, while Australia has recently emerged as one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters.

Co-hosting COP31 could help this tension by signalling Australia’s shift from fossil fuel heavyweight to clean energy powerhouse.

New economic opportunities in Asia (and beyond)

Global demand and investment is shifting from fossil fuels to clean energy commodities.

To reach net zero, the International Energy Agency suggests fossil fuels will drop from 80% of total energy supply in 2022 to 20% by 2050. Demand for coal, oil and gas is now expected to decline this decade.

Japan, China and South Korea buy over two-thirds of Australia’s coal and gas exports. But Japan and Korea now plan to double clean energy generation by 2030, while China commissioned as much solar in 2023 as the whole world did in 2022.

These shifts have huge implications. Last week, the Climate Change Authority released modelling showing Australia’s fossil fuel exports would fall 60% by 2050 if we and our trading partners take strong climate action – while our other mineral and metal exports would surge by 65%.

If the Australia/Pacific COP bid gets up as expected, the federal government must begin shaping the agenda now.

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The goal of the 2021 Global Methane Pledge is bold: cut methane emissions by 30% by the end of the decade. This is to buy us vital time to work on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Over 150 nations have now signed up to the pledge – representing more than half of the world’s emissions of an extremely potent but short-lived greenhouse gas.

To put the pledge into action, many leaders announced policies to cut methane. However, the latest research shows global methane emissions are still rising rapidly. Atmospheric concentrations are now growing faster than at any other time since global record-keeping began about 40 years ago.

These findings are published today in our fourth global methane budget, in a paper and pre-print research undertaken through the Global Carbon Project, with contributions from 66 research institutions around the world.

Natural sources of methane include decaying organic matter in wetlands. But humans have supercharged methane emissions. We tracked changes in all major sources and sinks of this potent greenhouse gas and found humans are now responsible for two-thirds or more of all global emissions.

This is a problem, but we can improve upon it. Cutting methane emissions is one of the best and only short-term levers we can pull to slow the rate of climate change.

Why is methane so important?

After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to human-driven global warming.

Although human activities emit much less methane than carbon dioxide in real terms, methane has a hidden punch – it’s 80 times as effective as CO₂ in trapping heat in the first two decades after it reaches the atmosphere.

Since the pre-industrial era, the world has heated up by 1.2°C (taken as an average of the past 10 years). Methane is responsible for about 0.5°C of warming, according to the latest reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the atmosphere, methane rapidly mixes with oxygen and converts into carbon dioxide and water. By contrast, carbon dioxide is a much more stable molecule and will stay in the atmosphere, trapping heat, for thousands of years until absorbed by ocean and plants.

The combination of short lifespan and extreme potency make methane an excellent candidate for efforts to rapidly tackle climate change.

Methane is not slowing

In the early-to-mid-2000s, methane emissions growth rates actually fell. Analyses suggest it was driven by a combination of reduced fossil fuels emissions and chemical changes in the atmosphere’s capacity to destroy methane.

Since then, however, methane has surged. Methane emissions from human activities increased by 50-60 million tonnes per year over the two decades to 2018-2020 – a 15-20% increase.

This doesn’t mean atmospheric methane goes up by the same amount, as methane is constantly being broken down.

During the 2000s, an extra 6.1 million tonnes of methane entered the atmosphere each year. By the 2010s, the rate of growth was 20.9 million tonnes. In 2020, growth hit 42 million tonnes. Since then, methane has been added even more rapidly. Growth rates are now higher than any previously observed year.

Where does the methane come from?

Human activities such as farming livestock, coal mining, extracting and handling natural gas, growing rice in paddies, and putting organic waste in landfills contribute about 65% of all methane emissions. Of this, agriculture (livestock and rice paddies) contributes 40%, fossil fuels 36%, and landfills and wastewater 17%.

Methane emissions from fossil fuels are now comparable to livestock emissions. The fastest growing contributors are from landfill and fossil fuels (think natural gas escaping during extraction and processing).

Our impact is even higher when we account for indirect emissions such as the leaching of organic matter into waterways and wetlands, the construction of reservoirs, and the impacts of human-driven climate change on wetlands.

In 2020, human activities led to emissions of between 370 and 384 million tonnes of methane.

The remaining emissions come from natural sources, primarily the decomposition of plant matter in wetlands, rivers, lakes, and water-saturated soils. Tropical wetlands are particularly large emitters. The world’s large areas of permafrost (permanently frozen ground) also produce methane, but at relatively low rates. As permafrost melts due to higher temperatures, this is changing.

Regional contributions and trends

Who emits most? By volume, the top five nations in 2020 were China (16%), India (9%), the United States (7%), Brazil (6%) and Russia (5%). The fastest-growing areas are China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

European nations have begun to lower their emissions over the last two decades, due to efforts to cut emissions from landfill and waste, followed by smaller cuts in fossil fuels and farming. Australia may also be lowering emissions mainly from farming and waste.

What does this mean for net zero?

Unchecked methane emissions are bad news. Recent observed atmospheric concentrations of methane are consistent with climate scenarios with up to 3°C of warming by 2100.

To keep global temperatures well-below 2°C – the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement – means cutting methane emissions as rapidly as possible. Methane has to be cut almost in half (45%) by 2050 to achieve that goal.

It’s not an impossible problem. We now have have methods of rapidly cutting methane for every sector.

The oil and gas sector could cut their emissions 40% at no net cost, according to the International Energy Agency.

In agriculture, we can achieve rapid reductions by feed additives to reduce methane belched from cows, sheep, goats and buffalo, and by mid-season drainage in rice paddies.

Capturing landfill methane and using it for energy production or heat is now well established.

Three years ago, the world committed to slash methane emissions. Our findings show that we need to rapidly accelerate solutions across the globe to address and reduce methane emissions.

Pep Canadell, Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Environment; Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO; Marielle Saunois, Enseignant-chercheur, Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l’environnement (LSCE), Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) – Université Paris-Saclay , and Rob Jackson, Professor, Department of Earth System Science, and Chair of the Global Carbon Project, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A zero-carbon mindset must “become the new normal” in Australia, according to a much-anticipated report from the federal government’s independent climate advisory body.

The report, released today by the Climate Change Authority, describes how Australia can meet the crucial target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

The authority does not attempt to solve the conundrum of how to broaden and strengthen Australia’s climate policy suite. But it shows in detail how a low-emissions economy can be achieved. It urges Australian governments, businesses and the community to get on with the decarbonisation task. It can help infuse policy ambition for governments and set expectations for investors and the public.

As the report makes clear, a huge national effort is needed. Mature technologies should be quickly deployed while emerging technologies develop further. Barriers must be overcome and opportunities seized. The net-zero goal should become front of mind for business, investors and governments.

Pathways to net-zero

The authority’s report is formally known as the sector pathways review. It was undertaken at the request of the federal parliament.

Australia has committed to reducing carbon emissions to net zero. This report is the most important analysis to date on how the country might get there.

The authority’s analysis is comprehensive, fine-grained and deeply researched. It shows how net zero would be achieved through action in Australia, rather than assuming we might cover the shortfall by buying international emissions credits.

It relies on available and achievable technologies, rather than unspecified future solutions. As the authority makes clear, “Waiting for new, better, cheaper technologies is tantamount to choosing to continue to emit.”

Both points are in contrast to the net-zero plan by the previous government, and earlier work by the authority, among others.

The report uses modelling the authority commissioned from Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO. The modelling examined two scenarios, one arriving at net zero in 2050, the other in 2040. It also includes an assessment of possible residual emissions at 2050, derived from detailed separate analysis.

–

Sector snapshots

The report splits the economy into six sectors, taking the same approach as the federal government’s own net-zero plan currently being developed.

It paints a picture of a modern, prosperous Australian economy by mid-century. In brief, sector by sector:

1. Electricity and energy

Electricity supply will be decarbonised through wind and solar power coupled with energy storage, and greatly scaled up to electrify the whole economy.

All scenarios have electricity emissions falling to near zero. This is now regarded as a near certainty in expert circles. The shift from coal to renewables is already happening fast, driven by the exit of old coal plants and the low cost of solar and wind power, supported by policy.

2. Transport

Transport decarbonisation is a story of electric vehicles, more rail and public transport in a shift away from private cars, and also the prospect of carbon-neutral fuels.

The transition will naturally be gradual, limited by vehicle stock turnover rates, timelines for building infrastructure, and increasing transport demand. But the authority envisages deep cuts by the 2040s.

3. Industry and waste

Stripping emissions from industry relies on electrification and new technologies.

Heavy industry emissions have not been declining. But the federal government’s safeguard mechanism, which targets Australia’s biggest emitters, is starting to work. In addition, low-emissions technologies are developing and maturing.

Nevertheless, the authority’s scenarios show notable remaining emissions from industry. The key is for governments to provide strong commercial incentives to cut emissions – such as those evolving under the safeguard mechanism – and for industry to avoid building new high-emitting facilities.

4. Agriculture and land

Together, land and agriculture are projected to go below zero emissions well before 2050, as vegetation cover and forests are expanded. This would lead to the takeup of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in vegetation, outweighing remaining emissions from livestock and cropping.

Overall, land use change and forestry has turned from a large combined source of emissions to a “sink” (or carbon absorber) over the past 20 years. This accounts for most reductions in national emissions over the past two decades.

Continuing and accelerating this trend is a huge opportunity. It will require potentially tough decisions on land use, such as converting grazing land back to natural vegetation. It will also require changing farming practices, and new technologies in areas such as reducing livestock emissions.

5. Resources

The authority considers the resources sector, including mining and gas extraction and processing, as being on a steady path to near-zero emissions, including through electrification of mining and gas processing, and carbon capture and storage.

The analysis does not include the emissions of Australia’s fossil fuel exports, because they are burned overseas.

Likewise, contributions that Australia can make to decarbonisation elsewhere in the world, by producing and exporting renewables-based, energy-intensive commodities and fuels, are not counted in the net-zero target.

6. Built environment

Direct emissions from building, principally from heating, cooling and cooking, can be eliminated through electrification, coupled with much greater building efficiency.

Compensating for remaining emissions to achieve net zero

After each sector has done its best to decarbonise, getting to net zero will require removing remaining CO₂ emissions from the atmosphere.

The precise extent of CO₂ removal will become a topic of intense interest in coming years. One scenario outlined by the authority puts the required annual removal in 2050 at about 30% of current annual emissions.

The authority assumes this will be achieved via greater carbon uptake on the land, and to a small extent through technological means.

Reality may be better than modelling suggests

The history of modelling emissions cuts in Australia is one of underestimating the possibilities.

For example, modelling done for the Garnaut Climate Change Review of 2008 and 2011 underestimated the scope for affordable low-emissions energy, and consequently overestimated the costs of reductions.

A review published by the authority in 2014 showed emissions increasing by nearly 30% from 2005 to 2030 without policy, flatlining under a moderate carbon price, and decreasing by about 20% under a high carbon price.

Reality has turned out far better – even though national climate policy was severely limited for most of that time.

A plausible way forward, without the tough policy answers

The report paints a plausible picture of the path to net-zero emissions in Australia. The government’s forthcoming sector plans, and similar exercises by state governments, will provide further detail.

The authority is notably cautious on policy. It calls for every tool in the kit to be used, but largely leaves open the question of new policy instruments.

So what about the question of carbon pricing – the hot potato at the centre of Australia’s long-running climate policy woes?

