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Repower Port Augusta says the final Australian Electricity Market Operator report into South Australia’s statewide blackout in September highlights the need for solar thermal with storage to be built in Port Augusta.

Flora and fauna can adapt to climate change, but some are more successful than others. allstars/shutterstock

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing Australia’s wildlife, plants and ecosystems, a point driven home by two consecutive years of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

Yet among this growing destruction there is a degree of resilience to climate change, as Australian animals and plants evolve and adapt.

Some of this resilience is genetic, at the DNA level. Natural selection favours forms of genes that help organisms withstand hotter and drier conditions more effectively.

Over time, the environmental selection for certain forms of genes over others leads to genetic changes. These genetic changes can be complex, involving many genes interacting together, but they are sufficient to make organisms highly tolerant to extreme conditions.

Some of this resilience is unrelated to DNA. These are “plastic” changes – temporary changes in organisms’ physical and biochemical functions that help them deal with adverse conditions or shifts in the timing of environmental events.

Plastic changes occur more quickly than genetic changes but are not permanent – the organisms return to their previous state once the environment shifts back. These changes also may not be enough to protect organisms from even more extreme climates.

What about Australia?

In Australia there is evidence of both genetic and plastic adaptation.

Some of the first evidence of genetic adaptation under climate change have been in vinegar flies on the east coast of Australia. These flies have a gene that encodes the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase. This gene has two major forms: the tropical form and the temperate form. Over the past 30 years, the tropical form of the gene has become more common at the expense of the temperate one.

Plastic adaptation due to climate change has been demonstrated in common brown butterflies in southern Australia. Female butterflies are emerging from their cocoons earlier as higher temperatures have been speeding up their growth and development by 1.6 days every decade. According to overseas research, this faster development allows butterfly caterpillars to take advantage of earlier plant growth.

Higher temperatures are causing the common brown butterflies in southern Australia to come out of their cocoons earlier. John Tann/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In many cases, it is not clear if the adaptation is genetic or plastic.

The average body size of Australian birds has changed over the the past 100 years. Usually, when comparing birds of the same species, birds from the tropics are smaller than those from temperate areas. In several widespread species, however, the birds from temperate areas have recently become smaller. This might be the direct result of environmental changes or a consequence of natural selection on the genes that affect size.

In the case of long-lived species like eucalypts, it is hard to see any adaptive changes. However, there is evidence from experimental plots that eucalypts have the potential to adapt.

Different eucalypt species from across Australia were planted together in experimental forestry plots located in various environments. These plots have unwittingly become climate change adaptation experiments. By monitoring the plots, we can identify species that are better at growing and surviving in extreme climatic conditions.

Plot results together with other forms of DNA-based evidence indicate that some trees unexpectedly grow and survive much better, and are therefore likely to survive into the future.

What’s next?

We still have much to learn about the resilience of our flora and fauna.

There will always be species with low resilience or slow adaptive ability. Nevertheless, plastic and genetic changes can provide some resilience, which will change the predictions of likely losses in biodiversity.

Much like how our worst weeds and pests adapted to local climate conditions, as demonstrated many years ago, our local plants and animals will also adapt.

Species with short generation times – a short time between one generation (the parent) and the next (the offspring) – are able to adapt more quickly than species with longer lifespans and generation times.

For species with short generation times, recent models suggest that the ability to adapt may help reduce the impacts of climate change and decrease local extinction rates.

However, species with long generation times and species that cannot easily move to more habitable environments continue to have a high risk of extinction under climate change.

In those cases, management strategies, such as increasing the prevalence of gene forms helpful for surviving extreme conditions and moving species to locations to which they are better adapted, can help species survive.

Unfortunately, this means doing more than simply protecting nature, the hallmark of our biodiversity strategy to date. We need to act quickly to help our animals and plants adapt and survive.

Ary Hoffmann receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, and Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. He is affiliated with the Climate Change Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

The Victorian plant will close down this week after half a century of electricity generation. The brown coal-powered station supplies more than 5% of Australia’s total energy demand – but is the country’s dirtiest and least efficient power plant, producing 3% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions. It will shut down entirely on 31 March after its owner, the power company Engie, decided it was uneconomical and unsafe to continue running the plant without major upgrades

• Gay Alcorn: Gloom in the valley as Hazelwood fades to black
  

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Final report by AEMO into S.A. blackout underlines need for system overhaul, with market operator saying new, faster technologies like battery storage, demand management, wind and solar need to be adopted, rather than relying on traditional thermal generators.

The first 3kW array had to pretend to be a coal-fired power station to get connected. But it didn’t destroy the grid, as the utilities feared.

Australia is closing one of the world's dirtiest coal power plants. Witness Hazelwood's emissions disappear before your eyes.

The origins of house mice go back about 15,000 years to the Middle East, fossil evidence suggests.

As more wind and solar is introduced into the grid, more storage will be needed. SolarReserve has plans for a facility of up to 2GW in Nevada.

Production of the luxury BIPV product will not begin until “mid-2017”, and a waiting list has appeared on the Tesla site.

Australia’s leading technology accelerator program opens for applications for the seventh year.

So many ways to win. Bignai/Shutterstock.com

In July 2018, Queensland will launch a container refund scheme, in a bid to boost recycling and reduce litter and pollution.

It will join South Australia, the Northern Territory, New South Wales (later this year) and other places around the world in offering a small refund on all eligible drink containers deposited at designated collection points.

Many of the details have been decided already, including the size of the refund: 10c a bottle.

