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BP has announced it will scrap its $1.4 billion oil and gas drilling program in the Great Australian Bight, off the coast of South Australia.

Cheetahs have extraordinarily low genetic diversity, placing them at risk. Copyright Amy Nichole Harris/Shutterstock

In science, it’s rare that a new idea comes along that stops people in their tracks. For ecologists, this has just happened, in a paper that found that species living in wild places have more genetic diversity than the same species living in areas dominated by people.

Why is this big news? For starters, it’s a completely new reason to worry about the decline of wilderness.

My colleagues and I showed recently that wilderness areas have shrunk by a tenth globally in just the past two decades. Large wild areas are now mostly confined to cold, dry or otherwise inhospitable parts of the planet such as the far north and big deserts. Biologically rich rainforests have been destroyed the fastest.

In Southeast Asia, as elsewhere, human activities are expanding while wilderness areas are shrinking. Shown here are changes in the Human Footprint over the past two decades. O. Venter et al. (2016) Scientific Data

The traditional reasons for defending wilderness areas are that they store massive stocks of carbon, produce clean drinking water, limit destructive flooding, harbour countless rare species, generate billions of dollars for local communities via ecotourism, and provide a scientific basis for understanding how nature is supposed to function in a rapidly changing world. These are compelling enough.

But this new finding is a game-changer, because it shows that genetic variation, the raw fuel for evolution, relies on wilderness too.

Environmental armageddon

The history of life on Earth has been a lot like what soldiers experience in a war: long periods of relative stability and even boredom punctuated by sudden periods of stark terror. Right now, we are living in one of the scariest times since life arose at least 3.7 billion years ago.

Life on Earth today is being battered by massive habitat disruption, climate change, invasive species, foreign pathogens, pollution, overhunting, species extinctions and the disruption of entire ecological communities. And it’s all down to humankind, which currently dominates three-quarters of the planet, according to our recent estimate.

Faced with this environmental onslaught, which will surely worsen in the coming century as the Earth struggles to support up to 12 billion people, the options for species are frighteningly limited.

Change or die

As Charles Darwin argued more than a century ago, hidden within most species is a surprisingly large amount of genetic variation. Humans vary in height, weight, body shape, skin colour, physiology and biochemistry.

Wolves, first domesticated around 40,000 years ago, have since been bred into dog varieties ranging from tiny Pekinese to Great Danes.

The world’s hugely varied breeds of domestic dog all arose from a single species of wolf. Shutterstock

For most organisms (except simple bacteria and other organisms that reproduce by cloning), there are two main sources of genetic variation: mutations and sex.

If life were a card game, then mutations create new cards. Most mutations are bad for the individual – such as those that cause the bleeding disease Haemophilia A – or are more or less neutral. But now and then a mutation generates a highly beneficial wild card.

While mutations create new cards, sex shuffles the deck, mixing our genes into new combinations. That’s important too, because by doing so one can discard bad cards. Individuals with bad cards tend to die or fail to reproduce, removing their dud genes from the population. And every once in a while a really good combination of genes pops up, like a Royal Flush, that can then spread rapidly through the population.

The ability of species to change and adapt, or evolve, is vital. We tend to think of evolution as an incremental process, requiring thousands or millions of years, but that’s not always so. When things get rough, species with lots of genetic variation can evolve surprisingly fast.

Evolution in action

Consider what happened when scientists introduced myxomatosis to Australia in 1950 to kill off introduced European rabbits, which were stripping the continent’s vegetation bare. At first, most of the rabbits died. But a few, which by random chance were more resistant to the pathogen, survived and reproduced. Within a few decades rabbits had evolved a far greater capacity to resist the disease.

And just as remarkably, myxomatosis evolved as well. It became less deadly. If you’re a pathogen, you don’t want to kill your host straight away because then you’ll die too.

Instead, you just want to make your host sick, or kill it very slowly. That way, you can spread to lots of other hosts. So while rabbits became more resistant, myxomatosis also became less virulent. And it all happened in just a couple of decades.