The authority notes a broad-based “consistent price for emissions” is generally seen as the most efficient policy. But it does not recommend a comprehensive carbon price, pointing to the inherent “political and social challenges”.

Instead, it recommends expanding and strengthening existing mechanisms. These include the safeguard mechanism, Australia’s carbon credit scheme, the federal government’s vehicle efficiency standard, and the capacity investment scheme for renewable electricity and energy storage.

Notably, the authority holds back on proposing new policy approaches specific to each sector, such as agriculture.

It makes sense to build on what we have. And incrementalism is often seen as the only viable option while Australia’s politics remains divided over climate policy.

Yet the the huge task and opportunity in the shift to net zero cry out for comprehensive, and overall far stronger, policy action.

This report provides a solid information base for the many debates to come. The next, highly anticipated decision will be Australia’s 2035 national emissions target, on which the authority is expected to provide advice to the government later this year.

Frank Jotzo, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy and Head of Energy, Institute for Climate Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Winter has ended dramatically across Australia’s southern states, as fierce winds and storms usher in spring.

Over the weekend, intense winds from a powerful cold front brought down trees, damaged powerlines, brought flooding rains and caused power outages for thousands of people. Gusts nearing 200 kilometres per hour were recorded in Tasmania. In southern New South Wales, a woman died after a tree fell on her holiday park cabin.

As southerners inspect the damage today, many of us will be looking anxiously at the trees we live next to – and wondering if they, too, could fall.

The good news is there are things you can do to make sure the trees near you are still safe.

These tips aren’t just for windstorm safety. As the climate changes, tree dieback is becoming more common. This year, we’ve seen large-scale dieback in south-west Western Australia and Tasmania. It’s increasingly important to keep tabs on large trees near you.

#1: Look down

When a whole tree falls over and pulls out its roots, it’s known as whole tree failure or “windthrow”. If this happens, it can be a major threat to you or your house.

There are often warning signs a tree might topple over even before a storm hits. On a windy day, look at the tree you’re worried about. Is there any sign of movement at the base of the tree and its visible roots? If so, call an arborist to come as quickly as possible to assess the risk.

#2. Look up

If large, dead branches are attached to the trunk, that’s dangerous. These branches – “hangers” – can be blown loose and be carried surprisingly far from the tree in strong winds. They’re also more likely to break during storms and strong winds than healthy branches.

To reduce your risk, it’s important to have these dead branches removed. The bigger the dead branch, the higher the risk. But small dead branches in a canopy are normal. These pose much less threat and can usually be left there.

#3. Inspect the junctions

Not all limb attachments are healthy or strong. If the place where the limb is attached looks damaged, it could mean the junction is weak and could fail. To check, look for signs of damage – loose bark, resin or sap on the bark or branch, or bark which has become much darker than usual.

Some junctions are riskier than others. Trunks and branches with steep V-shape junctions, or with fallen bark built up between them, are more likely to break during storms.

#4. Look for changes in leaf colour and coverage

If your tree rapidly loses foliage colour or suffers dieback of branches and canopy, this can also be a warning sign. These changes show us the tree is stressed and its health is getting worse. Sick trees are more vulnerable to storm damage.

Look for yellow and brown leaves, dead shoot tips and large branch dieback from their tips and dead patches on large limbs.

#5. Check the roots

Let’s say an excavator accidentally cuts one of your tree’s major structural roots with a diameter 100 mm or bigger. If this happens, it could risk the entire tree. Roots can also be damaged if the soil around them become compacted or waterlogged. These situations can weaken a tree from below.

To spot these issues, look for evidence of trenches where workers have cut through roots. Even when covered over, trenches will usually seem lower than the surrounding soil. Look for where soil has been compacted by vehicles or regular foot traffic. For waterlogging, look to see if water pools around trunks and under trees.

Root damage can be harder to spot, but damage underground can also trigger branch breakage or whole tree failure.

#6. Double check your lopped trees

If your tree has been badly pruned or lopped, it can become a threat. Poor work can trigger the growth of poorly attached shoots around the cuts or branch stubs. These shoots are more likely to fall during strong winds.

When the shoots are small, they don’t matter. But they can grow very quickly. Once more than 150 mm in diameter or ten metres long, they pose real risks.

Look for branching shoots which look different. Their branch attachment may look strange, or there may be multiple shoots from the same place on the trunk or stem. These shoots often grow almost vertically and grow at a much faster rate than normal branches.

#7. Check your canopy

If a large old trees dies or falls over, it can leave a large gap that changes local wind speed and intensity.

When trees are removed along roads, tracks and from around properties, canopy cover falls and wind speeds generally increase. This can be a real problem for your other trees, as they’re now enduring stronger winds than they were used to. It’s sensible to monitor your remaining trees in these circumstances.

Stormy future

Intense winds are projected to arrive more often in many parts of Australia as the climate keeps changing. This, in turn, will affect the trees we live close to.

It’s becoming more common to see householders pushing to remove large trees to reduce risk. But this comes with new challenges. With big trees gone, the wind speed near you will increase.

Big trees also offer unmatched cooling in summer. And while tree horror stories make the news, the vast majority of trees remain safely anchored in the ground during intense storms.

It’s entirely understandable to get anxious about big trees near your home. But rather than reaching for the chainsaw, it’s worth booking in regular tree inspections by a qualified arborist every three to five years to give reassurance or take action to reduce the risk.

Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Antidepressants have helped millions of people worldwide since the 1950s. But have you ever wondered what happens to these drugs once they leave our bodies?

We wanted to study the effects of pharmaceutical pollution on freshwater fish.

Our new research shows even low levels of the antidepressant fluoxetine – sold under the brand name Prozac, among others – will harm male guppies over time. In laboratory experiments, males exposed to fluoxetine at levels they would likely encounter in the wild suffered wide-ranging consequences.

As our reliance on medication grows, so too does the burden we place on natural systems. If we fail to understand the effects of pollution on wildlife, we risk compromising the health of our ecosystems and the services they provide.

Drugs in our waterways

When we take our medicine, only some is absorbed by our bodies. Most passes through largely unchanged, in urine.

Wastewater treatment plants were not designed to remove these residues. So vast quantities of drugs are released into the environment, along with treated wastewater, worldwide.

This means organisms in waterways downstream from wastewater treatment plants are likely to be bathed in a cocktail of human medicines.

Over time, exposure to these contaminants can potentially disturb animal behaviour, physiology and reproduction. Of particular concern are drugs such as antidepressants, which have been specifically designed to alter brain chemistry in humans.

In recent decades, antidepressants such as Prozac (fluoxetine) have been detected in rivers, lakes and streams across the globe.

Fluoxetine has become one of the most common pharmaceuticals found in our waterways worldwide, including here in Australia.

Fish on chill pills

Despite the obvious differences between humans and fish, we share remarkable similarities.

Pharmaceuticals designed for humans can affect fish and other species because they target receptors we have in common.

Prozac and other brands of fluoxetine increases levels of serotonin in the brain, which increases feelings of wellbeing and happiness. In fish, serotonin is also involved in reproduction, food intake and growth, stress and multiple behaviours.

So it’s not surprising fluoxetine can affect fish. Evidence suggests the effects can be specific to the life stages or even the sex of the fish.

What is surprising is most studies focus on short-term exposure, even though drugs such as fluoxetine can be highly persistent in the environment and affect fish over long periods.

We collected 3,600 wild guppies (Poecilia reticulata) from Alligator Creek in North Queensland. Water samples from the fish collection site showed no contamination with fluoxetine.

Back at the lab, we exposed 15 successive generations of these fish to fluoxetine over five years.

Fish were randomly assigned to one of three levels of exposure, no fluoxetine (control), “low” or “high”. The “low” treatment level represents common surface water concentrations. “High” represents levels typically found in bodies of water heavily dominated by human effluent.

Sex in contaminated water

We found male guppies exposed to low fluoxetine levels were in poor condition, using a measurement similar to body mass index (BMI) in humans. The modified fin male guppies use to inseminate females (gonopodium) was also larger in these males.

Having longer gonopodia helps with mating. So exposure to fluoxetine seemed to trigger a trade-off between physical and reproductive health. When the maintenance of body condition became too costly, the fish put more energy into growing a larger gonopodium.

Low levels of fluoxetine also decreased sperm motility. This means the sperm of exposed males were poor swimmers compared to the sperm of unexposed males.

Female guppies are capable of mating with multiple males. So sperm from different males can compete within the female to fertilise the eggs. Lower sperm motility can therefore reduce the reproductive success of males exposed to fluoxetine.

Strangely, the low-fluoxetine treatment had stronger effects than the high-fluoxetine treatment. But this type of dose-dependent relationship is often found for such drugs and various mechanisms may be at play, such as desensitisation towards higher doses.

Under the influence

Aside from the effects on reproduction, we also studied how fluoxetine exposure affects the activity and hiding behaviour of guppies. Both behaviours are crucial to survival in the wild.

Male guppies exposed to fluoxetine became less capable of adjusting their behaviour in different contexts. They were repeatedly more consistent in their behaviour. In the wild, this can reduce an individual’s ability to respond to environmental changes. For example, consistent behaviour can make a fish an easy target for predators, while unpredictable behaviours can reduce their vulnerability.

Our findings add to a growing body of evidence showing similar behavioural disturbances in exposed wildlife. For example, other studies found antidepressants such as fluoxetine can make fish less active. This could disrupt their ability to compete for food and mates.

Why this matters

Antidepressants can be life-saving for people but pose problems when they find their way into the environment.

Our research has uncovered effects on fish that were largely underappreciated and overlooked, until now. The effects of prolonged exposure to such pollutants demands further investigation.

This will be crucial if we are to develop effective strategies for protecting and managing sensitive aquatic ecosystems, such as better wastewater treatment processes.

Upama Aich, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University; Bob Wong, Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology, Monash University, and Giovanni Polverino, Assistant Professor in behavioural ecology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s winter in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, the weather is unusually warm. The top temperatures over large parts of the country this weekend were well above average for this time of year.

The outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia recorded 38.5°C on Friday and 39.4°C on Saturday – about 16°C above average. Both days were well above the state’s previous winter temperature record. In large parts of Australia, the heat is expected to persist into the coming week.

A high pressure system is bringing this unusual heat – and it’s hanging around. So temperature records have already fallen and may continue to be broken for some towns in the next few days.

It’s no secret the world is warming. In fact, 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record. Climate change is upon us. Historical averages are becoming just that: a thing of the past.

That’s why this winter heat is concerning. The warming trend will continue for at least as long as we keep burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere. Remember, this is only August. The heatwaves of spring and summer are only going to be hotter.

Records broken across Australia

The Bureau of Meteorology was expecting many records to be broken over the weekend across several states. On Thursday, bureau meteorologist Angus Hines described:

A scorching end to winter, with widespread heat around the country in coming days, including the chance of winter records across multiple states for maximum temperature.

The amount of heat plunging into central Australia was particularly unusual, Hines said.

On Friday, temperatures across northern South Australia and southern parts of the Northern Territory were as much as 15°C above average.

Temperatures continued to soar across northern parts of Western Australia over the weekend, with over 40°C recorded at Fitzroy Crossing on Sunday. It has been 2–12°C above average from Townsville all the way down to Melbourne for several days in a row.

