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Climate Home: With public assessment of each others’ subsidies, China and the US take a big step on transparency, but inch forward on reform

The world’s biggest polluters have released their fossil fuel subsidy peer reviews and the obstacles to reform are clear: the US will wait on Congress, while China will wait on China.

The documents, released on Monday by China’s G20 presidency, reveal the long road ahead. The G20 has commited to eliminate “inefficient” subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the medium term and the G7, of which the US is a member, has tightened the timeline to 2025.

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One Step Off The Grid The introduction of regulatory measures to reward local energy generators for their contributions to the grid could unlock savings of more than $1 billion in avoided network costs, a major Australian study has found. The study – which was led by the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures, and funded […]

Archaeologists believe they have found a lost Anglo-Saxon royal palace about four miles (6km) from one of Britain's best known finds.

Film explores how the contrasting fate of forests in Haiti and the Dominican Republic has exacerbated conflict, xenophobia, poverty and even murder

In January 2012, park ranger Eligio Eloy Varga was hacked to death by a machete near the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This incident, still unsolved, kicks off the new documentary thriller, Death by A Thousand Cuts. Airing in the Raindance film festival in London on 1 October, the film explores how the fate of forests in two neighbouring countries has exacerbated social conflict, xenophobia, poverty, and even resulted in multiple murders.

“[Haiti and the Dominican Republic] share the island of Hispaniola, but have starkly different trajectories, in large part, related to how they have managed their natural resources,” said Jake Kheel, co-director of the documentary, which won the Jury’s best documentary prize at the Seattle film festival.

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Controversial Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) could make it harder for governments to favour clean energy over fossil fuels as part of efforts to keep temperature rises to 1.5C

A far-reaching global trade deal being negotiated in secret could threaten the goals of the Paris climate deal by making it harder for governments to favour clean energy over fossil fuels, a leak of the latest negotiating text shows.

The controversial Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) aims to liberalise trade between the EU and 22 countries across the global services sector, which employs tens of millions in Europe alone.

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Blackwater, Norfolk Garden cross spiders must be among September’s most beautiful stars

At present it’s almost impossible to walk the rides around my patch and not snap spiders’ silk. It is everywhere. I notice, as I drive over, that there are even webs on both wing mirrors but, with the sun at the right angle, you can see that there is barely a twig or leaf not bound with gossamer to its neighbours.

Apparently those threads are, gram for gram, five times stronger than steel. Yet what strikes me most is not the strength but the elasticity of spider’s web. A female garden cross spider had just snared a honeybee (an unusual prey at Blackwater, although wasps are commonplace) and while the victim whirred its wings or pulsed its abdomen to break free, the web yawed but held true.

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Our in-house IT Helpdesk expert helps us use or dispose of old tech items.

The cost of the vehicle, the cost of infrastructure and recharging, as well as the fate of petrol refineries may influence the uptake of EVs in Australia.

WEC report says stable renewables policies supported by clear carbon price signals remain crucial as world passes tipping point of "grand energy transition". Meanwhile, in Australia...

The people who approved and pushed for the approval of the £18 billion (and rising) project stand to benefit from its approval. Financially.

Exclusive: Offers follow actor’s plea to address climate change and coral bleaching at Our Ocean conference in US

Scientists and tour operators on the Great Barrier Reef have extended a “non-political” offer to show Leonardo DiCaprio the impacts of coral bleaching, after the Queensland government responded to the actor’s comments on bleaching by inviting him to visit the reef.

Dean Miller, a marine biologist and science director of the non-profit group Great Barrier Reef Legacy, said he wanted to say to DiCaprio: “We would like to take you to the Great Barrier Reef and show you firsthand what we see, no political or media spin, just the facts from the scientists themselves to show you what is really happening here.”

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Addressing the US State Department’s Our Oceans conference in Washington DC, DiCaprio says Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has suffered what is thought to be the largest bleaching event ever recorded, and urges stronger action to protect it and other reefs around the world. DiCaprio says seeing the effects on the reefs off the Bahamas took his breath away – there was ‘not a fish in sight, colourless, ghost-like coral’.

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SunPower Corp. announced today that it is purchasing AUO's portion of the two companies' joint venture.

QUANTUM LEAP: Scientists have shown they can teleport matter across a city, a development that has been hailed as "a technological breakthrough".

JinkoSolar smashes solar cost record with a bid of 2.42c/kWh in an Abu Dhabi tender. But it's not just the cost of solar PV that is falling dramatically, other technologies such as offshore wind and solar towers and storage are also coming down quickly, a big boost for climate action.

GONER GUMS: It may be harder to spot a mountain ash in parts of Australia's mountains or some species of mallee trees in the outback within 60 years as climate change causes the range of many species of eucalypts to shrink or even disappear entirely, new research suggests.

Outdoor exercise delivers an estimated £2.2bn of health benefits to adults in England each year, a study suggests.

China has been building two wind turbines every hour, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has told BBC News.

Invasive species are a threat to wildlife across the globe – and invasive, predatory mammals are particularly damaging.

Our research, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that these predators – cats, rats and foxes, but also house mice, possums and many others – have contributed to around 60% of bird, mammal and reptile extinctions. The worst offenders are feral cats, contributing to over 60 extinctions.

So how can we stop these mammals eating away at our threatened wildlife?

Counting the cost

Our study revealed that invasive predators are implicated in 87 bird, 45 mammal and 10 reptile extinctions — 58% of these groups’ contemporary extinctions worldwide.

