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SA seeks final proposals for battery storage tender from candidates short-listed from the 90+ expressions of interest received last month.

PARKER SOLAR PROBE: It's been on NASA's bucket list for 60 years, and now the ambitious mission to touch the Sun is in its final phase before launch. So just how do you send a spacecraft into the Sun without it burning up?

Australia’s first biofuels pilot plant was officially opened by the Honourable Annastacia Palaszczuk MP, in Gladstone today.

Carnegie Clean Energy adds 2.6MWh battery storage system to 1.6MW solar system at CSIRO's Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.

Pikestone Fell, Weardale An oystercatcher, a gaudy pied clown with crimson beak and eyes, flew straight towards us, piping hysterically

In winter this part of the Weardale Way can be a morass, but the rain-leached soil drains quickly in spring. After weeks of dry, windy, weather, the mud had turned to sand and our boots were soon covered in yellow dust. In some sheltered hollows heather, at last showing a green tint of new shoots, shimmered in a heat haze.

Our route followed the wall that divides upland pasture from heather moorland. Together they provide habitats for grouse and the wading birds that return here from the coast to breed, and late May is the peak time for egg hatching.

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Leading Australian home energy management start-up, Reposit Power, has issued a recall for all Reposit meter and box Kits installed since 2015, due to potential risk of electric shock.

Endeavour says network ownership could turn 360° and revert to local councils and communities, as it seeks tender for solar and storage micro-grid.

Nauiyu community set to be powered by a 1MW solar plant during the day, relegating its diesel generators for use only at night and as back-up.

Australian Institute of Marine Science says reef’s capacity to recover under threat from climate change and pollution

Parts of the Great Barrier Reef not regularly affected by problems such as cyclones have demonstrated the reef still has the ability to regenerate, with a survey showing sharp declines in coral cover in the north but increases elsewhere.

However, the latest results from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims), collected by divers visiting 243 individual reefs, do not include the losses caused by bleaching this year, or the effects of cyclone Debbie, both of which killed coral in the central section.

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America’s time as leader of the free world is over. Now we’re the villain, thwarting the global effort to save humanity.

A testing laboratory built by Queensland utility Ergon Energy to host one of Australia’s biggest residential battery storage trials has been opened in Cairns.

A ‘JKT’ triad—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—sets a 21st century course for clean energy.

Offshore wind farms have been blamed by conservative media in the UK for the deaths of three whales - despite not having a shred of evidence.

Deputy PM departs from official Coalition line, saying ‘to speculate on what Donald Trump might do is insanity’ and I’m going to ‘see what happens’

Barnaby Joyce has declined to say whether Australia should remain within the Paris climate accord if the United States pulls out, in a departure from the official government line that Australia will stay the course.

While Australia’s energy and employment ministers have said this week Australia will honour its Paris commitments regardless of what Donald Trump decides, the Nationals leader and deputy prime minister was more guarded on Thursday.

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Regulators issue grim warning about power of big fossil fuel generators to game energy markets, forcing up prices. They say the price surge to "unprecedented" highs in coal-dependent Queensland is being driven by market concentration and the lack of large-scale wind and solar.

Intensive farming cited as main reason for destroying natural barriers to deluge and making low lying areas more vulnerable to floods

Only a tenth of England’s extensive floodplains are now fit for purpose – 90% no longer function properly – with the shortfall putting an increasing number of homes and businesses at risk of flooding, according to a new report.

Floods are more likely due to climate change and will claim higher economic costs unless action is taken to halt the damage to floodplains and restore some of their functions, warned the authors of the 12-month study – the first to paint a comprehensive view of England’s floodplains and their capabilities.

“We have ignored our floodplains,” said George Heritage of Salford University, co-author of the study the Changing Face of Floodplains, published by Co-Op Insurance on Thursday. “The changes to them mean water [from heavy rainfall] can flow much faster downstream, and can flow at the same speed as the water in the rivers.”

This accelerated flow has led to sudden and unstoppable deluges in recent years. For instance, Storm Desmond in 2015 affected more than 6,000 homes as rivers and streams burst their banks and spread water over floodplains. As these natural floodplains had been altered by man-made features, they no longer had the ability to store water, leading to rapid flows into urban areas which led to the devastation.

Storm Desmond caused more than £500m in damages, and misery for families excluded from their homes sometimes for months. The UK’s flooding bills are on the rise, with scientists warning of rocketing numbers of cloudbursts and periods of sudden and intense rainfall as climate change takes effect.

Floodplains act as natural “sponges”, soaking up excess water in their vegetation, forming natural buffers that hold back or divert rushing water after rain, and providing areas where rivers can breach their banks and wetlands can be replenished.

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RepuTex says ceasing all land clearing would save between 300m and 650m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year

Ending land clearing in Australia by 2030 would cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by about as much as completely shifting the electricity sector to renewable energy, a new report has found.

