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Experts calls for reinstatement of observer program as commercial shark catches jump dramatically on Great Barrier Reef

The Queensland government is allowing commercial fisheries to catch endangered sharks on the Great Barrier Reef, with a quota based on data that was useless for managing the shark numbers, according to an independent peer reviewer.

Shark experts and WWF are calling for an observer program, which was axed by the previous government in 2013, to be reinstated so that better data on shark catches can be collected.

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Despite substantial conservation efforts, human impacts are harming coral reefs all over the world. That in turn affects the millions of people who depend on reefs for their livelihoods. It’s a gloomy picture, but there are some bright spots.

In a study that appears on the cover of this week’s Nature, I and 38 international colleagues identify 15 places around the world where the outlook is not so bleak. Many of them are in surprising places like Pacific island states, which may not have lots of money for conservation but do have a close social connection to the health of their oceans.

Unlike scientific studies that look at averages or trends, we took a slightly different approach and focused on the outliers – the places bucking the trend. This type of “bright spot” approach has been used in a range of fields, including business, health and human development, to search for hope against backgrounds of widespread failure.

One example is in Vietnam, where the charity Save the Children looked at poor children who bucked the trend of widespread malnutrition. They discovered that poor families with healthier kids were collecting small crabs and shrimp from their rice paddies and grinding them into their kids' food, and feeding them smaller, more frequent meals. These practices have now spread to more than 2.2 million families, cutting childhood malnutrition by 65%.

This is a great example of local habits that, once identified and spread more widely, have had a hugely beneficial impact. My colleagues and I wanted to see if we could do the same for the world’s coral reefs.

Searching for bright spots

We carried out more than 6,500 reef surveys across 46 countries, states and territories around the world and looked for places where reef fisheries should have been degraded, but weren’t.

We defined these bright spots as reefs with more fish than expected, based on their exposure to pressures like human population, poverty and unfavourable environmental conditions. To be clear, bright spots are not necessarily “pristine” reefs, but rather reefs that are doing better than they should be given the circumstances. They are reefs that are “punching above their weight”.

We identified 15 bright spots and 35 dark spots (places that were doing much worse than expected) in our global survey. The bright spots were mainly in the Pacific Ocean, and two-thirds of them were in populated places like the Solomon Islands, parts of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Kiribati.

Dark spots were more globally distributed; we found them in every major ocean, sometimes in places that are generally considered to be pristine, such as in the northwestern Hawaiian islands. Again, this doesn’t mean the reefs were necessarily in terrible shape – just worse than we would expect, given that in cases such as Hawaii they are remote, well protected and in a wealthy country with a strong capacity to govern their reefs.

The Great Barrier Reef, which is often considered the best-managed reef in the world, performed largely as we would expect it to, given that it is in a wealthy country with low population density, and many of its individual reefs are offshore and mostly remote from people.

What makes bright spots special?

We wanted to learn what these bright spots were doing differently. Why were they able to withstand pressures that caused other reef systems to suffer? And could lessons from these places inform reef conservation in other areas?

Our preliminary investigation showed that bright spots (and their nearby human communities) generally had four crucial characteristics:

• strong local sea traditions, which include ownership rights and/or customary practices such as periodically closing a reef to fishing

• high levels of participation in management by local people

• high levels of dependence on fishing (this seems counter-intuitive, but research shows that where people’s livelihoods depend on a resource, they are more committed to managing it responsibly)

• deep-water refuges for fish and corals.

Importantly, the first two are malleable (for instance, governments can invite local people to become more involved with reef management), whereas the latter two are less so (it is hard to change people’s livelihoods, and impossible to change the undersea landscape in a way that wouldn’t devastate reefs in the process).

We also found some common characteristics of dark spots

• use of particular types of fishing nets that can damage habitat

• widespread access to freezers, allowing fish catches to be stockpiled

• a recent history (within the past five years) of environmental disturbance such as coral bleaching or cyclone.

Where next?

We believe that the bright spots offer some hope and some solutions that can be applied more broadly across the world’s coral reefs.

Specifically, investments that foster local involvement and provide people with ownership rights to their marine resources can help people develop creative solutions and defy expectations that reefs will just continue to get more degraded.

Conversely, dark spots can highlight the development or management pathways to avoid. In particular, it is important to avoid investing in technology that allows for more intensive fishing, particularly in places with weak governance or where there have already been environmental shocks like cyclones or bleaching.

