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Loss of Hazelwood will have an impact, says Grattan Institute.

Short term profits but long term uncertainty for Victoria's three remaining brown coal fired power generators.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s plan for a A$2 billion upgrade and expansion of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, announced last week, will be an impressive engineering achievement. Snowy Hydro 2.0 will increase the scheme’s capacity by 50%.

Meeting this extra capacity will depend entirely on the natural water supply available in the Snowy Mountains. But the current environmental conditions of these mountains, and the Australian Alps where they are located, are compromising both water delivery and water quality.

The only way to maintain water flow is to control the threats that are actively degrading the high country catchments. These include introduced animals, wetland loss, and climate change.

Restoration and management

The remarkable Snowy Hydro Scheme was developed over 25 years from the 1940s. During this period the NSW Soil Conservation Service and later NSW National Parks effectively managed soil and restored areas damaged by grazing.

Conservation efforts focused on looking after topsoil, stabilising wetlands, and restoring vegetation after decades of grazing. This ensured good amounts of high-quality water for both hydro power and irrigation downstream.

More recent efforts have focused on the impacts of building the original Snowy scheme. This includes restoring areas cleared for roads and construction sites, and areas where rock and soil from blasting and cutting were dumped.

Before and after revegetation works in the 1970s, following the removal of cattle. Current ecological change is likely to be far more significant and could require new types of intervention. Image courtesy of Roger Good Threats to mountain catchments

The Australian Alps are the nation’s water towers. They provide water for growing food and hydroelectricity, but face several threats.

Across the Alps, despite well-informed and committed control programs, feral horses, pigs and deer are destroying wetlands, degrading streamside vegetation, and causing moisture-holding peat soils and stream channels to erode. This leads to more evaporation, more rapid runoff and erosion, less water flow, and lower water quality.

There is currently no effective response to this damage. We estimate that more than 35% of the high mountains’ wetlands have been affected, and the problem is getting worse.

The Alps are also recognised as extremely vulnerable to climate change. Climate models suggest that alpine areas that currently receive at least 60 days of snow cover will shrink by 18-60% by 2020.

Temperatures in the alps are already increasing by 0.4℃ per decade, an increase of 1.79℃ since records began. Climate change projections for the Australian Alps indicate the hottest summer days will be around 5°C warmer in 2100, minimum temperatures will rise by 3-6℃, and precipitation (rain and snow) will decrease by up to 20%, with less falling as snow. These changes are already putting pressure on iconic mountain ecosystems including the peatlands, snowgum woodlands and alpine ash forests.

The Australian Alps are also likely to experience more extreme events such as heatwaves, storms, fires and severe frosts. All of these affect high mountain ecosystems, making the environment more vulnerable to disturbances such as more fires, weeds and disease outbreaks.

For example, the root-rot fungus, Phytophora cambivora, recently appeared in the alps. The fungus killed large areas of shrubs following unusually warm springtime soil temperatures.

New weeds are an additional concern for the alps as these may compromise the existing plant communities and their ability to deliver services such as water. Alpine peat soils, which build up over thousands of years, can also burn in drought.

Reliable water depends on functioning ecosystems

A stable water supply from the Alps is crucial for energy and food production. This relies on intact vegetation.

Back in the 1950s, it became clear to the researchers at the Soil Conservation Service that hard-hooved animals, in this case domestic cattle, were severely damaging the alpine catchments.

The success of the original Snowy scheme depended on removing cattle from alpine areas, controlling soil erosion that resulted from prior grazing and hydro works, and carrying out extensive revegetation works across the whole of the nearby mountain ranges.

However, land managers to this day are still controlling a legacy of disturbance and weed invasions from both the Snowy scheme itself and years of previous grazing. Snowy 2.0 must consider these lessons from the past, and work to improve mountain catchments.

Alpine plants and animals often live close to their environmental tolerances, meaning they are not necessarily able to cope with change. For some species, climate change is likely to exceed these thresholds. Vegetation communities will change as current populations decline and colonisers from different species move in to occupy the gaps, including invasive species.

Feral horses make it even more difficult for native species to respond to a changing climate, by exacerbating environmental degradation and impacts on water.

Part of the solution is restoring and re-vegetating degraded high country landscapes. For example, restoring snowgum communities, which were severely affected by burning and grazing, may lead to increases in the amount of water trapped as drifting fog.

But climate change will demand new research and management partnerships to find species that will survive well into the future and to develop adaptation pathways to respond to uncertain conditions.

