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Amazon fires: how we make rainforest more flammable
Climate change is disrupting seasonal behaviour of Britain's wildlife
Global warming is causing breeding and migration cycles of related plants and animals to fall out of sync with potential impacts on entire ecosystems, research shows
Climate change is disrupting the seasonal behaviour of Britain’s plants and animals, with rising temperatures having an impact on species at different levels of the food chain, new research shows.
The result could be widespread “desynchronisation” between species and their phenological events – seasonal biological cycles such as breeding and migration – that could affect the functioning of entire ecosystems, according to the large-scale study published this week in the journal Nature.
Brian Moss obituary
Lakes are the jewels in the landscape of Britain, yet have also been the dumping grounds for wastes and pollutants. The environmental scientist Brian Moss, who has died aged 72, knew this well and spent his life achieving the ecological understanding that has underpinned the management and restoration of freshwater environments in the UK and around the world. But it was his passionate and successful communication of this science to land managers and policymakers that made him stand out. Most notable was his work with the Broads Authority to return the Norfolk Broads, a much-valued system of inter-connected lakes and rivers, to a cleaner, more naturally functioning landscape for future generations to enjoy.
When Brian started working at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich in 1972, he was deeply disappointed with the Broads’ murky greenish-brown water, lack of plants, and their eroded, featureless banks. He realised that, rather than the mecca for wildlife he had thought the Broads would be, they had borne the brunt of what he called “environmental abuse”. Over the following 17 years at UEA he built a solid understanding of the functioning of these shallow lakes and, through careful experimentation, he proposed innovative solutions for their restoration.
Continue reading...James Hayter - Oxigen
June 2016
James Hayter - Oxigen.
James Hayter is the director of Oxigen, having established the studio in 1996 working as a sole practitioner in collaboration with clients and urban designers. James initially studied architecture and then landscape architecture in the United Kingdom and urban design at Harvard University.
Through his private practice, he has been honoured with many professional awards for excellence for projects including the Canberra Central Parklands, the new public realm at Kingston Foreshores, and Riverbank in Adelaide. His focus on improving the health and productivity of our cities is echoed in his practice approach and mirrors a global movement in new landscape architecture that will positively change the way our cities are planned and inhabited.
James also teaches landscape architecture and urban design and is a professor at the University of Adelaide within the School of Architecture + the Built Environment.
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UK coal power station in breach of EU air pollution law
Defra and the Welsh government are likely to have to pay European commission’s legal costs for breaching air pollution rules at Aberthaw power station, reports ENDS
The UK breached EU law by allowing a coal-fired power station to emit too much air pollution, the court of justice (CJEU) has said.
In a reasoned opinion, published on 28 June, the CJEU said the UK’s defence of how it regulated Aberthaw power station did not stack up and it should be forced to pay legal costs.
Continue reading...Cameron urged to ratify climate deal before quitting as PM
Automated amphibian teaches us to walk
Fill Good Inc – are we close to a refill revolution?
While Boris Johnson is busy reducing the size of Europe, his father, Stanley, is appealing to Europe to help us reduce the amount of rubbish we create.
This month, Environmentalists for Europe, the cross-party group co-chaired by Johnson senior, called on the EU to ban non-returnable bottles. Instead, the group said, consumers should be charged a 20p deposit, refundable when they take back the bottle. Or we should make all plastic bottles refillable.
Continue reading...Mellissa Bradley - Water Sensitive SA
June 2016
Mellissa Bradley - Water Sensitive SA
Mellissa Bradley is the Program Manager with Water Sensitive SA and is an experienced Adelaide water sensitive urban design practitioner. Mellissa is a strong advocate for the creation of more liveable cities and towns through the delivery of urban growth and infill development that delivers best practice water sensitive urban design. Mellissa has a unique combination of experience in engineering and planning, together with a history of developing and implementing capacity building programs for local government in catchment and urban water management. With more than 20 years experience working in the fields of engineering design, development assessment, policy development, environmental management and construction management, Mellissa understands the support that industry needs to ensure water sensitive urban design is commonplace within our urban landscape.
Cast: AdelaideSBN
Scotland's fishing industry welcomes decision to leave the EU
EU departure offers a chance to banish past overfishing and incoherent regulation, says head of industry group, despite warnings exit could hurt fisheries
Scottish fishermen’s representatives were adamant on Tuesday that Brexit would be good news for the 5,000 strong fleet, despite warnings that the uncertainty surrounding the UK’s departure from the EU could hurt fisheries.
Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, said that leaving the EU would give fleets “the ability to recover proper, sustainable, rational stewardship through our own exclusive economic zone for fisheries”, comparing the situation with Norway and Iceland, which share many key North Sea fishing grounds and are not members of the EU, though they are in the European Economic Area (EEA).
