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Waltham Brooks, West Sussex The bird bobs its squat body up and down, then launches low across the water, the light catching its shimmering back

The still pool reflects the blue sky. The kingfisher sits in the low willow branch. It flicks its tail up and down, up and down, like a switch, while it looks down, transfixed by something in the water below. It suddenly blurs into movement, there’s a splash, and the colourful missile returns to its perch with a tiny silver fish in its bill. It bashes the minnow on the branch twice, and swallows it.

Related: Kingfisher bonds will loosen as summer fades

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Success in Marrakesh will be difficult, as grunt work on rulemaking replaces the diplomatic showmanship of last year's Paris climate talks.

US Senate control is in the hands of 8 key states, only two of which will have a senator who accepts climate science.

Future prices the big news this week, with dramatic jumps in even the FY17 futures price, as traders zoom in on the June 17 contract, the first one due after the Hazelwood close.

The seeds of a VEEC market recovery planted in September flourished across October, with major price increases on large trading volumes. Meanwhile, has the ESC market found a new normal?

Genex Power to begin "financing activities" for planned solar and pumped hydro plant, after a feasibility study provided the all-clear to develop the unique project.

The ever expanding list of stuff we can blame on renewables received another contribution yesterday from Federal MP Craig Kelly. And it's a doozy.

The Turnbull government's strategy of letting technology push come to policy shove is putting key Australian industries at risk, according to a new report which says battery storage could displace traditional energy players "far more rapidly than anticipated.”

A media conference from Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts sparks debate about how journalists should respond to climate science deniers

On 28 April 1975, Newsweek ran a story on page 64 that became one of its most popular.

Under the headline, “The Cooling World”, the story ran for just nine paragraphs but suggested the world could be heading for a major cooling phase, putting food production at risk.

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Plane gets priority landing after large serpent appears on ceiling of the cabin before dropping to the floor

Passengers on a commercial flight in Mexico were given a start when a serpent appeared in the cabin in a scene straight out of the Hollywood thriller Snakes on a Plane.

The green reptile emerged suddenly on an Aeromexico flight from Torreon in the country’s north to Mexico City on Sunday, slithering out from behind an overhead luggage compartment.

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Naomi Klein clashed with Georgina Downer of the Institute of Public Affairs and Liberal senator James Paterson, also formerly of the IPA, when she appeared as a panellist on the ABC’s Q&A on Monday night. Downer and Paterson rejected the assertion of the Canadian journalist and author that climate change undermined the free-market assumptions of centres such as the IPA and the US Heartland Institute. The Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese and the author Don Watson were also on the panel.

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AGEING EYES: We are not the only ones who need glasses as we age - bonobos also become long-sighted as they get older, according to research.

This week’s US Presidential election will likely be more important for climate change action than the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference which started in Marrakech yesterday. Whichever candidate makes it to the White House, progressive action on climate change in America, and therefore globally, is going to take a hit.

We have already seen stagnation on climate change action in the lead up to the US election. The mudslinging and controversy of the campaign has taken climate change off the front pages. Climate change has had even less visibility in the US election campaign than it did in the Australian election in July.

It was telling that Hillary Clinton, who had talked up climate policy in the primaries when competing against Bernie Sanders, dropped the climate ball as soon as she had the Democratic party’s nomination.

It wasn’t simply that there was no longer any point taking on climate change in order to win more Sanders supporters, but that climate change was so far down the list of ways Clinton could differentiate herself from the Republican candidate Donald Trump that it seemed pointless to insert it into the election campaign at all.

Trump’s worldview projects a complete abnegation of climate change, as shown by his intention to undo America’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement should he get to the White House.

Trump’s negative attitude towards climate change is another example of his belief in conspiracy theories. But his neglect of climate change is not to be found in deploying denier myths, but his abandonment of a policy stance about anything in favour of filling the airwaves with insults more suited to a bar room brawl.

For many Americans, its 240 year old system of democracy is in great danger. Because so many unemployed and dispossessed Americans feel that neither capitalism nor the two great parties can meet their needs, they are rejecting the political elites and the establishment politics that keep the unequal distribution of wealth in check.

