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The Palaszczuk Government will consult with the energy industry to develop innovative ways to reduce state school energy costs using solar and energy efficiency measures.

South Australia looking for only one hour of battery storage, in decision that may rule out some battery storage technologies.

Nearly every Australian will pay some part of the cost of the Abbott Government’s decision to effectively stop investment in generation.

New edition of International Cloud Atlas includes asperitas cloud after long campaign by skywatchers.

Electricity network owner attacks major energy retailers over reliability of their gas plants, the manipulation of prices and high retail fees. It says it wants rapid transition to renewables, but incumbents and market rules getting in the way.

Fairfax joins Murdoch media, ABC and right wing blogs with hysterical and inaccurate story about potential blackouts once Hazelwood is closed.

Almost three-quarters of the 35 victims were male, and 20% were bitten while trying to pick up or kill snake

More than half of the deaths caused by snake bites in Australia since 2000 have occurred in or around the victim’s home, a nationwide review has found.

The coronial-based retrospective study of fatalities from January 2000 to December 2016 found that, of the 35 deaths recorded by the National Coronial Information Service, 16 were a direct result of the bite.

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A look at how the seed of a South American tree is increasingly being used as an alternative to ivory.

State representative introduced a bill that would limit the state attorney general’s ability to investigate or prosecute people based on their political speech

Maine laws protect people from discrimination based on factors such as race, disabilities and sexual orientation, and a Republican lawmaker wants to add a person’s beliefs about climate change to that list.

State representative Larry Lockman has introduced a bill that would limit the state attorney general’s ability to investigate or prosecute people based on their political speech, including their views on climate change. It would also prohibit the state from making decisions on buying goods or services or awarding grants or contracts based on a person’s “climate change policy preferences”.

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Latest aerial surveys confirm 2017 as the fourth mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef in the past 19 years.

Vic Premier Daniel Andrews wants 'a proper national debate' about energy with less point scoring.

An award-winning artist brings ancient fossil discoveries to life through illustrations.

Loss of Hazelwood will have an impact, says Grattan Institute.

Short term profits but long term uncertainty for Victoria's three remaining brown coal fired power generators.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s plan for a A$2 billion upgrade and expansion of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, announced last week, will be an impressive engineering achievement. Snowy Hydro 2.0 will increase the scheme’s capacity by 50%.

Meeting this extra capacity will depend entirely on the natural water supply available in the Snowy Mountains. But the current environmental conditions of these mountains, and the Australian Alps where they are located, are compromising both water delivery and water quality.

The only way to maintain water flow is to control the threats that are actively degrading the high country catchments. These include introduced animals, wetland loss, and climate change.

Restoration and management

The remarkable Snowy Hydro Scheme was developed over 25 years from the 1940s. During this period the NSW Soil Conservation Service and later NSW National Parks effectively managed soil and restored areas damaged by grazing.

Conservation efforts focused on looking after topsoil, stabilising wetlands, and restoring vegetation after decades of grazing. This ensured good amounts of high-quality water for both hydro power and irrigation downstream.

More recent efforts have focused on the impacts of building the original Snowy scheme. This includes restoring areas cleared for roads and construction sites, and areas where rock and soil from blasting and cutting were dumped.

Before and after revegetation works in the 1970s, following the removal of cattle. Current ecological change is likely to be far more significant and could require new types of intervention. Image courtesy of Roger Good Threats to mountain catchments

The Australian Alps are the nation’s water towers. They provide water for growing food and hydroelectricity, but face several threats.

Across the Alps, despite well-informed and committed control programs, feral horses, pigs and deer are destroying wetlands, degrading streamside vegetation, and causing moisture-holding peat soils and stream channels to erode. This leads to more evaporation, more rapid runoff and erosion, less water flow, and lower water quality.

There is currently no effective response to this damage. We estimate that more than 35% of the high mountains’ wetlands have been affected, and the problem is getting worse.

The Alps are also recognised as extremely vulnerable to climate change. Climate models suggest that alpine areas that currently receive at least 60 days of snow cover will shrink by 18-60% by 2020.

Temperatures in the alps are already increasing by 0.4℃ per decade, an increase of 1.79℃ since records began. Climate change projections for the Australian Alps indicate the hottest summer days will be around 5°C warmer in 2100, minimum temperatures will rise by 3-6℃, and precipitation (rain and snow) will decrease by up to 20%, with less falling as snow. These changes are already putting pressure on iconic mountain ecosystems including the peatlands, snowgum woodlands and alpine ash forests.

The Australian Alps are also likely to experience more extreme events such as heatwaves, storms, fires and severe frosts. All of these affect high mountain ecosystems, making the environment more vulnerable to disturbances such as more fires, weeds and disease outbreaks.

For example, the root-rot fungus, Phytophora cambivora, recently appeared in the alps. The fungus killed large areas of shrubs following unusually warm springtime soil temperatures.

New weeds are an additional concern for the alps as these may compromise the existing plant communities and their ability to deliver services such as water. Alpine peat soils, which build up over thousands of years, can also burn in drought.

Reliable water depends on functioning ecosystems

A stable water supply from the Alps is crucial for energy and food production. This relies on intact vegetation.

Back in the 1950s, it became clear to the researchers at the Soil Conservation Service that hard-hooved animals, in this case domestic cattle, were severely damaging the alpine catchments.

The success of the original Snowy scheme depended on removing cattle from alpine areas, controlling soil erosion that resulted from prior grazing and hydro works, and carrying out extensive revegetation works across the whole of the nearby mountain ranges.

However, land managers to this day are still controlling a legacy of disturbance and weed invasions from both the Snowy scheme itself and years of previous grazing. Snowy 2.0 must consider these lessons from the past, and work to improve mountain catchments.

Alpine plants and animals often live close to their environmental tolerances, meaning they are not necessarily able to cope with change. For some species, climate change is likely to exceed these thresholds. Vegetation communities will change as current populations decline and colonisers from different species move in to occupy the gaps, including invasive species.

Feral horses make it even more difficult for native species to respond to a changing climate, by exacerbating environmental degradation and impacts on water.

Part of the solution is restoring and re-vegetating degraded high country landscapes. For example, restoring snowgum communities, which were severely affected by burning and grazing, may lead to increases in the amount of water trapped as drifting fog.

But climate change will demand new research and management partnerships to find species that will survive well into the future and to develop adaptation pathways to respond to uncertain conditions.

This will be a new and different world. We are currently ill-prepared to maintain high-quality water yield in the future, to predict the impacts of climate change, or to effectively protect our alps for future generations.

But we are confident these questions can be answered with adequate investment in the environmental infrastructure needed to underpin the engineering. We estimate that between A$5 million and A$7 million per year is needed to research and develop new management structures. You could see this investment as royalties returned to the system that provides the water and power.

Turnbull’s plan may deliver more power, but only if the environment is carefully managed. Otherwise Snowy Hydro 2.0 may be left high and dry.

Adrienne Nicotra receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the NCCARF. She is a member of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Science Advisory Council and the Ecological Society of Australia.

David Freudenberger receives funding from Whitehaven Coal to conduct mine site rehabilitation research. He is a board member of the Society for Ecological Restoration Australasia, a member of the Australian Ecological Society and a member of the ACT Natural Resource Management Advisory Council

Geoff Cary currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Bushfire and Naturals Hazard CRC, and has recently received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Greenhouse Office/Department of Climate Change Greenhouse Action in Regional Australia funding schemes, NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, and the Bushfire CRC. He is affiliated with the International Association of Wildland Fire.

Geoffrey Hope has received funding from the Office of Environment and Heritage, NSW Government and the ACT Government for research on mountain wetland ecology. He is affiliated with the Australian Institute of Alpine Studies and is a member of the Kosciuscko National Park Wild Horse Management Plan Review Independent Technical Reference Group. . .

Sam Banks receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Susanna Venn receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Graeme Worboys 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.

Scientists reclassify dinosaurs, putting British fossils at the base of their family tree.

Extent of ice over North pole has fallen to a new wintertime low, for the third year in a row, as climate change drives freakish weather

The extent of Arctic ice has fallen to a new wintertime low, as climate change drives freakishly high temperatures in the polar regions.

The ice cap grows during the winter months and usually reaches its maximum in early March. But the 2017 maximum was 14.4m sq km, lower than any year in the 38-year satellite record, according to researchers at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) and Nasa.

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The A-level student noticed something odd in radiation levels from the International Space Station.

Massive fine reflects change in sentencing as previously low penalties failed to deter water firms from polluting England’s rivers and beaches

Thames Water has been hit with a record fine of £20.3m after huge leaks of untreated sewage into the Thames and its tributaries and on to land, including the popular Thames path. The prolonged leaks led to serious impacts on residents, farmers, and wildlife, killing birds and fish.

The fine imposed on Wednesday was for numerous offences in 2013 and 2014 at sewage treatment works at Aylesbury, Didcot, Henley and Little Marlow, and a large sewage pumping station at Littlemore.

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In the first in a series, Yale Environment 360 reports from Honduras where Berta Cáceres fought to protect native lands and paid for it with her life – one of hundreds of victims in this disturbing global trend

They came for her late one evening last March, as Berta Cáceres prepared for bed. A heavy boot broke the back door of the safe house she had just moved into. Her colleague and family friend, Gustavo Castro, heard her shout, “Who’s there?” Then came a series of shots. He survived. But the most famous and fearless social and environmental activist in Honduras died instantly. She was 44 years old. It was a cold-blooded political assassination.

Berta Cáceres knew she was likely to be killed. Everybody knew. She had told her daughter Laura to prepare for life without her. The citation for her prestigious Goldman Environmental prize, awarded in the US less than a year before, noted the continued death threats, before adding: “Her murder would not surprise her colleagues, who keep a eulogy – but hope to never have to use it.”

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