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Tasmanian salmon farmer Tassal is promising to create a 'flagship site' for aquaculture in Tasmania's Okehampton Bay, after getting the Federal go ahead for the project yesterday.

Eighty new climate research positions are needed to better predict future climate variability and risk, says the Australian Academy of Science.

If the allegations of water theft reported last week by the ABC’s Four Corners are accurate, they reveal a fundamental failing in the integrity of the system that records water use in the Murray-Darling Basin.

We have a suggestion that could help to restore trust that water users are not abusing the rights granted by their water entitlements and jeopardising the Murray-Darling Basin Plan by taking more than their fair share.

Instead of the current system in which state governments monitor consumption via water meters, we suggest that water users should instead have to fill in an annual “water return” – akin to tax returns – to account for their water use, which could be efficiently verified using technology such as satellite imagery.

Read more: Is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan broken?

These water returns could be randomly audited using satellite imaging and other spatial data, to reveal the (hopefully few) cases in which actual water use does not appear to be consistent with the user’s declaration. This would highlight places where more water than reported has been used – for instance, where the amount of crop grown is inconsistent with declared water use, or where the amount of water in storage exceeds what the returns indicate. Once these disparities come to light, they could then be investigated.

Time-series observations could also provide a dynamic, ongoing assessment of the credibility of water use declarations, helping to reveal over time the properties and regions with unusual patterns of water use.

An advanced approach might use blockchain reporting systems to improve the integrity and transparency of the data, ensuring that the water licence holder, the state-based regulator, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the spatial data manager (perhaps the Bureau of Meteorology) are all accessing the same data in the same time frame. This could help to overcome the current ambiguity about who is responsible for the integrity of implementation of the Basin Plan, which has been exposed by the responses to the ABC report.

Integrity and trust

A viable water market depends on integrity. If people lose confidence in the system, they are more likely to cheat. This in turn erodes public confidence that licence-holders can be trusted to hold private water extraction rights of an important resource that remains publicly owned and managed (within a system that bestows private rights to extract and use water).

This requires a system of oversight that can minimise the risk of water fraud or theft. Confidence in the current system is not likely to be reinstated by reviews and inquiries. Trust will only be restored when individual water users are genuinely accountable for their actions.

Regulating water use across the vast Murray-Darling Basin is hard. There are tens of thousands of irrigators, holding many kinds of water licences, collecting water in all sorts of ways: from surface flows, groundwater, river extraction, and flood plain harvesting.

Irrigators can buy, lease or borrow water. Under the existing water market, the right to extract water can be flexible in time and location. There are questions about the capacity of public agencies, including the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, to supervise such a complex system effectively, given limited manpower and funds and the high costs of supervision under cumbersome metering and compliance arrangements.

Under the Water Act 2007 and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, water extractions are legally restricted to a “sustainable diversion limit”. But determining and enforcing this limit, which can vary according to water availability, requires reliable data and accountability.

The distrust between Murray-Darling Basin states has been made worse by a lack of transparency. States have signed up to the National Water Initiative but it is proving difficult to ensure that all water users are complying with tighter arrangements for controlling water allocations.

Our suggested system of annual water-use declarations, verified using satellite data, would provide this transparency because it could work at a range of scales, from individual farms right up to the entire Murray-Darling Basin.

Licence-holders, public agencies and communities all need reliable information. The evidence of what a licence-holder claims to have extracted needs to be unambiguous and verifiable, preferably using random audits that are fast and inexpensive. The system needs to be designed so that fraud can be detected and controlled efficiently.

How it would work

Similar to a tax return or statutory declaration, the user would be legally responsible for the accuracy of their annual water statement. Random audits comparing declarations with information from telemetry and satellite imagery would provide the integrity checks.

Satellite imagery can pick up detailed information on areas watered and crop types, as well as channel flows and storage levels, which could verify the information provided in an annual water return. Where the licence holder uses methods that limit this oversight (for example, piped flows and covered storage), they would be required to install other technology to enable random audit. Water users who use more observable traditional methods would not have to incur this cost, as this would not be needed.

The great majority of irrigators with whom we have worked are careful and responsible about their water use, with an abiding concern for river health and sustainable water management. No one, including us, wants to burden responsible farmers with extra red tape. An annual declaration for someone who already meters and records their water use should not be an onerous task.

The oversight costs should be reduced by the use of technology. The Bureau of Metereorology already has a role in the Basin Plan, and has expertise in satellite data. Geoscience Australia has already trialled satellite-based vegetation analysis with the Murray-Darling Basin Vegetation Monitoring Project. Many of the elements of what is needed are already available.

We need a system that reinstates trust in the integrity of water resource management. Ambitious policies and large-scale plans often fail or lead to counterproductive consequences because of the “devil in the detail”. Designing elegant, cost-effective regulation is a 21st-century challenge that can be met using a combination of old tools (legally binding declarations) and new technologies (satellite audits).

The alternative is an ongoing breakdown in trust, and with it the health of the Murray-Darling river system itself.

Jason Alexandra has received paid consulting work from numerous government agencies including Catchment Management Boards agencies responsible for natural resources policies. He has no active contracts relevant to this article.