Of course, such a system has always been part of American life. It’s just that it is now at breaking point. It is of no consequence that Trump is himself part of the US economic elite. It is enough that he has himself been a “loser” many times over, and that he speaks the reality-TV language of those who want America to be “great again” both at rallies and on social media.

Ironically, America is a greater power now than it has been in the past. But due to the automation of the increased manufacturing output in heavy industries and the reliance on China for consumer goods, unemployment and income inequality have risen to unacceptable levels. It’s now the turn of working class Americans to be the “losers of globalisation”.

This has given rise to a loss of faith in American institutions, and the celebration of Trump as a bad boy who should be able to do whatever he wants to rail against the establishment.

Many analysts have drawn the comparison between Trump’s version of America and fascism — military isolationism, the ridiculing of “others” (including Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese and Mexicans), high levels of paranoia (the media is “rigged”, the election is “rigged”), and the fairy tale conviction that one person alone can save America.

But the real danger for the US is in four years from now. If Trump doesn’t win the presidency, a smarter Republican candidate – one who is actually supported by the floor of the Grand Old Party, actually has policies and appeals to the disaffected – will take US politics to a climate inactive isolationist extreme.

However, a moderating force for climate change is the success of the Paris agreement, which is now in full force. The Paris agreement, which replaces the Kyoto framework, has been ratified extremely quickly by UN standards. It now has almost 100 countries signed up – needing only the 55 countries that account for 55% of global emissions.

This is impressive progress given the scale and complexity of the UN’s framework convention on climate change. The momentum of the Paris agreement provides a kind of political guardrail for achieving stronger action on climate change, leaving no country with an excuse not to join in.

The only counter-force that could reverse this momentum would be the rise of populist support for isolationism within the states signed up to the treaty. And a Trumpist America, whether it eventuates this week or in the future, offers an archetypal case.

Reports of Sahara dust in late autumn are a signal to search for birds displaced from the desert and on to our shores

Some Novembers see southern Britain bathed in unseasonably warm sunshine, in that phenomenon known as an Indian summer. But few can match the events of early November 1984, when temperatures reached highs of 19°C, and balmy, southern breezes made it feel more like June than late autumn.

Then, on 9 November, car-drivers from Sussex to Yorkshire discovered their cars covered with a thin layer of fine, pale yellow dust. Amazing though it may seem, this really was sand blown here from the Sahara desert, more than 2,500km (1,500 miles) to the south.

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Recent centuries have seen a big jump in the rates of erosion in the iconic chalk cliffs on England’s south coast, a new study finds.

Iconic southern coastline is eroding 10 times faster than the past few thousand years due to human management and changes in storm intensity

The iconic white cliffs of southern England are eroding 10 times faster than they have over the past few thousand years, a new study has revealed.

The cause of the huge acceleration is likely to be human management of the coastline, which has stripped some cliffs of their protective beaches, as well as changes in storm intensity. Climate change, which is bringing higher sea levels and fiercer waves, will make the erosion even worse, say scientists.

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The Broken Hill Mayor is calling for a summit to address the management of the Darling River system as the city's water crisis ends.

The journal Climatic Change has published a special edition of review papers discussing major natural hazards in Australia. This article is the first in a series looking at those threats in detail.

Recent floods in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria have reminded us of the power of our weather and rivers to wreak havoc on homes, business and even, tragically, lives.

As Dorothea Mackellar poetically pointed out, “droughts and flooding rains” have been a feature of Australia throughout history, so maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised when they happen.

However, we also know that the reported costs of flooding in Australia have been increasing, most likely through a combination of increased reporting, increased exposure through land use change and population growth, and changes to flood magnitude and severity. So it is critical that we understand what might be causing these changes.

This was the question we asked in our review on how flood impacts have changed over time in Australia and how they may change in the future. We found that despite decades of research in these areas, there are still many gaps in what we know.

Copping a soaking

We know that floods depend not just on how much rain falls, but also on how wet the ground is before a heavy rainfall, and how full the rivers are. We also have evidence that the storms that generate heavy rainfall will become more intense in the future, because as the atmosphere warms it can hold more moisture.

This is particularly the case for storms that last just a few hours; in fact we think that these storms are the most likely to show the largest increases. In urban environments this translates to an even greater flood risk, because the concrete and hard surfaces allow this intense rain to run off quickly through storm drains and into creeks and rivers, rather than seeping into the landscape.

