Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has indicated a Coalition government would quickly approve a giant gas project off Western Australia which will release billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases until around 2070.

Woodside Energy is leading the joint venture, which would dramatically expand offshore drilling and extend gas production at the North West Shelf project – already Australia’s largest gas-producing venture.

In a statement on Wednesday, Dutton said a Coalition government would “prioritise Western Australian jobs and the delivery of energy security” by directing environment officials to fast-track assessment of the extension, later saying “we will make sure that this approval is arrived at in 30 days”.

Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is currently considering the proposal. Mining and business interests have been pushing her to make a decision this month.

Dutton’s support for the project is deeply concerning. Evidence suggests extending the project would undermine global efforts to curb carbon emissions and stabilise Earth’s climate. The extension also threatens significant Indigenous sites and pristine coral reef ecosystems. Federal approval of the project puts both natural and heritage assets at risk.

What’s this debate all about?

The North West Shelf project supplies domestic and overseas markets with gas extracted off WA’s north coast.

The project currently comprises offshore extraction facilities and an onshore gas-processing plant at Karratha. Its approval is due to expire in 2030.

Woodside’s proposed extension would allow the project to operate until 2070. It would also permit expanded drilling in new offshore gas fields and construction of a new 900km underwater gas pipeline to Karratha.

In 2022, the WA Environment Protection Authority recommended a 50-year extension for the plant, if Woodside reduced its projected emissions by changing its operations or buying carbon offsets. This paved the way for the state government approval in December last year.

Gas: a major climate culprit

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world is aiming to keep planetary heating to no more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. Greenhouse gas emissions must fall to net zero to achieve the goal. But instead, global emissions are rising.

Greenhouse gases – such as methane, nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide – are emitted throughout the gas/LNG production process. This includes when gas is extracted, piped, processed, liquefied and shipped. Emissions are also created when the gas is burned for energy or used elsewhere in manufacturing.

Australian emissions increased 0.8% in 2022–23 – and coal and gas burning were the top contributors. However, Australia’s greatest contribution to global emissions occurs when our coal and gas is burned overseas.

The North West Shelf project is already a major emitter of greenhouse gases. The proposed extension would significantly increase the project’s climate damage.

Woodside estimates the expansion will create 4.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime. Greenpeace analysis puts the figure much higher, at 6.1 billion tonnes.

Increasing greenhouse gas emissions at this magnitude, when the window to climate stability is fast closing, threatens major damage to Earth’s natural systems, and human health and wellbeing.

Woodside says it will use carbon-capture and storage to reduce emissions from the project. This technology is widely regarded as unproven at scale. Indeed, it has a history of delays and underperformance in similar gas operations in WA.

Woodside proposes to reduce the project’s climate impacts by buying carbon offsets. This involves compensating for a company’s own emissions by paying for cuts to greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere, through activities such as planting trees or generating renewable energy.

However, there are serious doubts over whether carbon offset projects deliver their promised benefits.

Threats to marine life and Indigenous heritage

Damage from the proposal could extend beyond climate harms.

The approval would enable increased drilling in the Browse Basin, including around the pristine Scott Reef. The reef is home to thousands of plant and animal species. Scientists say the project threatens migrating whales and endangered turtles, among other marine life.

Also, the onshore infrastructure is located near the 50,000-year-old Murujuga rock art precinct on the traditional lands of five Aboriginal custodial groups. The site contains more than one million petroglyphs said to depict more than 50,000 years of Australian Indigenous knowledge and spiritual beliefs.

Traditional Owners suffered severe cultural loss in the 1980s when about 5,000 rock art pieces were damaged or removed during construction of Woodside’s gas plant. The Traditional Owners and scientists fear increased acid gas pollution from the proposed expansion will further damage the rock art.

Acting in Australia’s interests

The Albanese government has failed to deliver its promised reform of Australia’s national environment laws. This means nature lacks the strong laws needed to protect it from harmful development.

At federal, state and territory levels, both major parties support expansion of the gas industry. This takes the form of policy inertia, tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

In the current term of government, Plibersek has green-lit numerous polluting projects. This includes approving several coal mine expansions last year.

What’s more, Australian governments support offshore gas developments in the Tiwi Islands, new onshore shale gas extraction in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley and a new coal seam gas pipeline and wells in Queensland.

Approval of the North West Shelf expansion is not in the best interests of Australia and future generations. No federal government should prioritise short-term economic gain over Earth’s climate and human health.