But is Queensland missing a trick here? Economic evidence suggests that the scheme could be cheaper to run, and boost recycling more, if it was run as a lottery instead, with every recycled bottle representing a “ticket” to a prize draw.

In it to win it

Boosting recycling relies on people changing their behaviour. One of the strongest drivers of behavioural change is economics; that’s why container refund schemes exist at all.

But economists also know that the type and size of this financial reward can have a large bearing on people’s behaviour. For many decades, researchers have focused on working out which rewards prompt the most effort. One key question is whether participants respond better to small, reliable rewards, or to being offered a chance of a big windfall.

Research suggests that contests can be easily designed to incite higher levels of effort than the more humdrum piece-rate rewards. Such contests have already been shown to work well in other environmental contexts, such as allocating pollution permits to companies.

Instead of getting 10c per container, Queenslanders could instead be given an electronic ticket for each container recycled. These tickets – which could perhaps be linked to a householder’s council rates account or other personal identifier – could then be entered into a quarterly lottery. The state government would need to decide on the size and number of prizes, as well as the eligibility rules.

Eyes on the prize

Several benefits are clear. First, there is evidence that it is very easy to incite more recycling using a contest approach.

Lotteries are also more flexible – the prizes can be adjusted relatively easily to increase or decrease participation. If recycling rates are too low, the prize value in the next lottery could be increased. In contrast, adjusting the 10c container refund would be far more difficult once it has already been set up.

The scheme might end up costing less overall, too. As the lottery may have only one prize (or a few), the administrative costs would be minimal compared with a per-unit payment. Depending on the size and number of the prizes, the prize fund could also be smaller than the cost of paying millions of 10c refunds.

Finally, the government can control the geographical placement of container points. This would allow it to influence the number of participants and also the ability to focus on citizens that may have certain preferences for recycling, or risk preferences that enjoy lottery contests. Indeed, research shows that risk attitudes and citizens’ preferences have an important impact on contest outcomes.

Lucky chance

A poorly designed lottery might conceivably work too well – recycling rates might become so high that they overwhelm the infrastructure or cause a glut of recycled materials. This has been shown to be possible when lottery-style contests are used in other environmental regulatory contexts. For example, contests that use pollution reduction as a lottery criterion can be too successful - driving down emissions hugely but at a significant cost to economic output.

Choosing the right-sized prize is crucial. If it’s too small, few people will be enticed to change their behaviour and take part. But if it’s too big, many people might stop using their kerbside recycling facilities altogether, “saving up” their recycling for the lottery. This would present a problem of “additionality”: the scheme would be capturing lots of bottles that would have been recycled anyway.

These are mere details, and the challenges of getting it right shouldn’t stop the Queensland government seriously considering giving the idea a go. It might make recycling a whole lot more exciting.

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

The death of activist Sikhosiphi Rhadebe in the Eastern Cape has not stopped local communities opposing plans for a titanium mine that threatens important lands and a way of life, reports Yale Environment 360

Environmentalists at risk: read parts one and two in this series

They called him “Bazooka” after his favourite soccer star. But Sikhosiphi Rhadebe’s real love was the magnificent coastal lands of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where he chaired a community organisation campaigning to prevent an Australian mining company from strip-mining their sand dunes for titanium, one of the world’s most commercially valuable metals.

One evening last March, a Volkswagen Polo pulled up at his home and two men posing as police dragged Bazooka outside. When he resisted, they shot him eight times in front of his 17-year-old son, then sped away. “Bazooka” was dead. Nearly a year later, there have been no arrests, and no apparent progress in the investigation into his murder. I had come to find out why.

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Despite its Sunshine State moniker, Florida is barely harnessing its bountiful rays for energy, with the number of households getting solar panels not projected to squeak past 100 a year until 2021. Meanwhile, there’s a solar boom occurring in north-east states such as New York and out west in California

• Sunshine state shuns solar as overcast New York basks in clean energy boom

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Global warming makes temperature patterns that cause heatwaves, droughts and floods across Europe, north America and Asia more likely, scientists find

The fingerprint of human-caused climate change has been found on heatwaves, droughts and floods across the world, according to scientists.

The discovery indicates that the impacts of global warming are already being felt by society and adds further urgency to the need to cut carbon emissions. A key factor is the fast-melting Arctic, which is now strongly linked to extreme weather across Europe, Asia and north America.

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During a record-breaking hot presidential election year, American news networks failed to report on climate change

Media Matters for America has published its annual review of American evening newscast climate coverage for 2016, and the results are stunning:

In 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as Fox Broadcast Co.’s Fox News Sunday, collectively decreased their total coverage of climate change by 66 percent compared to 2015

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Scientists describe a remarkable collection of dinosaur tracks on beaches in Western Australia.

An Australian university has asked amateur stargazers to help find a possible ninth planet.

The Senate crossbench is holding up the government's $48 billion plan to cut the company tax rate.

The founder and chief executive of Murray Energy supports Donald Trump’s move to roll back Obama’s clean power plan but cautions the president to pump the brakes on talk of bringing back mining jobs

America’s biggest coal boss is hopeful that his industry will soon be freed of “fraudulent” green legislation that has hampered his industry, but warned Donald Trump to “temper” expectations about a boom in mining jobs.

Robert Murray, founder and chief executive of Murray Energy, the largest privately held coal miner in the US, is confident Trump will follow through with campaign plans to reinvigorate the coal industry and will start by scrapping Barack Obama’s clean power plan (CPP), Obama’s signature climate change plan.

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In her series This Is Not Real Life, photographer Dominika Gesicka celebrates the stark beauty of the Svalbard archipelago

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