Queensland has been clearing about 300,000ha of land a year since the Newman government weakened restrictions on land clearing there and the Palaszczuk government failed to tighten them.

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The statement backing the Paris climate agreement is seen a snub to Trump, who is mulling a pullout.

A new global study predicts coral reefs of the future will be radically different.

The world’s coral reefs are undoubtedly in deep trouble. But as we and our colleagues argue in a review published today in Nature, we shouldn’t give up hope for coral reefs, despite the pervasive doom and gloom.

Instead, we have to accept that coral reefs around the world are transforming rapidly into a newly emerging ecosystem unlike anything humans have experienced before. Realistically, we can no longer expect to conserve, maintain, preserve or restore coral reefs as they used to be.

This is a confronting message. But it also focuses attention on what we need to do to secure a realistic future for reefs, and to retain the food security and other benefits they provide to society.

The past three years have been the warmest on record, and many coral reefs throughout the tropics have suffered one or more bouts of bleaching during prolonged underwater heatwaves.

A bleached coral doesn’t necessarily die. But in 2016, two-thirds of corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef did die in just six months, as a result of unprecedented heat stress. This year the bleaching happened again, this time mainly on the middle section of the reef.

Reefs are being degraded by global pressures, not just local ones. Terry Hughes, Author provided

In both years, the southern third of the reef escaped with little or no bleaching, because it was cooler. So bleaching is patchy and it varies in severity, depending partly on where the water is hottest each summer, and on regional differences in the rate of warming. Consequently some regions, reefs, or even local sites within reefs, can escape damage even during a global heatwave.

Moderate bleaching events are also highly selective, affecting some coral species and individual colonies more than others, creating winners and losers. Coral species also differ in their capacity to reproduce, disperse as larvae, and to rebound afterwards.

This natural variability offers hope for the future, and represents different sources of resilience. Surviving corals will continue to produce billions of larvae each year, and their genetic makeup will evolve under intense natural selection.

In response to fishing, coastal development, pollution and four bouts of bleaching in 1998, 2002, 2016 and 2017, the Great Barrier Reef is already a highly altered ecosystem, and it will change even more in the coming decades. Although reefs will be different in future, they could still be perfectly functional in centuries to come – capable of sustaining ecological processes and regenerating themselves. But this will only be possible if we act quickly to curb climate change.

The Paris climate agreement provides the key framework for avoiding very dangerous levels of global warming. Its 1.5℃ and 2℃ targets refer to increases in global average land and sea temperatures, relative to pre-industrial times. For most shallow tropical oceans, where temperatures are rising more slowly than the global average, that translates to 0.5℃ of further warming by the end of this century – slightly less than the amount of warming that coral reefs have already experienced since industrialisation began.

If we can improve the management of reefs to help them run this climate gauntlet, then reefs should survive. Reefs of the future will have a different mix of species, but they should nonetheless retain their aesthetic values, and support tourism and fishing. However, this cautious optimism is entirely contingent on steering global greenhouse emissions away from their current trajectory, which could see annual bleaching of corals occurring in most tropical locations by 2050. There is no time to lose before this narrowing window of opportunity closes.

A crisis of governance

Reef governance is failing because it is largely set up to manage local threats, such as overfishing and pollution. In Australia, when the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority was set up in 1976, the objective of managing threats at the scale of (almost) the entire Great Barrier Reef was revolutionary. But today, the scale of threats is global: market pressures for Australian reef fish now come from overseas; port dredging and shipping across the reef are spurred on by fossil fuel exports to Asia; a housing crisis in the United States can batter reef tourism half a world away; and record breaking marine heatwaves due to global warming can kill even the most highly protected and remote corals.

Increasingly, coral reef researchers are turning to the social sciences, not just biology, in search of solutions. We need better governance that addresses both local and larger-scale threats to coral reef degradation, rather than band-aid measures such as culling starfish that eat corals.

In many tropical countries, the root causes of reef degradation include poverty, increasing market pressures from globalisation, and of course the extra impacts of global warming. Yet these global issues desperately need more attention at just the time when some governments are reducing foreign aid, failing to address global climate change, and in the case of Australia and the US, trying to resuscitate the dying fossil fuel industry with subsidies for economically unviable projects.

Effective reef governance will not only require increased cooperation among nations to tackle global issues, as in the case of the Paris climate deal, but will also require policy coordination at the national level to ensure that domestic action matches and supports these larger-scale goals.

Quite simply, we can’t expect to have thriving coral reefs in the future as well as new coal mines – policies to promote both are incompatible.

Terry Hughes receives competitive research funding from The Australian Research Council.

Joshua Cinner receives competitive research funding from the Australian Research Council and currently holds a fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trust