Invasive predators also threaten 596 species classed as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List. Combined, the affected species include 400 birds, 189 mammals and 149 reptiles.

Twenty-three of the critically endangered species are classed as “possibly extinct”, so the number of extinctions above is likely to be an underestimate.

Until now, these shocking statistics have been unknown, and the heavy toll of invasive predators on native biodiversity grossly underappreciated. Species extinctions attributed to invasive predators include the Hawaiian rail (Zapornia sandwichensis) and Australia’s lesser bilby (Macrotis leucura).

Australia’s lesser bilby, now extinct. Who are the worst offenders?

We found that three canids (including the red fox and feral dogs), seven members of the weasel family or mustelids (such as stoats), five rodents, two primates, two mongooses, two marsupials and nine species from other families negatively impact threatened species. Some of these species, such as hedgehogs and brushtail possums, don’t immediately spring to mind as predators, yet they are known to prey on many threatened species.

Feral cats threaten the most species overall (430), including 63 that have become extinct. This equates to one-quarter of all bird, mammal and reptile extinctions – making the feral cat arguably the most damaging invasive species for animal biodiversity worldwide.

Five species of introduced rodent collectively threaten 420 species, including 75 extinctions. While we didn’t separate out the impacts of individual rodent species, previous work shows that black rats (Rattus rattus) threaten the greatest number of species, followed by brown rats (R. norvegicus) and Pacific rats (R. exulans).

The humble house mouse (Mus musculus) is another interesting case. Despite their small size, house mice have been recorded eating live chicks of albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters.

Other predators that threaten large numbers of species are the domestic dog (Canis familiaris), pig (Sus scrofa), small Indian mongoose (Herpestes auropunctatus), red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and stoat (Mustela erminea).

Invasive mammalian predators (clockwise from top left): feral dog, house mouse, stoat, feral pig, feral cat, brushtail possum, black rat, small Indian mongoose and red fox (centre). Clockwise from top-left: Andrey flickr CC BY 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/4M2E7y; Richard Adams flickr CC BY 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/7U19v9; Mark Kilner flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/4D6LPe; CSIRO CC BY 3.0 http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/image/1515; T. Doherty; Toby Hudson CC BY-SA 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BrushtailPossum.jpg; CSIRO CC BY 3.0 http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/image/10564; J.M.Garg CC BY-SA 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herpestes_edwardsii_at_Hyderaba.jpg; Harley Kingston CC BY 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/ceWFr7 (centre). Island species most at risk

Species found only on islands (insular endemics) account for 81% of the threatened species at risk from predators.

The isolation of many islands and a lack of natural predators mean that insular species are often naive about new predators and lack appropriate defensive responses. This makes them highly vulnerable to being eaten and in turn suffering rapid population decline or, worse, extinction. The high extinction rates of ground-dwelling birds in Hawaii and New Zealand — both of which lack native mammalian predators — are well-known examples.

Accordingly, the regions where the predators threatened the greatest number of species were all dominated by islands – Central America and the Caribbean, islands of the Pacific, the Madagascar region, New Zealand and Hawaii.

Conversely, the continental regions of North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia contain comparatively few species threatened by invasive predators. While Australia is a continent, it is also an island, where large numbers of native birds and mammals are threatened by cats and foxes.

Along with feral cats, red foxes have devastated native mammals in Australia. Tom Rayner Managing menacing mammals

Understanding and mitigating the impact of invasive mammal predators is essential for reducing the rate of global biodiversity loss.

Because most of the threatened species studied here live on islands, managing invasive predators on islands should be a global conservation priority. Invasive predators occur on hundreds of islands and predator control and eradication are costly exercises. Thus, it is important to prioritise island eradications based on feasibility, cost, likelihood of success and potential benefits.

On continents or large islands where eradications are difficult, other approaches are needed. This includes predator-proof fencing, top-predator restoration and conservation, lethal control, and maintenance of habitat structure.

Despite the shocking statistics we have revealed, there remain many unknowns. For example, only around 40% of reptile species have been assessed for the Red List, compared to 99% for birds and mammals. Very little is known about the impact of invasive predators on invertebrate species.

We expect that the number of species affected by invasive predators will climb as more knowledge becomes available.

This article was co-authored by Al Glen from Landcare Research, New Zealand.

Tim Doherty has received funding from Earthwatch Institute Australia, Gunduwa Regional Conservation Association, Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment, Edith Cowan University and Deakin University. Tim is affiliated with the Society for Conservation Biology (Oceania).

Chris Dickman receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Long Term Ecological Research Network and the Threatened Species Recovery Hub of the National Environmental Science Programme.

Dale Nimmo receives funding from the Hermon Slade Foundation, the Department of Land, Water and Planning, the Department of Parks and Wildlife, Parks Victoria, and The Australian Academy of Science. He is affiliated with the Ecological Society of Australia.

Euan Ritchie receives funding from Pozible, the Australia and Pacific Science and Hermon Slade Foundations, and the Australian Research Council. Euan Ritchie is affiliated with the Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Mammal Society.

An era of so-called reconciliation has disguised the continuation of Harper-era land and resource grabs

By now, we all know the greatest priority of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is its relationship with Indigenous peoples. How could we miss the weekly reminders?

Trudeau graciously wrapping himself in ceremonial blankets. Hauling jugs of drinking water door-to-door on a northern reserve lacking portable water. Paddling the Ottawa river in his dad’s buckskin jacket and moccasins with Indigenous youth, after a sunrise ritual at dawn.

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