The next step is to dig deeper into the social, institutional and ecological dynamics in the bright spots. By looking to the places that are getting it right – whether by accident or design – we can hopefully make the future a bit brighter for reefs the world over.

Joshua Cinner receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Pew Charitable Trust, and over the past five years has also received funding from the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The world is using its natural resources at an ever-increasing rate. Worldwide, annual extraction of primary materials – biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and minerals – tripled between 1970 and 2010. People in the richest countries now consume up to ten times more resources than those in the poorest nations.

Clearly, if the developing world is to enjoy a similar standard of living to those in the developed world, this cannot continue. We need to break the link between global economic development and primary resource consumption.

Over the past few days, nations have been meeting in New York to discuss the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to “promote prosperity while protecting the planet”.

Today the meeting sees the launch of an international report coordinated by CSIRO and the UN Environment Program. The report lists several ways in which the world can maintain economic growth while reducing its primary material use – ending the pattern that has driven world economic growth over the past four-and-a-half decades.

The importance of decoupling

Decoupling economic growth from resource use is crucially important – especially when we consider our finding that not even the wealthiest countries have managed to stabilise or reduce their overall material consumption footprint. The only time this footprint was reduced was during the global financial crisis of 2008-09. It has since begun to grow again.

This suggests that there is no level of human well-being at which the demand for primary materials will level off – unless we make some fundamental changes to our economy.

Since the turn of the century, as emerging economies like China have begun to industrialise and urbanise, they have used massive amounts of iron, steel, cement, energy and construction materials. While this has helped millions of people move out of poverty, huge infrastructure investments have also ratcheted up the demand for primary materials to unprecedented levels.

Surprisingly, this boom in global growth has not led to improvements in efficiency, despite the many technological advances along the way. The global economy uses more material per unit of GDP than it did in 2000. This is because production has shifted from material-efficient economies such as Japan, South Korea and Europe to less efficient ones like China, India and Southeast Asia.

Decoupling will create the space for developing countries to raise their standards of living while also achieving the SDG objectives. This won’t occur spontaneously; it requires well-designed policies, not to mention large public investments in research and development.

New measures needed

Past policy decisions that determine economic development, human well-being and environmental outcomes have often been informed by a small set of economic indicators.

In contrast, policies designed to achieve progress towards the SDGs will require new information about natural resource use and environmental impacts. The new report, compiled with help from my colleagues in Austria, Germany and Japan, aims to provide data on current resource use, and on how these primary materials might be used more efficiently to produce goods and services.

We have found that while dramatic increases in the consumption of fossil fuels, metals and other materials threaten to intensify the effects of climate change, increase pollution and harm wildlife, there are also large opportunities to embrace more sustainable practices. This in turn would also lead to economic benefits and improved well-being.

Here are some of the report’s recommendations for maintaining economic growth while streamlining resource use, split across the major sectors of the economy:

• Construction and housing. Improved building materials, insulation and orientation of new buildings – together these can cut energy use in buildings by 80%. Meanwhile, using higher-strength steel in the construction of medium-density and high-rise buildings can save on the amount of construction material used.

• Transport and mobility. Improved urban design, walkable cities, public transport, electric and hybrid vehicles, improved fuel efficiency in aviation, freight and private transport – all of these measures will deliver massive savings in materials, energy and greenhouse emissions.

• Agriculture and food. Improved irrigation techniques; reduced fertiliser and pesticide use; reduced average consumption of meat and dairy; and reducing food loss and waste from its current level of more than 30%.

• Heavy industry and energy. Besides embracing recycling and renewable energy, heavy industries such as steel, cement and paper can each draw on a range of new technologies, such as electric arc furnace improvements in the iron and steel industry.

• Technology. Nano- and biotechnology will play increasingly important roles in sustainable production and consumption – for instance, through the creation of more durable products or the development of enzymes as industrial catalysts.

The report also recommends placing a price on primary materials at the point of extraction, as well as putting a price on carbon emissions. The proceeds of these levies should be invested in research and development in resource-intensive sectors of the economy, to find yet more ways to reduce overall consumption of materials.

Of course, increasing material efficiency can bring its own problems. The report recommends various policy initiatives to address these issues. Among these is shorter working hours to compensate for productivity gains, instead of salary increases alone, to avoid the rebound effect of higher overall consumption.

Lower-income countries will doubtless require more primary materials than they currently use, if they are to reach the same level of development as today’s wealthy countries. Expanding global demand for materials may contribute to local conflicts like those seen in areas where mining competes with agriculture and urban development. But the more we can curb the world’s resource growth, the more room there will be for people’s standards of living to grow too without surpassing planetary limits.

