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London schools to be alerted on high air pollution days
Schools will receive an alert every time air pollution is high enough to pose an acute health risk, under new plans announced by Sadiq Khan
Schools in London will receive an alert every time air pollution in the capital is set to pose an acute risk to health as part of a renewed push to highlight the scale of the capital’s toxic pollution crisis.
Air pollution causes 40,000-50,000 early deaths a year in the UK – more than 9,000 in London – and the young are particularly vulnerable.
Continue reading...Can Sri Lanka's elephants and humans learn to live together? – in pictures
On this small, densely populated island, clashes between elephants and humans are rapidly increasing. Rangers and villagers are working to find ways to avoid the conflict and the devastating, at times deadly, impacts on both sides
Continue reading...Qantas uses mustard seeds in first ever biofuel flight between Australia and US
Blended fuel powers 15-hour Boeing Dreamliner 787-9 flight between LA and Melbourne, reducing carbon emissions by 7%
A Qantas plane powered partly by mustard seeds has become the world’s first biofuel flight between Australia and the United States, after landing in Melbourne on Tuesday.
The 15-hour flight used a blended fuel that was 10% derived from the brassica carinata, an industrial type of mustard seed that functions as a fallow crop – meaning it can be grown by farmers in between regular crop cycles.
Continue reading...Pollution in London higher than during the Great Smog – archive, 30 January 1959
30 January 1959: Conditions described as “very grim” by the AA, with visibility in south-east London varying between nil and ten yards
Fog stretched last night from the Home Counties westwards into Devon and South Wales and northwards through the Midlands and East Anglia up to Yorkshire. It is expected to persist to-day.
Related: How the Guardian reported on London's Great Smog of 1952
Continue reading...Despite those big bills, networks still most likely cause of blackouts
Explainer: power station ‘trips’ are normal, but blackouts are not
Tesla big battery now has it own widget to show charge and discharge
Australia risks missing out on lithium battery boom
A regulatory blow to Spain’s subsidised coal-fired electricity sector
The solar market consolidation that never happened
70 Council representing 7.5M take climate action
JinkoSolar interviewed by CNN as global leader in solar
Graph of the Day: Green bonds soar to record $163bn in 2017
Robo news
Support our new series that shines the spotlight on Australia’s neglected environmental issues
Help us to move these issues up the public agenda and challenge governments to do more
Australia’s fragile environment is under attack. Environmental protections have been dramatically eroded and funding slashed. The threat to climate change so dominates debate that other pressing and immediate environmental dangers struggle for attention. Few Australians know that our country has one of the worst records for species loss, with even the koala threatened; that microplastic pollution is so prevalent it can be found in the sediments of our river estuaries and nearby ocean floors; or that land clearing rates are just as severe as the notorious deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon.
Continue reading...Chile creates five national parks over 10m acres in historic act of conservation
- Founder of Patagonia firm donates 1m acres of private land
- President Bachelet signs ‘unprecedented’ measure into law
Chile has created five sprawling national parks to preserve vast tracts of Patagonia – the culmination of more than two decades of land acquisition by the US philanthropists Doug Tompkins and Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and the largest donation of private land to government in South America.
The five parks, spanning 10.3m acres, were signed into law on Monday by Chile’s president Michelle Bachelet, launching a new 17-park route that stretches down the southern spine of Chile to Cape Horn.
Continue reading...Our wide brown land: 'We've hit rock bottom' – video
There has never been a more serious time to pay attention to Australia's environment, yet Bob Brown, Peter Garrett and other activists say protections have been slashed, funding cut and charities silenced
Continue reading...Away from the public gaze, serious threats to the environment keep rising | Lenore Taylor
Our new in-depth series focuses on the less-scrutinised threats to Australia’s natural places, and you can get involved
Threats to the Australian environment get reported in bursts – a contested development decision or a particular conservation campaign can thrust an issue into the headlines and on to the nightly news bulletins for weeks before a deal is crunched and a “solution” heralded.
Related: 'The Franklin would be dammed today': Australia's shrinking environmental protections
Continue reading...'The Franklin would be dammed today': Australia's shrinking environmental protections
The nation is losing the political will to protect our pristine places – and biodiversity is suffering
What if the Franklin river hadn’t been saved?
Stopping the Gordon-below-Franklin dam was one of the Australian environment movement’s great victories: in the late 1970s, the state-owned Hydro-Electric Commission wanted to flood one of three last temperate rainforests in the southern hemisphere to create a power station.
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