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Why the Guardian is spending a year reporting on the plight of elephants
Elephant herds face an uncertain future – over the next year we’ll be taking a closer look at what can be done to help
Welcome to the elephant conservation hub. Over the next year, with the support of Vulcan, Guardian journalists will be taking a closer look at the situation of elephant herds around the world.
Elephant conservation has been a particular focus for Vulcan, a private company set up by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to look for solutions to problems like endangered species, climate change and ocean health. The future of this particular species is precariously balanced. Although in some areas (a very few) elephant herds are expanding and thriving, the overall picture is one of decline, with falls of as much as 60% in elephant population in countries such as Tanzania.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
A basking shark, panda cub and Finland’s bears and wolves are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...Grouse shooting's rich, influential backers join forces to fire on critics
Supporters are trying to improve sport’s reputation through a campaign group with no members that is funded anonymously
With the Glorious Twelfth, the 2016 grouse season is under way – and the first birds will be served up in many a country house on Friday night. But after raising a glass to the late Duke of Westminster, who owned a vast acreage of grouse moorland, the shooters may also toast a colourful and remarkably influential group of people trying to improve the tarnished reputation of their sport.
They include the retired cricketer Sir Ian Botham, a billionaire hedge fund owner who houses his chickens in a coop that supposedly cost £150,000, and a lobbyist who boasts of his role advising a Russian oligarch.
Continue reading...NZ scientists track penguins' marathon winter travels
Club owned by Shell blocks small Thames hydropower scheme
Club succeeds with an appeal to stop planning permission for the west London project that would power 600 homes
A proposed small hydropower project in west London has received a further setback, as court judges allowed an appeal by a club owned by Shell against the granting of planning permission to the site.
The project, at Teddington lock and weirs, would deliver enough electricity to power about 600 homes. It is proposed by a local cooperative group, run by volunteers, who have raised a potential £700,000 to build the plant, which the proponents say would not have any damaging effect on fish in the Thames or other local wildlife.
Continue reading...Hundreds of tiny Montserrat tarantulas hatch in zoo
Chester Zoo breeds Montserrat tarantulas in world first
Chris Packham and Ian Botham clash over grouse-shooting ban – audio
Wildlife presenter Chris Packham is called an extremist by former England cricketer Sir Ian Botham as they clash over a grouse-shooting ban on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Botham accuses Packham of using his position at the BBC to promote his views
Continue reading...Time-lapse footage of Perseid meteor shower
Chris Packham using BBC role to push grouse-shooting ban, Ian Botham says
Wildlife presenter accused of extremism in clash with former England cricketer as grouse-shooting season begins
The former England cricketer Sir Ian Botham has accused wildlife presenter Chris Packham of being an extremist and using his position at the BBC to promote his views on restricting grouse shooting.
The pair clashed in a joint interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on the opening day of the grouse-shooting season, – or the “inglorious twelfth” as Packham called it.
Continue reading...Tasmania rules out halving 'insurance population' of disease-free devils
About 600 Tasmanian devils untouched by facial tumour disease will stay in sanctuaries as insurance against animals in the wild becoming extinct
A controversial proposal to halve the insurance population of disease-free Tasmanian devils has been scrapped.
But the state government said it would continue to support the staged release of some of the animals as part of a vaccine-testing program.
Continue reading...People power is the secret to reliable, clean energy
Australia will likely have to close more coal power stations to meet climate targets Coal power image from www.shutterstock.comAustralia’s energy watchdog, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), has issued a stark warning: more wind and solar power will demand new approaches to avoid interruptions to electricity supply.
In its annual Electricity Statement of Opportunities, released this week, AEMO indicated that the overall outlook for reliability has improved. So far, so good.
However, South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales are potentially at greater risk of interruptions within ten years if the current trend of shutting down old coal-fired power stations accelerates, as we can expect from Australia’s efforts to meet national and international climate targets.
AEMO projections of supply
2016 AEMO Electricity Statement of Opportunities
The threat of power blackouts is reliable headline fodder as seen in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review. But the solution to this very real challenge is not to cling to ageing fossil fuel power stations.
Rather, as AEMO Chief Operating Officer Mike Cleary put it:
possible solutions could include an increased interconnection across [the electricity market], battery storage, and demand side management services.
While there is much excitement about battery technology, it is the oft-forgotten human dimension that offers the greatest potential. We consumers, the so-called “demand side” of the market, can play a crucial role in reducing the strain on the electricity network, which will in turn make for more reliable power.
The biggest variability that the electricity sector has to contend with is not intermittent solar or wind generation output, but the ups and downs of power demand.
People powerHelping business and household consumers manage their demand for power (or “demand management”) is a win-win scenario – lower costs for electricity and a stronger electricity system. Demand management and energy efficiency are key elements in lifting Australia’s energy productivity. Lifting energy productivity means we do not need to slow down the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Research from the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) that supported GetUp!’s Homegrown Power Plan highlights that we can not only retire coal power to achieve our climate targets, but also shift entirely to 100% renewable electricity generation by 2030.
However, to do this affordably we need to get smarter about saving energy and supporting the grid. GetUp!’s plan factored in a target to double Australia’s energy productivity by 2030, as advocated by the Australian Alliance to Save Energy and ClimateWorks.
