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As more urban trees face the prospect of being felled – now at a rate of almost 60 a day – we asked Guardian readers to share their pictures of trees in their neighbourhoods. These are a few of our favourites

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Akademgorodok is a science centre situated in a remote Siberian forest. Photographer Pablo Ortíz Monasterio gained access to marvel at its brightly coloured chemistry labs and nuclear particle accelerators

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When this is home, bad weather can make a bad situation much worse. Karen McIntyre, Author provided

The images of Hurricane Harvey in Texas have shown how extreme weather can rob people of their homes. But what about those who have no home to begin with, or whose living situation is already precarious?

Almost one-third of people who have been homeless have suffered extra trauma because of extreme weather, according to our research involving 163 homeless services in Australia and New Zealand.

What’s more, 19% of people in our study cited extreme weather as a factor in their clients becoming homeless in the first place.

Read more: Staying safe in a hotter Australia might depend on your income.

Our study, carried out on behalf of the Australian Attorney-General’s Department and published by the Australian Red Cross, featured surveys, interviews and focus groups involving people with experience of homelessness. We also talked to workers with homeless services and members of the emergency services.

We found that 39% of people who have experienced homelessness lose their home during severe weather.

Vulnerable situations

In media coverage of weather disasters, both overseas and in Australia, we often hear about how many homes have been damaged. But for those vulnerable to homelessness, the definition of “home” is much broader than this.

Our research focused on people who are already homeless or at risk of homelessness. This broad group includes rough sleepers, people who are couch-surfing or living in vulnerable situations such as temporary caravans, and those escaping domestic violence.

Compared with those who own or officially rent their home, and have access to financial security in the form of income or insurance, these people are especially susceptible to extreme weather. The problem is compounded by the fact that people in vulnerable living situations are also more likely to be suffering problems such as social isolation, mental illness, substance abuse or unemployment.

People in our study said they had lost tents, caravans, temporary structures such as shipping containers and cardboard shelters, and blankets and sleeping bags in open-air areas such as parks. This “loss of shelter” for the homeless community also includes losing a previously safe sleeping area to mud and water – until the area dries out it can’t be used for sleeping.

Less obvious, but critically important for people’s well-being, are the impacts of losing your shelter. During extreme weather, people are more likely to seek shelter in the lee of buildings like churches or public toilets to stay dry. This provides temporary shelter, but increases the risk that they will be moved on, or that they will face aggression and violence.

No match for a storm. Joao, Author provided

For 19% of people in our survey, experiencing a natural disaster was a factor that helped to tip them over into homelessness. One example is this man’s experience after a bushfire, as related to us by a homelessness service provider:

We had one fellow who was living as a caretaker on a farm. This was [230km away] … [He lost his accommodation because of the bushfires] and because there wasn’t the capability of providing homelessness services for him [there] he walked down to Adelaide and stayed down at the park for a few days until the police here connected him with us.

Besides losing shelter, extreme weather can also trigger mental health issues or worsen existing conditions. Community services working with people experiencing homelessness report that 30% of their clients had experienced mental trauma from an extreme weather event.

These impacts on shelter and mental health illustrate the hardship that extreme weather can bring to people who lack the money or resources to find shelter in a storm.

How communities can help

Providing suitable shelter is crucial. A lack of affordable long-term accommodation, and of short-term options such as drop-in centres with laundries and showers, was the biggest risk factor for people experiencing homelessness during severe weather. In 25% of the extreme weather events we studied, there was no publicly available shelter for people who are homeless.

Access to weather information and warnings is important too. Our research showed that 50% of people experiencing homelessness did not receive any warning of the coming events, and 45% had no access to information about what to do in the event of extreme weather. For those who did receive information and warnings, this was most often through the outreach services provided by community homelessness agencies.

This vital capability can be expanded, for example by providing staff with equipment such as four-wheel drive vehicles in rural and remote areas. This would help not only with disseminating emergency warnings, but also with distributing items such as bottled water, and helping people without transport to reach shelters and hospitals.

Read more: Cyclone Debbie: we can design cities to withstand these natural disasters.

However, homeless services themselves are also highly vulnerable to the impacts of natural disasters. Recent research in Australia found that 25% of community organisations could not recover if their infrastructure was damaged by extreme weather. Extreme weather can damage crucial infrastructure such as shelters and computer networks; it forces staff to work harder to meet the demand for shelter, bedding, food and emergency supplies; and it makes reaching people more difficult in cases where roads are cut off or mobile phone towers have been damaged. As one agency put it: “extreme weather stretches our already disproportionate response to need”.

Without access to housing, to weather information and warnings, to protective items or homeless services, extreme weather deepens the cycle of homelessness, as this service provider in Southeast Queensland described:

The largest event to hit was the flood event of January 2013 which impacted over 30 tenancies we managed as well as hundreds elsewhere in the town. Hundreds of homeless people were also affected as common areas for sleeping outside were near the river or in low-lying areas affected by the flood. This event immediately impacted the customers and continued to have impact over 18 months later with countless numbers still couchsurfing or living in overcrowded situations as a result of loss of housing or camping areas.

Homeless services can prepare by stockpiling items such as weatherproof swags, protective clothing and shoes, mobile phone chargers, cash cards, food and water. Homeless services can also use online emergency planning and preparedness tools like ACOSS’s Resilient Community Organisations Six Steps to Resilience.

But unless the situation improves, those least fortunate can find that they are living with the aftermath of events such as cyclones long after most people have cleaned up and moved on.

This article was coauthored by John Richardson, National Resilience Adviser at Australian Red Cross.

Danielle Every has received funding from the Attorney General's National Emergency Management Program, the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, the Victorian SES, and SAFECOM.

The results of the annual Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) review.

