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Australia continues to put lipstick on the pig of CCS, a tiny pittance of research dollars intended to provide air cover for the emissions of the coal industry.

Record $7.5 billion in large scale solar and wind investment pushes Australia up to number 5 in global renewable energy investment rankings.

The Department is seeking comments on the Draft National Recovery Plan for the Macquarie Perch (Macquaria australasica). The consultation period closes 1 September 2017.

The Department is seeking comments on the Draft Recovery Plan for Clay pans of the Swan Coastal Plain ecological community. The consultation period closes 1 September 2017.

Scientists suggest smaller plants are better at absorbing air pollution around tall buildings.

Church and climate: two issues that are close to many Pacific Islanders' hearts. Seaphotoart/Shutterstock.com

Unless you are cocooned in a tourist bubble, it is hardly possible to miss God when you visit the Pacific Islands. In every village and on every main street there seems to be a church or temple, packed to bursting point on holy days. It is testament to the considerable influence of spirituality on the way people live in the Pacific.

Yet almost every well-intentioned outside agency – including those of foreign governments such as Australia and the European Union – that seeks to help the region’s people adapt to the effects of future climate change is drawing up its plans in secular ways, and communicates using secular language.

Over some 30 years, most such interventions have failed, proving neither effective nor sustainable. The answer to the question “why” may in part lie in the sidelining of God.

At this point, conversations with representatives of donor organisations often become awkward. Why, they ask, should spirituality have any role in a problem like climate-change adaptation or disaster risk management, which is so clearly framed in human, secular terms?

The answer lies in who does the framing. Far fewer people in most donor programs are spiritually engaged than in the Pacific.

A recent survey of 1,226 students at the highly regarded University of the South Pacific found that more than 80% attended church at least weekly, 35% of them more often than that. Bear in mind that this is a sample of the region’s educated urban elite – its future leaders.

Among the wider population, churchgoing seems to be almost universal. For example, Fiji’s 2007 census and Tonga’s 2011 census both showed that less than 1% of the population stated they had no religion. That’s much lower than in donor countries like Australia, Europe and the United States, where at most around 40% of people are habitual churchgoers.

Besides being spiritually engaged, the student survey revealed significantly higher “connectedness to nature” among educated Pacific Islanders than among people in richer countries, as well as deep concerns about climate change and what it might mean for their future and that of their descendants.

The survey revealed widespread pessimism that not enough was being done about climate change in the Pacific. Yet within the responses were two interesting points. The first was “spatial optimism bias”, a widely expressed belief that familiar environments were in a better condition that less familiar ones. The other was a “psychological distancing” of environmental risk – the belief, often spiritually based, that other places were more vulnerable than places to which the respondent had ties.

Earlier this year, I attended Sunday church in a village in Fiji where I was conducting research. The village had escaped the fury of Severe Tropical Cyclone Winston the year before, despite being only 50km from the storm’s centre. The preacher told his congregation that it was their relationship with God that had saved them – because they were pious they had been spared the cyclone’s wrath.

It is easy to ridicule these views, but it would be a mistake to ignore them, given their prevalence among the communities that foreign agencies are trying to help.

My research suggests that one reason for the failure of external interventions for climate-change adaptation in Pacific Island communities is the wholly secular nature of their messages. Among spiritually engaged communities, these secular messages can be met with indifference or even hostility if they clash with the community’s spiritual agenda.

There are examples from all around the world. In the colonial history of Africa, the spiritual value of land was dismissed by colonisers who saw it solely in economic terms. More recently, the Dakota Access Pipeline has become a political flashpoint, pursued by the US government in the name of economic development, but resisted by Native Americans because of the sacredness of the land.

For communities in many poorer countries, including in the Pacific Islands, the most influential messages are those that engage with people’s spiritual beliefs, and the most influential communication channels are often those that involve religious leaders.

In April 2009, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) issued the Moana Declaration that presciently accepted that climate change and sea-level rise would force people from vulnerable coastal locations to less vulnerable areas elsewhere.

After this, the PCC set up a climate change unit and drove initiatives to put climate change into Sabbath sermons across this vast region.

But more needs to be done. My ongoing research, including projects with the PCC and the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, suggests that this lack of effective engagement with the religious community is still a key failing.

Church leaders can heavily influence practical discussions at every level of the community. That makes them an important potential target for agencies aiming to make a real difference in how Pacific Islanders cope with climate change.

I acknowledge my collaborators in this project: Dr Kate Mulgrew, Dr Bridie Scott-Parker and Professor Doug Mahar (University of the Sunshine Coast), Professor Don Hine and Dr Tony Marks (University of New England), and Dr Jack Maebuta and Dr Lavinia Tiko (University of the South Pacific).