Something similar is happening with Tasmanian devils, which are being killed off by a bizarre contagious cancer that spreads when the notoriously scrappy marsupials fight with one another.

Recent studies show that genes which produce greater resistance to the cancer are rapidly increasing in the population. Unfortunately, the devils don’t have a lot of genetic variation but hopefully they’ll have enough variation remaining to get past the killer cancer.

A Tasmanian Devil suffering from facial tumour disease, a contagious cancer. Menna Jones

Things are even scarier for the cheetah, the world’s fastest land animal. While built for speed on the African plains, cheetahs will have a hard time outrunning new environmental challenges. That’s because they have almost zero genetic variation.

Roughly 12,000 years ago, cheetahs went through a severe population bottleneck, eroding most of their genetic variation. The species is paying a price for this today, with reduced sperm quality, kinked tails, and palate deformities among other problems. These maladies arise both from low genetic variation and from inbreeding, which occurs because individual cheetahs are so similar genetically.

Sadly, this could make Cheetahs perilously vulnerable to an “extinction vortex”. The vortex starts with a population crash, perhaps from a newly-introduced disease, habitat loss or climate change. The remaining individuals are already so severely inbred and depleted of genetic variation that they reproduce and survive poorly. Their population dwindles and crashes into oblivion.

We need wilderness

That is why the new study is so significant: it shows that a particular species living in a wild area has more genetic variation than does the same species living in a place where humans abound. The study was based on over 4,500 different species of amphibians and mammals scattered across the planet and was published in one of the world’s best scientific journals. This gives us a lot of confidence in the strength of its conclusions.

The bottom line is that the world’s wilderness areas are under assault. We are not just losing wild places with clean air and water and beautiful vistas. We are losing the raw fuel of evolution and adaptation that has taken life millions of years to accumulate.

Given the breakneck pace at which we are currently changing the planet, eroding the capacity of species to adapt to new challenges is absolutely the last thing we want to be doing.

The sun sets over the wilds of the Western Ghats in southern India. William Laurance

Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. He is the director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University, and founder and director of ALERT--the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers.

Drone footage of southern right whales in ocean off South Australia will provide new insights into how they survive the yearly migration, monitoring their ongoing health over time in a changing environment. Southern right whales face a number of threats, including shipping traffic, naval activities, oil and gas exploration, unregulated whale watching and the depletion of fisheries

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The changing size of mother whales is being tracked after the southern white whale came back from the brink of extinction

After being hunted to near extinction and threatened with climate change, drones are giving southern right whales in the Great Australian Bight a much-needed health check.

Sponsored by WWF-Australia, researchers at Murdoch University are measuring the size of individual whales and monitoring how that changes during the calving season, with plans to track their weight each year.

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President Barack Obama says the US will work with private companies on its plan to send humans to Mars in the 2030s.

Climate Home: Nick Hurd waved away suggestions the government could be taken to court over a shortfall in policy to meet binding emissions targets

The UK’s world-leading Climate Change Act has been “dangerously neglected”, leaving the government open to lawsuits.

That is the view of environmental lawyers at Client Earth, in a report published on Tuesday.

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My sister Christine Howson, who has died of ovarian cancer aged 61, was a highly respected marine biologist and diver who undertook survey work in the UK and around the world.

Christine was well known in the sports diving world; she was one of the first female divers to attain the First Class grade. She trained divers and other instructors, and organised national events and conferences. Committed to developing swimming for young people, she worked tirelessly at her local swimming club in Tranent, East Lothian, where she was a committee member and coach.

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Relentless poaching is decimating Africa’s elephants. But the world’s largest land mammal could have a powerful, new champion if Hillary Clinton becomes president of the U.S.

When asked by Ellen DeGeneres what her spirit animal is, Hillary Clinton had a surprising answer: the elephant.

Although the symbol of the GOP, Clinton spoke on the Ellen DeGeneres Show this May with rare passion about the need to protect real elephants from a poaching crisis that has killed at least 110,000 of them over the past decade, pushing the world’s largest land animals – especially forest elephants – closer to extinction.

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A bottlenose dolphin is pictured flipping a porpoise into the air in a deadly attack.

