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In a year almost certain to be history’s hottest, drastic environmental changes are taking a toll on food supply and even language in Arctic communities

The extreme warmth of 2016 has changed so much for the people of the Arctic that even their language is becoming unmoored from the conditions in which they now live.

The Yupik, an indigenous people of western Alaska, have dozens of words for the vagaries of sea ice, which is not surprising given the crucial role it plays in subsistence hunting and transportation. But researchers have noted that some of these words, such as “tagneghneq” (thick, dark, weathered ice), are becoming obsolete.

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Soaring Arctic temperatures ‘strongly linked’ to recent extreme weather events, say scientists at cutting edge of climate change research

The dramatic melting of Arctic ice is already driving extreme weather that affects hundreds of millions of people across North America, Europe and Asia, leading climate scientists have told the Guardian.

Severe “snowmageddon” winters are now strongly linked to soaring polar temperatures, say researchers, with deadly summer heatwaves and torrential floods also probably linked. The scientists now fear the Arctic meltdown has kickstarted abrupt changes in the planet’s swirling atmosphere, bringing extreme weather in heavily populated areas to the boil.

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A third of Drax’s coal power station will switch to biomass after European commission approves government subsidies

The share price of Britain’s biggest power station operator has jumped to a five-month high after the European commission approved subsidies for its conversion to burn wood pellets instead of coal.

Drax was awarded a renewable energy subsidy contract by the government in 2014 to switch the third unit of its coal power station in North Yorkshire over to biomass. That prompted a state-aid investigation by the commission, which was concerned the estimates of the plant’s performance were too generous and Drax would be overcompensated.

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Other finds in the biodiverse greater Mekong region include a rare banana species from Thailand and a tiny frog from Cambodia and Vietnam

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What’s it like to live among elephants, to know that at any moment you might find yourself face to face with something so awe-inspiring – and so dangerous?

My family and I have lived on the edge of the Mudumalai wildlife sanctuary in the Nilgiri mountains, south India, for over three decades now. The children grew up here. Yet the thrill of knowing there’s an elephant in the garden is a feeling we all still savour. We cherish our elephant memories and can’t ever seem to become blasé about them.

Our elephant adventures began in 1984 when, with our one-year-old daughter, my husband and I crossed the jungle in a dilapidated jeep, sticking behind a lorry for comfort and company. The herds of elephants standing like sentinels on either side of the Bandipur-Mudumalai forest highway had us frantically praying for our safety. Mostly, one elephant, the matriarch, would trumpet loudly, warning us off, especially if there were young calves with the herd. Then she would angrily paw the ground as a prelude to charging. We would race away before she could carry out her threat.

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Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 23 December 1916

Surrey, December 21
Rabbits could be seen playing in the meadow at the bottom of the down right up to the time when darkness came. There was no evening. The afternoon sky was just tinged with a strip of dull red in the west, and this patch of colour moved a little towards the north; then it died out. Nothing was visible except a planet and a few stars shining faintly, and seemingly very far away. Clouds in the higher sky came and completely blotted them; you lost all sense of direction; a mist began to spread upward; it was only by the tread of grass underfoot you had knowledge of being on the earth at all. The light, cold air died away; there seemed to be nothing but a chill, dead vacancy for almost an hour. Then a rustle, very slight, came moving along low down, as of something creeping over the meadow face. Bending, it was possible to discover that this was but the first movement of a light wind, just playing along the grass and hardly to be felt a few feet above the ground. But before the top of the down could be reached it could be heard sweeping among the elms a few yards on the other side; it had driven off the mist, and the great limbs could just be perceived swaying now this way and now the other. In the bottom, by the farmstead, strangely, a barnyard cock crowed hoarsely and twice, with a long pause in between. After another interval a bantam sounded a long shrill note. The wind dropped. But this morning it was wild again, scurrying heavy rain through the bare hazels. We knew then why the rabbits had been so frolicsome.

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$145 wildlife warning devices are designed to scare devils off road and have limited resale value

Thieves in Tasmania are stealing electronic fence posts designed to save the lives of endangered Tasmanian devils.

The thefts have bewildered the manufacturers, who say the $145 wildlife warning devices serve no purpose other than deterring wildlife and have limited resale value.

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Video footage of the rare Hydrolagus trolli, also known as a chimaera or ghost shark, has been taken for the first time off the coast of California

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Also known as chimaeras, the creatures have tooth plates instead of teeth and a retractable penis on their heads

American scientists surveying the depths of the ocean off the coast of California and Hawaii have unwittingly filmed the mysterious ghost shark for the first time.

The team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Center had sent a remote operated vehicle down to depths of 2,000 metres (6,700ft) when the creature appeared on their screens.

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You couldn’t dream up the crazy set of events that have driven fears that South Australia is a sign of the threats to come to power supply reliability.

The AEMC really needs to get its act together in terms of more forward looking in terms of its approach to modelling.

We've read and reported on some remarkably misinformed analysis in recent weeks, including from country's principal energy rule maker and government's favourite energy consultant. But this one on solar and battery storage just about takes the biscuit.

Two new studies of different ice shelves have seen major melting that could portend a less stable future for the region.

Northern Territory appoints leading lights in wind and solar to panel devising strategy for its 50 per cent renewable energy target.

JP Morgan say that with rapid coal generation closure, AGL may be worth more than the market currently thinks. But maybe not.

Carnegie Clean Energy's EMC and Lendlease Services ink major deal to corner Australia's multi-billion dollar microgrid market.

British-Chinese cameraman Jacky Poon is one of a few professionals documenting endangered animals in China.

Powered by Reposit, South Australia has the largest operational virtual power plant (VPP) in Australia.