Melissa Haswell, Professor of Practice (Environmental Wellbeing), Indigenous Strategy and Services, Honorary Professor (Geosciences) at University of Sydney & Professor of Health, Safety and Environment, Queensland University of Technology, University of Sydney and David Shearman, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide

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

In the remnant rainforests of coastal far-north Queensland, bushwalkers may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a diminutive marsupial that’s the last living representative of its family.

The musky rat-kangaroo (Hypsiprymnodon moschatus) weighs only 500 grams and looks a bit like a potoroo. It’s part of a lineage that extends back to before kangaroos evolved their distinctive hopping gait.

Unlike their bigger relatives, muskies can be seen out and about during the day, foraging in the forest litter for fruits, fungi and invertebrates.

As the only living macropodoid (the group that includes kangaroos, wallabies, potoroos and bettongs) that doesn’t hop, they can provide a crucial insight into how and when this iconic form of locomotion evolved in Australia.

Our study, published in Australian Mammalogy today, aimed to observe muskies in their native habitat in order to better understand how they move.

Why kangaroos are special

If we look around the world, hopping animals are quite rare. Hopping evolved once in macropodoids, four times in rodents, and probably once in an extinct group of South American marsupials known as argyrolagids.

In animals heavier than five kilograms, hopping is an incredibly efficient form of locomotion, in large part thanks to energy being stored in the Achilles tendon at the back of the heel.

However, the vast majority of animals that hop are really small. The only hopping animals with body masses over 500 grams are kangaroos. And Australia used to have a lot more kangaroo species, many of them quite large.

Despite the abundance of fossil kangaroos, we still don’t really know why they evolved their hopping gait, especially given it only really becomes more efficient at body masses over five kilograms. Hypotheses range from predator escape, to energy preservation, to the opening of vegetation as Australia shifted to a drier climate.

Researchers looking at limb proportions have suggested that fossil kangaroos also hopped. But it’s likely the ways that extinct roos moved were much more diverse than has previously been suggested.

Why muskies are key in roo evolution

Muskies are the last living member of the Hypsiprymnodontidae, a macropodoid family that branched off early in kangaroo evolution. For this reason, it is thought muskies may move in a similar way to early kangaroo ancestors.

Studies on kangaroo evolution will often mention locomotion in muskies, but only in passing. And only a single, brief, first-hand description of locomotor behaviour in muskies has actually been published, in 1982. The authors observed that muskies moved their hindlimbs together in a bound and that all four limbs were used, even at fast speeds.

So, we set out to answer the question: can H. moschatus hop? And if not, what form of locomotion does it use?

Using high-speed video recordings, we studied the sequence in which muskies place their four feet on the ground, and the relative timing and duration of each footfall.

Through this gait analysis, we determined that muskies predominantly use what is called a “bound” or “half-bound” gait. Bounding gaits are characterised by the hindfeet moving together in synchrony – just like when bipedal kangaroos hop. In the case of muskies, the forefeet (or “hands”) also generally move together in close synchrony.

No other marsupial that moves on all fours is known to use this distinctive style of movement to the same extent as muskies. Rather, other species tend to use a combination of the half-bound and some form of galloping (the gait that horses, cats and dogs use) or hopping.

From all fours to hopping

We were also able to confirm that tantalisingly brief observation from the 1980s: even when travelling at high speeds, muskies always use quadrupedal gaits, never rearing up on just their back legs.

They are, therefore, the only living kangaroo that doesn’t hop.

Combined with further investigation of their anatomy, these observations help us get closer to understanding how and why kangaroos adopted their distinctive bipedal hopping behaviours.

These results also signal a potential pathway to how bipedal hopping evolved in kangaroos. Perhaps it started with an ancestor that moved about on all fours like other marsupials, such as brush-tail possums, then an animal that bounded like the muskies, and finally evolved into the iconic hopping kangaroos we see in Australia today.

However, we are no clearer on how the remarkable energy economy of kangaroo movement evolved, or why hopping kangaroos got so much bigger than hopping rodents.

The next part of the research needs to focus on that and will be informed by key fossil discoveries from early periods in kangaroo evolution.

Aaron Camens, Lecturer in Palaeontology, Flinders University; Amy Tschirn, PhD Candidate in Vertebrate Palaeontology, Flinders University, and Peter Bishop, Postdoctoral research fellow, Harvard Kennedy School

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

Two windswept beaches 80km south of Adelaide have been closed to the public after locals reported “more than 100” surfers fell ill on the weekend. Their symptoms included “a sore throat, dry cough and irritated eyes” or blurred vision. Dead sea dragons, fish and octopuses have also washed up on the beaches.

