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Written submissions to the independent review of Commonwealth Marine Reserves open today. The co-Chairs of the Bioregional Advisory Panels, Professor Colin Buxton and Mr Peter Cochrane invite interested parties to provide them with ideas and suggestions on how marine reserves should be managed into the future.

The Australian Government has commenced a water purchase tender for the southern New South Wales catchments of Lower Darling, Murray and Murrumbidgee, closing at 5pm AEST on Friday, 10 April 2015.

Every time you enter the ocean, anywhere on Earth with a temperate or subtropical climate, you cross into the domain of the great white shark. But almost everything the average human thinks he or she knows about these sharks – other than the fact that they are big and dangerous – is wrong. We unpick 10 of the most tenacious myths

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Round Five is now open for applications and will close 4pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time), 19 March 2015.

Nominations are now invited for the assessment period starting 1 October 2015, for any threatened species, threatened ecological communities or key threatening processes to be considered for listing under national environment law. Nominations...

SENG National Newsletter - November 2014

See information on Australia’s emissions compared with the United States and China.

See information on Australia’s emissions compared with the United States and China.

Over 50 companies, including Samsung, Dell, Sky and B&Q, have signed up to UK government-backed plan to refurbish and resell unwanted electrical goods

Consumers will be urged to trade in their unwanted electrical gadgets at retailers in return for cash – with the products to be refurbished and resold – as part of a national initiative unveiled on Tuesday.

The government-backed plan to improve the disposal of electric waste is supported by 51 companies and organisations including Samsung, Dell, Sky, B&Q, and the owner of Argos and Homebase.

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The Collaborative Australian Protected Area Database (CAPAD) is used to provide a national perspective of the conservation of biodiversity in protected areas.

On Tuesday, the Senate will vote to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. With Republicans now in control of both chambers in Congress, here’s a round-up of some of the most prominent climate sceptics (and deniers) in the GOP

It’s much easier to list Republicans in Congress who think climate change is real than it is to list Republicans who don’t, because there are so few members of the former group. Earlier this year, Politifact went looking for congressional Republicans who had not expressed scepticism about climate change and came up with a list of eight (out of 278).

But with the GOP taking over the Senate next year – and with the Senate set to vote on approving the Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday – the question again arises of what, exactly, prominent Republicans think about the evidence that humans are changing the climate.

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Information is sought by the Associated Press as part of an investigation into deaths of protected species at Pacificorp facilities and the government’s reluctance to prosecute

A company that operates at least 13 wind-energy facilities across three states is suing in federal court to block the US government from releasing information to the Associated Press about how many birds are found dead at its facilities.

Pacificorp of Portland, Oregon, is seeking an injunction in US district court in Utah to prevent the Interior Department from releasing information it considers confidential. The Obama administration has said it planned to turn over the material to the Associated Press, which sought it from the Interior Department in March 2013 under the US Freedom of Information Act. The government concluded that the industry’s concerns were “insufficiently convincing” to keep the files secret.

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Additional funding secured by the Threatened Species Commissioner means 10 innovative projects targeting key species, habitat and threats across the Parks Australia network now have the go-ahead.

The Minister has recently agreed to amend the list of threatened species, under section 178 of the Act, by including, transferring or deleting eleven bird species/subspecies.

Media release - A new five year monitoring plan for the Murray-Darling Basin announced today by the Commonwealth Government will provide unprecedented knowledge into the effectiveness of environmental watering.

November seminar - Personalised Rapid Transport: A New Sustainable Public Transport System

China and the US have agreed a historic deal to cut carbon emissions – but both countries are still huge consumers and producers of coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Drag the slider below to see how coal use has changed in the past few decades – and click the ‘future’ button to see what’s to come. Data: EIA

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RSPB described killing of 11 birds of prey by Allen Lambert at Stody estate in Norfolk as worst case ever detected in England

A judge has warned Britain’s rural aristocracy that they must take responsibility for the actions of their employees after a gamekeeper was sentenced for poisoning birds of prey.

The RSPB described the killing of 11 birds of prey by Allen Lambert, former gamekeeper at the Stody estate near Holt in Norfolk, as the worst case of bird poisoning ever detected in England.

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UN body’s warning on carbon emissions is hard to ignore, but breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry won’t be easy

At this point, the scientists who run the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must feel like it’s time to trade their satellites, their carefully calibrated thermometers and spectrometers, their finely tuned computer models – all of them for a thesaurus. Surely, somewhere, there must be words that will prompt the world’s leaders to act.

This week, with the release of their new synthesis report, they are trying the words “severe, widespread, and irreversible” to describe the effects of climate change – which for scientists, conservative by nature, falls just short of announcing that climate change will produce a zombie apocalypse plus random beheadings plus Ebola. It’s hard to imagine how they will up the language in time for the next big global confab in Paris.

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Report says logging and burning of Amazon might be connected to worsening droughts – such as the one plaguing São Paulo

The Amazon rainforest has degraded to the point where it is losing its ability to benignly regulate weather systems, according to a stark new warning from one of Brazil’s leading scientists.

In a new report, Antonio Nobre, researcher in the government’s space institute, Earth System Science Centre, says the logging and burning of the world’s greatest forest might be connected to worsening droughts – such as the one currently plaguing São Paulo – and is likely to lead eventually to more extreme weather events.

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