This article was written with the help of Karin Hosking from CSIRO’s Land and Water Flagship. More information on the data in the report is available from UNEP Live.

Heinz Schandl receives funding from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

South Africa's great white shark population is heading for possible extinction‚ after a rapid decline in numbers, say researchers.

June 2016 was the hottest June worldwide in modern history - marking the 14th month in a row that global temperature records have been broken

One of the biggest craters on the Moon's surface was created by an asteroid more than 250km across, a study suggests.

Research shows ‘rapid decline’ in numbers caused by hunting, pollution and nets

South Africa’s great white sharks face the threat of extinction after a steep decline in numbers caused by trophy hunting, shark nets and pollution, according to a study released Wednesday.

The six-year research project along the country’s coastline revealed that only between 353 and 522 of the sharks are still alive, half the level previously thought.

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Scientists said cooling of tip over past 15 years is related to wind patterns, but does not mean that global warming has stopped

The tip of the Antarctic peninsula has cooled over the past 15 years, scientists have found, but the discovery does not mean global warming has stopped.

Researchers analysed air temperature data from the area, which covers about 1% of the continent, and found it had warmed quickly from the 1920s until the late 1990s, as climate change drove up global temperatures. Since then, temperatures have fallen.

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Technology firm hailed success of machine-learning trial and said efficiencies will be applied to all its centres by end of year

Google says it has cut its vast data centres’ energy use by 15% by applying artificial intelligence to manage them more efficiently than humans.

The servers that power billions of web searches, streamed films and social media accounts are estimated to account for around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Google is believed to have one of the biggest fleets of them in the world.

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Its artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, has cut Google's data centres' energy consumption by 15%, using a machine-learning algorithm.

New figures show that animal experiments in UK labs are continuing at an almost identical rate to recent years.

Greenpeace urges legal ban to tackle problem after finding that top personal care companies fell short on commitments

Loopholes in the voluntary pledges by the biggest personal care companies to phase out polluting microbeads have been revealed in a report from Greenpeace, which says a legal ban is needed.

Tiny plastic beads are widely used in toiletries and cosmetics but thousands of tonnes wash into the sea every year, where they harm wildlife and can ultimately be eaten by people, with unknown effects on health. A petition signed by more than 300,000 people asking for a UK ban was delivered to the prime minister in June A US law banning microbeads was passed at the end of 2015.

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Maria Damanaki questioned feasibility of UK controlling stocks or setting its own catches without input from Europe

The EU’s former fisheries chief has said it is an illusion that the UK will be able to dictate its fishing policies after Brexit.

Maria Damanaki, the former commissioner for fisheries, who oversaw the most sweeping reforms of the EU’s common fisheries policy in decades, said: “The idea that you can control fisheries at a national level is an illusion for any country, but especially the UK - with Brexit or without. International cooperation is needed to keep stocks and control.”

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The World Bank is poised to support a new coal plant that would modernise Kosovo’s creaking energy infrastructure, but also lock the young nation into a future powered by a regressive fossil fuel

In the early days of December 2015, as the Paris climate talks veered off course and off schedule, the US secretary of state John Kerry left his team of negotiators and flew to Kosovo to voice his support for a proposed US-built, World Bank-sponsored coal power station.

Speaking alongside the prime minister, Isa Mustafa, Kerry told reporters at Pristina airport that the Kosovo e re (New Kosovo) plant would help the tiny, impoverished country do “its part to contribute to this global effort of nations who are committed to dealing with climate change” by replacing an extremely high-polluting cold war-era power plant. Kerry then returned to Paris and helped land a deal intended to bring the fossil fuel era to an end.

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A former UK energy minister claims the offshore wind industry in Scotland is "pretty much dead" after a legal challenge to four projects.

Britain has lost more than 70 percent of its cuckoos in the last 25 years, but tiny tracking devices fitted to some of the birds may have solved the mystery of their decline.

THE X FACTOR: An enormous X-shaped structure made of stars lies at the centre of the Milky Way, indicates a new study of infrared light coming from our home galaxy.

When Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews reshuffled his cabinet in May, most of the headlines were about Wade Noonan’s return after suffering mental health issues, and Lisa Neville who became the state’s first female police minister.

But from an environmental perspective there was another significant change. Energy and resources, long regarded as twin portfolios, were split. Instead, the energy brief was partnered with climate change and environment under a single minister, Lily D’Ambrosio.

