Feed aggregator

For the first time scientists have been able to track the high-flying insects that migrate across the skies of Southern England every year.

Giant clam shells seized by authorities in waters off Australia's north. NT government

High-value marine species in waters off northern Australia are at increasing risk of poaching by foreign fishing crews, according to figures from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority. The number of foreign fishing boats caught in Australian waters increased from six in 2014–15 to 20 in 2015–16.

These fishers have evidently come to poach species that fetch high prices and have been overfished elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region. They seek “lootable resources” – species that are attractive to the black market because they are expensive, easy to catch and weakly regulated.

Among the species being targeted are sea cucumbers, giant clams, turtles and sharks (specifically their fins).

Many of these species are listed as vulnerable or endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Some are even protected from trade by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

A long history of poaching

The apprehended vessels have been primarily from Vietnam and Indonesia. Last month, a Vietnamese fishing vessel stopped inside the Conservation Park Zone of the Coral Sea Commonwealth Marine Reserve was found to be carrying 3 tonnes of partially processed sea cucumbers. Dried sea cucumber, called bêche-de-mer, can fetch more than A$300 per kg when sold in China.

The Timor and Arafura Seas have long histories of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing due to regional fishery expansion and displacement. Some scientists believe the tensions in the South China Sea are pushing Southeast Asian fishermen into Australian waters. It is also possible that Indonesia’s stricter fisheries policy is shifting fishing patterns in the region.

But apart from economic loss as resources are poached from Australian waters, what are the impacts? A new review shows that species such as sea cucumber can play crucial roles in boosting the health of coral reef systems. This is important at a time when reefs are facing intense stress from climate change and coastal development.

Nine species of sea cucumbers from Australian waters were recently declared threatened with extinction globally by the IUCN. Removal of some marine fauna might degrade the resilience of coral reef ecosystems to broad-scale stressors.

What can be done?

In June, Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton said: “Preventing illegal fishers from plundering Australia’s well-managed fisheries is every bit as important as stopping the people smugglers and illegal arrivals.”

Although the Australian Border Force has the capacity to apprehend illegal fishing boats, much of the poaching happens on distant coral reefs. One problem is that illegal fishing boats can plunder lootable resources and get out of Australian waters before Border Force can reach them. So while regulation might be well enforced on reefs within the Great Barrier Reef, for instance, offshore reefs are comparably weakly regulated.

But stronger monitoring and enforcement might not be the only solution anyway. My team’s research, which involved interviewing sea cucumber fishers from Fiji, Kiribati, Tonga and New Caledonia, suggests that they see themselves as having few other livelihood options besides fishing. This means that even if their fishery collapsed or was closed down by authorities, they would simply move elsewhere or fish a different species.

Many fishers from Southeast Asia have doubtless been lured to poaching in Australian waters by similar issues. Curbing the rise in poaching therefore requires not only continued enforcement but also, crucially, foreign aid investment that can help these fishers to diversify their livelihoods.

Australia recently reshaped its foreign aid policy to focus predominantly on delivering “economic growth and poverty reduction”. Organisations such as the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) are investing in overseas research and development projects to provide more income-generating opportunities in fisheries and aquaculture. Support to Southeast Asian countries makes up 49% of the budget for fisheries and aquaculture projects.

Australia’s approach to reducing poaching of threatened resources should therefore be multifaceted. Helping foreign fishers deal with their own problems of overfishing by giving them more options to earn a living will ultimately help to tackle the root cause of marine poaching.

Steven Purcell receives funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

Hampus Eriksson participates in projects funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

Two baby orangutans have been rescued from the back of a taxi in Thailand.

New wind and solar farms, alongside wood burning and nuclear reactors, helped to push low carbon power to a new high in the third quarter of 2016

Half of the UK’s electricity came from wind turbines, solar panels, wood burning and nuclear reactors between July and September, in a milestone first.

Official figures published on Thursday show low carbon power, which has been supported by the government to meet climate change targets, accounted for 50% of electricity generation in the UK in the third quarter, up from 45.3% the year before.

Continue reading...

Route in Tourouvre-au-Perche cost €5m to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during two-year test period

France has opened what it claims to be the world’s first solar panel road, in a Normandy village.

A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.

Continue reading...

The strongest El Niño on record reached its peak in the final months of 2015, but its devastating impact on global food and water supplies continues to be felt

Continue reading...

