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Four-tuskers, hoe-tuskers, shovel-tuskers are all wiped out - now only a fragment of this keystone species remains

If, just 800 generations ago, we took a summer holiday to Crete, Cyprus or Malta, we would have found familiar-looking islands, filled with the flowers and birds we can enjoy today. But bursting through the scrub would’ve been one surprise: a pygmy elephant, one metre high, one of many different elephant species that once roamed every continent apart from Australia and Antarctica.

The 20,000-year-old pygmy elephants of the Mediterranean islands may appear as fantastical as the woolly mammoths which still ambled across one Alaskan island just 5,600 years ago. But these animals’ lives, and deaths, take on a new pertinence today. They lived a blink of an eye ago in evolutionary time and shared the planet with modern humans. And the fate of these lost elephants, warns Prof Adrian Lister, paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum, is analogous to the troubled future facing their close relatives, the African and Asian elephants threatened with obliteration today.

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In the last three years, significant amounts of illegal ivory have been picked up in the Singapore – conservationists worry that new smuggling routes are opening up

Large-scale seizures of ivory in Singapore over the last three years make the south-east Asian city-state one of the world’s premier ivory smuggling hubs for organised crime, say conservation watchdogs.

Data from seizures, collected by the UN’s wildlife trade monitor Traffic and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and shared with the Guardian, reveals how the gangsters operate. Shipping containers carrying thousands of tusks are labelled as carrying anything from tea to waste paper or avocados. They leave Africa from a few ports well-known for high levels of corruption.

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Knepp Castle Estate, West Sussex Emerging sallow scrub has provided these alluring butterflies with new territory, and the estate has become a breeding hotspot

Throngs of butterflies were on the wing. Small tortoiseshells basked on the sun-baked path, a red admiral was puddling in a muddy tyre track and peacocks were growing intoxicated on tree sap.

Meadow browns flitted low across the pasture, mingling with gatekeepers, ringlets and marbled whites among the thistles and knapweed. In the hedgerow a white admiral took nectar from the last of the bramble blossom, while a scalloped-winged comma fed on the first ripe blackberry.

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The first of five EV fast-charging stations has been opened in Queensland by power retailer Locality Planning Energy, using Tritium Veefil fast-chargers.

Energy prices are soaring again in South Australia, but the clean energy industry is blaming the market operator for poor choices and bad planning, and allowing a few generators to virtually set their own price for frequency services.

First Solar's Jack Curtis says "aggressive" investor appetite for Australian big solar could see it deliver up to 4GW of remaining RET.

Perth start-up to begin trials of blockchain technology that, if successful, could kick off peer-to-peer solar trading in Australia.

It's become clear that the energy future can and must include electric vehicles. A new report illustrates how they can help slash emissions.

Climate Flu is inconvenient to governments, corporates and the investor community for two key reasons. But while the symptoms are likely to get worse, there is a cure.

To celebrate the EV festival happening in Newcastle, our growing gang will jump on our Zero electric motorbikes and set out to push the boundaries of ev use yet again

Roberts' unrelenting harassment of climate scientists and academics working on climate change points to the kind of activities Roberts’ might get up to as a Senator.

Thousands are calling for a ban on grouse shooting, arguing the sport increases the threat faced by an endangered species of raptors.

Western Australian museum runs naming competition for new kind of sea-slug discovered by scientists in the Indian Ocean

The Western Australian museum is running a public competition to name a new species of “flamboyant sea-slug”, part of an order named nudibranch.

The blue and orange creature is up to 8cm long and looks like a cross between a slug and a Pokémon.

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Queensland government study shows current funding is far less than what is needed to meet environmental targets and avoid reef being placed on Unesco watch list

Attempting to fix the water qualityfor the Great Barrier Reef will cost $8.2bn in the next decade but even then some of the targets will be impossible to meet, according to a landmark report commissioned by the Queensland government.

The targets are part of the federal government’s Reef 2050 Plan, the implementation of which is required by Unesco in order for the reef to avoid being included on the world heritage in danger list. Currently, state and federal governments are spending less than a tenth of what the report finds is required.

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Scientists say they have found a Greenland shark that is about 400 years old - making it the longest-living vertebrate known.

Agency application on ecological sustainability - call for public comments open from 15 August 2016 until 14 September 2016

Agency application on ecological sustainability - call for public comments open from 15 August 2016 until 14 September 2016

Climate change plots, characters and product placement could fire audiences to act on climate change.

In 2015, the Australian and Queensland governments agreed on targets to greatly reduce the sediment and nutrient pollutants flowing onto the Great Barrier Reef.

What we do on land has a real impact out on the reef: sediments can smother the corals, while high nutrient levels help to trigger more regular and larger outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish. This damage leaves the Great Barrier Reef even more vulnerable to climate change, storms, cyclones and other impacts.

Dealing with water quality alone isn’t enough to protect the reef, as many others have pointed out before. But it is an essential ingredient in making it more resilient.

The water quality targets call for sediment runoff to be reduced by up to 50% below 2009 levels by 2025, and for nitrogen levels to be cut by up to 80% over the same period. But so far, detailed information about the costs of achieving these targets has not been available.

Both the Australian and Queensland governments have committed more funding to improve water quality on the reef. In addition, the Queensland government established the Great Barrier Reef Water Science Taskforce, a panel of 21 experts from science, industry, conservation and government, led by Queensland Chief Scientist Geoff Garrett and funded by Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection.