World Energy Council warns of potential gap in energy supply due to government’s lack of clarity and myriad changes

The UK has fallen out of the top 10 of a respected international league table of countries’ energy sectors for the first time.

The World Energy Council blamed the government’s lack of clarity and myriad changes which it said have left the country facing a potential gap in energy supply.

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Findings highlight how US is in grip of significant environmental changes driven by warming temperatures in different ways to processes that fuel hurricanes

The frequency of floods of the magnitude of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated parts of New York City in 2012, is rising so sharply that they could become relatively normal, with a raft of new research laying bare the enormous upheavals already under way in the US due to climate change.

These findings and two other fresh pieces of research have highlighted how the US is already in the grip of significant environmental changes driven by warming temperatures, albeit in different ways to the processes that are fueling hurricanes.

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Warren Entsch tells party room dugongs and sea turtles are being subjected to cruelty and being hunted commercially

The Turnbull government is considering greater regulation of Indigenous Australians’ hunting of dugongs and sea turtles.

Malcolm Turnbull has asked the environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, to investigate serious complaints that vulnerable and endangered animals are being subjected to great cruelty by some Indigenous families and killed merely for commercial purposes, not cultural purposes.

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Global oil giant BP has announced it will cease controversial exploration off the coast of South Australia.

The New South Wales government’s U-turn on its greyhound industry ban says as much about the weak calibre of some politicians holding high office as it does about their subjugation to the media, which has relentlessly pilloried Premier Mike Baird about the ban since it was first announced.

Facing declining popularity, Baird appears to have capitulated to the media to try to win public support, and avoid discontent within the Nationals party in New South Wales. This is unlikely to succeed: according to a recent RSPCA poll, 64% of the public support the ban.

The ban was announced in July to come into effect in 2017, following a review of the state industry led by Special Commissioner Michael McHugh.

So what does the backflip mean for greyhounds?

What will happen to the industry now?

In a media statement, Baird and deputy premier Troy Grant announced a suite of changes that would allow the industry to continue.

These include:

• Life bans and increased jail terms for live baiting

• A new regime to register greyhounds for their entire lives

• A new independent regulator with “strong new powers” to ensure transparency and accountability

• Fresh resources for enforcement and prosecution of wrongdoers and new resources for animal welfare.

Former NSW premier Morris Iemma will chair a Greyhound Industry Reform Panel that will determine the new rules, and will involve the RSPCA, the greyhound industry and government representatives.

The greyhound industry reportedly proposed a number of changes to overturn the ban including a cap on breeding, and reduced numbers of tracks and races.

Limiting the number of bitches breeding in NSW will do nothing to reduce the scale of the industry. Dogs could just be brought in from interstate, and it will be difficult to police this movement.

The sops to the animal advocacy bodies are that they will receive more money to deal with animal cruelty and there will be increased support for rehoming greyhounds in NSW. But as a recent study from my group shows, greyhounds have significant behaviour problems in the home, due no doubt in part to their traumatic upbringing.

Industry on the way out

In an industry already declining, these measures merely reflect the need to curtail its scale in the event of declining attendance and interest. Greyhound racing is now banned in 40 US states. Just 19 tracks remain in six states. Worldwide the industry is only maintained in a handful of countries.

There are a number of reasons why the public has turned away from racing. Like other animal (and human) competitions, these games have been tainted by use of drugs and other uncompetitive practices, such as live baiting in greyhound racing.

Top greyhound trainers earn earn up to A$5 million per year. There is declining public appetite for an industry that generates huge profits for a select few.

Then there are the ethical considerations. At least 50% of dogs are culled because they are too slow. The industry is clearly on the road to self-destruction in terms of its public appeal.

Greyhounds have abnormally large hearts, high blood pressure and a predisposition to gastric torsion and bloating. Like racing horses, the public does not gain any pleasure in seeing such animals win races when it knows that it is simply due to physiological abnormalities on the part of the winner.

Public interest in such sports is changing from “who is the fastest” to a celebration of giving everyone a fair go, to enjoy taking part, in line with the widening circle of compassion that has been increasingly sweeping through human society for at least 200 years.