Water samples have been taken for testing and health authorities suspect toxins from an algal bloom may be to blame.

But the “mysterious foam” in the water is a health hazard in its own right.

My research shows people should not go in the sea when it is foaming. These bacterial smoothies can contain more harmful pathogens than a sewage treatment plant – and you wouldn’t go swimming in sewage.

Beware of sea foam

Sea foam doesn’t look dangerous. But looks can be deceiving. This foam is likely to contain a mixture of many different types of microbes and pollutants.

On beaches with lots of sea foam, people should avoid all contact with the water – and definitely avoid surfing or breathing in the contaminated water droplets in the air.

I have been studying sea foams since 2003. In 2021, my PhD student Luke Wright and I published research on our discovery of infectious disease-causing microbes in the sea foams of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

Named Nocardiae, these microbes are filamentous bacteria that can cause foaming in wastewater treatment plants, particularly when there’s a high load of fats, oils and greases. We now know the bacteria can cause foaming in the sea too.

We detected 32 strains of Nocardiae in samples of sea foam from beaches at Noosa and south to Caloundra.

Some of these species were new to science. So we named them Nocardia australiensis and Nocardia spumea (“spumea” meaning froth or foam).

Nocardiae bacteria are known to cause skin, lung and central nervous system infections in both humans and animals. But the infection usually only takes hold in people with weakened immune systems. The bacteria can cause abscesses in the brain, lungs and liver.

The incubation time can range between one and six months, depending on the strain of bacteria and the health status of the person involved.

This means it will take some time for people to get infected and show symptoms. Long-term medical monitoring is required to detect the condition, as it can be masked by other disease-causing microbes such as the infectious agent that causes tuberculosis.

Where is the sea foam coming from?

During heavy winds, microbial spores from the soil can end up on the surface of the ocean.

If the water is polluted with floating fats and grease as well as asphaltene, motor oil and hydrocarbons, these spores soon form bacterial colonies or biofilms that go forth and multiply.

That’s because these microbes use pollution as a food source. Seawater is increasingly polluted by runoff from farmland or hard surfaces such as roads. Everything washed into the stormwater drains out to sea. During heavy storms accidental overflow from sewage systems can also occur, as Rockhampton has experienced in the past.

Algae is another food source for these microbes, as they can crack open algae cells to access the nutritious oils inside. Sea foams have been observed in northern France during algal blooms.

Warm water makes matters worse, as the warmth increases the survival rate for Nocardiae. In our laboratory on the Sunshine Coast, we were able to replicate a foaming event. We found foaming started at water temperatures of 24°C and above.

What can be done about it?

Reducing stormwater pollution will reduce the growth of sea foams. Any potential incident of infections of these surfers can raise awareness of the problem.

But sea foam can also be found in pristine environments such as national parks, where it is mostly due to oils leached from trees. We proved this fact at Noosa National Park.

In my experience on the Sunshine Coast, the council and other local authorities have been very receptive to advice on how to fix the problem. They have supported our research and also completed major upgrades at sewage treatment plants over the last 20 years.

Once there’s an outbreak in the environment it is very difficult to control. That’s because ocean is an open system, as opposed to the closed system of a sewage treatment plant, where operators can use special chemicals or mechanical equipment to break the foam down. In open sea it’s impossible. So we just have to wait for it to go away.

In this case, teams of researchers from different disciplines should come together to explore the issue. Microbiologists, marine scientists, meteorologists and chemists should team up to find out what’s going on. Ocean currents should be followed to determine where the pollutants end up.

Sea foam is a global issue

Earlier this month Tropical Cyclone Alfred whipped up sea foam all the way along the coast from South East Queensland to northern New South Wales. I was horrified to see footage of people playing in the thick, sticky sea foam, blissfully unaware of the dangers.

But the problem is not confined to Australia, sea foam can be found at polluted beaches all over the world. Examples include India and Turkey.

I have been telling this story ever since I first observed it on the Sunshine Coast in 2003. Every time there’s a major sea foam event, the media is interested. But research support is also needed in the gaps in between. We scientists need to monitor the shorelines continuously.

As long as humanity continues to produce pollution, the problem will increase. It will also worsen as the world warms, because sea foams like it hot.

Ipek Kurtböke, Associate Professor in Microbiology, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

Between 18,000 and 11,000 years ago, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere suddenly shot up. This caused rapid global warming, the mass melting of glaciers, and the end of the last ice age.

Much of this sudden influx of atmospheric CO₂ came from the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, highlighting the key role this body of water plays in regulating the global climate.