Paul Martin has received funding from the MDBA to review parts of the Basin Plan, and CRC funding for irrigation research. He is a member of the Australian Panel of Experts on Environmental Law, which has previously made recommendations about water management.

Solar has become the world’s favourite new type of electricity generation, according to global data showing that more solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity is being installed than any other generation technology.

Worldwide, some 73 gigawatts of net new solar PV capacity was installed in 2016. Wind energy came in second place (55GW), with coal relegated to third (52GW), followed by gas (37GW) and hydro (28GW).

Together, PV and wind represent 5.5% of current energy generation (as at the end of 2016), but crucially they constituted almost half of all net new generation capacity installed worldwide during last year.

It is probable that construction of new coal power stations will decline, possibly quite rapidly, because PV and wind are now cost-competitive almost everywhere.

Hydro is still important in developing countries that still have rivers to dam. Meanwhile, other low-emission technologies such as nuclear, bio-energy, solar thermal and geothermal have small market shares.

PV and wind now have such large advantages in terms of cost, production scale and supply chains that it is difficult to see any other low-emissions technology challenging them within the next decade or so.

That is certainly the case in Australia, where PV and wind comprise virtually all new generation capacity, and where solar PV capacity is set to reach 12GW by 2020. Wind and solar PV are being installed at a combined rate of about 3GW per year, driven largely by the federal government’s Renewable Energy Target (RET).

This is double to triple the rate of recent years, and a welcome return to growth after several years of subdued activity due to political uncertainty over the RET.

If this rate is maintained, then by 2030 more than half of Australian electricity will come from renewable energy and Australia will have met its pledge under the Paris climate agreement purely through emissions savings within the electricity industry.

To take the idea further, if Australia were to double the current combined PV and wind installation rate to 6GW per year, it would reach 100% renewable electricity in about 2033. Modelling by my research group suggests that this would not be difficult, given that these technologies are now cheaper than electricity from new-build coal and gas.

Renewable future in reach

The prescription for an affordable, stable and achievable 100% renewable electricity grid is relatively straightforward:

1. Use mainly PV and wind. These technologies are cheaper than other low-emission technologies, and Australia has plenty of sunshine and wind, which is why these technologies have already been widely deployed. This means that, compared with other renewables, they have more reliable price projections, and avoid the need for heroic assumptions about the success of more speculative clean energy options.

2. Distribute generation over a very large area. Spreading wind and PV facilities over wide areas – say a million square kilometres from north Queensland to Tasmania – allows access to a wide range of different weather, and also helps to smooth out peaks in users’ demand.

3. Build interconnectors. Link up the wide-ranging network of PV and wind with high-voltage power lines of the type already used to move electricity between states.

4. Add storage. Storage can help match up energy generation with demand patterns. The cheapest option is pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), with support from batteries and demand management.

Australia currently has three PHES systems – Tumut 3, Kangaroo Valley, and Wivenhoe – all of which are on rivers. But there is a vast number of potential off-river sites.

Potential sites for pumped hydro storage in Queensland, alongside development sites for solar PV (yellow) and wind energy (green). Galilee Basin coal prospects are shown in black. Andrew Blakers/Margaret Blakers, Author provided

In a project funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, we have identified about 5,000 sites in South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, the Canberra district, and the Alice Springs district that are potentially suitable for pumped hydro storage.

Each of these sites has between 7 and 1,000 times the storage potential of the Tesla battery currently being installed to support the South Australian grid. What’s more, pumped hydro has a lifetime of 50 years, compared with 8-15 years for batteries.

Importantly, most of the prospective PHES sites are located near where people live and where new PV and wind farms are being constructed.

Once the search for sites in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia is complete, we expect to uncover 70-100 times more PHES energy storage potential than required to support a 100% renewable electricity grid in Australia.

Potential PHES upper reservoir sites east of Port Augusta, South Australia. The lower reservoirs would be at the western foot of the hills (bottom of the image). Google Earth/ANU Managing the grid

Fossil fuel generators currently provide another service to the grid, besides just generating electricity. They help to balance supply and demand, on timescales down to seconds, through the “inertial energy” stored in their heavy spinning generators.

But in the future this service can be performed by similar generators used in pumped hydro systems. And supply and demand can also be matched with the help of fast-response batteries, demand management, and “synthetic inertia” from PV and wind farms.

Wind and PV are delivering ever tougher competition for gas throughout the energy market. The price of large-scale wind and PV in 2016 was A$65-78 per megawatt hour. This is below the current wholesale price of electricity in the National Electricity Market.

Abundant anecdotal evidence suggests that wind and PV energy price has fallen to A$60-70 per MWh this year as the industry takes off. Prices are likely to dip below A$50 per MWh within a few years, to match current international benchmark prices. Thus, the net cost of moving to a 100% renewable electricity system over the next 15 years is zero compared with continuing to build and maintain facilities for the current fossil-fuelled system.

Gas can no longer compete with wind and PV for delivery of electricity. Electric heat pumps are driving gas out of water and space heating. Even for delivery of high-temperature heat for industry, gas must cost less than A$10 per gigajoule to compete with electric furnaces powered by wind and PV power costing A$50 per MWh.

