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London’s Natural History Museum is preparing for a major display on whales which is scheduled to open in June 2017.

Stressed and dying coral release varying amounts of gas which influence the formation of clouds. Scientists are investigating the prospects for Queensland’s weather as parts of the Great Barrier Reef die following bleaching by hot ocean waters.

Dressed like an abalone diver in a rainforest ravine, the search for Tasmanian sapphire involves a lolly-scoop, a crow bar and physical endurance beyond the norm. This is a repeat episode from the Off Track archives.

Safety issues force many reactors offline prompting warnings of power cuts across France, higher energy prices and a rise in emissions

The company building the UK’s first new nuclear power station for decades is facing questions over the health of its fleet of French nuclear plants after an investigation which has left the country with the lowest level of nuclear power for 10 years and the prospect of power cuts during a cold snap.

Thirteen of Électricité de France’s (EDF) 58 atomic plants are offline, some due to planned maintenance, but most for safety checks ordered by the regulator over anomalies discovered in reactor parts.

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Abandoned working dogs and puppies find new homes; solar power runs composting machines; and Matt Wilson is living the dream, opening his own micro brewery in Albany in WA.

A huge alligator snapping turtle got stuck in a blocked drain pipe in Houston, Texas.

As a relatively new owner of a Nissan Leaf, I support entirely the need for adequate provision of charge points (Letters, 29 November). The ecotricity charging points at motorway services are great, even if they are now not free. But you can now only pay using a mobile phone app – not much use for my wife whose phone is too old to run the app, and not much use for anyone if their phone is lost or broken. What is wrong with a swipe card, as offered by Charge your Car at other charging points? But the biggest absurdity, as employed by all charging points, is that you pay by charging session, not by the amount of electricity you use. In a petrol or diesel car in an area with few fuel stations, you will top up whenever you have the opportunity even if it means putting in only, say, a quarter of a tank. Electric car users may need to follow that routine, but will have to pay the same however much electricity they need.
Dr Robin Shipp
Bristol

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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Hunter Mitchell raised thousands of dollars to save Osita the rhino.

Foreign secretary, who backs ban on ivory trade, breaks off London speech to make plea for ‘magnificent’ vulnerable animal

Boris Johnson has interrupted a sweeping speech on the UK’s geopolitical future to make a passionate plea to save the African elephant, saying they are on the brink of extinction as they “get turned into umbrella stands and billiard balls”.

In the midst of a speech at Chatham House to ambassadors and foreign policy advisers, the UK foreign secretary said he was “obsessed with the tragic fate of the African elephant”.

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A baby slow loris, a ‘walking shark’ and caribou in Alaska are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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European research ministers meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland, emphatically reaffirm their commitment to putting a robot rover on Mars in 2021.

Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City will ban the most polluting cars and vans by 2025 to tackle air pollution

Four of the world’s biggest cities are to ban diesel vehicles from their centres within the next decade, as a means of tackling air pollution, with campaigners urging other city leaders to follow suit.

The mayors of Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City announced plans on Friday to take diesel cars and vans off their roads by 2025.

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Climate change intensified the extreme weather in Tennessee, but its legislators deny the science

With my new hope that deniers of climate change will take ownership of the consequences, I am sad to report that this week, terrible wildfires have swept through Tennessee, a southeastern state in the USA. This state is beset by a tremendous drought, as seen by a recent US Drought Monitor map. There currently are severe, extreme, and exceptional drought conditions covering a wide swath of southern states. The causes of drought are combinations of lowered precipitation and higher temperatures.

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Lawyer on president-elect’s transition team says leaving UNFCCC is ‘most practical way’ way to quit agreement, a process that normally takes four years

The US should completely quit the United Nations forum to tackle climate change in order to quickly exit the Paris climate agreement, according to a conservative lawyer who is part of Donald Trump’s transition team.

Abandoning the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would allow the US to back out of the international climate effort within a year, far sooner than the four-year period that would be required to ditch the Paris accord, which came into force in November. Such a move would probably prove a severe blow to global efforts to avoid dangerous warming.

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More than 50 spectacular specimens of monkeys, apes, lemurs, lorises and bushbabies will go on show at the National Museum of Scotland from 9 December. The taxidermy was specially commissioned for the exhibition and is the first to show primates behaving as if they were in the wild

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It’s been a long time coming, but the world’s top powers are now betting billions on the Iter collaboration to deliver clean, safe, limitless energy for the modern world

“We are standing on the ground that could change the future of energy,” says engineer Laurent Pattison, deep in the reactor pit of the world’s biggest nuclear fusion project.