Bear in mind, it’s only August. As Hines said, the fire weather season hasn’t yet hit most of Australia – but the current conditions – hot, dry and sometimes windy – are bringing moderate to high fire danger across Australia. It may also bring dusty conditions to central Australia.

And for latitudes north of Sydney and Perth, most of the coming week will be warm.

What’s causing the winter warmth?

In recent days a stubborn high pressure system has sat over eastern Australia and the Tasman Sea. It has kept skies clear over much of the continent and brought northerly winds over many areas, transporting warm air to the south.

High pressure promotes warm weather – both through clearer skies that bring more sunshine, and by promoting the descent of air which causes heating.

By late August, both the intensity of the sun and the length of the day has increased. So the centre of Australia can really warm up when under the right conditions.

High pressure in June can be associated with cooler conditions, because more heat is lost from the surface during those long winter nights. But that’s already less of an issue by late August.

This kind of weather setup has occurred in the past. Late-winter or early-spring heat does sometimes occur in Australia. However, this warm spell is exceptional, as highlighted by the broken temperature records across the country.

Feeling the heat

The consequences of humanity’s continued greenhouse gas emissions are clear. Australia’s winters are getting warmer overall. And winter “heatwaves” are becoming warmer.

Australia’s three warmest Augusts on record have all occurred since 2000 – and last August was the second-warmest since 1910. When the right weather conditions occur for winter warmth across Australia, the temperatures are higher than a century ago.

The warmth we are experiencing now comes off the back of a recent run of global temperature records and extreme heat events across the Northern Hemisphere.

This warm spell is set to continue, with temperatures above 30°C forecast from Wednesday through to Sunday in Brisbane. The outlook for spring points to continued above-normal temperatures across the continent, but as always we will likely see both warm and cold spells at times.

Such winter warmth is exceptional and already breaking records. Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of this kind of winter heat – and future warm spells will be hotter still, if humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions continue.

Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The latest official update on the health of the Great Barrier Reef is heartbreaking.

Released on Friday, the fourth five-yearly Outlook Report prepared by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority says the window of opportunity to secure a positive future for the Reef is “closing rapidly”.

While the overall condition of coral reef habitats had improved from “very poor” to “poor” in the five years to December 2023, the return of mass coral bleaching in early 2024 after the reporting period and the future global temperature increases already locked in made further degradation “inevitable”.

The report talks of “difficult choices and trade-offs”, but we argue that investing in reef protection is in fact excellent economics.

Rather than just thinking about the economic cost of measures to support the Reef, we ought to be also thinking about the economic benefits of those measures, which are almost certainly larger. This makes supporting the Reef a win-win.

A 2017 Deloitte Access Economics study put the annual value added to the economy from the Reef at A$6.4 billion.

Nearly 90% of that benefit ($5.7 billion) came from one industry – tourism (pre-covid). Smaller economic benefits came from fishing ($162 million), recreation ($346 million) and scientific research ($182 million).

But these are only four of about 20 categories of so-called marine ecosystem services linked to marine ecosystems, among them coastal protection, climate regulation, pollution removal, oxygen production and cultural significance.

More than a tourist attraction

The Reef is the largest living structure on Earth. Spanning 2,300 kilometres and covering an area larger than New Zealand, it is home to hundreds of thousands of marine and coral species and one of the most complex ecosystems in the world.

Important in a different way, but not well understood, is its role in providing critical physical protection to coastal cities and towns from increasingly frequent and severe tropical cyclones and storms.

When corals die from bleaching, however, the degraded reefs can be about 50 centimetres deeper than healthy reefs, reducing the protection for low-lying infrastructure.

Worth $21 billion to $56 billion plus

Estimates of the value of the reef as an asset to the country range from A$21 billion to as much as $56 billion.

These estimates typically include the value of the reef to Australians who never visit it, as determined by a method known as contingent valuation. In this type of valuation, people are asked how much they would be willing to pay to protect something. In the case of the reef, it would typically exclude the direct value of it to ecosystem services.

Even at the lower $21 billion value, the Jacobs economics advisory group calculates that an appropriate amount to spend protecting the economic value of the reef (using the same formulas to assess what’s needed to protect other infrastructure) comes to about $830 million per year.

Clearly, using the higher $56 billion valuation would justify a significantly greater investment in protection.

While the government talks of spending billions on the reef, most of the spending announcements are for sums delivered over long time frames. The above economic evidence suggests that spending more would deliver a net benefit to the economy, as well as enormous environmental and heritage benefits.

How much more? Although most Australians believe the reef to be priceless, even incomplete estimates confirm its economic value is very high.

If we’re going to make choices and trade-offs, we need to at least understand the full costs of missing that closing window, of failing to secure a positive future for the Reef.

Looking after the Reef and addressing climate change should not be seen as costs but as investments, win-win investments for nature and the economy.

Laurence McCook, Adjunct Professorial Research Fellow, Partner Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University and Rashid Sumaila, Director & Professor, Fisheries Economics Research Unit, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Great Barrier Reef will continue to deteriorate, largely due to climate change, and the window to secure its future is rapidly closing. That is the sobering conclusion of a major new report into the state of the reef.

The report was released by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. It confirms what scientists have long known: humanity is killing the Great Barrier Reef, and other reefs around the world, by failing to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Earlier this year, I visited parts of the southern Great Barrier Reef where mass coral bleaching and death had just occurred. The picture was devastating. Vast swathes of coral were bleached a ghostly white. It was interspersed with bright flashes of pink and blue: a final, heartbreaking release of coral pigment as the organism makes a last-ditch effort to survive. I’ve since learned much of that coral is now dead.

Anyone who knows anything about coral reefs would have been upset by what I saw. The world’s largest reef was in very, very bad shape. As I swam, in the back of my head was the knowledge that 2023 was Earth’s hottest year on record. In fact, the Great Barrier Reef is the warmest it has been for at least 400 years.

Unless humanity takes dramatic action to halt climate change, we will lose the beautiful, complex reefs that have existed on Earth for millennia. As this latest report shows, even governments and officials now acknowledge this fact.

Make no mistake: the reef is in dire straits

The 2024 Great Barrier Reef Outlook report, released late on Friday, is the fourth in a series of five-yearly reports on the reef’s health.

It found warming oceans and severe tropical cyclones are compounding other threats such as crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks, poor water quality and unsustainable fishing.

The report said the condition of some coral species has improved over the past five years – from “very poor” to “poor”. We shouldn’t get too excited about this. It means a few fast-growing coral species are bouncing back.

Make no mistake: the reef’s overall prospects remain dire. As the report states:

While recent recovery in some ecosystem values demonstrates that the reef is still resilient, its capacity to tolerate and recover is jeopardised by a rapidly changing climate.

It’s also important to note that the report covers the five years to December 2023. It does not capture the damage caused by the mega-bleaching event up and down the reef last summer.

As my colleagues and I wrote recently, the Great Barrier Reef has suffered five mass bleaching events in the past nine summers.

Bleaching occurs when corals become so heat-stressed they eject the tiny algae living inside their tissues. These organisms give coral some of its colour and help power its metabolism. In mild bleaching events, corals can recover. But in the severe events that are becoming more common, corals do not survive.

Analysis by others shows the mortality in stark detail. The left-hand image below shows coral at Lizard Island “fluorescing” or releasing bright pigment in March this year. This protective measure aims to limit the damage to remaining microalgae.

The image on the right, three months later, shows more than 97% of the same corals had died.

Climate change is not the only threat

The report said climate-driven disturbances are compounding the effects of other chronic damage to the reef from:

• unsustainable fishing
• pollution
• sediment runoff
• outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish.

Among other key findings of the report were that:

• most populations of marine turtles have declined
• species such as seabirds, sharks, rays, dugongs and seagrasses have recovered in some areas and plateaued or declined in others
• populations of estuarine crocodiles are recovering
• many species in declines are listed as threatened or protected.

Strong leadership is needed

I first visited the Great Barrier Reef in 1980, as a university student. My interest in it has never waned. It’s one of those incredible bits of nature that defies description.

The reef’s World Heritage listing is proof of its outstanding global value. Australians love and feel pride in this vast and stunning place. The reef supports the livelihoods and wellbeing of many, including Traditional Owners who have cared for it over thousands of generations. It sustains all of us: economically, culturally and spiritually.

You might see a photo of healthy-looking coral and think the reef must be doing well. But I have seen the problem first-hand over many years. The reef is suffering badly – and every fraction of a degree of global warming compounds the harm.

Humanity must take urgent action to limit global temperature rise. But we are failing. We are failing the Great Barrier Reef and indeed, coral reefs across the planet.

There was a time when governments and reef managers were not willing to admit the extent of the problem. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. As the report states:

2024 opens a new chapter for the reef. Future warming already locked into the climate system means that further degradation is inevitable. This is the sobering calculus of climate change.

Climate change is a global problem, but Australia is undeniably part of it. This nation cannot export fossil fuels to be burnt overseas if we want to save the Great Barrier Reef. Dealing with this will take strong political leadership, from the prime minister down.

Humanity has all the facts in front of us. Earth is in an uncharted time of very rapid change. If we don’t respond, we will lose the Great Barrier Reef.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Japan has a very clear vision of what the Asia-Pacific’s clean energy future looks like – decarbonisation, but done slowly and with a longer role for coal, oil and gas.

It was on full display this week as energy ministers from nine South-East Asian nations, Japan and Australia gathered in Jakarta to hash out a shared vision for Asia’s energy future, under Japan’s Asian Zero Emissions Community (AZEC) initiative launched last year.

But there’s a clear problem here. Japan’s vision clashes directly with Australia’s efforts to become a green export superpower. And worse, Japanese investment is a key reason why Australia has emerged as an unlikely gas export giant.

Energy security is front of mind for Japanese policymakers worried about keeping the lights on across their import-dependent archipelago. While Tokyo does have green energy plans, its short-term push is all about prolonging the life of fossil fuels – coupled with carbon capture.

Labor came to power promising to act faster on climate change. By decade’s end, Australia should be largely run on renewables, and Canberra wants to make clean exports a reality.

But Japan is making that harder by financing gas exploitation in Australia. This could lock our fast-growing and energy-hungry region into much longer reliance on dirty fossil fuels and questionable carbon capture plans.

There’s a real danger Australia’s green export plans could be washed away by a tide of new fossil fuels.

So what are Japan’s zero emission plans?

In 2022, the Japanese Prime Minister Kishido Fumio began promoting a triple breakthrough – efforts combining decarbonisation, economic growth and energy security. Fumio launched the Asian Zero Emissions Community to encourage the idea.

While these goals sound reasonable, the devil is in the detail. The world’s fourth-largest economy, Japan has long been dependent on imported coal, oil and gas – and more so after the 2011 Fukushima disaster forced nuclear plant shutdowns. Even as the world belatedly scrambles to tackle climate change, Japanese policymakers are still focused on keeping fossil fuels flowing. Many AZEC projects aim to use fossil fuels for electricity.

The government’s energy policies explicitly aim to secure long-term supplies of fossil fuels and encourage Japanese firms to be involved. Japan is now the world’s second-largest public financier of international fossil fuel projects, spending more than A$7 billion every year.

How does this align with net zero? Japan claims new fossil fuel plants can slash emissions by burning ammonia in coal plants, blending hydrogen with fossil gas in gas plants and ramping up carbon capture and storage.

