Around The Web

Waste consultancy Eunomia claims English packaging firms need to step up on recycling rates.

This map shows the scale of land clearing in Australia by visualising the extent of clearing in states where data is available

Australia is in the midst of a land clearing crisis. Some estimate that 3m hectares of woodland will be cleared between 2010 and 2030.

This is having a huge impact on the environment. Loss of habitat is one of the main threats to about three-quarters of Australia’s 1,640 plants and animals listed by the government as at risk. Land clearing, and land-use changes that follow it, have caused a fivefold increase in the sediment pollution pouring on to the embattled Great Barrier Reef, further diminishing its ability to deal with climate change.

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A British designer wants used gum recycled into useful objects - also leading to cleaner streets.

A report has said the south Indian city is likely to run out of water - but is this really the case?

A breakthrough in materials technology could see fast-charging supercapacitors rival lithium-ion batteries.

Heavy rain has many graziers celebrating but the patchy weather has left some without and even those with mud in their backyards say it's not the end of the drought yet.

Flies need good grip because they often sleep upside down. Bryan Lessard, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CSIRO Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

New treaty compels states to investigate and punish killings and attacks on people defending their land or environment

Officials from 24 Latin American and Caribbean states have signed a legally binding environmental rights pact containing measures to protect land defenders, almost two years to the day since environmental leader Berta Cáceres was killed in her home in Honduras.

Last year almost 200 nature protectors were killed across the world, 60% of them in Latin America. The new treaty obliges states to “guarantee a safe and enabling environment for persons, groups and organisations that promote and defend human rights in environmental matters”.

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Replacing the government-controlled system by private companies made the costs of the delivery process soar, writes David Reed. Plus letters from John Heawood and Mark Lewinski

Privatising our vital energy services was a disaster waiting to happen, though the Tories daren’t admit it (Row over rise in energy bills for 1m households, 3 March). Every house has one set of cables carrying electricity and one set of pipes with gas; in addition, all the key energy market prices are set nationally, regionally or even globally, so there can be little or no competition in supply costs. You could argue that having more buyers actually increases competition, pushing prices higher.

We may not realise it, but it has been cold in all of Europe, so price rises are inevitable. As your report says, the 7.9% rise in prices in the last six months was “driven primarily by increases in wholesale gas and electricity costs”. How will the government’s much-vaunted price cap help with that? I have changed suppliers almost every year in the last five or more years, but my bills are higher than ever, for a very simple reason: replacing the government-controlled system by more than a dozen private companies, all with highly paid chief executives and shareholders to keep happy, made the costs of the delivery process soar. How could it not?

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Only five habitats put on critical habitat register since national environmental laws enacted

Australia has not listed any critical habitat for the protection of threatened species on the federal critical habitat register for more than a decade.

And only five places have been registered on the database since Australia’s national environmental laws – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – were enacted.

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Starfish and crabs among animals piled ankle-deep along parts of the North Sea coast

Massive numbers of starfish, crab, mussels and lobsters have been washed up on the North Sea coast of the UK, following the recent freezing weather and storms.

Tens of thousands of creatures are piled up ankle-deep in places along the Holderness coast in Yorkshire and similar mass mortality has been reported in Kent and Norfolk.

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The Bloodhound supersonic car will produce a huge amount of noise when it starts running later this year.

The fault lies entirely with the GOP. Focus on fixing it, not laying blame where it doesn’t belong

Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, and author of Bill Gates’ two favorite books. However, his latest – Enlightenment Now – has some serious shortcomings centering on Pinker’s misperceptions about climate change polarization. Pinker falls into the trap of ‘Both Siderism,’ acknowledging the Republican Party’s science denial, but also wrongly blaming liberals for the policy stalemate, telling Ezra Klein:

there is implacable opposition to nuclear energy in much of the environmental movement ... There are organizations like Greenpeace and NRDC who are just dead set opposed to nuclear. There are also people on the left like Naomi Klein who are dead set against carbon pricing because it doesn’t punish the polluters enough ... the people that you identify who believe in a) carbon pricing and b) expansion of nuclear power, I suspect they’re a tiny minority of the people concerned with climate … What we need are polling data on how many people really would support carbon pricing and an expansion of nuclear and other low carbon energy sources.

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Fossil gives a peek into the lives of primitive birds that shared the Earth with the dinosaurs.

Nearly a fifth of European beetles that live in old and hollowed wood are at risk of extinction.

Our food – from what we eat to how it is grown – accounts for more carbon emissions than transport and yet staple crops will be hit hard by global warming

Did you know that what’s on your plate plays a larger role in contributing to climate change than the car you drive? When most wealthy people think about their carbon footprint, or their contributions to climate change, they’ll think about where their electricity and heat come from or what they drive. They’ll think about fossil fuels and miles per gallon, about LED lights and mass transit – but not so much about combine harvesters or processed meals or food waste. Few consider the impacts of the food they eat, despite the fact that globally, food systems account for roughly one quarter of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than the entire transportation sector, more than all industrial practices, and roughly the same as the production of electricity and heat.

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Demise of the beetles, that need rotting wood to survive, could have devastating knock-on effect for other species, say scientists in a new report

Almost a fifth of Europe’s wood beetles are at risk of extinction due to a widespread decline in ancient trees, according to a new report which suggests their demise could have devastating knock-on effects for other species.

The study says 18% of saproxylic beetles – which depend on dead and decaying wood for some of their lifecycle – now exist on a conservation plane between “vulnerable” and “critically endangered”.

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5 March 1968 The steelworks pool was largely frozen, and walking in line ahead across the ice were three big yellow-billed whooper swans

YORKSHIRE and NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
Over a desert of rubbish-strewn waste ground on the outskirts of Sheffield skylarks were singing, and a brace of partridges whirred up from a patch of tall dead weeds. The steelworks pool was largely frozen, and walking in line ahead across the ice were three big yellow-billed whooper swans, while six more were keeping open a small patch of water in the centre of the pool. For the most part these were motionless, only giving brief glimpses of their bill-patterns as they lifted their heads from their sleeping posture. The whooper breeds occasionally in Scotland, although there have been no published records of its doing so even there since 1939, but it is only a winter visitor to the rest of the British Isles.

Related: Legendary birds of the wildness

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Helvellyn, Lake District The combination of deep, drifting snow and mountain wind creates absorbing patterns

A flare of sun, a rush of endorphins, and the cloud scatters like a flock of birds to reveal the Patterdale fells, snowbound and sublime. There was not a speck of snow in overcast Glenridding but as we climbed the snow cover had gradually spread, until this sudden sunburst at about the 700 metre contour marked the feeling we had crossed from the valleys below to the winter hills above, a world charged with adventurous promise.

Our aim is Helvellyn’s Striding Edge, but I find myself being absorbed by the sculptures resulting from the combination of deep, drifting snow and mountain wind. The sinuous patterns in a banked-up gully are mesmerising, interlocking and racing downhill like river currents; ripples radiate across a snowdrift like the surface of a windblown lake; miniature cornices shaped like cresting waves create the illusion of a rolling sea frozen in time. Water is flowing everywhere, but without motion.

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ACT's National Arboretum has replaced its diesel generator for 100% solar and battery storage – a shift that will pay for itself within 8 years.