However, we have a poor understanding of how and why CO₂ release from this region changed during periods such as the end of the last ice age. But our new study, published in Nature Communications, reveals how much CO₂ was released to the atmosphere from the polar Southern Ocean during this period – and what factors were responsible.

We reached these conclusions by examining the chemistry of sand-sized fossils, called foraminifera, from the seafloor south of Tasmania.

Tiny shells preserved in mud

Foraminifera are tiny single-celled organisms, either floating in the ocean surface or living on the seabed. Most of them build shells made of calcium carbonate to protect themselves. After death, these foraminifera shells are preserved in the mud on the seabed.

Newer generations of foraminifera shells stack over older ones, like adding new pages to a book. Over time, these foraminifera shells form a book on the seabed that can be dated back to millions of years ago.

Even more fascinating, trace amounts of elements in the seawater are incorporated into the calcium carbonate shells of foraminifera. In some foraminifera species, the amount of these elements is sensitive to the environment they live in.

For example, the amount of boron in a species called Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi is sensitive to carbonate ion concentrations, and the amount of cadmium in another species (Hoeglundina elegans) is sensitive to phosphate concentrations.

By looking at trace elements in these foraminifera shells found in the sequence of mud on the seabed, we can decipher mysteries about the past seawater condition in the book left by foraminifera on the seabed.

A giant metal straw

How do scientists do this? First we go out to the ocean to collect mud.

In this process, a giant metal straw is dropped to the seabed and then raised to our research ships, fully filled with mud. We take these mud samples back to our lab. There, we slice them into pieces and examine them separately.

This allows us to extract information from each page of the book in chronological order. Foraminifera shells are washed out of the mud, and specific shells are picked out under a microscope, cleaned, and finally analysed for their chemical composition.

Foraminifera have lived almost everywhere in the ocean for millions of years. Based on their chemical composition, scientists have reconstructed a continuous record of seawater temperature during the past 66 million years in great detail.

Among a few places in the ocean where you cannot find foraminifera is the polar Southern Ocean. Although some foraminifera live there, seawater in this region is often too corrosive for their shells to preserve on the seabed. The lack of foraminifera in the polar Southern Ocean brings a huge challenge for scientists eager to understand past changes in CO₂ exchanges between the ocean and the atmosphere.

From Antarctica to Tasmania

We decided to tackle the problem using mud on the seabed 3,300 metres below the surface just south of Tasmania.

Seawater at that depth near Tasmania is ideal for studying the chemistry of the polar Southern Ocean. That’s because seawater from the polar Southern Ocean sinks to the bottom of the ocean, moves northwards, and eventually occupies the seabed south of Tasmania.

Seawater chemistry – including concentrations of carbon, phosphate and oxygen – does change along its way at the bottom of the ocean.

These changes are, however, generally proportional to each other. So if all these concentrations are known for seawater at depth near Tasmania, we can work out their concentrations in the polar Southern Ocean.

Fortunately, there were plenty of foraminifera shells in the mud for all these reconstructions at the site we examined near Tasmania.

Reconstructing ancient chemical concentrations

Using the chemistry of foraminifera, we reconstructed changes in concentrations of carbonate ion (which is largely related to carbon), phosphate and oxygen at the bottom of the ocean near Tasmania during the end of the last ice age roughly 20,000–10,000 years ago. This period is known as the last deglaciation.

Based on these reconstructions, we calculated the amount of CO₂ released from the polar Southern Ocean during the last deglaciation. Some of this CO₂ came from biological processes – changes in the amount of carbon used by microscopic organisms living near the ocean surface. The rest was from physical processes – CO₂ molecules escaping from seawater directly to the air.

We found that biological processes were more important for CO₂ releases during the earlier stages of the deglaciation, while the physical processes contributed more during the later stages.

So why is this important?

Scientists use climate models to predict future climate and to reproduce past atmospheric CO₂ changes.

Our results provide testing targets for climate models to reproduce.

Better reproduction of past changes will improve climate model design for predicting future changes.

This will help us understand how future changes in the polar Southern Ocean can affect atmospheric CO₂, contributing to making effective plans to mitigate CO₂ emissions.

Yuhao Dai, Research Fellow in Earth Sciences, Australian National University

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

Power prices are set to go up again even though renewables now account for 40% of the electricity in Australia’s main grid – close to quadruple the clean power we had just 15 years ago. How can that be, given renewables are the cheapest form of newly built power generation?

This is a fair question. As Australia heads for a federal election campaign likely to focus on the rising cost of living, many of us are wondering when, exactly, cheap renewables will bring cheap power.