Petersfield, Hampshire Bags of picnic rubbish littered the lakeside, and rats were helping themselves to bread left for the ducks

After enduring weeks of overcast skies and squally showers, hordes of visitors had evidently spent the day at the heath, making the most of the long-awaited sunshine.

A confetti of carelessly discarded sweet and ice lolly wrappers littered the path to the 22-acre Heath Pond. The bins were overflowing with bottles, cans and fast food packaging, but rather than taking their rubbish home people had resorted to dumping bags of picnic detritus beside them.

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PM is chuffed about his rooftop PV and storage, and so he should be. Installations like that will be of greater value to the grid than Liddell, which is a similar age and condition to the Hazelwood generator Turnbull admitted was "very old" and no longer viable.

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For a long time, Australian governments have believed that the private sector should run the electricity sector. And successive governments have used market instruments to incentivise reducing emissions, by supporting renewables, discouraging coal use, or both.

Now things seem inside out: uncertainty about energy policy mechanisms is pervasive, and the federal government is attempting to broker a deal for the ageing Liddell coal plant to stay open past its planned decommissioning date. It’s possible the plan will require government payments – amounting to a carbon subsidy.

Read more: AGL rejects Turnbull call to keep operating Liddell coal-fired power station

Fear of supply shortages and an appetite for coal have combined with an inability to resolve the political side of energy and climate policy.

Power companies see coal as a technology of the past, but the government seems unready to accept that wind and solar technologies (already the cheapest option for new capacity in Australia) are the future of Australia’s power.

Read more: The day Australia was put on blackout alert

The latest suggestion amounts to deferring serious investment in renewables for a while, fixing up some of the old coal plants up so they can run a few more years, and buying time in the hope of keeping power prices down. Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has backed the idea, at least in principle.

The cost of delaying the inevitable

Commissioned in 1972, the Liddell power plant is the oldest of Australia’s large coal-fired stations (after the closure of the Hazelwood station). The New South Wales government sold it to AGL in 2014, at an effective price of zero dollars.

AGL announced some time ago that it will close the plant in 2022 and has considerable financial incentive to do so. This week AGL reiterated this. The latest suggestion is that Delta Electricity might buy and continue to operate Liddell.

What might be the benefits and costs of keeping Liddell running for, say, another decade? We do not know the plant-level technical and economic parameters, but let’s look at the principles and rough magnitudes.

Keeping the plant running longer will require refurbishments, defer the investment costs in renewables, and result in additional emissions, both in carbon dioxide and local air pollutants.

Refurbishment is costly. Finkel put refurbishment costs at A$500-600 million for a 10-year extension. Such refurbishment might achieve an increase in efficiency – as GE, a maker of power station equipment, recently argued – but perhaps not by much for a very old plant like Liddell.

Read more: Coal and the Coalition: the policy knot that still won’t untie

And refurbishment might not work so well, as the experience with the Muja plant in Western Australia shows: A$300 million was spent on refurbishment that ultimately failed. Spending big money on outdated equipment is not a particularly attractive option for energy companies, as AGL’s CEO recently pointed out.

Liddell’s power output during 2015-16 was around 8 terawatt hours – about 10% of present NSW power supply (it was more in 2016-17, and less in previous years). It might well be lower as the plant ages.

Ironically, the reduction in the Renewable Energy Target, from 41 to 33 terawatt hours per year, almost exactly matches Liddell’s present power output. With the original RET target, new renewables would have covered Liddell’s output by 2020.

Liddell emitted around 7.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in 2015-2016. With the assumed reduction in output and some improvement in CO₂ emissions intensity, the carbon dioxide output might be in the order of 5-6 million tonnes per year, or 50-60 million tonnes over ten years.

If the government were to pay for the refurbishment, as has been suggested, this would equate to subsidising CO₂ emissions at a rate of perhaps $10 per tonne, compared to the alternative of replacing Liddell with renewable power.

Read more: FactCheck Q&A: is coal still cheaper than renewables as an energy source?

At the same time, the government is paying for projects to reduce emissions, at average prices of around $12 per tonne of carbon dioxide, under the Emissions Reduction Fund. The contradiction is self-evident. Furthermore, keeping more coal plants operational deters commercial investment in any kind of new plants.

Of course this needs to be seen in the context of supply security, any subsidies that might be paid in future to renewable energy generators, and the possibility that a Clean Energy Target will determine overall emissions from electricity production irrespective of whether Liddell operates or not. It’s complicated. But the fundamental point is clear: paying for an old coal plant to operate for longer means spending money to lock things in, and delay the needed transition to clean power.

A possible compromise might be to mothball the Liddell plant, to use if supply shortages loom, for example, on hot summer days. But such a “reserve” model could mean very high costs per unit of electricity produced.

It is not clear that it would be cheaper than a combination of energy storage and flexible demand-side responses. And it may be unreliable, especially as the plant ages further. During the NSW heatwave last summer Liddell was not able to run full tilt because of technical problems.

A market model to pay for reserve capacity would surely do better than government direction.

Australia’s energy companies have been calling for a mechanism to support new clean investment, such as the Clean Energy Target. And many would no doubt be content to simply see a broad-based, long-term carbon price, which remains the best economic option. If the policy framework was stable, private companies would go ahead with required investment in new capacity.

Read more: Finkel’s Clean Energy Target plan ‘better than nothing’: economists poll

Meanwhile, federal and state governments are intervening ad-hoc in the market – making a deal to keep an old plant open here, building and owning new equipment there. It is the worst of all worlds: a market-based system but with extensive and unpredictable intervention by governments that tend to undermine investor confidence.

Frank Jotzo is in charge of research funded by different bodies including the Australian government. None of the research funding constitutes a conflict of interest for this article.

Zeba Anjum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.