Continue reading...Islands in action: Algarve – The Joan Wakelin bursary 2015, winning photographs
Off Portugal’s Algrave coast are the islands of Armona, Deserta and Culatra and the waterways of Rio Formosa natural park. The islands’ inhabitants have been in a court battle for the right not to demolish their houses there, which the authorities say are damaging the environment
• Photographs by John Gallo, winner of the RPS Joan Wakelin Bursary 2015
How will leaving the European Union affect our food? | Tim Lang
Whoever leads negotiations on leaving the EU faces big choices - any new food policies must have health, the environment and justice at their heart
Food barely featured in the referendum, but years of jibes about Eurocrats controlling our food standards, and myths about bent bananas, left their mark. Food politics will now come to the fore in ways most consumers might not like.
This was predicted by the few studies which bothered to look at this vital area of UK life. The academic reports on Brexit unanimously anticipated not liberation but a period of turmoil and dislocation in the food system.
Continue reading...Leaving EU will make it harder for UK to tackle climate change, says minister
Climate and energy secretary says while decision to leave will make UK’s role harder, the government’s commitment remains the same
Brexit will make it harder for Britain to play its role in tackling climate change, the UK energy and climate secretary has said.
But Amber Rudd said that the UK remained committed to action on global warming and Whitehall sources have told the Guardian that on Thursday she will approve a world-leading carbon target for 2032.
Continue reading...After 6 years of working on climate at Harvard, I implore it to show the courage to divest
Despite pressure from students and staff, Harvard leaders have refused to divest
One morning in the summer of 2014, I found myself in the city of Tacloban in the Philippines. The city and surrounding area had been devastated less than a year earlier by Super Typhoon Yolanda. Thousands had been killed; bodies were found for months afterwards.
As part of an international research collaboration, I was interviewing government officials and others throughout the Philippines to assess how to improve preparedness for and response to climate-related disasters. I had already interviewed survivors in cities and villages across the country about the impacts of extreme weather. (And, incidentally, a few weeks later, I would contract dengue and chikungunya—two mosquito-borne diseases aided by climate change in their ongoing spread.) With my prior experience, I thought I was prepared for what I would hear that morning, but I wasn’t.
Continue reading...‘Devastated’: scientists too late to captive breed mammal lost to climate change
Australian conservationists spent five months obtaining permissions and planning for a captive breeding programme for the Bramble Cay melomys. But when they arrived on the rodent’s tiny, low-lying island, they discovered they were too late.
The Bramble Cay melomys has become more famous in extinction than it ever was in life. A mouse-like rodent, the melomys amazingly survived on a 3.6 hectare grass-covered cay (a low-lying island in a coral reef) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef like a ratty Robinson Crusoe for thousands of years. There, it thrived off just a few plant species until human-caused climate change—in the form of rising sea levels and increasing inundations of sea water on the low-lying island—wiped it off the planet.
But, while the extinction has been reported widely, articles have missed an important point: the scientists who uncovered the rodent’s fate had planned to capture individuals and bring them back to the Australian mainland to start a captive breeding programme. They were just too late.
Tragic lack of leadership puts red hot climate change out in the cold
Environment and climate groups publish final scorecards rating main political parties as Australians prepare to vote
If ever there was going to be a climate change election, surely this was going to be it.
As May came and the election date was announced, the implications of the global Paris agreement between more than 190 countries just months earlier were still resonating – the world was moving away from fossil fuels and the challenge to keep global warming well below 2C was agreed.
Continue reading...UK light pollution 'causing spring to come a week earlier'
Report is the first to examine the impact of artificial night-lighting on the seasonal behaviour of plants on a national scale
Light pollution is causing spring to come at least a week earlier in the UK, a new study has revealed.
The report, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that budburst in trees occurs up to 7.5 days earlier in brighter areas, with later-budding species being more affected.
The heifers are in their new quarters
St Dominic, Tamar Valley A handsome South Devon bull has now joined them, so the cycle will continue
A herd of South Devon cattle again graces the fields opposite home. For 30 years the land, with distinctive beech trees on a hedge and an old, freestanding oak, was used mainly for a succession of cereal crops, with annual and ever dearer costs of ploughing, sowing, spraying to control weeds and moulds, and harvesting by combine and straw baler. Marauding pigeons from nearby woods were shot and once there was a mysterious double corn circle that caused consternation and wonder.
Over the past few years the new tenant has resown the former arable fields with grasses that have thickened up with regular topping (cutting) and sheep grazing. This year, strong post-and-wire fences have been reinstated against the hedge-banks, and a cattle crush or pen has been installed for sorting the animals and for the obligatory TB tests.
