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Ark Energy pulls plans for its second wind project in six months, this time over repeated planning delays for a project criticised for being too close to world heritage areas.

The post Major wind farm withdrawn after more planning delays, downsizing, name changes and fierce opposition appeared first on RenewEconomy.

BBC nature presenter delivers eulogy at protest aimed at ‘scaring people a bit’ about the loss of biodiversity in the UK

The BBC nature presenter Chris Packham has joined hundreds of environmental activists in a mock funeral procession for nature to spotlight biodiversity loss in the UK.

The procession aimed to sound “code red for nature” and highlight the UK’s position as “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, organisers said. It was planned to coincide closely with Earth Day on 22 April.

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A Tanzanian project developer has signed an agreement with a local district council to implement a forest conservation scheme covering 250,000 hectares across 14 villages.

Chris Stark, head of the Climate Change Committee, says Tories’ decision to dilute key green policies has had huge diplomatic impact

Rishi Sunak has given up Britain’s reputation as a world leader in the fight against the climate crisis and has “set us back” by failing to prioritise the issue in the way his predecessors in No 10 did, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Chris Stark, the outgoing head of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said that the prime minister had “clearly not” championed the issue following a high-profile speech last year in which he made a significant U-turn on the government’s climate commitments. The criticism comes after Sunak was accused of trying to avoid scrutiny of Britain’s climate policies by failing to appoint a new chair of the CCC.

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Keir Starmer must learn from the Tories’ failures and ensure green projects are well planned and resourced

In the energetic pursuit of net zero, billions of pounds could be squandered needlessly. That’s the lesson from countries as diverse as Italy, the US and UK, where the rush to subsidise green projects suggests vast sums are at risk. Worse, they could be lining the pockets of multinational businesses and City financiers.

In the UK, 14 years of austerity has left the public sector struggling to make coherent, strategic decisions. When a decision is finally made, it is a panic measure that quickly unravels. The fallout could be that voters become disenchanted with green tech, especially if the dash for net zero leads to higher taxes and higher borrowing while early adopters unwittingly pay for costly mistakes.

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Guyana is the first Small Island Developing State to report on its climate action pledge under the Paris Agreement, acting ahead of the Dec. 31, 2024 deadline, the UN’s climate change secretariat announced Friday.

In a BBC interview, Chris Stark says the PM has not made climate change "as much of a priority as his predecessors".

Recordings of healthy fish are being transmitted to attract heat-tolerant larvae back to degraded reefs in the Maldives

An underwater experiment to restore coral reefs using a combination of “coral IVF” and recordings of fish noises could offer a “beacon of hope” to scientists who fear the fragile ecosystem is on the brink of collapse.

The experiment – a global collaboration between two teams of scientists who developed their innovative coral-saving techniques independently – has the potential to significantly increase the likelihood that coral will repopulate degraded reefs, they claim.

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Exclusive: Whistleblowers point to broader sewage scandal, with wastewater systems manipulated to divert sewage

Whistleblowers say UK water companies are knowingly failing to treat legally required amounts of sewage, and that some treatment works are manipulating wastewater systems to divert raw sewage away from the works and into rivers and seas.

It is well known that water companies are dumping large volumes of raw sewage into rivers and seas from storm overflows but an investigation by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations reveals that the industry’s “dirty secret” is bigger, broader and deeply systemic.

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The EU is allocating €28.5 million in investments towards small-scale industrial CO2 removal and CCUS projects as part of its LIFE programme, a bloc-wide initiative for funding environmental and climate actions.

The Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA), a US-led jurisdictional carbon crediting programme, on Friday detailed its recent developments, while the top US climate envoy said that federal guidelines for the use of offsets will be published in the coming days.

The CEO of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has reaffirmed the organisation's dedication to robust science-based decarbonisation standards, saying he “deeply regrets the concern and distress” caused by a proposed change in its policy regarding offsets.

Traders reduced exposure across North American carbon markets this week except for RGGI compliance entities, according to latest data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commissions (CFTC) released Friday.

A CO2 pipeline developer is being taken to court by one of its suppliers for terminating their agreement, amid increasing opposition from permitters and stakeholders that has delayed construction of a major US project.

Overall, coastal habitat restoration greatly increases animal numbers and diversity. But not all projects deliver the goods and we need to find out why. Michael Sievers, Research Fellow, Global Wetlands Project, Australia Rivers Institute, Griffith University Christopher Brown, ARC Future Fellow in Fisheries Science, University of Tasmania Rod Connolly, Professor in Marine Science, Griffith University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Video shows trees and shrubs along Western Australia's south-west coastline turning brown after Perth recorded it hottest and driest six months since records began. There were similar scenes in the state's south-west eucalypt forests in 2010 and 2011 – a major die-back event that prompted more than a dozen studies. Drought-hit forests were hit by fire years later

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International climate finance flows will depend on movement within the G20, not the UN negotiations at COP29 this year, several sources told Carbon Pulse on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Spring Meetings held this week in Washington DC.

With its certification for emissions' removals, the EU is moving to lock out international carbon credits to meet its own climate targets, at the expense of developing countries that are in direst need of green finance, critics say.

Experts celebrate discovery of secretive and endangered Australasian bittern in recently restored wetlands

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The “bunyip bird” – named after a mythological river-lurking, human-eating monster – is as elusive as its namesake. Also known as the Australasian bittern, it is heard more often than it is seen.

It means that when bittern expert Geoff Shannon discovered the bird at Tasmania’s recently restored Lagoon of Islands – the first time it had been seen there in 40 years – it was a “very special moment”.

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Dead and dying shrubs and trees – some of which are found nowhere else on Earth – line more than 1,000km across the state’s south-west

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A couple of weeks ago, Joe Fontaine stood in the middle of one of Western Australia’s eucalypt forests on another hot and dry day that was stripped of the usually raucous backing-track of bird calls.

“I could hear this scratching-crunching noise coming from the trees,” says Fontaine, a forest ecologist at Perth’s Murdoch University.

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