The simple answer is – not yet. While solar and wind farms produce power at remarkably low cost, they need to be built where it’s sunny or windy. Our existing transmission lines link gas and coal power stations to cities. Connecting renewables to the grid requires expensive new transmission lines, as well as storage for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Notably, Victoria’s mooted price increase of 0.7% was much lower than other states, which would be as high as 8.9% in parts of New South Wales. This is due to Victoria’s influx of renewables – and good connections to other states. Because Victoria can draw cheap wind from South Australia, hydroelectricity from Tasmania or coal power from New South Wales through a good transmission line network, it has kept wholesale prices the lowest in the national energy market since 2020.

While it was foolish for the Albanese government to promise more renewables would lower power bills by a specific amount, the path we are on is still the right one.

That’s because most of our coal plants are near the end of their life. Breakdowns are more common and reliability is dropping. Building new coal plants would be expensive too. New gas would be pricier still. And the Coalition’s nuclear plan would be both very expensive and arrive sometime in the 2040s, far too late to help.

Renewables are cheap, building a better grid is not

The reason solar is so cheap and wind not too far behind is because there is no fuel. There’s no need to keep pipelines of gas flowing or trainloads of coal arriving to be burned.

But sun and wind are intermittent. During clear sunny days, the National Energy Market can get so much solar that power prices actually turn negative. Similarly, long windy periods can drive down power prices. But when the sun goes down and the wind stops, we still need power.

This is why grid planners want to be able to draw on renewable sources from a wide range of locations. If it’s not windy on land, there will always be wind at sea. To connect these new sources to the grid, though, requires another 10,000 kilometres of high voltage transmission lines to add to our existing 40,000 km. These are expensive and cost blowouts have become common. In some areas, strong objections from rural residents are adding years of delay and extra cost.

So while the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, we have underestimated the cost of getting this power to markets as well as ensuring the power can be “firmed”. Firming is when electricity from variable renewable sources is turned into a commodity able to be turned on or off as needed and is generally done by storing power in pumped hydro schemes or in grid-scale batteries.

In fact, the cost of transmission and firming is broadly offsetting the lower input costs from renewables.

Does this mean the renewable path was wrong?

At both federal and state levels, Labor ministers have made an error in claiming renewables would directly translate to lower power prices.

But consider the counterpoint. Let’s say the Coalition gets in, rips up plans for offshore wind zones and puts the renewable transition on ice. What happens then?

Our coal plants would continue to age, leading to more frequent breakdowns and unreliable power, especially during summer peak demand. Gas is so expensive as to be a last resort. Nuclear would be far in the future. What would be left? Quite likely, expensive retrofits of existing coal plants.

If we stick to the path of the green energy transition, we should expect power price rises to moderate. With more interconnections and transmission lines, we can accommodate more clean power from more sources, reducing the chance of price spikes and adding vital resilience to the grid. If an extreme weather event takes out one transmission line, power can still flow from others.

Storing electricity will be a game-changer

Until now, storing electricity at scale for later use hasn’t been possible. That means grid operators have to constantly match supply and demand. To cope with peak demand, such as a heatwave over summer, we have very expensive gas peaking plants which sit idle nearly all the time.

Solar has only made the challenge harder, as we get floods of solar at peak times and nothing in the evening when we use most of our power. Our coal plants do not deal well with being turned off and on to accommodate solar floods.

The good news is, storage is solving most of these problems. Being able to keep hours or even days of power stored in batteries or in elevated reservoirs at hydroelectric plants gives authorities much more flexibility in how they match supply and demand.

We will never see power “too cheap to meter”, as advocates once said of the nuclear industry. But over time, we should see price rises ease.

For our leaders and energy authorities, this is a tricky time. They must ensure our large-scale transmission line interconnectors actually get built, juggle the flood of renewables, ensure storage comes online, manage the exit of coal plants and try not to affect power prices. Pretty straightforward.

Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute

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

For the fourth year running, the condition of Australia’s environment has been relatively good overall. Our national environment scorecard released today gives 2024 a mark of 7.7 out of 10.

You might wonder how this can be. After all, climate change is intensifying and threatened species are still in decline.

The main reason: good rainfall partly offset the impact of global warming. In many parts of Australia, rainfall, soil water and river flows were well above average, there were fewer large bushfires, and vegetation continued to grow. Overall, conditions were above average in the wetter north and east of Australia, although parts of the south and west were very dry.