Continue reading...So what will the Coalition, Labor and the Greens do about climate change? A video explainer
Lenore Taylor explains what each of the major parties plan to tackle the problem of greenhouse emissions. While the Coalition is planning to review its plans after Saturday’s general election, Labor is promising two new emissions trading schemes and the Greens have are advocating that Australia source 90% of its power from renewable sources by 2030
Continue reading...Treasure from trash: how mining waste can be mined a second time
Mines typically follow a set path from prospecting, to development, to extraction and finally closure as the finite resources are exhausted. But does that really need to be the end of the mine’s productive life?
All mines generate waste, one type of which is known as “tailings”. Often these solid wastes are stored at or near the mine site itself. Mine site rehabilitation can be expensive, and often the burden falls on the taxpayer rather than the mining company.
However, this burden could be minimised if mining companies change their perception and start to view these disused materials not as waste, but as potential resources. Tailings dumps can be gold mines – literally, in some cases.
The opportunitySociety’s appetite for commodities is shifting in favour of critical or strategic metals such as lithium, indium and cobalt. These metals are vital to support the rapidly diversifying electronics industry.
For example, earlier this year the Indian government announced an ambitious plan for all vehicles to be electric by 2030. Hitting this target will require a lot of lithium – a crucial component of batteries.
Australia is currently the world’s top lithium producer, offering a much-needed boost to Western Australia’s mining sector in particular. But maintaining this position is tough, because building new mines can cost anything between A$150 million and A$2 billion, on top of exploration costs.
But you don’t necessarily need a brand-new mine to get lithium, thanks to new techniques that allow lithium to be recovered from much lower-grade materials. Instead of being simply dumped, mine tailings can be re-mined. Through this process, characterisation of these wastes will allow for tailor-made, environmentally conscientious management strategies to be developed to handle the lower-value byproducts.
This can also help protect the environment from these often toxic wastes. Many of Australia’s 50,000 abandoned mines contain reactive sulphide minerals such as pyrite. These can leach acid into the environment in a process known as acid mine drainage (AMD), potentially costing more than A$100,000 per hectare to clean up.
Acid mine drainage in Western Tasmania.
Anita Parbhakar-Fox
Revisiting mine tailings can not only increase the working life of existing mines, it can also potentially breathe new life into long-abandoned mine sites.
There are two main reasons why this might be preferable to developing new mines. First, mining costs are reduced, as these materials have already been extracted from the ground. Second, the older the mine, the greater the proportion of the target commodity that is likely to be left over, because many older mining techniques had lower recovery rates than today’s technology.
For example, the historic Baal Gammon mine in northern Queensland once produced copper, tin and silver, but acid drainage from the disused site now poses a risk to the nearby Jamie Creek and Walsh River. But analysis of the waste boulders shows that they are rich in tin and indium, both of which can be recovered using today’s metallurgical techniques. This would have the added benefit of removing the sulphide compounds that threaten the local waterways.
Similarly, Tasmania’s Zeehan lead-zinc field contains more than 100 legacy mine sites, many of which – such as the Silver Spray mine – are affected by AMD. Again, characterisation of the waste rocks that contain AMD-forming sulphides shows that they also contain significant amounts of indium.
In neither of these cases has a mining project been established to recover these metals – surely a missed opportunity.
Queensland’s abandoned Croydon mines contain sulphide-bearing waste rocks.
Anita Parbhakar-Fox
There are signs that re-mining tailings could make more financial and environmental sense than other rehabilitation options. One example is Tasmania’s Old Tailings Dam, which contains mine waste piled more than 30 metres deep between 1962 and 1982.
While many rehabilitation options have been considered, including flooding the tailings or covering them with vegetation, the technical challenges have been considered too great. Yet the pyrite-rich tailings also contain up to 3% cobalt, which is worth well over US$23,000 per tonne.
It may even be possible to retrieve almost all of the cobalt by using bacterial oxidation. This process was initially developed to release gold from pyritic rocks, and is regarded as a greener processing technique.
Elsewhere in Tasmania, a similar project is under way to recover gold, and another is proposed to recover tin from mine tailings. Overseas, mine tailings reprocessing projects are planned as far afield as South Africa and Bolivia.
With technology improving just as the mining sector’s economic fortunes dip, firms have more incentive than ever to comb through their trash in search of treasure. Treating waste as a potential resource could help the industry rise from the ashes of the downturn, while helping the environment too.
Anita Parbhakar-Fox receives funding from The ARC Transforming the Mining Value Chain Industrial Transformation Research Hub.
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