In Europe’s ‘bleak midwinter’ of 1430-1440, medieval society made dramatic changes in response to food shortages and famine caused by exceptional cold. What lessons can we learn from history?

Sat in the centrally heated school Christmas concert, I sang, like countless others, In the Bleak Midwinter, not knowing the half of it. Christina Rossetti’s mournful, yearning poem, later set to music by Gustav Holst, was written in 1872, but speaks of a “bleak midwinter, long ago”, relocating the nativity to a chill northern landscape where, “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”

Continue reading...

The 2016 US presidential election wasn’t the first case of a successful email hacking faux scandal

A batch of stolen emails was released to the public, with evidence pointing towards Russian hackers. The media ran through the formerly private correspondence with a fine-toothed comb, looking for dirt. Although little if any damning information was found, public trust in the hacking victims was severely eroded. The volume of media coverage created the perception that where there’s smoke, there must be fire, and a general presumption of guilt resulted.

The year was 2009, and the victims were climate scientists working for and communicating with the University of East Anglia. The story was repeated in 2016 with the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

Continue reading...

After years of record temperatures, the Arctic is melting. The Northwest passage had an ice-free summer in 2016, allowing cruise ships into one of the world’s most remote places. Join our environmentally friendly Arctic tour, and witness the consequences of human behaviour

Continue reading...

The largest city in the Russian Arctic expects global warming to change its trading fortunes with the revival of the northern sea route

It’s noon in Murmansk, but the sky is dark. Chunky silhouettes can just be made out scurrying along Lenin Street, swaddled in furs. This is a polar night, and it will be more than a month before anyone here sees the sun again.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, this city – by far the world’s largest settlement within the Arctic Circle – went into steep decline, its population tumbling from nearly half a million to barely 300,000.

Continue reading...

The bank’s private sector arm is accused of subsidising loans that funded the Indian firm’s Queensland exploration bid

Adani’s Carmichael mine has been “covertly funded” by the World Bank through a private arm that is supposed to back “sustainable development”, according to a US-based human rights organisation.

Adani Enterprises acquired exploration rights for Australia’s largest proposed coalmine in 2010 with a US$250m loan from banks including India’s ICICI, which was in turn bankrolled by the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, a report by Inclusive Development International says.

Continue reading...

Aberystwyth, Wales The larch added welcome colour, but single species planting has brought an almost industrial look to the Welsh hills

My first indication that the local landscape was about to change dramatically came after dark. In an area with only a scattering of houses and a solitary street lamp, the sudden appearance of an extra light is a significant event – and a flickering source moving through the trees certainly makes a rural observer stop and take note.

In daylight the explanation became clear. Across the valley, on the shoulder of a hill forming a buttress at the westward limit of the Cambrian mountains, a stand of mature larches was being felled. Working outwards from the old track that loops sinuously across the hillside, heavy machinery was quickly and efficiently removing the trees, leaving the profile of the hill oddly rebalanced. Within a week or so the familiar dull orange of autumn foliage was gone, leaving a briefly scarred residue from which the woodland will regenerate or be replanted.

Continue reading...

Official data quietly released before Christmas shows emissions rose 0.8% in the year to June and will miss 2030 goal based on current policies

Australia’s emissions are rising, and projected to keep doing so to 2030, meaning Australia will fail to meet its 2030 emissions targets, according to government figures.

The official quarterly figures, showing growth in year-on-year emisssions, confirms independent projections from NDEVR Environmental, released earlier this month by Guardian Australia, which predicted Australia’s emissions would be rising.

Continue reading...

Queensland government examines three alleged cases of illegal fishing for the protected reptiles over past two months

The Queensland government is investigating “disturbing” reports of people in the state’s far north trying to catch crocodiles with baited fishing lines, including one who advertised their efforts on Facebook.

The Department of Environment and Heritage Protection is examining three alleged cases of illegal fishing for the protected reptiles over the past two months in Douglas, Hinchinbrook and Whitsunday shires.

Continue reading...

Address by David Papps | 2016: in review | Bird Breeding Bonanza | Who manages water quality issues? Read our latest update.

Matt Canavan attacks the broadcaster for being one-sided and says Australia’s biggest coalmine would improve the environment

The federal resources minister has accused the ABC of reporting fake news and thrown his weight behind the energy giant Adani, amid Indian finance ministry investigations into the company.

Matt Canavan attacked the ABC for what he described as one-sided coverage of Adani’s plans to build Australia’s biggest coalmine and accused the national broadcaster of having a massive blindspot when it came to the project.