In larger catchments and rural areas the story is more complicated than in cities. If the soil is very wet as a result of rain over the previous weeks and months, then when a big storm hits there will be a lot of runoff. In contrast, if the soil is dry then flooding is less likely to be a problem.

Engineers currently use simple models to estimate this relationship between soil wetness and storm rainfall. But our research indicates that these simple models will need to be replaced with longer-term simulations that model all of the previous rainfall leading up to the storm.

Simple models use simple assumptions to translate rainfall risk into flood risk. But if these assumptions are incorrect, our estimates of flood risk (that is, the probability of a given flood magnitude occurring in any particular year) could be wrong. Flood risk is used to guide infrastructure assessment through cost-benefit ratios, so getting it right is important.

One of the reasons that catchment wetness varies is because of climate cycles like El Niño and La Niña. We have some idea how these and similar ocean cycles affect our climate, including the fact that they can cause fluctations in flood risk over decades-long timescales.

The difficulty here is that for most locations we only have 50 to 60 years of recorded river flow data. This makes it hard to separate out the influences of these climate cycles from other trends in flood data, such as the effect of increasing urbanisation.

There has been progressively less monitoring of streamflow in Australia over the past few decades, and this makes it even harder to understand regional changes in flood risk. Governments need to prioritise investment in data collection to allow us to improve our estimates of the risk of flooding and the associated damages now and in the future.

The recent work by the Bureau of Meteorology to develop a comprehensive set of high quality streamflow gauge data is a step in the right direction, but much more investment is needed in these areas.

Finally, we recommend that continued research into the fundamental changes likely from climate change is required. This requires climate models to be run at a range of resolutions to enable all the important climate processes for extreme rainfall to be properly represented.

Recent pressure on CSIRO’s climate modelling capabilities is concerning – the scientific questions are by no means fully answered on these topics. It is great to see the recent funding of the ARC Centre of Excellence on Climate Extremes. The work of these researchers, combined with ongoing efforts across Australia, will be important to provide better assessments on climate changes. This can help engineers and hydrologists continue to provide accurate flood risk estimates.

Fiona Johnson receives funding from the Australian Research Council and World Health Organisation.

Chris White receives funding from various Tasmanian State Government research funding programs, Wine Australia and the Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC.

Seth Westra receives funding from the Australian Research Council and various State Government research funding programs.

Bushfires have been the most common natural disaster in New South Wales over the past decade, according to our study published today in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

Our study, the first of its kind, looked at disaster declarations in local government areas (LGAs). We found 207 disasters affected the state between 2004 and 2014. Bushfires were the most common, responsible for 108 disaster declarations, followed by storms (55) and floods (44).

By looking at where disasters were declared, we found a “hotspot” in northern New South Wales, which includes some of the state’s most disadvantaged communities.

This suggests that to help communities prepare for disasters, we need to address underlying causes of disadvantage.

There’s nothing natural about a disaster

Disasters are a regular part of life for communities across the globe. So far in 2016, disasters have cost US$71 billion and claimed some 6,000 lives. Globally, the number and cost of disasters is rising.

Australia has a long history of natural disasters, from catastrophic bushfires to flooding rains. Many people are asking whether such disasters are becoming more frequent, and what we can do to better prevent and prepare for them.

Despite the way we talk about them, fires, floods and storms are not inherently natural disasters. Though they may threaten social systems or the environment, they are more accurately classified as natural hazards.

A disaster occurs when a natural hazard overwhelms a social system’s capacity to cope and respond. Instead, disasters require many agencies and a coordinated response. Many factors such as vulnerability, resilience and population density influence a how a community copes with hazards.

Natural disasters are therefore socially constructed, and this is in Australian legislation on how disasters are declared.

What types of disasters are most common in NSW?

Using data on local government areas (LGAs) involved in Natural Disaster Declarations we examined three types of sudden hazards - bushfires, floods and storms. We found that LGAs in New South Wales were involved in disaster declarations on 905 separate occasions.

Across the state, 27 LGAs experienced no disaster declarations. All of these were located within the Greater Metropolitan Region around Sydney. The highest numbers of disasters declared were in Clarence Valley (21), Richmond Valley (16), Narrabri (15) and Nambucca (15).