Each of these technologies is expensive and largely unproven. They cannot cut emissions at anywhere near the scale or speed needed. And every million spent on propping up fossil fuels is a million not spent on renewables and storage.

Japanese funding makes Australian gas flow

Japan sees Australia as a friendly nation with huge fossil fuel resources and longstanding trade links.

Any changes to coal and gas extraction have been met with Japanese lobbying. When Queensland hiked coal royalties in 2022, Japan’s ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami, pushed back hard. The move, he warned, could have “widespread effects on Japanese investment beyond the coal industry”.

When the federal government strengthened the Safeguard Mechanism, our main industrial emissions policy, costs increased for some gas projects. In response, Yamagami dialed up his rhetoric, warning the neon lights of Tokyo would go out without Australian energy exports.

Japan isn’t burning it all at home. It on-sells more liquefied natural gas (LNG) to other Asian nations than it imports from Australia. Without Japan’s funding on favourable terms, our LNG producers would not be able to compete with lower-cost producers such as Qatar.

Given a global gas glut is now forecast to arrive by 2026, Australia should be looking to dial down LNG. But Japan won’t let that happen.

Just this year, Japan loaned $2.5 billion to help Woodside develop Western Australia’s massive Scarborough gas field.

Independent and green – or dependent and dirty?

Domestically, Australia is greening. Coal is retiring as renewables and storage rush in. Last year, 40% of the power in our main grid came from clean energy and more than 80% of Australia’s total power needs should be provided by renewables by 2030. But internationally, we’re now the second-largest exporter of carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

With major reserves of critical minerals (essential for renewables and batteries) and world class renewable resources, Australia is ideally placed to export green commodities to the region.

The Albanese government is promoting Australia as a “renewable energy superpower” and will invest public money through the Future Made in Australia plan to give local green industries a chance of global success.

But Japan has a different vision. Funding flows from Tokyo have already distorted Australia’s energy market and boosted demand for gas in the region. Worse, it has made it harder for Australian leaders to create future-focused industries. New gas projects pull investment, workers and supply-chain capacity away from clean energy industries.

It’s not that Japan is anti-renewable. It’s just slow to move. Tokyo has ambitious plans to become the world’s top producer of energy from offshore wind.

Recent modelling shows Japan could achieve 90% clean energy by 2035, gaining far greater energy independence and slashing reliance on expensive fossil fuels. If Japan took this route, we would likely see its Australian investments shift from gas to green exports.

But right now, Japan’s focus is on keeping fossil fuels flowing.

Australia has to help shape Asia’s energy transition. If we don’t, we risk our future being made in Tokyo.

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This week, outgoing Senex Energy chief executive Ian Davies made headlines when he warned within a few short years, Australia won’t have enough gas to meet our demand, due largely to government inaction and intervention.

This is both true and not true. Australia-wide, there is no shortage of gas. We’re the world’s second largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), after all. Critics see the purported supply crisis as a move by the industry to open up new gas fields.

But in gas-dependent Victoria, the risk of shortages is very real. That’s because the state’s offshore gas wells are running out, and governments and industry haven’t acted to boost supplies until renewables can cover the gap.

Since 2010, production from offshore gas wells in Victoria has fallen by 70% and there’s not been enough new gas to replace it. The state government has banned fracking. And while New South Wales will soon have a gas import terminal (Australia’s first), Victoria knocked back a similar proposal on environmental grounds three years ago, and another, proposed for Geelong, is yet to secure environmental approval.

Victorian leaders will be relieved winter is ending and the gas heaters will be turned off. But the problem will not go away without concerted action.

What’s the shape of the problem?

Australia’s energy market operator has issued increasingly direct calls for more investment in Victoria’s straining gas system. Early this year, the operator warned:

Investment uncertainty in gas supply and infrastructure projects remains high, and many [potential projects] have not materially progressed.

Since the late 1960s, Victoria has relied on its wealth of offshore gas in Bass Strait, extracting enough for its own needs and exporting to South Australia and NSW. Its abundance and affordability led to more homes and small businesses taking up gas than in any other Australian jurisdiction. More than two million Victorian homes still use gas.

Change is coming slowly – last year, the state used about 177 petajoules of gas, the lowest demand this century. Annual output from Bass Strait’s gas fields is now around 300 petajoules and falling steadily. But this is an annual figure – it’s hard to ramp up production to meet sudden increases in demand.

The problem came to a head this cold, still winter. Wind and hydro power production fell. People fired up gas heaters, and gas power plants had to cover more electricity demand. Stored gas rapidly ran low.

At winter’s end, demand for gas falls off sharply. But this seasonal problem will soon become continuous as production keeps falling.

The state government is belatedly planning to phase out gas. These plans are welcome, but too late to solve the immediate problem. Getting Victoria off gas means 200 households have to quit gas every day for the next 20 years.

In 1998, an explosion at the Longford gas plant in Gippsland left households and businesses without gas for weeks. A gas shortage would be less immediate but still bring disruption and financial pain for businesses.

What should be done?

Australia has a lot of gas, but it is unevenly distributed.

Most large current or future gas fields are in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. To send it thousands of kilometres south would require major upgrades to existing pipelines or new, bigger pipelines. Investors have shown limited interest.

The NSW import terminal under construction at Port Kembla, near Wollongong, could deliver gas to Victoria via existing pipelines. But so far, energy retailers have not committed to use it, likely because potential seasonal shortfalls are not yet severe enough to cover the cost of its use.

That leaves shipping it directly to Victoria from overseas or from northern ports. It sounds odd for a major producer to import gas – but it could be the cheapest solution.

Our major gas buyers – Japan, Korea and China – have built large LNG import terminals, with giant tanks and lots of infrastructure. A Victorian import terminal would look very different, as it would be a temporary measure to ensure gas keeps flowing until demand ceases.

To do it, the terminal operator would build a wharf and lease a special type of ship – a floating storage and regasification unit, able to boil LNG back into gas and store it. While it would cost, say, A$100-200,000 a day to rent, that could still be cheaper than building new pipelines. When demand falls, the operator could stop leasing the ship.

Three years ago, AGL’s proposed import terminal in Westernport Bay was knocked back on environmental grounds.

Now there are plans for an import terminal in a less ecologically sensitive location in Geelong. Oil refinery owner Viva Energy wants to build a new wharf next to its existing one in Corio Bay, and then hire a regasification unit. Environmentalists have taken aim at this proposal too. If Viva is knocked back, it would leave Victoria dependent on the Port Kembla terminal.

Environmentalists do not like the idea of gas. They point out that burning methane is far from green. Environmentally minded voters are likely one reason why Victoria’s long serving Labor government has struggled to shore up gas supplies. In May, state energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio had to admit Victoria would need new gas supplies.

The harsh reality is we must get off gas – but we can’t erase Victoria’s long reliance overnight. Doing nothing means gas shortages will be inevitable, acting as an economic, social, and political disruption to tackling climate change. 

Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Multi-billion-dollar transport projects create headlines, and politicians love to bask in the glow of a successfully completed project such as Sydney’s new Metro. This service will change many people’s lives for the better.

In stark contrast with the shiny new Metro stations, the bus network is suffering from under-investment. Our survey of thousands of suburban bus stops, conducted with advocacy group Sweltering Cities, found many lack shelter, seating, signage and even stable surfaces.

Fixing Sydney’s busted bus stops might not grab headlines, but it will greatly improve access to our public transport network. It will also provide comfort and dignity for the many people who rely on buses. Sydneysiders make more than 600,000 bus trips every weekday.

Extreme heat and rain are becoming more frequent with climate change. This makes the task of providing bus riders with adequate shelter even more urgent.

The weakest link in the network

Transport network planners often think about bus stops as points along a route rather than places – they appear merely as dots on a network map.

But, for passengers, bus stops are public places in their neighbourhood. If they lack basic amenity such as shade, seating, signage and smooth surfaces, they become the “weakest link in the journey chain”, either discouraging or preventing people from using bus services. Transport researchers are increasingly recognising the importance of bus stop infrastructure for making buses accessible – especially for riders who have mobility or health issues.

In cities such as Atlanta and New York in the United States, organised groups of bus riders are agitating for improvements. They not only want to improve access, but also to combat the indignity of waiting for buses in places that offer them no care or protection.

Sydney’s busted bus stops

Buses are a vital element of metropolitan Sydney’s public transport. Some 37% of public transport trips in New South Wales are by bus.

But Sydney’s network of more than 20,000 bus stops leaves a lot to be desired. Their sorry state has led to a community campaign for improvements.

As part of Sweltering Cities’ “Busted Bus Stops” campaign, community members and University of Sydney urban geography students conducted a “bus stop census”. We documented the amenities at more than 2,500 bus stops in Sydney. Using a combination of Google Street View and in-person field visits, we mapped the stops with shelters or shade structures, seats and signage.

We focused our attention especially on the hottest suburbs in the west. It can be over 9°C hotter here than in the city’s east. Extremely hot days are also more frequent.

Exposure to extreme heat can have a range of harmful health effects. Some groups like children and older people are especially vulnerable.

What did the survey find?

Analysing this data, the Busted Bus Stops report revealed glaring problems and inequalities. For instance:

• more than 60% of 105 bus stops mapped in the new growth area around Schofields in the north-west had no shelter, shade or seating

• almost 70% of 596 bus stops mapped in and around Penrith, where temperatures have reached over 50°C in summer, had no shelter, shade or seating

• in comparison, in the inner-west suburbs of Strathfield, Ashfield and Summer Hill, over 65% of 101 bus stops mapped had seating and shade or shelter.

Not surprisingly, passengers raised bus stop amenity as a key issue during consultations for the NSW government’s 2023 Bus Industry Taskforce report. Many Sydneysiders will be familiar with the experiences passengers shared – such as seeking shelter from the sun or rain by moving away from an unsheltered bus stop, only to then have the bus you are waiting for cruise right past.

Upgrades aren’t glamorous but make a huge difference

Reflecting the neglect of bus stops, Transport for NSW does not take responsibility for providing bus stop shelters, seating or surface works. Indeed, when we started our research, we asked Transport for NSW if they could share data about bus stop shelters and were told they didn’t collect it.

Responsibility for bus stop amenity falls mostly on cash-strapped local councils. This leads to unequal provision across the city.

Local councils in wealthy areas have more resources to provide bus shelters. They are also in a better position to strike deals with outdoor advertising companies to provide street furniture like bus stops.

Lower-income and hotter areas where good shelters are most needed are left behind. This is the case in Western Sydney’s 2770 postcode suburbs of Willmot, Lethbridge Park, Bidwill and Tregear. Residents there are calling for improvements to bus amenities and services.

These problems can be fixed. The City of Los Angeles recently started a major upgrade project to install 3,000 shelters and 450 shade structures at bus stops across the city over the next ten years. Priority locations are being identified through analysis of ridership data, along with equity and heat indexes. The goal is for 75% of all passengers to board buses from locations with a shelter.

It’s time for the NSW government to follow LA’s lead and launch a city-wide program of upgrades for Sydney’s neglected bus stops.

Investing in bus stops might be less glamorous than new mega-projects. But it’s a lot cheaper.

And, just like the new Metro, it would make a huge difference to the everyday lives of millions of Sydneysiders – especially the young, the old and others who are most vulnerable to heat and depend on buses because they don’t drive.

