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Poaching, illegal logging and fishing are threatening some of the world's most iconic natural heritage sites.

As the cost of solar, storage and wind continue to fall, the pressure on utility business models and their so-called "parenting advantage" will increase significantly.

Conservation charity warns that almost half of world heritage sites designated for importance to nature are at risk

Almost half of the Unesco world heritage sites designated for their importance to nature are threatened by the illegal wildlife trade, a WWF report has said.

Poaching, illegal logging and fishing, and the trafficking of rare species are plaguing 45% of the world’s most precious natural areas, the report from the conservation charity said.

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Gas producers have been re-called to Canberra tomorrow for more talks on the looming supply crisis.

Has carbon capture and storage been tarnished by its association with the coal industry? Peabody Energy/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Since the February blackouts in South Australia, the Australian government has increased its interest in carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS). However, in Australia and elsewhere, CCS is closely associated to so-called “clean coal” technologies. The media sometimes treats them as one and the same thing.

Given the negativity with which the general public, and expert commentators view “clean coal”, this confusion is distracting attention from other sectors where CCS can make a unique and substantial contribution.

CCS is vital for “clean coal”. Even the most efficient coal-fired power plants emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Unless these emissions are captured and stored in rock formations thanks to CCS, meeting climate targets with coal power is impossible.

But here’s the thing: carbon dioxide can be captured from any large-scale source. This means that CCS has a valuable role to play in other industrial sectors – as long as clean coal’s bad reputation doesn’t drag CCS down with it.

Other industries

About half of the global potential for CCS by 2050 has been estimated to lie in industry. Some sectors like synthetic fuels and hydrogen production may not grow as predicted. But others such as cement, steel and ammonia, are here to stay.

Several recent UK reports on industrial decarbonisation argue that CCS brings emissions reductions beyond the 50% needed by 2050 required in most sectors and countries.

For cement in the UK, the report argues, efficiency and other measures could deliver a roughly 20% emissions reduction by 2050. But adding CCS could bring this figure to 54%.

Meanwhile, the British steel industry could cut emission reductions by 60% compared to 34% without CCS. For UK chemical manufacturers, these figures are 78.8% versus 34%. These processes often produce a high-purity stream of carbon dioxide that avoids the costly capture methods used for power applications.

So why aren’t industries like these the stars of carbon capture and storage right now?

Money and hype

Unlike the power sector, which is under pressure to reduce emissions, other high-carbon industries currently have little incentive to pay the estimated cost of US$50-150 per tonne of carbon dioxide captured. Carbon pricing has been hard to introduce even far below such levels.

However, if CCS is to be deployed by mid-century, concept demonstration and confirmation of suitable storage sites needs to start now, and on a wide enough scale to deliver useful emissions cuts. Other strategies may be needed to incentivise it.

CCS was first mooted in 1976, but it only caught world leaders’ attention in the mid-2000s. However, over the past decade its popularity seems to have waned, perhaps because of the “clean coal” issue.

In 2005, WWF joined Europe’s CCS platform, and the following year the environmentalist George Monbiot described the technology as crucial.

But over the ensuing ten years, as a “hype process” around CCS for clean coal developed, industrial CCS was largely ignored. At its peak in 2007, proponents announced some 39 CCS power projects, most of them coal-fired, aiming to capture an average per project of 2.2 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide per year.

Yet by early 2017, only two large-scale power projects have been completed around the world: Boundary Dam, capturing 1Mt per year, and Petra Nova, capturing 1.4Mt per year.

Number of carbon capture and storage projects by type since first concept. Mature refers to projects in sectors in which capture is routinely commercial, such as in natural gas processing. Immature refers to projects in sectors where capture is not the norm, including power generation, steelmaking, and certain chemicals. The share of power generation projects among immature is highlighted.

Cynicism around the technology has grown, with the Australia-founded Global CCS Institute recently being described as a “coal lobby group”. Unfortunately for CCS, the focus has been mostly on the gap between announced and successful “clean coal” projects, rather than on its contribution to industrial emissions reduction.

Last year, Emirates Steel Industries completed its steelmaking CCS project, which now captures 0.8Mt of CO₂ per year.

Australia will soon be host to the world’s largest CCS development, at the Gorgon LNG Project, which will store 4Mt a year from 2018.

Steel, gas-produced ammonia and other industrial products will be fixtures of the 21st century, whereas coal-fired electricity has no such certainty. Economies that aspire to 100% renewable energy will have no room at all for coal, “clean” or otherwise.

Even if our electricity and transport were to become 100% renewables-based, there will be parts of the economy where greenhouse emissions are hard to eliminate. It is important that the unpopularity of “clean coal” does not distract from the importance of CCS in decarbonising other industries.

