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What do you see when you look at an elephant? The world’s biggest land mammal – or a giant data store, sharing information in a living, breathing network?

Elephants have such sad expressive faces that is hard to imagine how anyone could harm them. They have drawn lips and sagging shoulders; a long, drooping demeanour; sad, knowing eyes capable of laying on the guilt. Yet, it would appear that guilt is not enough to save them. Eighty years ago there were perhaps 6 to 9 million African and Asian elephants. Today there are roughly half a million left. Day by day, they are getting closer to extinction.

Perhaps we need some new ideas. Perhaps it is time for a different perspective on why elephants need saving. Rather than their bodies, maybe it is their shared memories and experience that we might one day come to value. This is the argument that I’d like to put forward in this piece.

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Group of 13 people lock themselves to objects to stop vehicles entering Cuadrilla site at Fylde, as part of month of action

Protesters have blockaded the entrance to a fracking site as part of a month of action to resist the controversial drilling process.

The group of 13 protesters, including three local councillors, arrived at the site on Preston New Road in Fylde, Lancashire, in the early hours of Monday morning and locked themselves to objects in an attempt to prevent vehicles entering the site.

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The fine art photographer Diane Tuft travelled to the Arctic Circle to document the fragility of the snowbound landscape as it melts away. The photographs produced on her journey are on show at Marlborough Gallery NYC until 20 July, and an accompanying book, The Arctic Melt: Images of a Disappearing Landscape, is published by Assouline

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Illegal fishing, logging and poaching are damaging two thirds of the 57 natural world heritage sites monitored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is drawing attention to their plight. The 41st session of the Unesco World Heritage Committee in Kraków runs until 12 July

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The favorite satellite data of contrarians like Ted Cruz corrected for some errors and ended up hotter

A new paper just published in the Journal of Climate is a stunning setback for the darling of cherry-picking for contrarian scientists and elected officials. Let’s walk though this so we appreciate the impact.

The vast majority of scientists know that the climate is changing, humans are the main reason, and there are going to be severe consequences. We have decades of measurements that prove our understanding of this process. There is simply no debate or dispute.

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India is touted as a rapid adopter of renewable energy, but its energy challenges are complex.

The late 1800s showcased the beauty of America’s public lands in color for the first time. A photographic technique called photochrom was developed, which allowed color to be introduced on to black and white negatives. The process was used extensively by William Henry Jackson, whose early pictures of Yellowstone helped convince Congress to make it the first national park in 1872. Here is a selection of the collection held by the Library of Congress

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Garnaut says Australia could likely meet its reduction targets without a CET, rendering it useless and debate about it irrelevant. He proposes a dual pathway to resolve the political impasse.

Taskforce head says complexity, scale and political resistance mean key protections could be lost during rollover into law

A taskforce of environmental lawyers is drawing up plans to stop thousands of EU rules protecting rivers, wildlife, coastlines and air quality from being dropped by the government after Brexit.

The EU is the source of most environmental protection in Britain and for 40 years has acted as a monitoring body and enforcer, with powers to fine member states for breaches in the law.

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About 20 per cent of male fish in UK rivers are now showing female characteristics.

SA Water Corporation seeks to build grid-connected, rooftop solar PV system of more than 100kW, plus 50kWh battery storage system and “smart controls.”

Another 141MW of utility-scale solar farms approved for development, as Sunshine State starts to live up to its massive PV potential.

Industry warns that if proposed new battery installation standards remain unchanged, the Australian behind-the-meter battery storage market will be stopped dead in its tracks – and the estimated by the CSIRO at up to 85GWh by 2040 – will simply fail to materialise.

AEMO constrains wind farms in South Australia for first time because there were not enough "synchronous units" as wind output blew above 1200MW.

AAP/Black Inc Books

Melbourne-born author Anna Krien’s latest Quarterly Essay explores the debates on climate change policy in Australia and the ecological effects of not acting.

She interviewed farmers, scientists, Indigenous groups, and activists from Bowen to Port Augusta. She says climate change denialism has transformed into “climate change nihilism”.

Krien says the Finkel review provides another opportunity in a long line of proposals to take up the challenge of legislating clean energy. “We just need to get that foot in the door. The door has been flapping in the wind for the past decade.”

On a current frontline battle – the planned Adani Carmichael coalmine – she found the people who would be affected were being ignored and blindsided.

Meanwhile, the potential for exploitation of local Indigenous peoples through “opaque” native title legislation was high. “Outsiders are not meant to understand it and to tell you the truth you get the sense that insiders aren’t meant to understand it either.”

Michelle Grattan 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.

Appletreewick, Yorkshire Dales Its body is as dark as the river at its deepest, where the peat-stained water turns as black as molasses

The heatwave hits its stride before breakfast, building to a dog day intensity that will relent only with the last red moments of the sunset. For the long hours between, an endless afternoon, the light ceases to move, training its intensity on the elderflower, oxeye daisies and buttercups of Wharfedale until their colours take on the bleach-brightness that signals high summer in England.