Continue reading...

Threatened by habitat loss and hunting, Madagascar's lemurs, a critically endangered species, are finding refuge in a private sanctuary.

This summer, bushfires ravaged thousands of hectares of world heritage forest in Tasmania. Ancient species are in grave danger. We go to visit the fire fields.

From the first direct evidence for black holes, to a rocky planet circling a neighbouring star, 2016 was packed with amazing science stories.

An Arctic iceberg, pictured in 2015. This year, ice coverage has reached record lows for the early northern winter. AWeith/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

For the Arctic, like the globe as a whole, 2016 has been exceptionally warm. For much of the year, Arctic temperatures have been much higher than normal, and sea ice concentrations have been at record low levels.

The Arctic’s seasonal cycle means that the lowest sea ice concentrations occur in September each year. But while September 2012 had less ice than September 2016, this year the ice coverage has not increased as expected as we moved into the northern winter. As a result, since late October, Arctic sea ice extent has been at record low levels for the time of year.

These record low sea ice levels have been associated with exceptionally high temperatures for the Arctic region. November and December (so far) have seen record warm temperatures. At the same time Siberia, and very recently North America, have experienced conditions that are slightly cooler than normal.

Extreme Arctic warmth and low ice coverage affect the migration patterns of marine mammals and have been linked with mass starvation and deaths among reindeer, as well as affecting polar bear habitats.

Given these severe ecological impacts and the potential influence of the Arctic on the climates of North America and Europe, it is important that we try to understand whether and how human-induced climate change has played a role in this event.

Arctic attribution

Our World Weather Attribution group, led by Climate Central and including researchers at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oxford and the Dutch Meteorological Service (KNMI), used three different methods to assess the role of the human climate influence on record Arctic warmth over November and December.

We used forecast temperatures and heat persistence models to predict what will happen for the rest of December. But even with 10 days still to go, it is clear that November-December 2016 will certainly be record-breakingly warm for the Arctic.

Next, I investigated whether human-caused climate change has altered the likelihood of extremely warm Arctic temperatures, using state-of-the-art climate models. By comparing climate model simulations that include human influences, such as increased greenhouse gas concentrations, with ones without these human effects, we can estimate the role of climate change in this event.

This technique is similar to that used in previous analyses of Australian record heat and the sea temperatures associated with the Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching event.

To put it simply, the record November-December temperatures in the Arctic do not happen in the simulations that leave out human-driven climate factors. In fact, even with human effects included, the models suggest that this Arctic hot spell is a 1-in-200-year event. So this is a freak event even by the standards of today’s world, which humans have warmed by roughly 1℃ on average since pre-industrial times.

But in the future, as we continue to emit greenhouse gases and further warm the planet, events like this won’t be freaks any more. If we do not reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we estimate that by the late 2040s this event will occur on average once every two years.

Watching the trend

The group at KNMI used observational data (not a straightforward task in an area where very few observations are taken) to examine whether the probability of extreme warmth in the Arctic has changed over the past 100 years. To do this, temperatures slightly further south of the North Pole were incorporated into the analysis (to make up for the lack of data around the North Pole), and these indicated that the current Arctic heat is unprecedented in more than a century.

The observational analysis reached a similar conclusion to the model study: that a century ago this event would be extremely unlikely to occur, and now it is somewhat more likely (the observational analysis puts it at about a 1-in-50-year event).

The Oxford group used the very large ensemble of Weather@Home climate model simulations to compare Arctic heat like 2016 in the world of today with a year like 2016 without human influences. They also found a substantial human influence in this event.

Santa struggles with the heat. Climate change is warming the North Pole and increasing the chance of extreme warm events. Climate Central

All of our analysis points the finger at human-induced climate change for this event. Without it, Arctic warmth like this is extremely unlikely to occur. And while it’s still an extreme event in today’s climate, in the future it won’t be that unusual, unless we drastically curtail our greenhouse gas emissions.

As we have already seen, the consequences of more frequent extreme warmth in the future could be devastating for the animals and other species that call the Arctic home.

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Marc Macias-Fauria, Peter Uhe, Sjoukje Philip, Sarah Kew, David Karoly, Friederike Otto, Myles Allen and Heidi Cullen all contributed to the research on which this article is based.

You can find more details on all the analysis techniques here. Each of the methods used has been peer-reviewed, although as with the Great Barrier Reef bleaching study, we will submit a research manuscript for peer review and publication in 2017.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.