But this is no cause for complacency. Australia’s environment remains under intense pressure. Favourable conditions have simply offered a welcome but temporary reprieve. As a nation we must grasp the opportunity now to implement lasting solutions before the next cycle of drought and fire comes around.

Preparing the national scorecard

For the tenth year running, we have trawled through a huge amount of data from satellites, weather and water measuring stations, and ecological surveys.

We gathered information about climate change, oceans, people, weather, water, soils, plants, fire and biodiversity.

Then we analysed the data and summarised it all in a report that includes an overall score for the environment. This score (between zero and ten) gives a relative measure of how favourable conditions were for nature, agriculture and our way of life over the past year in comparison to all years since 2000. This is the period we have reliable records for.

While it is a national report, conditions vary enormously between regions and so we also prepare regional scorecards. You can download the scorecard for your region at our website.

Welcome news, but alarming trends continue

Globally, 2024 was the world’s hottest year on record. It was Australia’s second hottest year, with the record warmest sea surface temperatures. As a result, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its fifth mass bleaching event since 2016, while Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia also experienced bleaching.

Yet bushfire activity was low despite high temperatures, thanks to regular rainfall.

National rainfall was 18% above average, improving soil condition and increasing tree canopy cover.

States such as New South Wales saw notable improvements in environmental conditions, while conditions also improved somewhat in Western Australia. Others experienced declines, particularly South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania. These regional contrasts were largely driven by rainfall – good rains can hide some underlying environmental degradation trends.

Favourable weather conditions bumped up the nation’s score this year, rather than sustained environmental improvements.

A temporary respite?

The past four years show Australia’s environment is capable of bouncing back from drought and fire when conditions are right.

But the global climate crisis continues to escalate, and Australia remains highly vulnerable. Rising sea levels, more extreme weather and fire events continue to threaten our environment and livelihoods. The consequences of extreme events can persist for many years, like we have seen for the Black Summer of 2019–20.

To play our part in limiting global warming, Australia needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Progress is stalling: last year, national emissions fell slightly (0.6%) below 2023 levels but were still higher than in 2022. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions per person remain among the highest in the world.

Biodiversity loss remains an urgent issue. The national threatened species list grew by 41 species in 2024. While this figure is much lower than the record of 130 species added in 2023, it remains well above the long-term average of 25 species added per year.

More than half of the newly listed or uplisted species were directly affected by the Black Summer fires. Meanwhile, habitat destruction and invasive species continue to put pressure on native ecosystems and species.

The Threatened Species Index captures data from long-term threatened species monitoring. The index is updated annually but with a three-year lag due largely to delays in data processing and sharing. This means the 2024 index includes data up to 2021.

The index revealed the abundance of threatened birds, mammals, plants, and frogs has fallen an average of 58% since 2000.

But there may be some good news. Between 2020 and 2021, the overall index increased slightly (2%) suggesting the decline has stabilised and some recovery is evident across species groups. We’ll need further monitoring to confirm whether this represents a lasting turnaround or a temporary pause in declines.

What needs to happen?

The 2024 Australia’s Environment Report offers a cautiously optimistic picture of the present. Without intervention, the future will look a lot worse.

Australia must act decisively to secure our nation’s environmental future. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, introducing stronger land management policies and increasing conservation efforts to maintain and restore our ecosystems.

Without redoubling our efforts, the apparent environmental improvements will not be more than a temporary pause in a long-term downward trend.

Albert Van Dijk, Professor, Water and Landscape Dynamics, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University; Shoshana Rapley, Research Assistant, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University, and Tayla Lawrie, Project Manager, Threatened Species Index, The University of Queensland

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

Climate change is the most pressing problem humanity will face this century. Tracking how the climate is actually changing has never been more critical.

Today, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published its annual State of the Climate report, which found heat records kept being broken in 2024. It’s likely 2024 was the first year to be more than 1.5°C above the Earth’s pre-industrial average temperature. In 2024, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit the highest point in the last 800,000 years.

The combination of heat and unchecked emissions, the organisation points out, had serious consequences. Attribution studies found a link between climate change and disasters such as Hurricane Helene, which left a trail of destruction in the southeastern United States, and the unprecedented flooding in Africa’s arid Sahel region.

Slowing these increasingly dangerous changes to Earth’s climate will require a rapid shift from fossil fuels to clean energy.

The record heat of 2024

From the North Pole to the South Pole, the oceans and our land masses, the report catalogues alarm bells ringing ever louder for Earth’s vital signs.

Steadily rising global average temperatures show us the influence of the extra heat we are trapping by emitting greenhouse gases. The ten warmest years on record have all happened in the past ten years.