The weather brings people out of hibernation, and into encounters with unfamiliar forms of life. “Look at the size of that crayfish!” The woman paddling in the untypically warm river Wharfe near Appletreewick points near her feet, causing half a dozen swimmers to coalesce around the spectacle. Children express something between amazement and open-mouthed horror.

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Minerals Council halves cost of coal, doubles cost of wind and solar and comes up with fantasy number of $27bn for a 650MW renewable plant.

There will be a cost to decarbonise the economy, its' just a lot less than the cost of not decarbonising. Generation prices will stay high, network prices will be sticky, and the incentive for “grid defection” is going to continue.

Earth’s last intact wilderness areas are being rapidly destroyed. More than 5 million square km of wilderness (around 10% of the total area) have been lost in the past two decades. If this continues, the consequences for both people and nature will be catastrophic.

Predominantly free of human activity, especially industrial-scale activities, large wilderness areas host a huge range of environmental values, including endangered species and ecosystems, and critical functions such as storing carbon and providing fresh water. Many indigenous people and local communities, who are often politically and economically marginalised, depend on wilderness areas and have deep cultural connections to them.

Yet despite being important and highly threatened, wilderness areas have been almost completely ignored in international environmental policy. Immediate proactive action is required to save them. The question is where such action could come from.

In a paper published in Conservation Biology, we argue that the United Nations’ World Heritage Convention should expand the amount of wilderness included in its list of Natural World Heritage Sites (NWHS).

Wilderness areas are underrepresented among the 203 sites currently on the list. The World Heritage Committee’s meeting in Poland this week offers a good opportunity to redress the balance.

Whither wilderness?

The World Heritage Convention was adopted in 1972 by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to conserve the world’s most valuable natural and cultural sites – places of exceptional importance to all of humanity and future generations. Each one is unique and irreplaceable. Currently, 193 countries (almost the entire world) are parties to the convention, which has inscribed 203 natural sites around the world.

World Heritage Status is granted to places with “Outstanding Universal Value”, which is defined based on three pillars. First, a site must meet one of the four criteria for listing as natural World Heritage (aesthetic value, geological value, biological processes, and biodiversity conservation). Second, a site must have “integrity” and “intactness” of its values (in other words, it must be in excellent condition). Finally, a site must be officially protected by the national or subnational government under whose jurisdiction it falls.

Wilderness areas can be associated with all four of the natural criteria, as well as the integrity and intactness requirements. What’s more, a wilderness by definition cannot be recreated once it is lost. The argument for protecting wilderness areas by adding them to the NWHS list is therefore compelling.

We created the most up-to-date maps of terrestrial wilderness using recent maps of human pressure and assessed the World Heritage Convention’s current coverage of wilderness areas. We found that some 777,000 square km (around 2% of the total) are already protected in 52 Natural World Heritage Sites.

Very little of the world’s wilderness (green) is within natural World Heritage Sites (pink). Author provided

For example, more than 90% of the World Heritage-listed Purnululu National Park in the Kimberley region of Western Australia can be defined as a wilderness area. Similarly, the Okavango Delta in Botswana features more than 18,000 square km of wilderness, containing many of the world’s most endangered large mammals.

Wilderness boosts heritage value

In these cases, wilderness areas are likely contributing to the Oustanding Universal Value of of these World Heritage Areas – which as explained above is a key consideration in how they are managed and protected.

One way to strengthen this protection further would be to redraw the boundaries of natural World Heritage Areas to include more wilderness. This would help to preserve the conditions that allow ecosystems and other heritage values to thrive.

Our study identified broad gaps in wilderness coverage by the World Heritage Convention. Some places are already protected by national governments and could therefore be added to UNESCO’s list, such as the Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve in Myanmar, which contains 4,000 square km of wilderness, and the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna Reserve in Bolivia, which has 9,000 square km.

The places we have identified, and others, could potentially be designated as new Natural World Heritage Sites if they meet the other strict criteria for Outstanding Universal Values and integrity.

The World Heritage Convention could better achieve its objectives and make a substantial contribution to the conservation of wilderness areas by doing these four things:

1. formally acknowledge the Outstanding Universal Values of wilderness areas

2. strengthen the current protection of wilderness within NWHS

3. expand or reconfigure current NWHS to include more wilderness, and

4. designate new NWHS in wilderness areas.

It’s up to national governments to submit sites for inscription as NWHS, and we urge them to consider wilderness when doing so. This will strengthen their applications, and provide wilderness areas with the extra protection they need.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee’s meeting in Poland this week will consider two sites with significant wilderness areas for World Heritage status: Qinghai Hoh Xil Nature Reserve in China and Los Alerces National Park in Argentina. We urge the committee to approve these sites, and use this to spur further opportunities to raise the profile of wilderness conservation worldwide. It is an obvious win-win.

The clock is ticking fast for our last wilderness areas and the biodiversity they protect. Immediate action is needed.

James Allan receives a stipend from The Australian Research Council

James Watson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is Director of Science and Research Initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

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