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RenewEconomy's Giles Parkinson named alongside GFG Alliance’s Sanjeev Gupta, climate policy pioneer Simon Corbell and community energy champion Nicky Ison, in 350.org list of more than 30 low-carbon heroes.

The post Australian “low-carbon heroes” recognised amid federal climate policy vacuum appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Millions of acres of trees and energy crops will be needed to help the UK become carbon neutral by 2050, say scientists

The first major assessment of the state of the fungi kingdom says they are vital for life on Earth.

Fungi are vital to life on Earth but little studied – new species of mould were found on baby-carrier backpack and an oil painting

New species of porcini, chanterelle and portobello mushrooms were among 2,000 new species of fungi discovered in 2017, which scientists say shows how little is known about the organisms.

More than £30bn of edible fungi are sold each year, according to the State of the World’s Fungi report published on Wednesday by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the UK. But the lifeforms are even more vital to plants – 90% rely on fungi to thrive – and many human medicines such as penicillin derive from fungi.

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Payments under EU’s CAP will be replaced by subsidies based on environmental protections

The UK’s biggest landowners will see the payments they receive from the public purse fall sharply from 2021 in what would be the biggest shake-up of farming for decades.

From 2021, a new system rewarding farmers for the public goods they provide will be phased in until 2027 when the last payments based on the amount of land farmed will be made. In place of the £3bn a year farmers currently receive under the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), farmers will be expected to sign environmental land management contracts detailing their commitments to protecting habitats, improving flood management and enhancing air and water quality.

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A coalition of environmental groups is suing the Ontario Progressive Conservative (PC) government for cancelling the province’s cap-and-trade programme without public consultation.

Google search histories can be used to reveal how much the public knows about climate change in countries all over the world - and how ready they are to take action to guard against its effects. Carla Archibald, PhD Candidate, Conservation Science, The University of Queensland Nathalie Butt, Postdoctoral Fellow, The University of Queensland Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

• Obama-era rules targeted climate change gas from oil wells
• EPA: move ‘may degrade air quality and adversely affect health’

The Trump administration moved closer on Tuesday to rolling back Obama-era rules reducing oil and gas industry leaks of methane gas.

Related: Jerry Brown: Trump's 'gross ignorance' main obstacle in climate change fight

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California Governor Jerry Brown publicly ridiculed a Trump administration proposal that could ease regulations on methane emissions leaks in the US, while simultaneously calling on the expansion of carbon pricing mechanisms to other areas of the world.

Retired farmer Sylvia Wilson’s husband died before they could do their dream road trip. She decided to go anyway

Sylvia Wilson drove around Australia in an electric car. It cost her $150.90.

Wilson, 70, a retired farmer from near Biloela in central Queensland, had planned the trip of a lifetime with her husband, Rod. One impulsive evening in mid-2016 they went online and, sight-unseen, bought a Tesla S75 electric car for the journey.

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National Geographic has created the 50 greatest wildlife photographs exhibition. A pop-up, which starts its global debut in Melbourne zoo’s historic Carousel Park, the Air, Land & Sea exhibition showcases the world’s best wildlife photography from the likes of Paul Nicklen, Beverly Joubert and Steve Winter

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Number of Australians concerned about impact of climate change and wanting coal phased out rises

A growing number of Australians are concerned about the impact of climate change, and more than half of a survey of 1,756 voters believe the Morrison government needs to stay in the Paris agreement, despite Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US.

A study tracking voter sentiment for more than a decade, funded first by the Climate Institute and now by the Australia Institute, finds 73% (up from 66% in 2017) of respondents concerned about climate change, and a clear majority, 68%, believes the government should set domestic targets to comply with our Paris commitments.

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EU carbon prices shed more than a euro on Tuesday, giving back over half of the previous session’s massive gains that had seen prices hit a fresh decade-high €25.79.

Offset developer Bluesource has secured an undisclosed investment from private equity firm GEF Capital Partners to help further expand its services in the North America market, the two companies announced Tuesday.

EU carbon traders are mired in doubt about when regulators could meet to discuss market intervention, even as soaring EUA prices close in on a likely trigger point.

A rapid global shift to clean energy is needed to prevent runaway climate change, says António Guterres

United Nations secretary general António Guterres has warned that the world is facing “a direct existential threat” and must rapidly shift from dependence on fossil fuels by 2020 to prevent “runaway climate change”.

Guterres called the crisis urgent and decried the lack of global leadership to address global warming.

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Progress made in the past decade has been reversed, with climate extremes such as droughts and floods identified as a main cause

Global hunger has reverted to levels last seen a decade ago, wiping out progress on improving people’s access to food and leaving one in nine people undernourished last year, with extreme weather a leading cause, the UN has warned.

Hunger afflicted 821 million people last year, the third annual rise since 2015, with most regions of Africa and much of South America showing worsening signs of food shortages and malnutrition. More than half a billion of the world’s hungry live in Asia.

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Governments are failing to tackle the crisis that causes 1,000 early deaths a day, says damning EU report

Air pollution is now “the biggest environmental risk” to public health in Europe but governments are failing to adequately deal with the crisis, the EU Court of Auditors has found.

Europe’s air pollution limits are “much weaker” than WHO guidelines – and most EU countries do not comply with them anyway, according to the damning new report.

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WA government says federal nature conservation funding fell from $8m in 2009 to $1m in 2016

The premier of Western Australia has expressed concerns about the lack of federal funding for threatened species protection and government inaction on recovery planning. And the Northern Territory government has said it may have just one threatened species with an adequate monitoring program.

In a letter to a Senate inquiry into Australia’s high rate of fauna extinctions, the WA premier, Mark McGowan, writes that conservation work by the state, including control of predators, had enabled the WA government to downgrade the threatened status of some species, but protecting the country’s endemic wildlife was becoming more challenging because of reduced federal spending.

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The South Korean government has ordered Samsung Electronics to withdraw a CDM project that originally aimed at generating nearly 770,000 carbon credits per year over a decade.