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Brazil’s president has cut science funding while opening the region to loggers, miners and farmers – putting priceless evidence of ancient cultures at risk

When archaeologists Eduardo Kazuo and Márjorie Lima recently unearthed nine pre-Columbian funerary urns in Tauary – a tiny community in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest – their immediate reaction was “a mix of pleasure and desperation”.

The bulbous vessels – containing human remains and writhing with anthropomorphic painted serpents and monkeys – are the only ones of their kind to be excavated intact.

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Chloe Hooper on Victoria's 'Black Saturday' bushfires, the arsonist responsible for two of the fires, and why we are living in an age of fire.

Forests can cope in a warming world only if temperatures increase in line with rises in CO2, a study finds.

Global emissions must fall by 7.6% a year for next decade to avoid crisis, report says

Countries must make an unprecedented effort to cut their levels of greenhouse gases in the next decade to avoid climate chaos, the UN has warned, as it emerged that emissions hit a new high last year.

Carbon dioxide emissions in 2018, also accounting for deforestation, rose to more than 55 gigatonnes, and have risen on average by 1.5% a year for the past decade, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) annual emissions gap report.

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The UN says nations must "dramatically strengthen" carbon cuts to avoid dangerous climate change.

Countries must immediately peak their emissions and ratchet up GHG abatement to an 8% yearly clip over the next decade to keep the average global temperature rise within the more ambitious Paris Agreement limit, a UN report said Tuesday.

Claims that koalas are ‘functionally extinct’ after the bushfires are overstated. But there are very real threats to their future

Hundreds of koalas have been killed and millions of hectares of their habitat destroyed in the bushfires that have swept across parts of Australia this month.

A recent headline in Forbes alleged the fires had rendered koalas “functionally extinct”, a claim that was repeated widely in Australia and overseas, including by the Daily Mail and news.com.au.

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Researchers have uncovered what appears to be widespread logging of steep slopes in Victoria, which has the potential to damage critical water supplies. David Lindenmayer, Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University Chris Taylor, Research Fellow, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Morrison under pressure to stand down energy minister Angus Taylor after NSW Police launch formal investigation into reports of "fraudulent documentation".

The post Morrison to consider Taylor’s future after NSW police launches strike force appeared first on RenewEconomy.

ESB chair Kerry Schott says two-sided market - driven by demand response and distributed solar and storage - will require complete reform of NEM.

The post Schott says “two-sided” market turning energy sector on its head appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Solar and storage optimisation tech start-up opens $7m fund-raising round to private and wholesale investors, as it looks to expand to global markets.

The post Evergen taps crowd funding to accelerate smart solar growth, expand overseas appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Lendlease says its operations at construction sites are now carbon neutral, but the bigger challenge is for building supplies, including concrete.

The post Lendlease says construction sites are “carbon neutral”, now for the concrete appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Revised plans unveiled for a 115km transmission line that would link two proposed wind farms with the grid in Tasmania’s north-west.

The post UPC Renewables unveils new route for controversial Tasmania wind farm link appeared first on RenewEconomy.

What happens to solar when the sun goes down? Quite a lot, it turns out, with a UK solar farm providing grid support at night. Australia could be next.

The post Solar farm helps balance UK grid – at night. And Australia could do the same appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Phasing out coal can be done at relatively modest cost, and could be the greatest climate bargain of all time.

The post Climate bargain of all time: US could close coal for just $3 a tonne appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Senate inquiry told that misrepresentation and selective use of science is dangerous

Australia’s peak scientific institution has told an inquiry into the reliability of Great Barrier Reef science that it is “greatly concerned” over a trend to cherrypick and misrepresent scientific evidence.

In a submission to a Senate inquiry, the Australian Academy of Science’s president, Prof John Shine, wrote that selective use of science and misrepresentations were “dangerous” and would lead to “poor outcomes”.

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

There was a time when people thought that forests were the low-hanging fruit of the climate challenge, and that reducing emissions from deforestation was fast, easy, and cheap. No one thinks that anymore.

When you think of what our future will look like, do you find it hard to be optimistic? Monash University is trading on our sense of doom by kicking us awake in a pop up exhibition called A Future Without Change.

Prices for California offset credits financially backed against invalidation could rise as a result of state regulator ARB's probe into a Michigan-based livestock project, developers and market participants said.