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Head of the Kunming biodiversity summit asks nations to review destructive support for fishing, agriculture and other industries

Billions of pounds of environmentally harmful government subsidies must be redirected to benefit nature, the United Nation’s biodiversity chief has said, before the restart of negotiations on an international agreement to set new targets for protecting nature.

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said states must review and adapt support for agriculture, fishing and other industries that are driving the destruction of the natural world, and adopt policies that meet human needs while also conserving the health of the planet.

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Victoria increases 2030 emissions reduction target to up to 50 pct. The reaction shows the deep gulf between environmentalists, investors and employers.

The post Victoria ramps up climate target, but stays at lower end of recommended range appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Victoria Falls is one of the natural wonders of the world, yet in 2019, it fell silent.

Col Faulkner, 68, owns the only house in Wollar that hasn’t been bought up by US-based miner Peabody

Bev Smiles usually turns up at least an hour before the start of any functions at Wollar’s community hall – a spot for many a dance and committee meeting over the years.

“We have to get in early with leaf blowers to get an inch of dust off the floor – every surface in the hall is black,” Smiles says. “That’s what people’s kitchens are like.”

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Hundreds took part in Extinction Rebellion ‘rebellion of one’ acts on Saturday to protest lack of action on climate emergency

A man has been arrested after gluing himself to Westminster Bridge in London in protest at a lack of government action two years after parliament declared a climate emergency.

Related: ‘I’ll continue to fight’: the prosecuted Extinction Rebellion protesters

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The Green New Deal, formerly seen as radical, is now in mainstream debate. And renewable energy becomes more efficient every day

That we are living in science fiction was brought home to me last week when I put down Kim Stanley Robinson’s superb climate-futures novel The Ministry for the Future and picked up Bill McKibben’s New Yorker letter on climate, warning of the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, “already known as the ‘doomsday glacier’ because its collapse could raise global sea levels by as much as three feet”. Where we are now would have seemed like science fiction itself 20 years ago; where we need to be will take us deeper into that territory.

Three things matter for climate chaos and our response to it – the science reporting on current and potential conditions, the technology offering solutions, and the organizing which is shifting perspectives and policy. Each is advancing rapidly. The science mostly gives us terrifying news of more melting, more storms, more droughts, more fires, more famines. But the technological solutions and the success of the organizing to address this largest of all crises have likewise grown by leaps and bounds. For example, ideas put forth in the Green New Deal in 2019, seen as radical at the time, are now the kind of stuff President Biden routinely proposes in his infrastructure and jobs plans.

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Victoria to offer $3,000 subsidy for electric vehicles from Sunday, in response to criticism over its EV road tax.

The post Victoria offers $3,000 subsidy for electric vehicles, sets 50pct target by 2030 appeared first on RenewEconomy.

A novel lawsuit is taking advantage of a local ‘rights of nature’ measure passed in November in effort to protect wetlands

A network of streams, lakes and marshes in Florida is suing a developer and the state to try to stop a housing development from destroying them.

The novel lawsuit was filed on Monday in Orange county on behalf of the waterways under a “rights of nature” law passed in November. It is the largest US municipality to adopt such a law to date.

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A look at the winning entries in the German Society for Nature Photography’s member competition

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Analysis: glaciers are on average 8 metres thinner and many have vanished completely because of global heating

The rate at which glaciers have been thinning has accelerated in recent years. Since the 1960s, when the effects of global heating started to become clear, the pace of melting has grown faster and faster.

In the 1960s, glaciers were losing just a few centimetres of thickness a year, and in some years even adding mass. However, by the 1990s, it was normal to see 40-60cm a year of average ice loss. The only exception was in the year after the enormous volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which had a dramatic cooling effect on the Earth, resulting in a slight gain in mass.

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Commercial beekeepers in the US say counterfeit honey from Asia is forcing down prices and pushing them to financial collapse

Imports of cheap, fake honey from Asia are pushing American beekeepers to financial collapse, according to a lawsuit.

Thousands of commercial beekeepers in the US have taken legal action against the country’s largest honey importers and packers for allegedly flooding the market with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of counterfeit honey.

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A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

How a study designated the rare, odd-looking frogmouth the most instagrammable of avian species.

Owners of wood burners and open fires will need to burn cleaner alternatives as new rules come into force.

The Ocean Cleanup suggests plastic pollution comes from more rivers in the world than previously thought.

CO2 output under the US Northeast and Mid-Atlantic RGGI cap-and-trade programme rose by 17% during the first quarter of 2021 even when excluding new member Virginia, as the return of several coal plants to the grid boosted emissions, according to data updated Friday.

International team of researchers also found that deforestation rose nearly four-fold in 2019

The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20% more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past decade than it absorbed, according to a startling report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world’s largest tropical forest to help absorb manmade carbon pollution.

From 2010 through 2019, Brazil’s Amazon basin gave off 16.6bn tonnes of CO2, while drawing down only 13.9bn tonnes, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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With our Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) project, we are targeting becoming the world’s first carbon negative power station from 2027. We’ll be producing negative emissions which will help decarbonise the UK economy and we’ll also be in a position to help other corporations meet their net zero ambitions too. That’s where you come in.

Regulated entities came closer to holding a cumulative California Carbon Allowance (CCA) short position this week for the first time in over a year, while financial entities continued their months-long permit accumulation, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday.

Credit generation under the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) grew by nearly 5% during the fourth quarter of 2020, with record volumes from biofuels and electric vehicles propped up by a fall in deficit generation from petroleum-based options.