While bushfires were the most commonly occurring type of disaster event, floods affected the highest number of LGAs. Bushfire and storm disasters were most common in 2012-13, and floods in 2010-11.

By analysing these data we found a cluster or hotspot in the state’s north east. LGAs here were much more frequently involved in disaster declarations than elsewhere.

What’s causing these disasters?

We found clear differences between the number and type of disaster declarations in different years. We wondered if disasters were linked to El Niño (which can lead to hotter, drier weather in Australia) and La Niña (which can lead to cooler, wetter weather).

We did indeed find that bushfires were more common in hot, dry El Niños, and floods and storms in wetter La Niñas. But the relationship wasn’t “statistically significant” - which is how scientists decide how important a statistical finding is.

This suggests that for NSW at least, the strength of El Niño and La Niña is not a good predictor of the number of bushfire, storm or flood disaster declarations that will be made. This might be for two reasons.

First, the declaration of a disaster is based on its socioeconomic and human impacts – not the physical size or intensity of the actual event. And second, we only have a good data set of disaster declarations back to 2004, a very short period of time to look for detailed patterns.

We also compared disaster declarations to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas data, a dataset that ranks communities on their relative social disadvantage. Research shows that vulnerable, disadvantaged communities are more susceptible to hazards and disasters.

We found that of the most disadvantaged LGAs in NSW, 43% were found in the state’s disaster hotspot.

While we don’t know exactly why so many disadvantaged communities are found in the disaster hotspot, this demonstrates the role that social disadvantage plays in influencing susceptibility to disasters. This builds on other recent studies about inequality and disadvantage in Australia.

The key message for Australia, and the world, is if we do not deal with the root causes of inequality, injustice, disadvantage and poverty, no amount of spending on disaster risk management will stem ever increasing disaster losses.

What can we do?

The overlap of disadvantage and disaster declarations presents a challenge to communities, disaster managers and governments. Increased funding to address social disadvantage in these communities may increase resilience to natural hazards, preventing them from becoming disasters.

Even Sydney, where all of the LGAs with no disasters were found, shouldn’t become complacent. Areas with less experience of hazards have lower awareness of the risks, and respond less effectively as a result. So even though metropolitan areas are typically better off, if a disaster were to occur, the population here would likely be less prepared to cope with the impacts.

Community outreach and education programs may help increase general awareness of the risks and help communities become better prepared. Similarly, more training and deploying emergency services personnel to disasters elsewhere could help gain insight and experiences which can be brought home.

The 2011 Queensland floods demonstrated the need for better education, risk communication and community awareness.

With flood disasters the most widespread across NSW, it would be prudent to focus on educating communities about floods to increase resilience and help them cope. Increasing resources for the State Emergency Service will also allow for more effective planning, mitigation and response strategies to be developed and implemented.

The damage bill from recent flooding across NSW topped A$500 million. The Bureau of Meteorology has predicted an above-average 2016-17 cyclone season. It is an apt time to pause and reflect on what drives people’s understanding of disaster risk and community resilience.

Dale Dominey-Howes receives funding from AusAID, the Australian Research Council, the Global Resilience Partnership and the Australian National Disaster Resilience Program.

Eleanor Bruce receives funding from ACIAR and the Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research.

Ruby E. Stephens currently works for the NSW Government. The views expressed in this article are solely her own and are not representative of this organisation.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Thomas Sewell now works for the NSW Government and is also a volunteer member of the NSW State Emergency Service. The views expressed in this article are solely his own and are not representative of the opinions of either of these organisations.

My former colleague Palmer Newbould, who has died aged 87, was a champion of scientific nature conservation, an innovative university teacher and a generous, warm-hearted man with broad interests.

His nature conservation work was based mainly in Northern Ireland, where wide-ranging conservation legislation was introduced only in 1965. Palmer served on two statutory committees in the 1970s – the Nature Reserves Committee and Ulster Countryside Committee – before becoming chairman of the Council for Nature Conservation and the Countryside in 1989, for which he was appointed OBE. He was also a Northern Ireland representative on the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee and served on Ireland’s Nuclear Energy Board.

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