Importantly, the more that low-cost PV and wind is deployed in the current high-cost electricity environment, the more they will reduce prices.

Then there is the issue of other types of energy use besides electricity – such as transport, heating, and industry. The cheapest way to make these energy sources green is to electrify virtually everything, and then plug them into an electricity grid powered by renewables.

A 55% reduction in Australian greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved by conversion of the electricity grid to renewables, together with mass adoption of electric vehicles for land transport and electric heat pumps for heating and cooling. Beyond this, we can develop renewable electric-driven pathways to manufacture hydrocarbon-based fuels and chemicals, primarily through electrolysis of water to obtain hydrogen and carbon capture from the atmosphere, to achieve an 83% reduction in emissions (with the residual 17% of emissions coming mainly from agriculture and land clearing).

Doing all of this would mean tripling the amount of electricity we produce, according to my research group’s preliminary estimate.

But there is no shortage of solar and wind energy to achieve this, and prices are rapidly falling. We can build a clean energy future at modest cost if we want to.

Andrew Blakers receives funding from The Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Australian Research Council and similar sources.

By 2100, millions of people could face a lethal threat from heat and humidity driven by global warming.

If warming is not tackled, levels of humid heat that can kill within hours will affect millions across south Asia within decades, analysis finds

Extreme heatwaves that kill even healthy people within hours will strike parts of the Indian subcontinent unless global carbon emissions are cut sharply and soon, according to new research.

Even outside of these hotspots, three-quarters of the 1.7bn population – particularly those farming in the Ganges and Indus valleys – will be exposed to a level of humid heat classed as posing “extreme danger” towards the end of the century.

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Researchers have discovered a new global threat to pollination - artificial light at night.

The technique could prevent deadly diseases being passed down the generations.

The BBC's Claire Marshall travels more than 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle to meet the Inupiat, who call the ocean their "garden".

Climate science workforce needs to grow by 77 positions over the next four years, according to report prompted by CSIRO redundancies

Australia has a critical shortage of climate scientists, leaving it at serious risk of not delivering essential climate and weather services to groups like farmers, coastal communities and international organisations, a report has found.

The report into the nation’s climate science capability by the Australian Academy of Science found the climate science workforce needed to grow by 77 full-time positions over the next four years, with 27 of those positions urgently required.

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Council apologises for ‘serious errors’ in air quality readings over three years and says it is reviewing planning applications

A local authority has admitted its air pollution data was deliberately manipulated for three years to make it look cleaner.

Cheshire East council apologised after “serious errors” were made in air quality readings from 2012 to 2014.

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Lancashire wildlife expert says infected insects go on "death march" like a "zombie horror film".

Two recently fledged night herons have been seen at Westhay Moor nature reserve, Somerset, which suspects climate change drew their parents north

Night herons are among the most mysterious of birds, and for the first time in recorded history they have been spotted breeding in the UK.

Long-distance photographs captured the adult pair and one of their two offspring at the Westhay Moor national nature reserve, run by Somerset Wildlife Trust. The young birds have recently fledged, having been born either on Westhay Moor or the nearby Avalon Marshes.

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Video from Dr Greg Skomal shows the moment a curious white shark took a GoPro camera in its mouth. The fish, seen off the Monomoy national wildlife refuge in Massachusetts on Monday, is believed to have been 12ft (3.6 metres) long. Skomal works for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy

• Watch the video on the AWSC’s social media
  

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Animals across the globe are struggling to survive the perils of the Anthropocene era. Writer and environmental campaigner Ceri Levy introduces the much-loved artist’s portraits of these embattled beasts

• Buy Critical Critters at the Guardian Bookshop
• An exhibition of Ralph Steadman’s signed prints from the book will run at the Goldmark Gallery from 2 September
• Ralph Steadman, Ceri Levy and poems about climate change – books podcast

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Researcher says emissions from fracking in the basin could be ‘far bigger than everything you’d get’ from the proposed Queensland mine

Fracking the McArthur basin could release four to five times as much greenhouse gas emissions as the proposed Adani Carmichael mine, a leading researcher has said.

Tim Forcey, a chemical engineer with 30 years experience in the petrochemicals industry, appeared before a Northern Territory inquiry on Wednesday, also giving evidence that a gas shortage on the east coast was highly unlikely.

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Ski resort of Alta Badia enters the craze for cycling sportives allowing amateurs to experience closed-roads settings

A ski resort in Italy is experimenting with closing sections of its mountain roads in an effort to become a mecca for road cyclists during the summer season.

Alta Badia in the Italian Dolomites has hosted three “bike only” days this summer to boost its cyclo-tourism credentials and capitalise on the trend for closed-roads sportives.

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ClimateWorks urges Australia to go further and quicker on vehicle emissions standards, because the cost savings and health benefits to consumers will be even greater, while AGL says EVs can help transition to a decarbonised grid.

Donald Trump has achieved something that Tony Abbott tried and failed to do – the complete elimination of an agency funding clean energy research.

Conergy says acquisition by US-based funds including Goldman Sachs will strengthen its big solar and battery storage development in Australia and Asia-Pacific.