The report shows 2024 was the warmest year since comprehensive global records began 175 years ago. The planet was an estimated 1.55°C (plus or minus 0.13°C) warmer than it was between 1850 and 1900.

Together, 2023 and 2024 marked a jump in global mean temperature from previous years. There was a jump of about 0.15°C between the previous record year (2016 or 2020 depending on the dataset) and 2023. Last year was even warmer – about 0.1°C above 2023.

Last year was the first year the planet was likely more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This doesn’t mean we have broken the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of holding warming under 1.5°C – temperatures would need to be sustained over a number of years to formally lose that fight. But it’s not good news.

There are a few extra factors at play in this record-breaking global temperature, including an El Niño event boosting eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures in the first part of 2024, falling pollution from shipping leading to less cloud over the ocean, and a more active sun as well.

Researchers are hard at work unpicking why the Earth’s average temperature jumped in 2023 and 2024. But it is clear the 2024 record-breaking warmth and most other damning statistics in the report would not have occurred if it wasn’t for human-induced climate change.

Carbon dioxide up, glacial melt up, sea ice down

It’s not just global temperatures breaking records.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reached 427 parts per million last year. Sea level rise has accelerated and is now about 11 centimetres above early 1990s levels, and the oceans are at their highest temperatures on record.

Seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic and around Antarctica shrank to low levels (albeit short of record lows) in 2024, while preliminary data shows glacial melt and ocean acidification continued at a rapid pace.

Almost all parts of the world were much warmer in 2024 than even recent averages (1991–2020) and much of the tropics experienced record heat.

From cyclones to heatwaves, another year of extreme events

In the English-speaking media, extreme events affecting North America, Europe and Australia are well covered, such as the devastating Hurricane Helene in the US and the lethal flash flooding in Spain.

By contrast, extreme weather and its fallout in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia get less coverage.

In September 2024, Super Typhoon Yagi killed hundreds and caused widespread damage through the Philippines, China and Vietnam. Later in the year, Cyclone Chido struck Mayotte and Mozambique causing more than 100,000 people to be displaced. Hundreds died in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan due to spring floods following an unusual cold wave.

Unusual flooding hit parts of the arid Sahel and even the Sahara Desert. Meanwhile the worst drought in a century hit southern Africa, devastating small farmers and leading to rising hunger.

Much of South and Central America was hit by significant drought. Huge tributaries to the Amazon River all but dried up for the first time on record. Severe summer heat hit much of the Northern Hemisphere, while more than 1,300 pilgrims died during the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca as heat and humidity pushed past survivable limits.

Globally, extreme weather forced more people from their homes than any other year since 2008, which had widespread floods and fires.

Did climate change play a role in these extreme events? The answer ranges from a resounding yes in some cases to a likely small role in others.

Scientists at World Weather Attribution found the fingerprints of climate change in Hurricane Helene’s large-scale rain and winds as well as the flooding rains in the eastern Sahel.

Paying the price for decades of inaction

This report is a dire score card. The numbers are sobering, scary but sadly, not surprising.

We have known the basic mechanism by which greenhouse gases warm the planet for over 100 years. The science behind climate change has been around a long time.

But our response is still not up to the task.

Currently, our activities are producing ever more greenhouse gas emissions, trapping more heat and causing more and more problems for people and the planet. Every fraction of a degree of global warming matters. The damage done will keep worsening until we end our reliance on fossil fuels and reach net zero.

Andrew King, Associate Professor in Climate Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather, The University of Melbourne and Linden Ashcroft, Lecturer in climate science and science communication, The University of Melbourne

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

Australia’s energy policy would take a sharp turn if the Coalition wins the upcoming federal election. A Dutton government would seek to build seven nuclear power plants at the sites of old coal-fired power stations.

The Coalition says its plan makes smart use of the existing transmission network and other infrastructure. But solar and wind power would need to be curtailed to make room in the grid for nuclear energy. This means polluting coal and gas power stations would remain active for longer, releasing an extra 1 billion to 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

So is there another option? Yes: pumped hydro storage plants. This technology is quicker and cheaper to develop than nuclear power, and can store solar and wind rather than curtail it. It’s better suited to Australia’s electricity grid and would ultimately lead to fewer emissions. Drawing on our recent global analysis, we found the technology could be deployed near all but one of the seven sites the Coalition has earmarked for nuclear power.