Alfonso Martínez Arranz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Humans are changing Earth’s climate at an alarmingly fast rate

A new study published in Nature Communications looks at changes in solar activity and carbon dioxide levels over the past 420 million years. The authors found that on our current path, by mid-century humans will be causing the fastest climate change in approximately 50 million years, and if we burn all available fossil fuels, we’ll cause the fastest change in the entire 420 million year record.

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Seventeen-year-old in critical condition after being mauled at Kelp Beds, near Wylie Bay in Esperance

A 17-year-old girl has been attacked by a shark in Western Australia’s south.

Monday’s attack happened at Kelp Beds, near Wylie Bay in Esperance just before 4pm, police said.

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The federal resources Minister Matt Canavan defends the argued benefits of Adani's Carmichael project.

Paul Kingsnorth complements his fiction with a selection of thought-provoking essays

Fancy ripping out your plumbed-in lavatory and replacing it with a bucket, some pine needles and sawdust? This is Paul Kingsnorth’s new environmentalism: less concerned with arguing for grand political gestures that won’t prevent Earth’s “sixth mass extinction” in any case, rather, arguing for small change in the immediate world around us. Last year, Kingsnorth published the second instalment of his earthily brilliant Buckmaster fictional trilogy and Confessions is akin to its nonfiction companion: a collection of essays that often act as both a paean to a landscape we are losing and a mournful realisation that little that can be done about it now. The title piece is Kingsnorth at his best, a tremendous combination of the personal and the political. His views on the past and future of environmentalism are perhaps over-rehearsed over the course of a book, but taken as a collection to dip into rather than read from cover to cover, there’s plenty to enjoy, learn from and even inspire.

• Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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Authors of Can Clean Air Make You Happy? say exposure to nitrogen dioxide can be as damaging as ‘big-hitting’ life events

The effect on wellbeing of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, a gas mostly produced in diesel fumes, is comparable to the toll from losing a job, ending a relationship or the death of a partner, research suggests.

The study found a “significant and negative association” between life satisfaction and levels of the pollutant, which causes lung problems. These effects were “substantive and comparable to that of many ‘big-hitting’ life events,” according to the researchers behind Can Clean Air Make You Happy?.

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Afon Rheidol When I reached the Rheidol falls it was clear that the river was in spate from the recent rains

A narrow-gauge steam railway winds across the steep southern side of the Rheidol valley, slowly climbing the route from Aberystwyth to Devil’s Bridge. While walking deep in the valley beside the river, I was convinced I could hear the train coming and hurried out of the trees to see it pass. The noise persisted, drifting in and out of my hearing as though the engine were rounding the rocky spurs and disappearing into wooded side valleys, yet no train appeared.

Slowly, awkwardly, I realised that the sound was that of the low set of waterfalls further up the valley, distorted and modulated by the strong east wind that was straining the still bare branches of the trees. When I reached the Rheidol falls, having taken the sloping path from just beyond the old chapel, it was clear that the river was in spate from the recent rains, with substantial volumes of water pouring over and between the rocks.

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Work has now started on a new super-sewer that's big enough to deal with London's waste.

Trees cover almost a third of the earth's surface, but, every year, more than four million hectares of forested land are lost.

On a cold day on Cairn Gorm there was little to occupy the attention – until the appearance of a ring ouzel signalled the return of spring

Go-back, go-back, go-back! A red grouse was calling just above the car park, at the bottom of the path to the summit of Cairn Gorm. For a moment I was tempted to heed his advice and retreat to the nearby café.

But my children were uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the idea of walking up the mountainside; buoyed, no doubt, by the prospect of playing in the snow. And so we headed up the path.

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More people than ever are coming to see the reef and those who make a living showing it off want the world to know it’s still a natural wonder. But they worry about its future, and that of their 64,000-strong industry

In the dark clouds gathering over the future of the Great Barrier Reef, there has been a small silver lining for the people who make their living showcasing the natural wonder.

When the reef was rocked by an unprecedented second mass bleaching event in the space of a year, the coral hardest-hit by heat stress lay mostly in the tourist-heavy latitudes between Cairns and Townsville.

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Around 250 million years ago, life on Earth nearly came to an end, in a mass extinction between the Permian and Triassic periods known as the Great Dying. Some 90% of the species in the oceans and 70% of vertebrate families on land were killed, and the great marine life experiment of the Palaeozoic era was brought to a halt.

What does this have to do with nickel? Well, as part of my recent work as a mining geologist, which involves studying the world’s most valuable nickel ore deposits in Siberia, I uncovered evidence of a link between ore genesis – how the nickel got there – and the onset of the Great Dying. These results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It was an exceedingly strange world 250 million years ago, and finding the culprits for the world’s worst mass extinction is like putting together a puzzle.

Earth, fire, water

This catastrophic episode was triggered by several different events, which in turn killed the world’s species in different ways: declining oxygen levels in the ocean, massively rising temperatures, and a possible meteor impact.

One of these trigger events involved a major jolt to the carbon cycle, which had dramatic climate effects. Some scientists think the temperature of the upper level of the world’s oceans and rivers increased from 21℃ to 38℃ in the late Smithian era (250.7 million years ago).