New work commissioned by the taskforce now gives us an idea of the likely cost of meeting those reef water quality targets.

This groundbreaking study, which drew on the expertise of water quality researchers, economists and “paddock to reef” modellers, has found that investing A$8.2 billion would get us to those targets by the 2025 deadline, albeit with a little more to be done in the Wet Tropics.

That A$8.2 billion cost is half the size of the estimates of between A$16 billion and A$17 billion discussed in a draft-for-comment report produced in May 2016, which were reported by the ABC and other media.

Those draft figures did not take into account the reductions in pollution already achieved between 2009 and 2013. They also included full steps of measures that then exceeded the targets. A full review process identified these, and now this modelling gives a more accurate estimate of what it would cost to deliver the targets using the knowledge and technology available today.

A future for farming

Importantly, the research confirms that a well-managed agricultural sector can continue to coexist with a healthy reef through improvements to land management practices.

Even more heartening is the report’s finding that we can get halfway to the nitrogen and sediment targets by spending around A$600 million in the most cost-effective areas. This is very important because prioritising these areas enables significant improvement while allowing time to focus on finding solutions that will more cost-effectively close the remaining gap.

Among those priority solutions are improving land and farm management practices, such as adopting best management practices among cane growers to reduce fertiliser loss, and in grazing to reduce soil loss.

While these actions have been the focus of many water quality programs to date, much more can be done. For example, we can have a significant impact on pollutants in the Great Barrier Reef water catchments by achieving much higher levels of adoption and larger improvements to practices such as maintaining grass cover in grazing areas and reducing and better targeting fertiliser use in cane and other cropping settings. These activities will be a focus of the two major integrated projects that will result from the taskforce’s recommendations.

A new agenda

The new study, produced by environmental consultancy Alluvium and a range of other researchers (and for which I was one of the external peer reviewers), is significant because nothing on this scale involving the Great Barrier Reef and policy costings has been done before.

Guidelines already released by the taskforce tell us a lot about what we need to do to protect the reef. Each of its ten recommendations now has formal government agreement and implementation has begun.

Alluvium’s consultants and other experts who contributed to the study – including researchers from CQ University and James Cook University – were asked to investigate how much could be achieved, and at what price, by action in the following seven areas:

1. Land management practice change for cane and grazing

2. Improved irrigation practices

3. Gully remediation

4. Streambank repair

5. Wetland construction

6. Changes to land use

7. Urban stormwater management

Those seven areas for potential action were chosen on the basis of modelling data and expert opinion as the most feasible to achieve the level of change required to achieve the targets. By modelling the cost of delivering these areas and the change to nutrient and sediments entering the reef, the consultants were able to identify which activities were cheapest through to the most expensive across five catchment areas (Wet Tropics, Burdekin, Mackay-Whitsunday, Fitzroy and Burnett Mary).

Alluvium’s study confirmed the water science taskforce’s recommendation that investing in some catchments and activities along the Great Barrier Reef is likely to prove more valuable than in others, in both an environmental and economic sense.

Some actions have much lower costs and are more certain; these should be implemented first. Other actions are much more expensive. Of the total A$8.2 billion cost of meeting the targets, two-thirds (A$5.59 billion) could be spent on addressing gully remediation in just one water catchment (the Fitzroy region). Projects with such high costs are impractical and highly unlikely to be implemented at the scale required.

The Alluvium study suggests we would be wise not to invest too heavily in some costly repair measures such as wetland construction for nutrient removal just yet – at least until we have exhausted all of the cheaper options, tried to find other cost-effective ways of reaching the targets, and encouraged innovative landholders and other entrepreneurs to try their hand at finding ways to reduce costs.

The value of a healthier reef

The A$8.2 billion funding requirement between now and 2025 is large, but let’s look at it in context. It’s still significantly less than the A$13 billion that the Australian government is investing in the Murray-Darling Basin.

It would also be an important investment in protecting the more than A$5 billion a year that the reef generates for the Australian economy and for Queensland communities.

The immediate focus should be on better allocating available funds and looking for more effective solutions to meet the targets to protect the reef. More work is still needed to ensure we do so.

If we start by targeting the most cost-effective A$1 billion-worth of measures, that should get us more than halfway towards achieving the 2025 targets. The challenge now is to develop new ideas and solutions to deliver those expensive last steps in improving water quality. The Alluvium report provides a valuable tool long-term to ensure the most cost-effective interventions are chosen to protect the Great Barrier Reef.

This article was written with contributions from Geoff Garrett, Stuart Whitten, Steve Skull, Euan Morton, Tony Weber and Christine Williams.

Read more of The Conversation’s Great Barrier Reef coverage, including articles by experts including Jon Brodie and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.

John Rolfe has previously received funding from the National Environmental Research Program and the National Environmental Science Program for economic studies evaluating the costs and benefits of reef protection.

Shark, which would have reached sexual maturity at around 150 years, sets new record for longevity as biologists finally develop method to determine age

She was born during the reign of James I, was a youngster when René Descartes set out his rules of thought and the great fire of London raged, saw out her adolescent years as George II ascended the throne, reached adulthood around the time that the American revolution kicked off, and lived through two world wars. Living to an estimated age of nearly 400 years, a female Greenland shark has set a new record for longevity, scientists have revealed.

Related: Forget Nessie, now is the time to spot basking sharks in Scottish waters

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