Kurt Iveson, Professor of Urban Geography, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Almost 35 years have passed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first assessment report. It found human activities were substantially increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other gases ion the atmosphere, which was warming the global climate.

Since then, countries around the world have introduced a slew of policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what actually worked?

This question is at the heart of a landmark new paper by German researchers. They analysed 1,500 climate policies implemented around the world over the past two decades, and found only a small fraction were effective.

Importantly, they found most emissions reduction relied on a mix of policies. The results point to a way forward for Australia, where an economy-wide carbon price is currently politically impossible.

Untangling the policy labyrinth

At a global level, emissions-reduction policies have yet to produce the sustained reduction in CO₂ emissions needed to hold global heating below 2°C.

So it’s important to understand how well, or badly, emissions-reduction policies in various countries have worked.

A few ad hoc observations can be made. For example, Australia’s carbon emissions fell during the brief period of the Gillard Labor government’s carbon price, then rose when the Abbott government removed the policy. It is not hard to identify causality here.

Rarely is the cause for success or failure so clear-cut. Globally, in the past few decades, various policies have been introduced, modified, and in some cases, abandoned. It can be seemingly impossible to disentangle their effects.

But a new paper attempts this task.

‘Difference in difference’

The research was led by Annika Stechemesser from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. It employs a standard technique for determining the effects of a policy intervention, known as the “differences in differences” approach.

This approach compares changes in outcomes over time between two groups. If a policy was ineffective, the differences between the groups should stay the same over time. If the gap changes in the expected direction, the policy is assumed to be effective.

The method was applied most famously in a 1994 study in the United States by economists David Card and Alan Kreuger. They compared fast-food restaurants in New Jersey, where minimum wages were increased, with those in Pennsylvania, where wages were unchanged.

They found the rise in the minimum wage had no effect on the number of people employed by restaurants. The analysis led to a radical change in thinking about minimum wages.

But that analysis involved a single change. The Potsdam team sought to distinguish the effects of more than 1,500 climate policy interventions, implemented across 41 countries over two decades.

It required sorting through a huge volume of data, while applying the “differences in differences” approach. The researchers did this using artificial intelligence.

They analysed four sectors: buildings, electricity, industry and transport. They examined eight kinds of policy interventions, primarily focused on:

• pricing policies, such as carbon taxes and permits that can be bought and sold

• regulation, such as bans, building codes and energy efficiency rules

• applying or removing subsidies, such as governments paying property owners to install rooftop solar, or removing tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry.

What the research found

The researchers identified 63 cases where climate policies had led to large emissions reduction.

Unsurprisingly, though a little disappointingly, no “silver bullet” policy emerged. Rather, most successful cases – at least in developed economies – were the result of two or more policies working together.

This might mean, for example, a fuel efficiency mandate for vehicles, combined with subsidies to help develop a network of charging stations for electric vehicles.

The study also found successful policy mixes vary across sectors. For example in developed countries, pricing was particularly effective policy in sectors dominated by profit-oriented companies, such as electricity and industry. But a mix of incentives and regulations worked best in the buildings and transport sectors.

And countries have different needs, depending on income. In developing countries, for example, pricing interventions did not lead to large emission reductions in the electricity sector. This may change, however, as China gradually develops carbon markets.

The researchers have made the data available to the public in a handy tool. It is easily searchable by sector and country.

The strength of this approach is the ability to integrate analysis across many different countries. However, this global approach precludes a fine-grained analysis for each country.

For example, because Australia’s carbon pricing scheme was so short-lived, and its effects rapidly reversed, the differences-in-differences analysis did not capture its significance.

What can Australia learn?

The research is an impressive effort to distil lessons from the mass of confusing data surrounding climate policy.

The findings would once have been unwelcome news to the economics profession, which in the past has largely advocated for one stand-alone policy applied across the economy – most commonly, putting a price on carbon.

Carbon prices are not a complete solution, but they are important. Research in 2020 showed countries with carbon prices, on average, had annual carbon emissions growth rates two percentage points lower than countries without a carbon price.

Unfortunately in Australia, the federal Coalition is resolutely opposed to any kind of price-based measure to cut emissions. And following the Gillard government’s politically bruising experience over the carbon price, the Albanese government is allergic to any mention of such policies.

So while price-based mechanisms are, theoretically, the ideal way to cut emissions, most economists now accept there’s no point holding out for it. If a combination of measures in different parts of the economy is the best we can do, it’s better than nothing. The important task is to reduce emissions.

The political constraints on price-based policy mean Australia must push harder on other policy approaches – namely regulations and subsidies – to reach net-zero by 2050.

John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Imagine if Australian cities became major producers of clean energy, rather than relying on far-flung solar and wind farms.

Far fetched? Hardly. Our cities and towns are full of warehouses, commercial areas, shopping centres and factories. These types of buildings have one very important underutilised resource – large expanses of unoccupied rooftops, perfect for solar and battery power stations.

If our commercial and industrial areas took up solar and storage, it would be revolutionary. Electricity could be produced in cities and used in cities, reducing transmission losses. Commercial businesses could generate solar power during the day, store it in batteries on site and sell it back to the grid during the evening peak.

Our calculations show Australia has enough unused commercial and industrial rooftop space to supply at least 25% of our annual electricity use – five times as much as currently supplied by gas-fired generators.

Australia is already the world’s top rooftop solar nation, per capita. But our solar is largely on our houses. We have four times as much residential solar as we do on commercial buildings. In Europe, it’s the opposite – there’s 1.5 times as much solar on businesses as on houses. The EU’s new Solar Energy Standard is expected to double rooftop solar capacity in four years.

In our new discussion paper, we make the case for a massive expansion of battery-backed solar photovoltaic power on Australian business premises. Call it “business power”.

There are excellent reasons for policymakers and building owners to look at this. It offers a potentially large new source of cheap, reliable, clean electricity with little downside risk.

What’s the benefit of warehouse power stations?

Rooftop solar has been Australia’s quiet achiever. In 2023, rooftop solar produced 70% more electricity on Australia’s rooftops than either hydro generators or solar farms.

Solar farms are largely built in rural areas, as it’s easier to get large tracts of land. But city-based solar has advantages. City solar doesn’t change land use, need vegetation cleared or change the beauty of the countryside. Solar and wind farms in rural areas have to send power to cities, necessitating expensive new transmission lines. Some planned new lines have proven controversial.

When you add storage, you turn cheaply produced solar into a much more valuable commodity – reliable evening power. In evenings, the sun has set and demand soars. This is when much more expensive coal, gas or hydro generation dominates supply.

Locally produced battery-backed solar can also make better use of our distribution networks – the urban poles and wires. In a recent report, the peak body for Australia’s energy networks found surplus capacity in our distribution networks could be used by decentralised power generation and storage.

By contrast, some large rural transmission lines are already hitting capacity limits as distant wind and solar farms take up spare capacity.

What would it take to start this in earnest?

When a business owner or householder goes solar, it’s usually to save money. By producing their own power, they reduce how much expensive grid power they buy.

By contrast, our proposal would encourage businesses to install solar and batteries so they can export power to the grid.

A scheme like this would need policy support to get it started. That’s because it’s much less profitable to sell to the grid than it is to avoid buying from the grid. In electricity, as in other markets, wholesale prices are almost always lower than retailer prices.

To make it attractive to businesses, we propose the incentive of new floor prices (minimum prices) for electricity sold to the grid by businesses. It would cover electricity injected into the grid outside solar peak periods – before 11am or after 2pm – and from behind-the-meter batteries discharging to the grid during the evening peak, from 6pm to 9pm.

Floor prices would have to be set carefully to make investment worthwhile – but without unnecessary public largesse. To be eligible, businesses would have to have enough storage relative to the solar installation to be able to reliably store solar power to sell in the evenings. The payback period would differ from one business to another.

What’s in it for the public?

Like almost all competing energy policies, this scheme would require governments to use public funds to stimulate supply. Why might consumers or taxpayers support this?

Our governments are already using the money of taxpayers and electricity consumers to fund new gas power stations, to prolong the life of ageing coal power stations and to encourage more large renewables and storage. We believe this scheme would stack up favourably on cost, speed, cleanliness, reliability and ease.

The scheme also offers a comparatively cheap way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The value Australia’s government places on avoiding one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2024 is A$70. We estimate our scheme could cut emissions at a cost of around $23 a tonne.

What’s next?

Let’s say governments introduce these floor prices. What would happen next?

We anticipate business owners would weigh up the benefits. Many would decide to take advantage of the policy directly, while others might rent their rooftops to specialist companies to do the same.

Recent regulatory changes mean businesses are now legally able to export power without messing with their existing retail contracts.

Of course, policies come with risks. Desk-based studies like ours can only go so far. Important information is often only revealed by putting policies into practice. But schemes like this one could easily be tweaked or closed to new entrants – just as state governments did in ending premium solar feed-in tariffs.

In short, there seems to be little to be lost and a potentially large benefit to society.

Bruce Mountain, Professor and Director, Victoria Energy Policy Centre, Victoria University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For decades, Australia’s largest independent oil and gas company, Woodside, has eyed off a prize: the largest known unconventional gas fields in the nation.

But there’s a problem. The enormous Brecknock, Calliance and Torosa gas fields are hundreds of kilometres off the coast of Western Australia – buried underneath pristine coral reefs. To access it, the company would have to drill more than 50 wells around the Scott Reef system and pipe the gas 900 km along the ocean floor to a processing plant.

Now Woodside has an even larger problem. The state’s Environmental Protection Authority is signalling it will reject this A$30 billion project, known as Browse, which is part of Woodside’s much larger Burrup Hub project.

It would be unusual to see the state authority reject a project of this size – they’re more commonly approved with conditions. But the authority is clearly concerned about the potential damage the giant gas project could do. The project has been mired in controversy, attracting 800 public appeals and more than 400,000 signatures on a petition against it. Conservationists are elated at news of the rejection.

Has this project by Australia’s homegrown answer to Big Oil been shut down? Not quite. The authority has only made a preliminary decision. Woodside has vowed to keep pushing for a green light – and it has the support of federal Resources Minister, Madeleine King.

But because these reefs are on an important migration route for endangered pygmy blue whales, federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek may have to weigh in.

What happens next will tell us a great deal about who holds sway within the Albanese government.

How big is this project?

If approved, the Browse project would feed gas into Woodside’s proposed Burrup Hub, the company’s gas megaproject which would become one of the largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing hubs in Australia. Conservationists have described Burrup as a “climate bomb”, which would produce twice the emissions of any other fossil fuel project seeking approval.

The Browse gas has high levels of carbon dioxide (12% CO₂), and gas extraction commonly leads to escaped methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Last year, Shell left the joint venture citing concerns about profitability and carbon.

But greenhouse gas emissions aren’t usually covered under an environmental authority’s remit. The Western Australian authority reportedly rejected the Browse project on conservation grounds. A freedom of information request by the Nine newspapers produced a letter the authority sent in February to Woodside, indicating the project was “unacceptable” due to the likely impacts on Scott Reef.

The concerns are well-founded. The project would threaten the habitat or migratory routes of endangered species such as pygmy blue whales, manta rays, whale sharks and nesting green turtles. Gas flaring would disorient migratory birds and young turtle hatchlings.

Noise pollution from drilling, piling and other infrastructure would cause stress and impact habitat. Chemical pollutants including drilling fluid and treated sewage would be released into the water.