Out of step

The review of the industry advised that:

Given … the highly entrenched nature of live baiting as a traditional training method, there is a very real risk that, once the harsh spotlight of this Commission is removed from the industry, the practice of live baiting will thrive once more. It is imperative that regulators take all available steps to try to ensure that this does not occur.

For live baiting, the review recommended lifetime bans for any trainer found to be involved in the practice.

Overall, the review recommended the government consider banning the industry, or, if it was to continue, make a number of changes to tighten regulation such as lifetime registration, improved reporting and oversight.

Mike Baird was bold enough to ignore his government’s earlier support for the industry, and was evidently influenced by the widespread evidence of cruelty in the industry.

The evidence of this very detailed investigation now lies in tatters.

This is out of touch with the attitude of the general public, the majority of whom want to see the welfare of animals managed better at a government level.

Australia should be at the forefront of world leadership in celebrating the opportunities through sport for those less advantaged, the aptly named underdogs in society, to be given a fair go.

Instead of racing greyhounds, why aren’t we supporting the public to bring their elderly, overweight, or otherwise less-than-perfect pooches to meet other dogs and have a trot around the track, to the delight of onlookers?

Clive Phillips is on the Scientific Panel for Voiceless and chairs the Queensland government's Animal Welfare Advisory Board

At least 1,000 people were killed when Hurricane Matthew battered the Tiburon peninsula in Haiti last week, destroying houses and displacing tens of thousands.

A humanitarian crisis is now unfolding for the survivors, with the Pan American Health Organization warning of a likely cholera surge in the country due to severely damaged water supply and sanitation systems.

Several other Caribbean island states have been affected, including the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Cuba, as well as the United States.

In 2011, one of us (Jason) led a team to Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince to contribute to the reconstruction effort after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The team worked particularly on the provision of housing.

In all interactions, the team encountered a local community that was honourable, industrious and kind. This perception is confirmed by those who have spent time on the ground after Hurricane Matthew.

But, as is common in the media and institutional narrative following disasters, prejudices and preconceptions abound. Following the earthquake, the Haitians were portrayed as weak, dependent, corrupt and lawless victims. The international community intervened, amid a global outpouring of grief, support and solidarity.

Five years later, destruction and suffering in Haiti is again making headlines. Why is history repeating itself?

Unnatural disasters

According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, disaster risk is a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. It is normally expressed as the likelihood of deaths, injury or loss of infrastructure for a specific period of time. This suggests that disasters are the product of the human condition.

But other experts describe disasters as “manifestations of unresolved development problems”. Therefore, disasters are not a natural phenomenon. Humans play a central role. As a result, a natural hazard such as Hurricane Matthew impacts each country in its path differently.

Countries, regions, people groups and individuals are distinctly affected by hazards, mostly based on pre-existing vulnerability. While most scholars agree that there are particular vulnerabilities for specific hazards, some argue for “a generalised vulnerability that affects the poorest of the poor and most marginal in all parts of the world”.

In Haiti, many aspects of risk and vulnerability have very deep roots in colonial history. The structural injustice existing in society has been compounded by recent trends in international economics. These have worked to exacerbate widespread vulnerability and exposure.

The status quo has failed Haiti

The earthquake in 2010 resulted in 222,750 deaths, 300,000 injuries, 1.5 million displaced people, and more than 3 million affected in total. Most of the built environment in Port-au-Prince was destroyed, as well as its basic services and infrastructure.

In August 2010 the United Nations tacitly admitted blame for the cholera outbreak that occurred after the earthquake. However, it later invoked absolute immunity.

Cholera has claimed more than 9,000 lives and infected more than 720,000 people in Haiti since 2010. And the failure to contain and eradicate the disease has manifested into the current crisis, with a surge of infections in the areas hit hardest by Hurricane Matthew due to poor water and sanitation.

Little of the US$13.5 billion pledged by the international community after the earthquake ever made it to Haiti’s people or into its economy. Most of it (94%) went to private contractors, donor nations’ own civilian and military entities, international non-government organisations, and UN agencies.