This will be a new and different world. We are currently ill-prepared to maintain high-quality water yield in the future, to predict the impacts of climate change, or to effectively protect our alps for future generations.

But we are confident these questions can be answered with adequate investment in the environmental infrastructure needed to underpin the engineering. We estimate that between A$5 million and A$7 million per year is needed to research and develop new management structures. You could see this investment as royalties returned to the system that provides the water and power.

Turnbull’s plan may deliver more power, but only if the environment is carefully managed. Otherwise Snowy Hydro 2.0 may be left high and dry.

Adrienne Nicotra receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the NCCARF. She is a member of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Science Advisory Council and the Ecological Society of Australia.

David Freudenberger receives funding from Whitehaven Coal to conduct mine site rehabilitation research. He is a board member of the Society for Ecological Restoration Australasia, a member of the Australian Ecological Society and a member of the ACT Natural Resource Management Advisory Council

Geoff Cary currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Bushfire and Naturals Hazard CRC, and has recently received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Greenhouse Office/Department of Climate Change Greenhouse Action in Regional Australia funding schemes, NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, and the Bushfire CRC. He is affiliated with the International Association of Wildland Fire.

Geoffrey Hope has received funding from the Office of Environment and Heritage, NSW Government and the ACT Government for research on mountain wetland ecology. He is affiliated with the Australian Institute of Alpine Studies and is a member of the Kosciuscko National Park Wild Horse Management Plan Review Independent Technical Reference Group. . .

Sam Banks receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Susanna Venn receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Graeme Worboys does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Scientists reclassify dinosaurs, putting British fossils at the base of their family tree.

Extent of ice over North pole has fallen to a new wintertime low, for the third year in a row, as climate change drives freakish weather

The extent of Arctic ice has fallen to a new wintertime low, as climate change drives freakishly high temperatures in the polar regions.

The ice cap grows during the winter months and usually reaches its maximum in early March. But the 2017 maximum was 14.4m sq km, lower than any year in the 38-year satellite record, according to researchers at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) and Nasa.

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The A-level student noticed something odd in radiation levels from the International Space Station.

Massive fine reflects change in sentencing as previously low penalties failed to deter water firms from polluting England’s rivers and beaches

Thames Water has been hit with a record fine of £20.3m after huge leaks of untreated sewage into the Thames and its tributaries and on to land, including the popular Thames path. The prolonged leaks led to serious impacts on residents, farmers, and wildlife, killing birds and fish.

The fine imposed on Wednesday was for numerous offences in 2013 and 2014 at sewage treatment works at Aylesbury, Didcot, Henley and Little Marlow, and a large sewage pumping station at Littlemore.

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In the first in a series, Yale Environment 360 reports from Honduras where Berta Cáceres fought to protect native lands and paid for it with her life – one of hundreds of victims in this disturbing global trend

They came for her late one evening last March, as Berta Cáceres prepared for bed. A heavy boot broke the back door of the safe house she had just moved into. Her colleague and family friend, Gustavo Castro, heard her shout, “Who’s there?” Then came a series of shots. He survived. But the most famous and fearless social and environmental activist in Honduras died instantly. She was 44 years old. It was a cold-blooded political assassination.

Berta Cáceres knew she was likely to be killed. Everybody knew. She had told her daughter Laura to prepare for life without her. The citation for her prestigious Goldman Environmental prize, awarded in the US less than a year before, noted the continued death threats, before adding: “Her murder would not surprise her colleagues, who keep a eulogy – but hope to never have to use it.”

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From air- and ground-source heat pumps to desalinating seawater, these properties flaunt their environmentally friendly credentials

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A new study looks at the complex relationship between global warming and increased precipitation

The world is warming because humans are emitting heat-trapping greenhouse gases. We know this for certain; the science on this question is settled. Humans emit greenhouse gases, those gases should warm the planet, and we know the planet is warming. All of those statements are settled science.

Okay so what? Well, we would like to know what the implications are. Should we do something about it or not? How should we respond? How fast will changes occur? What are the costs of action compared to inaction? These are all areas of active research.

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Princess Anne has told the BBC's Farming Today she believes gene technology has important benefits to offer in terms of providing food.

A report suggests a "dramatic" decline in the number coal-fired power plants in pre-construction in 2016.

With his gorgeous and patiently realised black and white images, Kobayashi searches for a spiritual dimension in the calm beauty of nature

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Anne says she would farm GM food and GM livestock a ‘bonus’, while Charles says GM crops will cause ‘biggest disaster environmentally of all time’

Princess Anne has strongly backed genetically modified crops, saying she would grow them on her own land and that GM livestock would be a “bonus”.

