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Many farmers are welcoming an expected summer of La Niña rain, while others have been hit by heavy rain and floods Chelsea Jarvis, Research fellow, University of Southern Queensland Professor Scott B. Power, Dip. Ed., Director, Centre for Applied Climate Sciences, University of Southern Queensland Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

*PREMIUM LISTING - Verra is a global leader helping to address the world’s most intractable environmental and social challenges. Verra administers a portfolio of leading standards programs, including the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), which accounts for over two-thirds of all voluntary carbon market issuances globally.

The EU will emit double its 1.5C-aligned carbon budget under its current emissions targets, according to analysis by a veteran climate campaigner published on Wednesday that suggests the bloc will need to raise its ambition further.

A UK-based crypto currency venture has sold a single carbon credit for $70,000 without stating where the unit came from, a price astronomically higher than units achieve in the voluntary carbon market.

Scientists say they have made a major step forward in storing information in molecules of DNA.

At 42m metric tons of plastic waste a year, the US generates more waste than all EU countries combined

The US is the world’s biggest culprit in generating plastic waste and the country urgently needs a new strategy to curb the vast amount of plastic that ends up in the oceans, a new report submitted to the federal government has found.

The advent of cheap, versatile plastics has created “a global scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look”, the report states, with the US a leading contributor of disposable plastics that ends up entangling and choking marine life, harming ecosystems and bringing harmful pollution up through the food chain.

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EUAs shot to a new record for the tenth time in 13 days as traders said financial participants continued to drive the market to loftier levels, triggering another high-level call for intervention, while energy prices advanced more modestly.

Simply Energy will expand its VPP offering into NSW, QLD and Victoria while expanding eligibility to more batteries and inverters.

The post Simply Energy expands VPP network to new states, moves beyond Tesla appeared first on RenewEconomy.

With a similar landscape to other worlds, it could aid research into extra-terrestrial missions.

Exotic pet ownership in the UK has grown 60% since 2000, according to the wildlife charity Born Free. But escaped wild animals are also a growing concern for their potential to spread disease, and the impact an invasive species might have on nature. The Guardian visits BeastWatch, an organisation of volunteers that specialises in the safe retrieval of exotic pets, and Bristol Zoo to see how wild animals are kept in captivity and ask if new laws can address some of the issues 

• Watch more episodes of Human Animal: a series looking at our evolving relationship with other animals

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Government accused of reneging on environmental pledges with plan to build on old airfield near Braintree

Campaigners have criticised plans to develop two mega-prisons on the site of a rare bird and amphibian habitat in England.

The government has been accused of reneging on commitments in the Environment Act to stop the decline of wildlife by proposing the development on the old Wethersfield airfield, which has become an important space for nature near Braintree, Essex.

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Steel can be produced with almost no carbon emissions by 2050 if $278 billion in investment to decarbonise the industry is made over the next three decades, a report released on Wednesday claimed.

South Korea will open its emissions trading market up to participation from about 20 financial institutions later this month, according to the environment ministry.

The Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is inviting fans of wildlife photography from around the world to vote for the winner of the People’s Choice Award. This year’s 25 unforgettable scenes were shortlisted by the Natural History Museum from more than 50,000 image entries from 95 countries

• The images are currently on display at the Natural History Museum in London, until the voting ends on 2 February 2022. The winner will then be showcased until the exhibition closes on 5 June 2022

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RSPB warns wildlife is in freefall with 70 of Britain’s 245 bird species now seriously at risk

The red list of Britain’s most endangered birds has increased to 70 species with the swift, house martin, greenfinch and Bewick’s swan added to the latest assessment.

The red list now accounts for more than a quarter of Britain’s 245 bird species, almost double the 36 species given the status of “highest conservation concern” in the first review 25 years ago.

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Malaysia plans to launch a domestic emissions trading market late next year, beginning with voluntary offset trade before rolling out an ETS at a later date, the country’s environment minister said Wednesday.

Dame Meg Hillier says scheme cost £50m and delivered only a fraction of objectives

The government’s green homes grant scheme underperformed badly and risks damaging future efforts to deliver net zero, the public accounts committee (PAC) said.

Hailed by the prime minister, Boris Johnson, as a key plank in his green industrial revolution, the grants only upgraded about 47,500 homes out of the 600,000 originally planned. They also delivered a small fraction of the expected jobs.

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Mark Tufnell says many farmers are reluctant to trust government as changes to subsidy payments loom

Farmers are anxiously awaiting further detail from the government on imminent changes to their subsidy payments, with many reluctant to trust the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to manage the transition, the leader of one of the UK’s biggest farming organisations has said.

“Quite a few have said to me: ‘Well, we’re not at all clear what Defra is doing,’” Mark Tufnell, the recently installed president of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), told the Guardian. “[They say:] ‘We don’t think that Defra know what they’re doing,’ and ask me: ‘What do you know?’”

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Techniques could help make farm animals resistant to disease but there are fears welfare standards could drop

Robust regulations must be put in place to protect the welfare of farmed animals before genome-editing procedures are approved for commercial livestock, ethicists have warned.

Powerful gene-editing techniques have the potential to improve modern farming by making animals resistant to heat and disease, reducing methane emissions and increasing productivity, but the same approaches could also exacerbate animal welfare problems, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics says.

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Renewables will account for about 95% of growth in global power-generation capacity up to the end of 2026, finds energy agency

It has been another record year for renewable energy, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and rising costs for raw materials around the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

About 290GW of new renewable energy generation capacity, mostly in the form of wind turbines and solar panels, has been installed around the world this year, beating the previous record last year. On current trends, renewable energy generating capacity will exceed that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined by 2026.

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