This shift in the carbon cycle has been attributed to a major burst of activity of deep marine colonies of Archaea methanosarcina, relatives of bacteria. These colonies had acquired a new way of getting energy from their environment. In much the same way as human bodies get energy from food, producing carbon dioxide in the process, these organisms got energy from transforming organic carbon into methane.

The archaea colonies were normally limited by the amount of nickel in the oceans, but for some reason, 250 million years ago, nickel seems to have been in abundant supply compared with today.

At the same time as the Great Dying, in an area on Earth that we now call Siberia, an astronomical amount of lava generated in the guts of the Earth erupted over an area the size of Europe. This province is the host to the Noril’sk ore deposits, the Earth’s most valuable source of mined nickel.

Scientists previously thought that nickel released into the atmosphere could explain the glut of marine nickel 250 million years ago. But how could nickel get into the air? This is where our work comes in.

Volcanoes and champagne

Let’s take a step back: how do nickel ore deposits form from molten rock (or magma)? Magma rich in nickel needs to come all the way to shallow depths beneath volcanoes, where it becomes enriched with sulfur, and forms liquid sulfide droplets.

The volcanic plumbing system then acts as a smelter. The sulfide liquid droplets scrub the nickel out of the magma. Ore deposits form when the sulphide droplets finally sink and accumulate at the bottom of the magma under the volcanoes. The nickel never reaches the surface – making it hard to explain how so much nickel got into the atmosphere.

A previous paper by our group showed that when liquid sulfide droplets and gas bubbles form together in the same magma they have a strong tendency to stick together. So, if there is a gas present, sulfide droplets can rise to the top of the magma chambers, taking the metals with them.

In a big eruption, like the one that produced the Siberian lava, the pressure drops, and it’s like opening a bottle of champagne. A swarm of bubbles forms and floats to the top. The liquid sulfide droplets hitch a ride like baskets beneath hot air balloons.

We think that this “bubble riding” is how nickel got from the bottom of the Noril’sk magma all the way to the surface and into volcanic gases and aerosols.

During our recent studies of the Noril’sk nickel ores, we found the smoking gun: we used 2D and 3D X-ray imaging to show nickel-rich sulfide droplets physically attached to former gas bubbles, frozen in the ore.

We combined this observation with simple thermodynamic models to show that this transport mechanism greatly increases the amount of nickel content in volcanic aerosols.

The perils of methane

The Noril’sk nickel deposits are unique. They are the only known place where nickel had a direct path to the atmosphere. Explosive eruptions helped to release colossal amounts of gas into the air.

During these massive gas episodes, our sulfide-carrying champagne bubbles transported large amount of nickel and tipped it into the atmosphere to feed the blooming archaea, playing an important role in the Great Dying.

The Noril'sk ores formed in a freak event, but if the broader hypothesis is correct they hold a lesson for life on Earth: release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere at enormous peril.

Under normal circumstances, volcanic eruptions are a relatively minor source of methane in the atmosphere, but lethal time bombs exist in methane frozen into permafrost, much of it, coincidentally, to be found in the tundra wastelands covering the Siberian lava fields. Here, melting of the permafrost releases bubbles of methane into the atmosphere, creating a climate changing feedback loop – to potentially devastating effect.

Margaux Le Vaillant would like to acknowledge the contribution of Steve Barnes, James Mungall and Emma Mungall.

Margaux Le Vaillant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Celebrities and pressure groups warn UK prime minister against entering into ‘environmental race to the bottom’ to secure post-Brexit trade deals

Leading environmental campaigners have warned the government against scaling back on commitments to tackle climate change and end the illegal market in wildlife in order to secure post-Brexit trade deals.

Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and high-profile figures including Andy Murray and Will Young are among those who have signed a joint letter to the prime minister urging Theresa May not to engage in an “environmental race to the bottom” after withdrawal from the EU.

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Researchers estimate there are 150,000 urban foxes in England, with Bournemouth having the highest concentration

The number of urban foxes in England has quadrupled in the past 20 years, according to a study that estimates there are nearly 150,000 in England, or about one for every 300 urban residents.

While the number of foxes is declining overall in the UK, the study by Brighton and Reading universities has found that Bournemouth tops the charts with the highest concentration of urban foxes in the UK at 23 per square kilometre.

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Around 13% of cache of ice cylinders extracted from glaciers in Canadian Arctic exposed to high heat in new storage facility at University of Alberta

Within them sits some 80,000 years of history, offering researchers tantalising clues about climate change and the Earth’s past. At least that was the case – until the precious cache of Arctic ice cores was hit by warming temperatures.

A freezer malfunction at the University of Alberta in Edmonton has melted part of the world’s largest collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic, reducing some of the ancient ice into puddles.

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Environmentalists urge the UK not to water down laws on climate change and wildlife after Brexit.