Her stance puts her sharply at odds with her brother Prince Charles, who has long opposed GM food and has said it will cause the “biggest disaster environmentally of all time”.

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The Long Mynd, Shropshire The sound of Light Spout waterfall seems, at first, to be all roar and splash

To stand in the stream under the Light Spout is to be drenched in sound and mesmerised by light. Through a narrow cleft, water gathered from bogs on the plateau of the Long Mynd plunges 20ft over the rock face into a shallow pool before roiling down the stream of Carding Mill valley.

The sky is grey, there is bite left in the season and a fine drizzle lowers between hills. Shale ledges break the flow of water; it spins into a million bubbles filled with light so that, on a day like this, it looks like the ghostly Lady in White, a shimmering apparition.

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Pollution and debris off the Sri Lankan coast. David Jones/plasticoceans.org

We live in a world of plastic. Shopping bags, drink bottles, your toothbrush and even your clothes are among the everyday items made from plastic. But plastic isn’t fantastic, and neither is the current state of our environment.

Humans have been mass-producing plastic since the 1950s. We produce hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic every year and production is only increasing. Unfortunately, most of it is used only once and then thrown away.

Only a small proportion of plastic is recycled. The majority ends up in landfill or, in the worst case scenario, our oceans.

A Plastic Ocean is a documentary film directed by the Australian journalist Craig Leeson. It dives into and investigates the devastating impacts that plastic has caused to our environment, especially our marine life.

What starts off as an adventure to film the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet, leads to the shocking discovery of a thick layer of plastic debris floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Craig, alongside Tanya Streeter, a world record-breaking free diver and environmental activist, then travel across the globe to report on the havoc caused by decades of plastic use.

The film presents beautiful shots of the marine environment. This contrasts with footage of heavily polluted cities and dumps full of plastic rubbish. The juxtaposition between these images sends the message that our actions and choices can severely impact the planet. Throughout the film, experts are interviewed to provide further insight into some of the problems derived from plastic.

Impacts of plastic use

Plastic is so widely used because it is durable and cheap. Unfortunately, this durability is the same quality that makes it so detrimental to the environment. Most plastics do not break down chemically. Instead, they break into smaller and smaller pieces that can persist in the environment for an extensive period of time.

Because it is so affordable, developing countries use plastics extensively. However, many regions lack proper waste management, and much of the rubbish is washed into the ocean when it rains. As a result, a large percentage of all plastics in the ocean are due to only a handful of countries. Scientists estimate that more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are currently floating in our oceans.

Throughout the film, we are shown footage of numerous marine species that have been affected by plastic debris. Marine animals and sea birds often mistake floating plastic for food. Large pieces of plastic, when eaten, can obstruct the animals’ digestive tracts of the animals, essentially starving them to death.

When smaller “microplastics” are ingested, toxins are released and become stored in their tissue. These toxins accumulate up the food chain and can eventually end up on our dinner tables. The consumption of the contaminated seafood can cause many health problems including cancer, immune system problems, and even childhood developmental issues. This is a major problem, as almost a fifth of the world’s population relies on the ocean for their primary source of protein. Society’s huge appetite for plastic is literally poisoning us.

The future of plastics

There is no quick fix for a problem that has grown hugely over the past few decades. The use of plastics is so ingrained in society that it is all but impossible to eliminate them completely.

The film does, however, offer various strategies that can be implemented to reduce the impact of plastics.

Ideally, avoid plastic-containing products as much as possible. Avoid single-use plastic products and recycle whatever you can. Local governments also need to implement a refund scheme for the return of plastic bottles to incentivise recycling.

For unrecyclable plastics, new technology has been developed to convert them into fuel, providing a second life for those plastics.

It is up to us to embrace these changes and move away from the plastic culture. We need to get this problem under control, as it will only become worse as the human population increases. Our marine animals deserve to live in a blue ocean, not a plastic soup.

A Plastic Ocean is touring internationally, including screenings in Brisbane on March 25 and Cairns on March 27.

Gary Truong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Tesla is planning to open its third service centre in Australia, combined with the first store for Queensland, both in Brisbane.

Princess Royal's views in BBC radio show appear to be at odds with the taken by the Prince of Wales.

How the toxic pests, described as "dispersal machines", are thwarting efforts to halt their advance.

The ancient arthropod, found in Herefordshire, joins a long list of items named after the TV legend.