High speed transfer boats could threaten whale migration paths. Then there’s the chance of an oil blowout. If this happened, it would be devastating for marine life.

There’s a chance gas extraction could cause Sandy Islet, the only part of Scott Reef above the high tide mark, to be submerged, risking the destruction of a popular nesting habitat for green turtles.

In the public interest?

Woodside argues exploiting these enormous gas fields is necessary to avoid a forecast gas shortage in WA – and to firm up energy security in Asia.

But the state doesn’t have a gas shortage. Even if it did, WA has a domestic reservation policy requiring LNG producers to reserve 15% for the domestic market. Given a recent WA parliamentary inquiry found major gas companies are only reserving 8% of the state’s gas at present, it would be far simpler to enforce the current reservation policy rather than crack open new gas under a coral reef.

What’s coming next?

A final decision by the state Environmental Protection Authority is yet to be handed down. But even if the decision is a clear no, it’s hard to see the company giving up.

In that case, Plibersek would likely have to weigh in. She is tasked with making determinations of national environmental significance under Australia’s main environment laws.

These laws don’t account for damage done by emissions, meaning Plibersek could not reject Woodside’s proposal on climate grounds. But the act does cover protection of endangered species, migratory species and the marine environment.

The endangered pygmy blue whale is found in Western Australian waters –including Scott Reef. Under Australia’s environment laws, endangered means the species has had a severe drop in population and has fallen by at least 50% over ten years or three generations.

Plibersek could stop the Browse project due to its impact on the pygmy blue whale, as this species has an existing species recovery plan.

When a recovery plan is in place, our laws state the federal minister cannot approve a project inconsistent with or in contravention of the plan. But the whale’s recovery plan expires next year.

Gas – or nature?

When the Albanese government came to power, it promised stronger action on climate and a reversal of the worsening decline of the natural world.

But what happens when the government’s priorities conflict? This year, King launched the government’s future gas strategy, which envisages a role for fossil gas out to 2050.

For so long when a fossil fuel company has applied to open new gas fields or coal mines in Australia the answer has been yes. A decision by WA’s environmental authority has challenged that. But it’s not a hard no.

If Browse gets federal approval, it will be a very clear sign of the government’s priorities.

Samantha Hepburn, Professor, Deakin Law School, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Emissions of a super-strong greenhouse gas could be substantially reduced if factories would properly implement existing “destruction technology” in certain industrial production processes. If operated properly, emissions of this greenhouse gas could be cut by at least 85% – that’s equivalent to 17% of carbon dioxide emissions from global aviation.

Our research, published today in the journal Nature, scrutinises emissions of one of the most potent hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) greenhouse gases, called trifluoromethane (HFC-23). One gram of HFC-23 in the atmosphere contributes as much to the greenhouse effect as 12kg of carbon dioxide.

This unwanted byproduct comes from the production of certain gases used as refrigerants and the manufacture of fluoropolymers (a class of plastic chemicals) such as polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a key ingredient in most non-stick cookware.

More than 150 countries have pledged to significantly reduce their HFC-23 emissions as part of the 2016 Kigali Amendment to an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer. The breakdown of HFCs in the atmosphere does not directly link to ozone depletion, but HFCs were introduced to replace ozone-depleting substances such as chloroflourocarbons (CFCs), so they have been included in this regulation.

HFCs are also strong greenhouse gases. While the Kigali Amendment aims to reduce emissions of widely used HFCs, an exceptional arrangement is made for HFC-23. Because HFC-23 is largely emitted from production processes and not from end-use applications, its destruction as a by-product is required “to the extent practicable” as of 2020 – that means as much as possible, but it’s a vague limit.

Even before 2020, many countries, including the biggest manufacturers of PTFE such as China, reported they had installed destruction technologies at PTFE factories and are successfully destroying HFC-23. In 2020, the reported global annual emissions of HFC-23 were only around 2,000 metric tonnes – but actual global emissions, derived from atmospheric measurements, amounted to around 16,000 metric tonnes.

To unravel this discrepancy between real and reported emissions, we analysed HFC-23 emissions from a major European PTFE factory in the Netherlands, which already operates destruction technologies – these include the incineration of harmful byproducts.

The aim of our experiment was to define what “practicable” actually means, and to identify how much HFC-23 can be easily destroyed by existing technology at a factory-wide scale, considering that emissions come from both the chimneys and leaks from other parts of the plant.

With the factory’s collaboration and the consent of the Dutch environment authorities, we released a controlled amount of a tracer gas directly next to the factory: this is a non-toxic, degradable gas that does not occur in the atmosphere. We then measured the concentrations of HFC-23, other byproducts of flouropolymer manufacture, and the released tracer at an observing site run by the Europe-wide greenhouse gas research centre, the Integrated Carbon Observation System, near the Dutch village of Cabauw.

This 213m-tall tower is located around 25km away from the factory. We knew exactly how much tracer we had released and how much of it arrived at the measuring point, so we could calculate the emissions of HFC-23 and other gases.

Results showed that even though our estimated emissions were higher than those reported by the factory, the technology at this particular factory was working properly and successfully destroying HFC-23.

Upscaling to global emissions

However, as the industrial manufacture of fluoropolymers is currently the major known source of HFC-23 to the atmosphere, we suspect that destruction technologies are not as effectively operated as reported by manufacturers.

Our findings indicate that if all factories globally were controlling emissions in the same way as the Dutch site, HFC-23 emissions could be cut by at least around 85%, representing emissions equivalent to 170 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. This reduction equates to almost one-fifth (17%) of carbon dioxide emissions generated by all aviation traffic.

Real and reported emissions of HFC-23

An independent auditing framework for fluoropolymer production would ensure that HFC-23 is destroyed properly at factories around the world. Targeted monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the production of fluorochemicals would further the understanding of emission sources and ensure that countries are fully compliant under different international climate and environment agreements.

Our results show that destruction technologies can effectively be implemented – in this case, at factories producing fluoropolymers such as PTFE, to significantly reduce the emissions of a highly potent greenhouse gas.

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Dominique Rust, Research Associate, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol; Kieran Stanley, Senior Research Fellow, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, and Stephen Henne, Senior Scientist, Group Atmospheric Modelling and Remote Sensing, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The bright blue blood of the horseshoe crab is used around the world to detect bacterial contamination in vaccines. Synonymous with luxury, sturgeon caviar has been patented as an antidote to impotency in China. Rhino horn is used in traditional Asian medicine to treat various ailments, and is also an ingredient in 50 different recipes for snuff.

Similarly, pangolin scales have been suggested as an ingredient in livestock feed, according to a 2014 patent. Wildlife products, even those that have been traded and used for centuries, are the subject of constant innovation, and that could be putting rare and endangered animals under increasing pressure.

Market shifts are usually detected after trade – either legal or illegal – has become established. Since 2014, jaguar parts began replacing the more rare and difficult to obtain tiger parts in Chinese markets. As businesses make technological advances, they apply for patents to protect their commercial interest.

These patent applications document changes in species, products and locations of wildlife trade. So patents can provide a window into innovations related to wild products.

In our new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, we analysed the patents for products sourced from various species. We selected bears, Ophiocordyceps caterpillar fungus, rhinos, pangolins, sturgeon and horseshoe crabs, to cover a range of use types, taxonomic groups and trade legalities. Using machine learning, we analysed half a century of wildlife-related patenting, looking at patents from 1970-2020.

We used a method called “changepoint analysis” to look for the key point at which patent filing rate changed, and also “topic modelling”, which grouped together patents with similar topics (such as medicine, food or farming) based on a set of keywords. We could then pinpoint key moments when patent filing rates shifted and explore when or how commercial interest changed.

We found 27,308 patent applications for the species we focused on in this study. Patent filing rates for them increased at 130% per year since 1988, more than the average of 104% for all patent filing. On a global scale businesses consider wild species an important component of future commercial trade.

While we expected that legislative bans would reduce patenting rates for products using wild species, and potentially increase patent filing for alternatives, this was not the case. Changes in patent filing trends did not always coincide with regulations such as trade bans.

Patents filed for illegal products also increased. For example, 426 patents for medicines containing rhino horn were filed in China after it was banned as a medicinal ingredient there. This included a proposed treatment for blood disease in 2016 and an anti-cancer food supplement in 2013.

This may suggest that, in most cases, businesses have some confidence that these markets will reopen in the future. It could also indicate that the people filing patents are unaware of these regulations.

One exception was a decrease patent applications for products containing pangolins and an increase in patenet applications for patents related to farming patents, for example formula for feeding young pangolins, in 2017. This was the year when pangolins were legally protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in the equivalent of an international commercial trade ban.

Innovative applications

Patents diversified over time. This included the emergence of applications for horseshoe crab blood in the electronics industry in the 1980s, and a new “environmentally-friendly” pesticide containing rhino horn, which was patented in 2013.

Sometimes existing products are promoted for a new purpose. Cordyceps, a caterpillar controlled by an infecting fungus collected in the high altitude Himalayas, was a popular traditional medicine and food supplement.

Demand for these products soared after they were named as a performance enhancer for athletes at the Beijing Olympics. The medicinal use of pangolin scales was the basis for a 2019 patent for healthcare trousers, which have a pouch containing pangolin scales and other medicinal ingredients.

Innovations aimed at expanding markets and increasing profits for businesses can lead to more wild harvest and trade of animals, plants and fungi to meet demand. However, innovation can also focus on reducing wild trade through improved farming as an alternative to wild collecting.

For example, there are patents for sturgeon breeding enclosures. Patents also include processes to produce synthetic versions of active ingredients, such as a bear bile substitute made from poultry bile in a lab.

Wildlife trade is subject to the same pressures and processes as other commercial sectors. Understanding how and why businesses innovate is key to understanding the future of wildlife markets. Even illegal trade is not based solely in hidden markets. Patents reveal a side of wildlife trade that has not been recognised or incorporated into decision making.

Conducting regular scans of patent applications could provide researchers with early warnings of emerging commercial interests that may lead to unsustainable or illegal harvesting. Policymakers and conservationists should use patent data to inform development of regulations and laws to identify businesses with a commercial interest in wildlife and better understand why and how they plan to use wild species.

Companies working to reduce the impact of their global supply chains on biodiversity may need to consider the potentially hidden uses of wild species in fertilisers and pesticides. They must also examine ingredients such as squalene, an oil extracted from shark livers for use in sunscreen, cosmetics and personal care products.

Unexpected use of wild species in widely available products increases the burden on consumers mindful of their impact on natural resources. Labelling requirements conceal wildlife used upstream of product manufacture.

For example, wild-collected wrasse are sometimes used to control lice in farmed salmon pens but this isn’t mentioned on any product labels. The more information that is available on hidden wild harvests, the greater the opportunity there is to reduce pressure on wild species.

Amy Hinsley, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, University of Oxford and Susanne Masters, PhD Candidate, Institute of Biology, Leiden University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Plastic waste is piling up at a daunting pace around the world. The World Bank estimates that every person on the planet generates an average of 1.6 pounds (0.74 kilograms) of plastic waste daily.

To curb this flow, 175 nations are negotiating a binding international treaty on plastic pollution, with a completion target of late 2024. In July 2024, the Biden administration released the first U.S. plan for addressing this problem.

The new U.S. strategy covers five areas: plastic production, product design, waste generation, waste management and plastic capture and removal. It also lists actions that federal agencies and departments are currently pursuing.