Investigations have revealed that the actors of predatory capitalism rushed to secure quick and easy profits in the wake of calamity. This has helped to prevent any serious effort to address disaster risk by sidelining local stakeholders.

Under the guise of goodwill and solidarity, the United States has officially supported what journalist Antony Loewenstein calls “the latest incarnation of a tired model that failed to deliver long-lasting benefits to locals, but instead delivered cheap labour to multinationals”.

No argument for skills development and employment opportunities can really excuse abusive labour practices. In Haiti, these simply reinforced underlying vulnerability and made a mockery of the commitment to “build back better”. In reality, the United States’ interests have been protected and served in Haiti for a century.

Reducing disaster risk in an age of uncertainty

Put simply, we are creating new risk faster than we are dealing with the existing risk. James Lewis and Ilan Kelman warn that:

…without tackling all vulnerability drivers – that are the roots of [disaster risk creation] – the conditions of [disaster risk creation] will continue to prevail over attempts at [disaster risk reduction].

We continue to demand conformity to orthodox ways of thinking about economics, development, governance and society that have locked us into destructive pathways. Disaster risk is socially-constructed and we must propose solutions that do not ignore root causes. This means providing empowerment and autonomy to communities which live in at-risk areas, including access to resources, education, livelihoods, and health.

Jocelyn McCalla, of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, asserts that:

Hurricane Matthew has disrupted the expected course of events. We should not seek to put Haiti back on course. We need to change course altogether, use disruption to identify another course of action in consultation with Haitians.

We know that development, imposed by external forces that exploit the local labour force is not in the interest of the marginalised. A failure to respect human rights, local needs, the environment and human-environment relations simply creates disaster risk.

A shift towards truly transparent, democratic and participative practices is necessary. We must acknowledge the role of corporations, governments, NGOs and even United Nations agencies both in creating new risk and preventing the reduction of existing risk. Otherwise our well-meaning efforts to help Haiti now and in the future will leave us asking the same questions when disaster next strikes.

Jason von Meding receives funding from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Giuseppe Forino receives funding from University of Newcastle.

New technology is a significant step towards the creation of virtual power stations that would enable smarter electricity use by homes and businesses

Data has been transmitted across a national electricity grid for the first time, in what could be a significant step towards the creation of virtual power stations, where many thousands of homes and businesses combine to manage electricity use more smartly.

The new technology could lead to lower energy bills for consumers who allow small variations in the energy consumption of their appliances, such as water heaters or freezers.

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Waltham Brooks, West Sussex Around the pool’s edges, snipe drill into the mud as the sun sinks towards the horizon

The air is noticeably colder, and the blue sky above the Brooks seems empty. The swallows and martins that had been following the river Arun south to the sea, in an almost continuous stream for the past month, have gone. Only jackdaws and rooks fly over, croaking to each other, heading towards the woods and back to their evening roosts. The sinking sun casts a warm glow across the large pool, where recent arrivals – a flock of wigeon – are paddling, dipping into the muddy water to feed alongside the regular mallard and shoveller.

Around the pool’s edges, snipe bob their dark brown-striped heads up and down, drilling their long bills into the mud in hurried sewing-machine movements. More snipe sit by the reeds, preening or sleeping, their heads turned and their bills tucked into the feathers on their backs. I walk on through the wet grass, listening to the cries of the coot, water rail and ducks, and watch my footing.

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The developers of 12 big solar projects that won grants from ARENA pay their bonds on time, indicating all projects to go ahead as planned.

The transition to a low carbon economy is already happening, but is at risk when residents of Australia’s capital go to the polls in local elections

The transition to a low carbon economy is already happening … in the Australian Capital Territory, where the local Labor government has legislated for a 100% renewable energy target by the year 2020.

But this major achievement is at risk on Saturday when residents of Canberra go to the polls for territory elections.

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BHP Billiton says wind and solar are heralding the "dawn" of an energy revolution. But a dawn is all it can see, because it predicts fossil fuels will still account for 80% of energy needs by 2040. Surely it's time to get serious.