The Coalition is likely to spend anywhere from A$116 billion to $600 billion of taxpayers’ money to deliver up to 14 gigawatts of nuclear energy. Experts say the plan will not lower power prices and will take too long to build. Our findings suggest cheap storage of solar and wind, in the form of pumped hydro, is a better way forward.

This way, we can continue to build renewable energy capacity while stabilising the grid. More than 45GW of solar and wind is already up and running, with a further 23GW being supported by the Capacity Investment Scheme until 2027. Only a handful of the pumped hydro sites we found would be needed to decarbonise the energy system, reaching the 1,046 gigawatt-hours of storage CSIRO estimates Australia needs.

Building pumped hydro storage systems near old coal-fired power generators has some advantages, such as access to transmission lines – although more will be needed as electricity demand increases. But plenty of other suitable sites exist, too.

Filling the gaps

Pumped hydro is a cheap, mature technology that currently provides more than 90% of the world’s electrical energy storage.

It involves pumping water uphill from one reservoir to another at a higher elevation for storage. Then, when power is needed, water is released to flow downhill through turbines, generating electricity on its way to the lower reservoir.

Together with battery storage, pumped hydro solves the very real problem of keeping the grid stable and reliable when it is dominated by solar and wind power.

By 2030, 82% of Australia’s electricity supply is expected to come from renewables, up from about 40% today.

But solar panels only work during the day and don’t produce as much power when it’s cloudy. And wind turbines don’t generate power when it’s calm. That’s where storage systems come in. They can charge up when electricity is plentiful and then release electricity when it’s needed.

Grid-connected batteries can fill short-term gaps (from seconds to a few hours). Pumped hydro can store electricity overnight, and longer still. These two technologies can be used together to supply electricity through winter, and other periods of calm or cloudy weather.

Finding pumped hydro near the Coalitions’s proposed nuclear sites

Australia has three operating pumped hydro systems: Tumut 3 in the Snowy Mountains, Wivenhoe in Queensland, and Shoalhaven in the Kangaroo Valley of New South Wales.

Two more are under construction, including Snowy 2.0. Even after all the cost blowouts, Snowy 2.0 comes at a modest construction cost of A$34 per kilowatt-hour of energy storage, which is ten times cheaper than the cost CSIRO estimates for large, new batteries.

We previously developed a “global atlas” to identify potential locations for pumped hydro facilities around the world.

More recently, we created a publicly available tool to filter results based on construction cost, system size, distance from transmission lines or roads, and away from environmentally sensitive locations.

In this new analysis, we used the tool to find pumped hydro options near the sites the Coalition has chosen for nuclear power plants.

Mapping 300 potential pumped hydro sites

The proposed nuclear sites are:

• Liddell Power Station, New South Wales
• Mount Piper Power Station, New South Wales
• Loy Yang Power Stations, Victoria
• Tarong Power Station, Queensland
• Callide Power Station, Queensland
• Northern Power Station, South Australia (small modular reactor only)
• Muja Power Station, Western Australia (small modular reactor only).

We used our tool to identify which of these seven sites would instead be suitable for a pumped hydro project, using the following criteria:

• low construction cost (for a pumped hydro project)

• located within 85km of the proposed nuclear sites.

We included various reservoir types in our search:

• new reservoirs on undeveloped land (“greenfield” sites)

• repurposing existing reservoirs (“bluefield” sites)

• repurposing existing mining pits (“brownfield” sites).

Exactly 300 sites matched our search criteria. No options emerged near the proposed nuclear site in Western Australia, but suitable sites lie further north in the mining region of the Pilbara.

One option east of Melbourne, depicted in the image below, has a storage capacity of 500 gigawatt-hours. Compared with Snowy 2.0, this option has a much shorter tunnel, larger energy capacity, and larger height difference between the two reservoirs (increasing the potential energy stored in the water). And unlike Snowy 2.0, it is not located in a national park.

Of course, shortlisted sites would require detailed assessment to confirm the local geology is suitable for pumped hydro, and to evaluate potential environmental and social impacts.

More where that came from

We restricted our search to sites near the Coalition’s proposed nuclear plants. But there are hundreds of potential pumped hydro sites along Australia’s east coast.

Developers can use our free tool to identify the best sites.

So far, the Australian electricity transition has mainly been driven by private investment in solar and wind power. With all this renewable energy entering the grid, there’s money to be made in storage, too.

Large, centralised, baseload electricity generators, such as coal and nuclear plants, are becoming a thing of the past. A smarter energy policy would balance solar and wind with technologies such as pumped hydro, to secure a reliable electricity supply.

Timothy Weber, Research Officer for School of Engineering, Australian National University and Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University

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