I study environmental law, including efforts to reduce plastic pollution. As the world’s largest economy, the U.S. is a critical player in this effort. Based on my research, here are three proposals in the U.S. plan that I believe are important and one omission that I view as a major gap.

A federal standard for measuring microplastics

Studies have detected tiny plastic fragments, known as microplastics, in settings that include the atmosphere, drinking water sources, wild animals and human food chains.

While scientists have found that wildlife, such as seabirds, can be harmed by consuming plastic, the effects on human health are less clear. Unlike other pollutants, microplastics have different effects depending on their size, their shape and where they are found, such as in food, air or water. And humans can be exposed to them via many different pathways, including inhalation, ingestion and touch.

There is no federal standard for measuring microplastics in various media, such as water and soil, so studies lack standardized definitions, methods and reporting techniques. In 2023, California launched a microplastic monitoring program, which includes developing a standardized method for measuring microplastics in drinking water.

The Biden administration’s plan calls for developing standardized methods for collecting, quantifying and characterizing microplastics and nanoplastics, which are even smaller. This will help scientists generate consistent data that regulators can use to set limits on microplastics in food, water and air.

Extended producer responsibility

All plastics contain chemicals that add properties such as strength, softness, color and fire resistance. A subset of these chemicals, including bisphenols and phthalates, have been linked to adverse health effects that include fetal abnormalities, reproductive health problems and cancer.

Some scientists argue that certain types of plastic waste with particularly harmful ingredients or properties, including PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate, should be classified as hazardous waste. Currently, the U.S., Europe, Australia and Japan consider items made from these plastics as solid waste and treat them in the same way as kitchen food scraps or used office paper.

The fact that only about 5% of U.S. plastic waste is currently recycled, while 9% is incinerated and 86% is buried in landfills, has sparked calls for assigning some responsibility to plastic producers.

Extended producer responsibility laws, which exist for other products such as paint and electronics, make producers responsible for collecting and disposing of their products or paying part of the costs to manage these wastes. Such requirements give producers incentives to create more environmentally friendly products and support recycling.

As of mid-2024, California, Colorado, Maine and Oregon have adopted extended producer responsibility laws for plastic waste, and about a dozen other states are considering similar measures. Studies show that when such policies are adopted, recycling rates increase.

The Biden administration plan calls for launching a national extended producer responsibility initiative that would allow state, local and tribal governments to develop their own approaches while offering a vision for a harmonized national system and goals for plastic waste management. Support at the federal level could help more jurisdictions enact rules that require producers to help manage these wastes.

Banning single-use plastics

Bans on plastic items are a tool to reduce waste generation. Most of these measures apply to items that are used once and discarded, such as shopping bags, food wrappers and plastic bottles. Items like these are the most common plastics in the environment.

The U.S. plan calls for developing strategies to “replace, reduce, and phase out unnecessary use and purchase of plastic products by the Federal Government,” including an end to the purchase of single-use plastic items by 2035. Although this action applies only to use by federal agencies, the U.S. government is the largest single purchaser of goods and services in the world, so this step can send a powerful signal in favor of alternative products.

Capping plastic production

Current projections suggest that global plastic production will double by 2040, with an accompanying surge in plastic waste. In response, 66 countries have formed the High Ambition Coalition, co-chaired by Norway and Rwanda, to support stringent provisions in the global plastics treaty. One of their central goals is limiting global plastic production.

Early in 2024, several nations participating in the treaty negotiations proposed to cut world plastic production 40% below 2025 levels by 2040. This concept is still under discussion.

Plastic manufacturers and companies reliant on plastic argue that a production cap would drive up the costs of all plastics. Instead, groups like the World Plastics Council are calling for steps that would reduce plastic waste generation, such as using resins with more recycled content and increasing recycling rates.

Through mid-2024, the U.S. had not endorsed a cap on plastic production. However, in August, press reports stated that the Biden administration was changing its position and will support limits, including creating a global list of target chemicals to restrict.

This is a major change that I expect could move more countries to support limits on new plastic production. Details are likely to emerge as the final round of negotiations, scheduled for November 2024 in Busan, South Korea, approaches. The plastics industry strongly opposes limiting production, and Congress would have to ratify a global treaty to make its provisions binding on the U.S. But U.S. support could boost the chances of capping the ever-increasing flow of plastic into the world economy.

This article has been updated to reflect reports that the Biden administration will support limiting future plastic production.

Sarah J. Morath, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International Affairs, Wake Forest University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As intense heat breaks records around the world, a little-reported fact offers some hope for cooling down cities: Under even the most intense periods of extreme heat, some city blocks never experience heat wave temperatures.

How is this possible?

Civilizations have recognized the power of cities to heat themselves up and cool themselves for centuries. City architects in ancient Rome called for narrowing streets to lessen late afternoon temperatures. Narrow streets were found to cool the air by limiting the area exposed to direct sunlight.

The whitewashed architecture of the Greek Isles demonstrates another long-practiced strategy. Light-colored walls and roofs can help cool cities by reflecting incoming sunlight.

In hot and humid regions of the southern U.S., Thomas Jefferson proposed another approach to cooling: Have all new settlements employ a checkerboard pattern of heavily vegetated city blocks interspersed among dense construction. That could promote cooling through convective air movement between cool and warm zones.

As I explore in my recent book, “Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World,” modern cities unintentionally elevate their own temperatures, creating what is known as the “urban heat island effect.”

How cities heat themselves up

Cities elevate their temperature in four key ways:

• Developers cut down trees to make space for buildings and cars. When tree canopies disappear, that lessens shading and the release of cooling water vapor from leaves via transpiration.

• Urban construction then amplifies the heat. Asphalt, concrete and dark roofing materials all absorb heat from the Sun and heat up the environment around them.

• Absorbed solar energy is compounded by copious amounts of waste heat emitted from industrial processes, vehicle tailpipes and building air conditioning systems.

• In zones of the city occupied by tall buildings, radiant energy released from streets and parking lots is trapped in the concrete canyons, further elevating temperatures.

In combination, these four drivers of the urban heat island effect can raise urban temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (5.6 to 11 degrees Celsius) on a hot summer afternoon – a significant, human-driven shift in the weather that can become a serious health risk for anyone lacking air conditioning.

Coupled with the design of the built environment, the natural topography of a city can further accentuate temperature differences from one neighborhood to another. The hills and fog patterns of San Francisco, for example, consistently partition the city’s neighborhoods into distinct climate zones. And the extensive use of yard irrigation systems in hot and arid climates can yield urban temperatures lower than the surrounding desert, sometimes referred to as urban cool islands.

Simple steps for cooling cities down

Understanding the extent to which cities can heat themselves up offers powerful tools for cooling them down as human-driven global warming raises the baseline temperature.

First, it is essential that cities sharply reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to stop fueling the global-scale phenomenon of climate change. Globally, urban areas, with their industries, vehicles and buildings, account for more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions from energy use, and their populations are growing quickly. Even globally coordinated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will require many decades to measurably slow warming trends, so cities will still need to adapt.

Cities can also slow the pace of urban heat island-driven warming trends by taking sometimes simple steps. Research shows that the health benefits of urban heat island reduction could be substantial.

At the Georgia Tech Urban Climate Lab, my colleagues and I partner with city governments to estimate the cooling potential of urban heat management – sets of strategies designed to reverse the urban heat island effect. To do this, we measure the direct health benefits of actions such as expanding tree cover and other green infrastructure and using cool materials for roads and roofs.

Our work shows that planting trees across just half of the space available to support tree canopy – such as along streets, within parking lots and in residential yards – could lower summer afternoon temperatures by 5-10 F (2.8-5.6 C), reducing heat-related deaths by 40%-50% in some neighborhoods.

In recognition of these substantial benefits, New York City set and met a goal of planting 1 million trees across its five boroughs.

Cool roofing material and light-colored surfaces can also help lower the temperature. If you wear a black shirt in the Sun on a hot day, you’ll heat up more than if you wear a white shirt. Similarly, light-colored construction materials, roof coatings and shingles will reflect more incoming solar heat than dark ones, and absorb less of that heat. It’s particularly effective in the heat of the day when the Sun’s radiation is strongest.

To leverage this cooling effect, Los Angeles in 2013 became the first major city to require cool roofs on all new homes.

What cities can do now

Aggressive strategies to increase green tree cover across cities, a rapid transition to cool roofing materials, and even replacing some on-street parking lanes and other underutilized impervious areas with bioswales filled with vegetation, can substantially reduce urban temperatures. In so doing, that can increase a city’s resilience to rising temperatures.

Urban heat risk assessments we conducted in numerous U.S. cities, including Atlanta; Dallas; Louisville, Kentucky; and San Francisco, show that a combination of urban heat management strategies could lower neighborhood temperatures by more than 10 F (5.6 C) on hot days and reduce heat-related premature deaths by 20%-60%.

A cooler city is a safer city, and one very much within communities’ power to create.

Brian Stone Jr., Professor of Environmental Planning, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier got its nickname the “Doomsday Glacier” for its potential to flood coastlines around the world if it collapsed. It is already contributing about 4% of annual sea-level rise as it loses ice, and one theory suggests the glacier could soon begin to collapse into the ocean like a row of dominoes.

But is that kind of rapid collapse really as likely as feared? A new study of Thwaites Glacier’s susceptibility to what’s known as marine ice cliff instability offers some hope. But the findings don’t mean Thwaites is stable.

Polar scientist Mathieu Morlighem, who led the study, explains the results.

Why is the Thwaites Glacier so important?

Thwaites Glacier drains a huge area of Antarctica’s ice sheet – about 74,000 square miles (192,000 square kilometers), an expanse bigger than Florida. If a snowflake falls within that drainage system, it will eventually end up as part of an iceberg in the ocean off Thwaites.

What we are seeing with Thwaites Glacier right now is a disaster in slow motion.

The bedrock under Thwaites Glacier sits below sea level and slopes downward going inland, so the glacier gets deeper toward the interior of the ice sheet. Once the glacier begins losing more ice than it gains from new snowfall and starts to retreat, it’s very hard to slow it down because of this slope. And Thwaites is already retreating at an accelerating rate as the climate warms.

Thwaites Glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea level by more than 2 feet (0.65 meters). Once Thwaites starts to destabilize, it also will destabilize neighboring glaciers. So, what happens to Thwaites affects all of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and that affects sea-level rise along coastlines everywhere.

What is marine ice cliff instability?

Marine ice cliff instability is a relatively new concept proposed by scientists in the past decade.

Many of the glaciers around Antarctica have huge floating extensions called ice shelves that buttress the glacier and slow its ice flow into the ocean. With the climate warming, we have seen some of these floating extensions collapse, sometimes very rapidly, in the span of a few weeks or months.

If Thwaites’ ice shelf were to collapse, it would expose a very tall ice cliff facing the ocean along its 75-mile (120-kilometer) front. There is only so much force that ice can sustain, so if the cliff is too tall, it will collapse into the ocean.

Once that happens, a new ice cliff farther back would be exposed, and the new cliff would be even taller because it is farther inland. The theory of marine ice cliff instability suggests that if the cliffs collapse quickly enough, that could have a domino effect of ever-higher ice cliffs collapsing one after the other.

However, no one has observed marine ice cliff instability in action. We don’t know if it will happen, because a lot depends on how quickly the ice collapses.