Patrick D. Nunn receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change

Electoral register and young people | Typefaces | Nottingham’s peregrines | Names for grandparents | 35mm film canisters

Warnings about young people dropping off the electoral register were issued a long time ago (Report, 15 May). The next government needs to take swift action and automatically register 16-year-olds when they receive their national insurance number. Policies were set out last year by the all-party parliamentary party in its report on the Missing Millions and have cross-party support. Urgent action is needed so that next generation of citizens are included in the democratic process.
Dr Toby James
Senior fellow to the all-party parliamentary group on democratic participation, University of East Anglia 

• Mrs May’s battlebus has lettering in the Swiss typeface Akzidenz. Voters may wish that Akzidenz will happen (but it doesn’t translate so helpfully). Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche uses the British Gill Italic, which leans to the right. Read the runes.
Richard Hollis
London

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Scientists have decoded the genome of a snail involved in the spread of a deadly parasitic disease.

A leaked letter throws doubt on the legal basis for sharing 1.6 million patient records with DeepMind.

Hint: the elephant is the obstructionist political party’s symbol

There was tremendous outcry when the New York Times hired opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who has a long history of making misinformed comments about climate change. Stephens didn’t assuage those fears when he devoted his first column to punching hippies, absurdly suggesting that our lack of progress on climate policy is a result of greens being too mean to climate deniers.

Stephens lamentably stayed on the subject of climate change in his second and third Times columns as well. In those pieces, he used corn-based ethanol subsidies as an example of where climate policy has gone wrong:

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Why wouldn't a straight banana make it onto a supermarket shelf?

We must reduce our dependence on plastics, especially single-use items, and seek out alternative materials

• 38 million pieces of plastic waste found on uninhabited South Pacific island

It’s everywhere. From the Mariana Trench to the floor of the Arctic Ocean, on tropical beaches and polar coasts. It’s in wildlife, seafood, sea salt and even on the surface of Mars. The world is blighted by plastic. Up to 12m tonnes of the stuff enters the world’s oceans every year (that’s one new tonne of plastic every three to 10 seconds) and it doesn’t go to that magical place called “away”.

Once in the oceans, it can float around for years, or even decades, before being swallowed by a bird or a whale. During that time, it can travel tens of thousands of kilometres, all the while absorbing contaminants from the sea water, concentrating them like a sponge. When wildlife ingest plastic, the brew of toxic chemicals can be transferred to the animal’s tissues with potentially dangerous consequences.

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Australia has had a record-breaking year when it comes to building large-scale solar power projects and our capacity for solar is about to triple.

Henderson Island in the South Pacific Ocean is believed to be one of the world’s worst polluted places. Australian scientists say they found its beaches littered with about 38m pieces of plastic during an investigation in 2015. The island is in the path of the South Pacific Gyre, an ocean current known for its accumulation of plastic debris

• 38 million pieces of plastic waste found on uninhabited South Pacific island
  

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The uninhabited Pacific island is littered with 37.7 million pieces of plastic debris, scientists say.

The Charted Institute for Waste and Environmental Management (Ciwem) Photographer of the Year competition was set up 10 years ago to chronicle human impact on the natural environment. The 2017 competition launches this week and judges include Stephen Fry, Ben Fogle and Steve Backshall

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Only 30 vaquita are left in Gulf of Mexico as pirate fishermen net them when fishing for highly valued totoaba maws

The world’s rarest marine mammal is on the verge of extinction due to the continuing illegal demand in China for a valuable fish organ, an undercover investigation has revealed.

There are no more than 30 vaquita – a five-foot porpoise – left in the northern Gulf of Mexico today and they could be extinct within months, conservationists have warned. The population has been all but eradicated by pirate fishermen catching the large totoaba fish and killing the vaquita in the process.

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Solar is cheap enough for homeowners to use it to power air conditioners to cool outdoor verandahs. The big challenge, ARENA says, is integration into the grid. The technology is there, but rules, regulations and business models will have to change.

AGL Energy (AGL) has commenced construction on the 200 MW Silverton Wind Farm in north western New South Wales near Broken Hill.

Buxton, Derbyshire They look like animate furry fruit bonbons. The queens hatch late and their preferred food is bilberry and heather

After the most rainless spring that I can recall, the vegetation on the moor tops is frazzled to an August tinder. The full sweep of folded slopes look grey rather than the usual heathery brown, and even the deepest gullies are dry bottomed and crunchy underfoot. Yet the strong north-easterlies have kept the entire season freeze-dried, and there are almost no swallows through the blue overhead, while the pipits, parachuting down in song display, whose notes are flat at best of times, were picked to desultory shreds by the currents of cold air.

It was so dry that I could at least lie among the bilberry bushes to escape the wind and there, in a condition of enforced sloth, I chanced upon a search method for the creature I’d come to see.

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