On Monday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull followed suit, creating a new super-portfolio of environment and energy, with Josh Frydenberg as the minister.

Linking policy development and decision-making for the energy and climate change portfolios makes sense. As a result of the historic Paris Agreement struck last year, the world – including Australia – is committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

This calls for a major transformation, shifting the world’s energy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources like solar and wind, newer technologies such as wave and geothermal energy, and innovations like battery storage and energy demand management.

In that sense, energy and climate (and therefore the environment) go hand in hand. Decisions about energy sources have direct implications for our ability to deal with climate change. Conversely, decisions taken to reduce emissions will invariably impact on the energy portfolio. The two sectors have been crying out for better integration.

Many of the technologies needed to decarbonise our electricity system are already available. But we need to move faster. Our research at ClimateWorks Australia shows we will need at least 50% renewable electricity by 2030 if we are to decarbonise the electricity sector in time to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

This means we need policies that will push harder to help large-scale clean energy technologies reach the necessary level of commercialisation and integration.

Renewables and efficiency

Within these broad portfolios, there are particular policy areas that also need to be linked more closely with one another. In particular, renewable energy policy needs to be combined with measures to promote energy efficiency.

There is a natural synergy between renewable energy and energy efficiency, yet the two have never been systematically linked at either a national or state level. The better our energy efficiency performance, the less investment we need in new renewable energy sources to replace carbon-intensive ones. This in turn helps to lower the overall network costs and can protect households against rising power bills.

While unit prices of electricity are expected to rise as we modernise and decarbonise the energy system, household bills need not. If governments promote energy efficiency at the same time, households can reduce their energy use to offset the rising energy costs, keeping bills flat or even reducing them.

The lack of joined-up thinking between these two areas has led to missed opportunities. Some 1.5 million Australian homes have solar panels, thanks in part to the federal incentive scheme. Meanwhile, there are separate state-based incentive schemes for household energy efficiency. Why have these two never been linked? If solar panel installers could also provide household energy efficiency audits, householders could kill two birds with one stone and further reduce their demands on the electricity grid.

Household battery storage technology provides the next key opportunity to link installation incentives with renewable energy and energy efficiency. But this opportunity will again be missed if policies are not better integrated within the portfolio.

The National Energy Productivity Plan is a new policy with 34 measures aimed at improving energy efficiency. Frydenberg led this process when he chaired the COAG Energy Council last year. He has retained these responsibilities within his expanded portfolio, giving him a golden opportunity to take a truly integrated approach.

In the meantime, D’Ambrosio has taken the opportunity to review Victoria’s upcoming action plans on renewable energy and energy efficiency, to take advantage of the opportunity in her joint portfolio to ensure energy and climate policies have the close integration they need.

Whole-of-government support

Of course, integrating the energy and climate portfolios is not the whole solution. Cabinet support will still be needed to introduce integrated policies in other areas that are critical to hitting Australia’s emissions reduction targets. Examples include: putting specific regulations on emissions-intensive industries; creating market enablers for low-carbon technologies; ratcheting up green standards for buildings, vehicles and infrastructure; and ensuring planning approval systems are designed to take account of these targets.

The real work will need to happen in the federal government’s 2017 review of policies to achieve Australia’s Paris emissions target of 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. A recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers report found that “Australia will need to nearly double its historic rate of decarbonisation, to 4.4% annually”, if it is to meet even the lower end of this goal.

Ministers often talk about taking a “whole-of-government approach” to major issues. Yet plenty of silos still need breaking down if we are to achieve meaningful action on climate change.

The moves in both Canberra and Spring Street to bring environment, climate and energy under a single umbrella are a positive step towards better policy and real action. But, as ever, there is still plenty of hard work ahead.

Anna Skarbek is CEO of ClimateWorks which receives funding from philanthropy and project-based income from federal, state and local government and private sector organisations.

Government says carbon storage technology not cost-efficient, while critics say U-turn will double cost of tackling climate change

The government’s cancellation of a pioneering £1bn competition to capture and store carbon emissions may have pushed up the bill for meeting the UK’s climate targets by £30bn, according to a report from the UK’s official spending watchdog.

The National Audit Office (NAO) report, published on Wednesday, says the move has delayed by a decade the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology in the UK, which takes emissions from power stations and industry and buries them so they do not contribute to global warming.

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Britain's roads, bridges, railways, hospitals, electricity, gas, water and internet remain at risk from floods, a government review will soon concede.