What did you discover about the risk to Thwaites?

When the theory of marine ice cliff instability was first introduced, it used a rough approximation of how ice cliffs might collapse once the ice shelf was gone.

Studies since then have determined that ice cliffs won’t fail systematically until the ice is about 442 feet (135 meters) high. Even at that point, they would fail more slowly than projected until they became much taller.

We used three high-resolution models to explore what this new physical understanding of ice cliff instability would mean for Thwaites Glacier this century.

Our results show that if Thwaites’ entire ice shelf collapsed today, its ice front would not rapidly retreat inland due to marine ice cliff instability alone. Without the ice shelf, the glacier’s ice would flow much faster toward the ocean, thinning the front of the glacier. As a result, the ice cliffs wouldn’t be as high.

We found that Thwaites would remain fairly stable at least through 2100. We also simulated an ice shelf collapse in 50 years, when the glacier’s grounding line – where its grounded ice meets the ocean – would have retreated deeper inland. Even then, we found that marine ice cliff instability alone would not cause a rapid retreat.

The results call into question some recent estimates of just how fast Thwaites might collapse. That includes a worst-case scenario that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentioned in its latest assessment report but labeled as “low likelihood.”

Thwaites is the glacier everyone is worried about. If you model the entire ice sheet, this is where marine ice cliff instability starts and where it propagates far inland. So, if Thwaites isn’t as vulnerable to ice cliff failure as we thought, that’s a good sign for the entire ice sheet.

But marine ice cliff instability is only one mechanism of ice loss. This finding doesn’t mean Thwaites is stable.

What else is causing glaciers to retreat at an accelerating rate?

There are many processes that make the Antarctic ice sheet unstable, some of them very well understood.

Ice-ocean interactions explain most of the recent ice mass loss so far. Antarctica is a very cold place, so atmospheric warming isn’t having a large effect yet. But warm ocean currents are getting under the ice shelves, and they are thinning the ice from below, which weakens the ice shelves. When that happens, the ice streams flow faster because there is less resistance.

Over the past few decades, the Amundsen Sea sector, where Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers are located, has seen an intrusion of warm water from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which has been melting the ice from below.

What does climate change have to do with it?

Antarctica can seem like a faraway place, but human activities that warm the planet – such as burning fossil fuels – are having dramatic effects at the poles. Ice loss contributes to sea-level rise, affecting coastal regions around the world.

People’s choices today will determine how quickly the water rises.

Mathieu Morlighem, Professor of Earth Sciences, Dartmouth College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Human-wildlife overlap is projected to increase across more than half of all lands around the globe by 2070. The main driver of these changes is human population growth. This is the central finding of our newly published study in the journal Science Advances.

Our research suggests that as human population increases, humans and animals will share increasingly crowded landscapes. For example, as more people move into forests and agricultural regions, human-wildlife overlap will increase sharply. It also will increase in urban areas as people move to cities in search of jobs and opportunities.

Animals are also moving, mainly in response to climate change, which is shifting their ranges. Across most areas, species richness – the number of unique species present – will decrease as animals follow their preferred climates. But because human population growth is increasing, there still will be more human-wildlife overlap across most lands.

We also found areas where human-wildlife overlap will decrease as human populations shift, although these were much rarer than areas of increase.

We found that Africa will have the largest proportion of land with increasing human-wildlife overlap (70.6%), followed by South America (66.5%). In contrast, Europe will have the largest proportion of land experiencing decreasing human-wildlife overlap (21.4%).

Why it matters

Around the world, humans and wildlife increasingly compete for limited space on land. This can lead to harmful outcomes, such as human-wildlife conflicts and the spread of diseases between humans and animals.

Interacting with wildlife, however, can also have benefits. For example, birds provide valuable pest control for some crops. And studies show that observing birds and animals in nature improves people’s mental health.

It is important to manage these interactions in ways that minimize negative impacts and maximize benefits. This is a key goal of the Global Biodiversity Framework that nations adopted in 2022 as a blueprint for conserving life on Earth and slowing the loss of wild species.

Our findings underscore the need to manage for coexistence between people and wildlife. Our research provides a broad understanding of where changes in human-wildlife overlap will occur in the future, including hot spots that will require more effective measures to improve human interactions with wildlife.

How we did our work

We developed a spatial index to measure human-wildlife overlap around the world. To calculate the degree of overlap region by region, we multiplied human population density by the number of species present in a given area. Our study included 22,374 land-dwelling species of amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles.

By combining published datasets on most recent (2015) and future (2070) populations, species distributions and land types, we were able to investigate how human-wildlife overlap will change by 2070 and to identify the places where this overlap will increase most dramatically. We then investigated changes in species richness across each land type – cropland, grassland, urban and forest – with increasing human-wildlife overlap.

What’s next

Our research shows broadly how human-wildlife overlap will change, but researchers will need local studies to understand the consequences. Future research on shared lands should analyze factors including species abundance, species behavior and ecology, as well as types of interactions between people and wildlife.

Policymakers can use insights from our work to guide conservation planning in a more crowded future. For example, our projections can help identify locations for habitat corridors that enable wildlife to move between critical habitats. They also could help to identify areas that are relatively buffered from the effects of climate change over time and could serve as havens for at-risk species.

Our work can inform future conservation investments, such as rewilding areas where human population density is decreasing, or preserving and enhancing wildlife habitats in places that are becoming more urbanized.

Finally, our study shows the importance of engaging local communities in wildlife conservation. In our view, using many conservation strategies and taking human needs into account will be the most effective way to ensure sustainable coexistence.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Neil Carter, Associate Professor of Wildlife Conservation, University of Michigan and Deqiang Ma, Postdoctoral Researcher in Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A tiny, vibrant world thrives along the rocky bottom of most streams. As sunlight filters through the water, mayfly nymphs, no larger than your fingernail, cling to algae-coated cobbles. Their brushlike mouthparts scrape the greenish coating, leaving faint trails as they feed. Six spindly legs anchor them against the current, while feathery gills wave gently, drawing oxygen from the flowing water.

This scene is common in well-maintained creeks and streams that flow through populated areas. But when wildfires sweep through, the toxic materials left behind can devastate this ecosystem.

When you think of urban wildfires, you might picture charred trees and houses. But beneath the surface of nearby streams, fires can also cause a silent upheaval – one that affects populations of creatures that are important indicators of the water’s health.

Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems. They rejuvenate landscapes by clearing out dead brush and releasing nutrients from vegetation and soils.

When fires move from nature into neighborhoods, however, they encounter a drastically different set of fuels. Urban conflagrations consume a mix of synthetic and natural materials, including homes, vehicles, electronics and household chemicals. This creates a unique set of problems that can have far-reaching consequences for waterways and the creatures that call them home.

As an environmental engineer, I study how human actions on land affect the chemistry and ecology of surface water systems, including an important group of stream dwellers: benthic macroinvertebrates. These tiny creatures, which include mayflies, stone flies and caddis flies, are not only food sources for fish and other stream life but also serve as nature’s own water quality monitors.

2018’s Camp Fire was a wake-up call

In November 2018, the Camp Fire devastated the town of Paradise, California, destroying over 18,000 homes and other structures. In the aftermath of this tragic event, my colleagues and I examined the effects of large-scale urban burning on the chemistry of nearby watersheds.

The results were alarming: Metal concentrations in affected watersheds increased dramatically – up to two-hundredfold compared with prefire levels. Concentrations of these metals exceeded EPA aquatic habitat acute criteria, recommended levels that indicate when a metal has reached the threshold of “toxic” for organisms in the water.

These elevated metal levels can pose risks to both ecosystems and human health.

For humans, contaminated watersheds can compromise drinking water sources by requiring extensive water treatment or even making some water supplies temporarily unusable.

Wildlife, particularly sensitive aquatic species such as fish and amphibians, face immediate threats from these pollutants. The toxic metals can disrupt their reproductive cycles, impair growth and destabilize ecosystems. Tiny benthic macroinvertebrates provide early warnings of the harm.

Silent witnesses: Benthic macroinvertebrates

In their larval stages, benthic macroinvertebrates live on the benthos, or bottom, of the stream, where they are constantly exposed to the water, making them sensitive to changes in stream chemistry.

Fly-fishing enthusiasts might recognize these creatures as the inspiration for the flies they tie. They are food for other aquatic life, but their presence, diversity and abundance also provide insight into both short-term pollution events and long-term environmental changes that chemical tests alone might miss.

Many species have short life cycles, allowing scientists to observe changes quickly. Different species also have varying tolerances for pollution, providing a nuanced picture of water quality.

Marshall Fire dramatically altered water quality

Just as we were finishing up our analysis of the Camp Fire samples, on Dec. 30, 2021, the Marshall Fire devastated communities in my home state of Colorado, destroying over 1,000 homes in Boulder County’s Coal Creek watershed.

For two years following the fire, I worked with a team at the University of Colorado Boulder to monitor water chemistry, benthic macroinvertebrate populations and algae in Coal Creek. We found that the runoff from fire debris dramatically altered both water quality and the ecological balance at fire-affected sites.

Our findings showed persistently elevated toxic metal levels and declines in sensitive aquatic species, indicating potential long-term risks to human activities, such as fishing and irrigation. They also showed that recovery would likely take many years.

Urban wildfires create a toxic cocktail for streams

Similar to after the Camp Fire, at Boulder County’s urban, fire-affected sites, we observed elevated concentrations of nutrients and metals, including copper, nickel, lead and zinc. By measuring stormwater, we were able to show that these pollutants were conveyed by concrete drainage systems that quickly funneled the water into the creek. We noted 84 instances where metal concentrations exceeded EPA aquatic life criteria limits in the first year.

We also measured significant changes in the types and numbers of benthic macroinvertebrates present. One of the most striking findings was the impact on algae-eating mayflies, which are particularly sensitive to changes in water quality.

In the burned urban stretch of the stream, we observed an interesting phenomenon: abundant algae growth, but fewer algae-eating mayflies. This suggests that fire runoff is having a dual effect on the stream ecosystem: Nutrients from burned vegetation are likely stimulating algae growth, while toxic metals from the urban fire debris seem to be negatively affecting sensitive organisms such as mayflies.

The algae, while plentiful, may be accumulating toxic metals from the water. When other organisms consume this algae, they could potentially ingest these metals as well. This process, known as bioaccumulation, can lead to increasing concentrations of toxic materials moving up the food chain.

What does the evidence mean?

It’s important to note that the full impacts of urban wildfires on stream life are still being studied. We can’t yet say definitively whether organism numbers are low because those organisms are dying or if they are experiencing subtler effects, such as reduced reproduction. The decrease in mayfly populations, however, is a concerning indicator of ecosystem stress.

For humans, the implications are nuanced. While Coal Creek isn’t a source of drinking water, it is used for irrigation and recreation. Metal-contaminated water could accumulate in stream sediments and continue to affect sensitive organisms long term.

The creek’s overall health also affects its ability to filter water and support biodiversity.

Protecting streams and their ecosystems

The story told by these streams and their tiny inhabitants is clear: Urban wildfires pose a serious threat to water quality and aquatic life. To protect streams, communities need to reduce fire risk and runoff afterward. Improving urban planning, management of stormwater and watershed monitoring can help safeguard water resources.

The health of streams affects the health of communities. Everyone can benefit by listening to the mayflies’ warning.

Lauren Magliozzi, Researcher in Environmental Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.