Around The Web

Among those who've been anticipating this morning's announcement from the National Farmer's Federation is Water Minister David Littleproud.

The NFF wants drought relief programs to be monitored and evaluated to establish what does and doesn't work.

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation will release a draft post-2020 RGGI regulation this year and will hold a public comment period as it looks to conform to the US Northeast ETS’ revisions, a government source told Carbon Pulse.

Little more than two years of land clearing will cancel out the $1.5bn in taxpayer funds that goes towards protecting native habitat

Since 2015 the Australian government has committed more than $1.5bn of taxpayer funds to climate change projects that plant or protect native habitat. Over a slightly longer period it has also spent nearly $62m on a policy to plant 20 million trees promised under Tony Abbott.

At the same time the country has significantly stepped up land-clearing programs in several states, bulldozing hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, mostly for agriculture.

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An epidemic of land clearing is sabotaging efforts to address climate change. Farming communities are bitterly divided over the issue – but it also has global consequences.

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The leashed beasts may look like large powerful dogs, but they still have the wild heart of a wolf.

Carbon market analysts have raised their medium-term EU carbon price forecasts by as much 18% on the view that coal-to-gas fuel switching potential will be exhausted sooner than previously thought.

European carbon hit a fresh three-week high on Wednesday, whipsawing around for another session as EUAs continue to be directed by Brexit-fuelled fluctuations in the British pound.

Researchers grow brains in a lab and discover that human neurons develop more slowly than those of other primates.

Monitoring trip returns from ‘stronghold’ for species without finding a single sawfish

Numbers of endangered sawfish in one of their most globally important strongholds are dropping, with conservationists calling for a rules that will cut the numbers of animals being caught in commercial fishing nets in north Queensland.

In September, a two-week private expedition to monitor and tag sawfish in the Norman River, Queensland, returned without finding a single sawfish.

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Several big-emitting Asian nations are considering stepping up their low-ball Paris emission pledges as they discover viable alternatives to coal and a limited role for emissions trade under Article 6, according to the operational head of intergovernmental body GGGI.

The team behind the Bloodhound supersonic car is in Northern Cape to start running the vehicle.

Anti-nuclear campaigner who targeted the Sellafield complex in Cumbria and became a respected expert on the industry

For 30 years Martin Forwood, who has died of cancer aged 79, was a thorn in the side of the huge Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria. With his unrivalled collection of original documents on the nuclear industry he was a more reliable source of information to journalists and campaigners than the government-owned industry British Nuclear Fuels, or anyone in Whitehall.

But Martin was not just an armchair campaigner; he went in for many imaginative direct actions, including, in 2003, chaining himself to a railway line to halt a nuclear waste shipment from Italy destined for Sellafield. When he came up in court charged with a Victorian-era offence of obstructing the railway, which carried a potential sentence of life imprisonment, the judge acknowledged his sincerity, reduced the charge and fined him.

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The Guardian columnist and environmental activist George Monbiot was arrested on Wednesday for defying a London-wide police ban on Extinction Rebellion protests

• Today, I aim to get arrested. It is the only real power climate protesters have | George Monbiot
  
• Extinction Rebellion lawyers apply for judicial review over protest ban
  

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The agency reveals a prototype for a spacesuit for all shapes and sizes to be worn for lunar missions.

London Zoo has announced that a maidenhair fern that is part of its Rainforest Life exhibition has taken its own picture. It’s a bit blurry, but at least he’s not camera shy

Name: Pete.

Occupation: Plant.

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The Duke of Cambridge calls for more education and awareness during a visit to northern Pakistan.

Critics condemn move placing thousands of square miles of rainforest under control of international companies

The Ivory Coast’s dwindling rainforests could be “wiped out” under a new law that will see legal protections removed from thousands of square miles of classified forest and unprecedented power handed to industrial chocolate manufacturers.

Civil society groups, environmental campaigners and workers’ cooperatives have warned that the new forestry code, ratified by the National Assembly and currently being implemented, will encourage unsustainable cocoa production and legalise large-scale deforestation in already ravaged areas.

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Request for expedited hearing comes after Metropolitan police impose section 14 order

Lawyers for Extinction Rebellion have filed an urgent application for a judicial review hearing at the high court in London, as the number of arrests in 10 days of demonstrations rose to 1,642 with 133 charged.

The request was filed at the royal courts of justice on the Strand just after 10am on Wednesday. It comes after the Metropolitan police imposed a section 14 order on Monday night, in effect banning all protest by XR in the capital.

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UK-based team to chart unprecedented waters with fully autonomous sea journey.