Encountering a peacock in the wild is a surreal experience. Just one of the sightings among a wealth of exotic and unfamiliar birds at the Uttar Pradesh Bird Festival

There was a flash of the richest blue, as the bird emerged from the forest and strutted across the path in front of us. Instantly recognisable, yet at the same time oddly unfamiliar, it lifted its neck and flicked an enormously long tail, before melting into the vegetation, never to be seen again.

Encountering a peacock in the wild, in its native India, is a surreal experience. I regularly see them in the grounds of Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court, where they strut around as if they own the place. Yet now I was watching them in the fields and forests of India’s most populous state, home to the second Uttar Pradesh Bird Festival.

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Timber stockpiled along a logging road. Day Edryshov/Shutterstock

If you asked a friend to name the worst human threat to nature, what would they say? Global warming? Overhunting? Habitat fragmentation?

A new study suggests it is in fact road-building.

“Road-building” might sound innocuous, like “house maintenance” – or even positive, conjuring images of promoting economic growth. Many of us have been trained to think so.

But an unprecedented spate of road building is happening now, with around 25 million kilometres of new paved roads expected by 2050. And that’s causing many environmental researchers to perceive roads about as positively as a butterfly might see a spider web that’s just fatally trapped it.

A Malayan tapir killed along a road in Peninsular Malaysia. WWF-Malaysia/Lau Ching Fong Shattered

The new study, led by Pierre Ibisch at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, Germany, ambitiously attempted to map all of the roads and remaining ecosystems across Earth’s entire land surface.

Its headline conclusion is that roads have already sliced and diced Earth’s ecosystems into some 600,000 pieces. More than half of these are less than 1 square kilometre in size. Only 7% of the fragments are more than 100 square km.

Remaining roadless areas across the Earth. P. Ibisch et al. Science (2016)

That’s not good news. Roads often open a Pandora’s box of ills for wilderness areas, promoting illegal deforestation, fires, mining and hunting.

In the Brazilian Amazon, for instance, our existing research shows that 95% of all forest destruction occurs within 5.5km of roads. The razing of the Amazon and other tropical forests produces more greenhouse gases than all motorised vehicles on Earth.

Animals are being imperilled too, by vehicle roadkill, habitat loss and hunting. In just the past decade, poachers invading the Congo Basin along the expanding network of logging roads have snared or gunned down two-thirds of all forest elephants for their valuable ivory tusks.

Deforestation along roads in the Brazilian Amazon. Google Earth Worse than it looks

As alarming as the study by Ibisch and colleagues sounds, it still probably underestimates the problem, because it is likely that the researchers missed half or more of all the roads on the planet.

That might sound incompetent on their part, but in fact keeping track of roads is a nightmarishly difficult task. Particularly in developing nations, illegal roads can appear overnight, and many countries lack the capacity to govern, much less map, their unruly frontier regions.

One might think that satellites and computers can keep track of roads, and that’s partly right. Most roads can be detected from space, if it’s not too cloudy, but it turns out that the maddening variety of road types, habitats, topographies, sun angles and linear features such as canals can fool even the smartest computers, none of which can map roads consistently.

The only solution is to use human eyes to map roads. That’s what Ibisch and his colleagues relied upon – a global crowdsourcing platform known as OpenStreetMap, which uses thousands of volunteers to map Earth’s roads.

Therein lies the problem. As the authors acknowledge, human mappers have worked far more prolifically in some areas than others. For instance, wealthier nations like Switzerland and Australia have quite accurate road maps. But in Indonesia, Peru or Cameroon, great swathes of land have been poorly studied.

A quick look at OpenStreetmap also shows that cities are far better mapped than hinterlands. For instance, in the Brazilian Amazon, my colleagues and I recently found 3km of illegal, unmapped roads for every 1km of legal, mapped road.

A logging truck blazes along a road in Malaysian Borneo. Rhett Butler/Mongabay

What this implies is that the environmental toll of roads in developing nations – which sustain most of the planet’s critical tropical and subtropical forests – is considerably worse than estimated by the new study.

This is reflected in statistics like this: Earth’s wilderness areas have shrunk by a tenth in just the past two decades, as my colleagues and I reported earlier this year. Lush forests such as the Amazon, Congo Basin and Borneo are shrinking the fastest.

Road rage

The modern road tsunami is both necessary and scary. On one hand, nobody disputes that developing nations in particular need more and better roads. That’s the chief reason that around 90% of all new roads are being built in developing countries.

On the other hand, much of this ongoing road development is poorly planned or chaotic, leading to severe environmental damage.

For instance, the more than 53,000km of “development corridors” being planned or constructed in Africa to access minerals and open up remote lands for farming will have enormous environmental costs, our research suggests.

Orangutans in the wilds of northern Sumatra. Suprayudi

This year, both the Ibisch study and our research have underscored how muddled the UN Sustainable Development Goals are with respect to vanishing wilderness areas across the planet.

For instance, the loss of roadless wilderness conflicts deeply with goals to combat harmful climate change and biodiversity loss, but could improve our capacity to feed people. These are tough trade-offs.

One way we’ve tried to promote a win-win approach is via a global road-mapping strategy that attempts to tell us where we should and shouldn’t build roads. The idea is to promote roads where we can most improve food production, while restricting them in places that cause environmental calamities.

Part of a global road-mapping strategy. Green areas have high environmental values where roads should be avoided. Red areas are where roads could improve agricultural production. And black areas are ‘conflict zones’ where both environmental values and potential road benefits are high. W. F. Laurance et al. Nature (2014)

The bottom line is that if we’re smart and plan carefully, we can still increase food production and human equity across much of the world.

But if we don’t quickly change our careless road-building ways, we could end up opening up the world’s last wild places like a flayed fish – and that would be a catastrophe for nature and people too.

Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. He is the director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University, and founder and director of ALERT--the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers.