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Australia’s first peer-to-peer green lending platform launched, with $20m cornerstone investment from Clean Energy Finance Corp.

Land Tawney, president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, explains why the fight for national monuments is a battle sportsmen and women must win

Signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the Antiquities Act has been used by 16 presidents – eight Republicans and eight Democrats – to safeguard millions of acres of exceptional public lands and waters, including outstanding fish and wildlife habitat that provides some of the best hiking, camping, floating, hunting and fishing in the nation.

On 26 April, however, President Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating the review of 27 national monuments nationwide, launching an unprecedented reassessment by the Interior Department.

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Hundreds of large old trees were removed when the Hume Highway was widened. Brian Yap/Flickr, CC BY-NC

It’s no secret that human development frequently comes at a cost to other creatures. As our urban footprint expands, native habitat contracts. To compensate for this, most Australian governments require developers to invest in biodiversity offsetting, where habitat is created or protected elsewhere to counterbalance the impact of construction.

Researchers monitored hundreds of nest boxes used to offset habitat loss. Mason Crane, Author provided

Although biodiversity offsetting is frequently used in Australia – and is becoming increasingly popular around the world – we rarely know whether offsets are actually effective.

That’s why we spent four years monitoring the program designed to offset the environmental losses caused by widening the Hume Highway between Holbrook and Coolac, New South Wales. Our research has found it was completely ineffective.

Map courtesy Google/The Conversation, CC BY-ND Trading trees for boxes

The roadworks required the removal of large, old, hollow-bearing trees, which are critical nesting sites for many animals, including several threatened species. To compensate for these losses, the developer was required to install one nest box for every hollow that was lost – roughly 600 nest boxes were installed.

Wild honeybees occupied many nest boxes. Mason Crane, Author provided

Many of the boxes were specifically designed for three threatened species: the squirrel glider, the superb parrot and the brown treecreeper. We monitored the offset for four years to see whether local wildlife used the nest boxes.

We found that the nest boxes were rarely used, with just seven records of the squirrel glider, two of the brown treecreeper, and none of the superb parrot. We often saw all three species in large old tree hollows in the area around the boxes we monitored.

Even more worryingly, almost 10% of the boxes collapsed, were stolen or otherwise rendered ineffective just four years after being installed. Perversely, we found that invasive species such as feral bees and black rats frequently occupied the nest boxes.

The offset clearly failed to deliver the environmental outcomes that were promised. Indeed, researchers have been concerned for some time now that offsetting can be misused and abused.

What can be done?

It’s worth noting that research supports using nest boxes as a habitat replacement. However, they may never be effective for species such as the superb parrot. It’s not quite clear why some animals use nest boxes and others don’t, but earlier monitoring projects in the same area found superb parrots consistently avoid them.

Still, concrete steps can – and should – be taken to improve similar offset programs.

First, the one-to-one ratio of nest boxes to tree hollows was inadequate; far more nest boxes needed to be installed to replace the natural hollows that were lost.

There also was no requirement to regularly replace nest boxes as they degrade. It can take a hundred years or more for trees to develop natural hollows suitable for nesting wildlife. To truly offset their removal, thousands of boxes may be required over many decades.

An old hollow-bearing river red gum. Trees like this are vital habitat for many species. Peter Halasz/Wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA

Second, nest boxes clearly cannot compensate for the many other key ecological values of large old trees (such as carbon storage, flowering pulses or foraging habitat). This suggests that more effort is needed at the beginning of a development proposal to avoid damaging environmental assets that are extremely difficult to replace – such as large old trees.

Third, where it is simply impossible to protect key features of the environment during infrastructure development, more holistic strategies should be considered. For example, in the case of the woodlands around the Hume Highway, encouraging natural regeneration can help replace old trees.

Tree planting on farms can also make a significant contribution to biodiversity – and some of these may eventually become hollow-bearing trees. A combination of planting new trees and maintaining adequate artificial hollows while those trees mature might be a better approach.

Being accountable for failure

When an offset program fails, it’s unlikely anyone will be asked to rectify the situation. This is because developers are only required to initiate an offset, and are not responsible for their long-term outcomes.

In the case of the Hume Highway development, the conditions of approval specified that nest boxes were to be installed, but not that they be effective.

Despite the ecological failure of the offset (and over A$200,000 invested), the developer has met these legal obligations.

This distinction between offset compliance and offset effectiveness is a real problem. The Australian government has produced a draft policy of outcomes-based conditions, but using these conditions isn’t mandatory.

The poor results of the Hume Highway offset program are sobering. However, organisations like Roads and Maritime Services are to be commended for ensuring that monitoring was completed and for making the data available for public scrutiny – many agencies do not even do that.

Indeed, through monitoring and evaluation we can often learn more from failures than successes. There are salutary lessons here, critical to ensuring mistakes are not repeated.

David Lindenmayer receives funding from National Environmental Research Program and The Australian Research Council.

Martine Maron receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Environmental Science Programme, the Science for Nature and People Partnership, and the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. She is a Director of BirdLife Australia and a Governor of WWF Australia.

Megan C Evans receives funding from the National Environmental Research Programme Threatened Species Recovery Hub

Philip Gibbons receives funding from the Australian Research Council, IUCN and ACT, NSW and federal governments.

Scientists say the Solar System's biggest planet is showing itself to be far more complex than anyone thought.

We compare the manifesto pledges of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Ukip and the Greens to see who comes top on cycling policy

Amid fevered discussions of Brexit, the NHS and social care, not to mention the suddenly renewed importance of security and tackling terrorism, it might seem a bit niche – almost frivolous – to ask what the party manifestos are saying about cycling.

But I’d argue it’s interesting and worthwhile for a couple of reasons. To begin with, as I’ve endlessly argued on this blog, getting significantly more people on to two wheels can bring enormous benefits to the nation.

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Martindale Hause A tug-of-war occurs as a rook grabs one end of a crooked stick and a jackdaw just half its size seizes the other

Bump. A stick bounces off my scalp. I touch it with a finger. Blood! More sticks rain down. On goes the beanie hat. A cacophony of harsh cawing ensues. Rooks are robbing their decrepit old nests of twigs to add to more recent homes they are refurbishing on adjacent treetops.

Related: Feathered blades and feathered wings

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Documents suggest that a major spill from the Rover pipeline in Ohio described as 2m gallons of ‘drilling fluids’ might now be more than twice as large

The oil company behind the Dakota Access pipeline is facing intense scrutiny from regulators and activists for a series of recent leaks across the country, including a major spill now believed to be significantly bigger than initially reported.

Documents obtained by the Guardian suggest that a spill from the Rover pipeline that Ohio regulators originally described as 2m gallons might now be more than twice as large. The revelation was included in a legal challenge activists filed on Wednesday to block the natural gas pipeline run by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the corporation that operates the controversial Dakota Access pipeline and is now facing numerous government fines and violations.

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A new study helps civil engineers account for ongoing climate change in infrastructure design

People who work on building infrastructure understand the risks of climate change. As the Earth warms, new stresses are applied to our buildings, bridges, roads, houses, and other structures. Some of the obvious threats to infrastructure are from extreme weather including heat waves, storms, and intense rainfalls. There are some other less obvious threats, and many of the threats vary by location.

Regardless, the planning for infrastructure relies upon a reasonable estimation of future climate changes. To help quantify such an estimate for the civil engineering community, a recent paper was published by the Institution of Civil Engineering Journal of Forensic Engineering (I was fortunate to be a coauthor). The article was prepared with the collaboration of Dr. Michael Mann from Penn State University and Dr. Lijing Cheng from the Chinese Institute of Atmospheric Physics.

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59% give thumbs down to state or federal assistance for Carmichael mine as state government faces factional fight over whether to give project a royalties holiday

Queensland voters have given the thumbs down to taxpayer support for the controversial Adani coalmine, with 59% saying they were opposed to state or federal assistance.

A new poll of 1,618 Queenslanders taken by ReachTel indicates 57% of the sample objected to a loan for a rail link between the mine and Abbot point, which is championed by the federal resources minister Matt Canavan.

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The first launch ever from New Zealand is a step towards sending small satellites into orbit for cheap.

Europe by night, Canada’s vanishing river and the Netherland’s tulip fields are among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month

From space, the strait of Gibraltar appears tiny compared to the continents it separates. At the strait’s narrowest point, Africa stands just 14km (nine miles) from Europe. But the narrow waterway is a complex environment that gives rise to striking phytoplankton blooms when conditions are right. The intricate swirls of phytoplankton trace the patterns of water flow, which in this region can become quite turbulent. For example, water moving east from the North Atlantic into the Mediterranean has created turbulence in the form of internal waves. These waves – sometimes with heights up to 100 metres – occur primarily deep within the ocean, with just a mere crest poking through the surface. At the same time, water flowing west helps stir up water in the North Atlantic, including the Gulf of Cádiz. While most of the swirls of colour are phytoplankton, the ocean scientist Norman Kuring of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center notes that some of the colour near coastal areas could be due to sediment suspended in the water, particularly near the mouths of rivers.

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It is now clear there are enough projects ready to go to sail past the 2020 renewable energy target. But just because we can doesn't mean that we will. There are still some major hurdles.

The plunging cost of solar and storage present a huge threat to the business models of incumbent utilities. But the biggest threat to their future is their own greed, and the invitation to consumers to look at alternatives.

Sandy, Bedfordshire The jingle-jangle of a corn bunting rings out as skylarks criss-cross the path, chasing each other

The car door opened in a farm layby and the fat bird sang. Described in ornithology books as sounding like the jangling of keys, the two-second salvo always seems higher and looser to my ears, and is more of a jingle than song. I find I can reproduce it best with four 10p coins shaken in a half-closed fist.

The jingle-jangle rang again and I spied the corn bunting – the “fat bird of the barley” – near the crown of a blossoming hawthorn bush, perched between two thorny sprays. Its slack-jawed beak moved, the lower mandible oddly placed as if it had been unhinged then badly refitted.

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Businesses across the Canberra region were today recognised for their commitment to making a change towards a more sustainable future at the annual Actsmart Business Sustainability Awards.

ARENA CEO tells federal government Senate Committee that new wind and solar power generation is already, on average, cheaper than existing fossil fuel generation on the NEM.

With the rising number of plug-in models available in the U.S., many at increasingly affordable prices, the climate benefits of electric cars are growing.

Report by the International Renewable Energy Agency shows large increase in number of people employed in renewable energy sectors.

The move to decarbonisation will benefit from the rising price of fossil fueled, grid delivered electricity because higher prices will encourage investment in efficiency and lower consumption ,and incentivise alternatives such as distributed renewables.

Is the rise of subsidized clean energy causing power markets to misfire?