Around him is a vast construction site, all aimed at creating temperatures of 150mC on this spot and finally bringing the power of the sun down to Earth. The €18bn (£14.3bn) Iter project, now rising fast from the ground under the bright blue skies of Provence, France, is the first capable of achieving a critical breakthrough: getting more energy out of the intense fusion reactions than is put in.

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Wenlock Edge, Shropshire Defying the season, the flowering hedge-bank plant has an irrepressible urge to burst forth

A hogweed blooms in the violet breath of shadows on the lane. Where garden roses are bred to keep flowering compulsively in a desperate denial of the season, the hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium) opens in defiance. In a frosty corner of the hedge bank cut down at the end of summer, one flower makes a reappearance.

Related: Late bloomers in the lee

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Caribbean Princess discharged thousands of gallons of polluted bilge waste along British coast, while other ships used rigged sensors to hide contamination

Princess Cruise Lines will pay a US$40m penalty after pleading guilty to seven federal charges in an illegal ocean pollution case that involved one ship’s use of a so-called magic pipe to divert oily waste into the waters.

Miami US attorney Wifredo Ferrer told a news conference the penalty was the largest ever of its kind. A plea agreement filed in federal court also requires UK and US-listed Carnival Corp, parent company of the Princess line, to submit 78 cruise ships across its eight brands to a five-year environmental compliance programme overseen by a judge.

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Water quality is one of the biggest threats facing the Great Barrier Reef. Tatters ❀/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The Australian and Queensland governments have delivered their progress report to the UN on the Reef 2050 Plan to ensure the long-term survival of the Great Barrier Reef.

The report focuses on water quality, and managing pollution runoff, but only deals in a superficial way with the other preeminent issue for the reef - climate change.

It shows recent progress on water quality has been slow, and ultimately we will not meet water quality targets without major further investments.

Progress?

The progress report claims some success in managing water quality through improved practices in sugarcane cultivation under the SmartCane program, and in rangeland grazing.

But actual reductions in sediment and nutrients loads to the reef over the last two years have been very small, as shown in the Reef Report Card 2015. This contrasts with the first five years of Reef Plan (2008-2013) where there was modest progress, as you can see below.

Great Barrier Reef Report Card 2015

The positive news out of the Report Card was that grain cropping and non-banana horticulture were doing well, but these are the industries we have little robust data on.

And there’s been little progress towards adequate management practices in sugarcane and rangeland grazing as well as gully remediation in the large dry tropics catchments of the Burdekin, Fitzroy and Normanby.

The specific actions and funding promised in this area over the next five years mentioned in the progress report which have some real substance are:

1. Direct a further A$110 million of Reef Trust funding towards projects to improve water

2. Bring forward the review of the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan and set new scientifically based pollutant load targets

3. Invest A$33 million of Queensland government funding into two major integrated projects

4. Better prioritise of water quality as a major theme in Reef 2050 Plan.

What we need to do

However these fall far short of the real requirements to meet water quality targets on the reef, set out in the Reef 2050 Plan and the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan.

The best estimate is that meeting water quality targets by 2025 will cost A$8.2 billion. Other estimates suggest we’ll need at least A$5-10 billion over the next ten years.

If we assume that about A$4 billion is needed over the next five years, the amounts mentioned in the progress report (perhaps A$500-600 million at most) are obviously totally inadequate.

There is thus almost no chance the targets will be reached at the nominated time.

This reality has been clearly acknowledged by Dr David Wachenfeld, the Director of Reef Recovery at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. In fact the current progress towards the targets is so poor that we will not even get close.

The actions actually needed to manage water quality for the Great Barrier Reef are well known and have been published in the Queensland Science Taskforce Report and scientific papers.

The most important of these are:

1. Allocate sufficient funding (A$4 billion over the next five years)

2. Use the legislative powers already available to the Australian government under the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act (1975) and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (the EPBC Act) to regulate agriculture and other activities in the reef’s water catchment

3. Examine seriously the need for land use change in the reef catchment. For example, we may need to look at shifting away from more intensive forms of land use such as cropping, which produce more pollutants per hectare, to less intensive activities such as beef grazing, forestry or conservation uses

4. Continue to improve land management in sugarcane, beef grazing and horticulture but acknowledge the need to extend these programs. We also need better practices in urban and coastal development

5. Critically examine the economics and environmental consequences of the further expansion of intensive agriculture in the reef’s catchment as promoted under the Australian government’s Northern Australian Development Plan

Progress on water quality management for the Great Barrier Reef, as clearly reported in the 2015 Report Card is poor. There is little chance we will reach the water quality targets in the next ten years, without upping our game.

Jon Brodie is also a partner in the consulting partnership C2O. See: http://www.c2o.net.au/