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Penalty for ‘unacceptable’ water leaks comes three months after the company received a record fine for an untreated sewage leak

Thames Water will pay a £8.5m penalty after failing to meet its target to cut water leakage from its pipes. Ofwat, which regulates the privatised water industry, called the failure “unacceptable” and said the penalty was the maximum possible.

Leaks from Thames Water’s network rose by 5% in the last year, or 35m litres per day. In May, the Guardian revealed that amid fears of a drought and with some water companies asking customers to save water, the vast amount of water that leaks from company pipes every day across England has not fallen for at least four years.

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The new study also confirms the planet is warming 20 times faster than Earth’s fastest natural climate change

Earth’s last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago. The warmer and more stable climate the followed allowed for the development of agriculture and the rise of human civilization. This important period encompassing the past 12,000 years is referred to as the Holocene geological epoch. It also created a “conundrum” for climate scientists, because global temperatures simulated by climate models didn’t match reconstructions from proxy data.

To be specific, the overall temperature change during the Holocene matched pretty well in reconstructions and models, but the pattern didn’t. The best proxy reconstruction from a 2013 paper led by Shaun Marcott estimated more warming than models from 12,000 to 7,000 years ago. Then over the past 7,000 years, Marcott’s reconstruction estimated about 0.5°C cooling while model simulations showed the planet warming by about the same amount.

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Will Australia have a clean energy target, or not? That's the question the Government is currently grappling with.

Report shows 14 people died following attacks between 2005 and 2014, compared with 10 deaths in the 33 years to 2004

The number of people being killed by crocodiles in the Top End is on the rise, new data shows.

A study by the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre, Royal Darwin Hospital and the Menzies School of Health Research has found croc-related deaths have jumped since hunting was outlawed in 1971.

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Vesuvius in Italy and volcanoes in northern Tanzania, lights going out in Syria, and flooding in Sri Lanka are among images captured by Nasa and the ESA this month

A vertical view of Vesuvius in southern Italy, taken by the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet from the International Space Station. The Proxima mission is named after the closest star to the sun, continuing a tradition of naming missions with French astronauts after stars and constellations. The mission is part of the ESA’s plan to use Earth-orbiting spacecraft as a place to live and work while preparing for future voyages of exploration further into the solar system.

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Ivory poaching is the most immediate, urgent threat to Africa’s elephants. But even if that can be tackled, they will have to fight humans for land, food and water

It is the dead of night. The day’s red-dust heat has given way to a cooling breeze. A hundred frogs chirp urgently. Tim and his crew are preparing for another stealth raid. Their mission is highly dangerous and now there’s a new threat: armed men are following them.

This is the scene repeated nightly on the eastern fringes of Amboseli national park in Kenya, close to the border with Tanzania. Tim is an elephant who, along with a group of up to 12 other males, has developed a taste for the tomatoes and maize growing on local farms on the outskirts of the park. The armed men are park rangers who have been tasked with keeping him from the crops – and saving his life.

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Clean air signposts and online walking maps to sidestep diesel fumes would benefit public health, finds study

Taking a side street route when walking through a city cuts a person’s air pollution exposure by half, according to a new study.

Signposting these clean air routes and providing online maps would keep people away from heavily polluted main streets and would benefit their health, the researchers said. In fact the UK group behind the research have developed a new interactive map of London that allows people to put in any route and be shown a low-pollution walking option.

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People with batteries and behind the meter devices can help the market meet demand. But are they well served by the Finkel Review?

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire There is in them a curious combination of industry and decadence, fun and devotion

There’s something Elizabethan about the ashy mining bees. The females are 10mm long, black with a bluish reflection, a ruff of grey hair, a further grey ring around the thorax and a furry white facial mask. The males are smaller, squatter and less strikingly marked.

Andrena cineraria is one of 67 species in Britain and Ireland belonging to the mining bee genus. They are hairy little sprites with pollen baskets on their back legs, short tongues and pointed antennae, and the most effective of pollinators. They excavate nests underground in all kinds of soils.

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Standards Australia guidelines may ban installations of battery storage in homes or garages, despite industry backlash against draft proposals.

Given Tesla is saying almost all of its charging stations will go off-grid, is it time to revisit out assumptions about the energy market?

The energy crisis solution must provide complementary emphasis on driving down consumption, not just on providing more generation.

Eco Energy World says approval of three new solar projects, including 280MW solar farm in Bouldercombe, bring “ready to build” portfolio to total of 570MW.

Global wind giant notes “new confidence” in Victoria market, after announcing deal to deliver 116 turbines for RES Australia’s Murra Warra wind farm.

The modelling prepared by private consultancy for Finkel Review deliberately ignores certain technologies that can provide grid security and replace coal fired generation at a much cheaper cost than gas. It also uses inflated costs for wind and solar.

With current market prices 2–4 times the costs of generation, our remaining coal fired power stations are making out like bandits.

The Global Solar Council has selected Jodie Roussell to be the Council’s new Chief Executive Officer.

The 2017 Global Cleantech Innovation Index (GCII) shows the Nordic region has the strongest cleantech start-up creation leadership for the first time.

Sungrow has installed PV and energy storage system for five islands in the Maldives where people heavily relied on diesel for power and were plagued by poor power quality and high power cost.

Paying farmers to produce environmental goods like healthy soils and clean rivers. It's not a new idea, but there's renewed interest in countries like Britain as it heads towards Brexit and also in Australia.