Despite the potential, neither AEMO nor any other institution is tasked with assessing demand management opportunities that will strengthen the network and promote renewables. Work is needed to understand this demand-side opportunity, just as AEMO’s latest report provided for electricity supply.
It may also be time to revisit AEMO’s 2013 modelling on 100% renewables that did not factor in major energy productivity gains.
Switching upThe importance of demand management has been recognised since the dawn of the National Electricity Market in 1992. But this potential has never been properly tapped.
Happily, there are signs that this is finally changing. For example, the Australian Energy Regulator has announced a process to design a Demand Management Incentive Scheme. This will provide an incentive for electricity networks to help consumers reduce demand and cut energy costs.
The more progressive energy systems worldwide have already incorporated energy productivity into their energy policies and strategies. Germany is implementing its National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency as one of the twin pillars of its Energiewende (energy transition). And a 23% reduction in buildings' energy consumption by 2030 is one of the three key targets to achieve New York’s “Reforming the Energy Vision”.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has also recommended energy efficiency improvements as its first measure to achieve peak energy emissions by 2020, in tandem with a US$130 billion increase in renewables investment. This “bridge” scenario was the IEA’s contribution to the 2015 Paris climate summit.
Policy measures recommended under the IEA Bridge Scenario
OECD/IEA 2015 World Energy Outlook Special Report 2015: Energy and Climate Change, IEA Publishing
Global energy-related GHG emissions reduction by policy measure in the Bridge Scenario relative to the INDC Scenario
OECD/IEA 2015 World Energy Outlook Special Report 2015: Energy and Climate Change, IEA Publishing.
Time for Australia to get serious
It is now time for Australia to embrace the link between demand management, energy productivity and renewable energy. We need these to work together so that we can achieve our carbon reduction goals while protecting electricity security and economic growth.
We have taken a good first step, releasing a comprehensive National Energy Productivity Plan at the end of 2015. It is not quite as ambitious as proposed by the Homegrown Power Plan (it only seeks a 40% improvement between 2015 and 2030) but it is a step in the right direction.
What are missing, as RMIT energy researcher Alan Pears points out, are the resources to make it happen: no additional funding has been allocated to deliver the 34 recommended measures.
We can unlock Australia’s energy productivity potential. And we can have a clean, affordable and reliable electricity system. But this will not happen by accident.
Let’s encourage our utilities to engage energy consumers in providing the solutions. In other words, power to the people.
The Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO and corporate clients, including energy businesses.
The Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO and corporate clients, including energy businesses.
Elephants on the path to extinction - the facts
The world’s population of elephants is nearing a critical point. Karl Mathiesen explains why there has never been a more dangerous time to be an elephant
The largest of all land beasts, elephants are thundering, trumpeting six-tonne monuments to the wonder of evolution. From the tip of that distinctive trunk with its 100,000 dextrous muscles; to their outsize ears that flap the heat away; to the complex matriarchal societies and the mourning of their dead; to the points of their ivory tusks, designed to defend, but ultimately the cause of their ruin.
Elephants are the end of a 60 million year lineage – the last of the megaherbivores
Four-tuskers, hoe-tuskers, shovel-tuskers are all wiped out - now only a fragment of this keystone species remains
If, just 800 generations ago, we took a summer holiday to Crete, Cyprus or Malta, we would have found familiar-looking islands, filled with the flowers and birds we can enjoy today. But bursting through the scrub would’ve been one surprise: a pygmy elephant, one metre high, one of many different elephant species that once roamed every continent apart from Australia and Antarctica.
The 20,000-year-old pygmy elephants of the Mediterranean islands may appear as fantastical as the woolly mammoths which still ambled across one Alaskan island just 5,600 years ago. But these animals’ lives, and deaths, take on a new pertinence today. They lived a blink of an eye ago in evolutionary time and shared the planet with modern humans. And the fate of these lost elephants, warns Prof Adrian Lister, paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum, is analogous to the troubled future facing their close relatives, the African and Asian elephants threatened with obliteration today.
Continue reading...Large ivory seizures in Singapore make it a smuggling hub of 'primary concern'
In the last three years, significant amounts of illegal ivory have been picked up in the Singapore – conservationists worry that new smuggling routes are opening up
Large-scale seizures of ivory in Singapore over the last three years make the south-east Asian city-state one of the world’s premier ivory smuggling hubs for organised crime, say conservation watchdogs.
Data from seizures, collected by the UN’s wildlife trade monitor Traffic and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and shared with the Guardian, reveals how the gangsters operate. Shipping containers carrying thousands of tusks are labelled as carrying anything from tea to waste paper or avocados. They leave Africa from a few ports well-known for high levels of corruption.
Continue reading...Purple emperor is the jewel of the wildland
Knepp Castle Estate, West Sussex Emerging sallow scrub has provided these alluring butterflies with new territory, and the estate has become a breeding hotspot
Throngs of butterflies were on the wing. Small tortoiseshells basked on the sun-baked path, a red admiral was puddling in a muddy tyre track and peacocks were growing intoxicated on tree sap.
Meadow browns flitted low across the pasture, mingling with gatekeepers, ringlets and marbled whites among the thistles and knapweed. In the hedgerow a white admiral took nectar from the last of the bramble blossom, while a scalloped-winged comma fed on the first ripe blackberry.
Continue reading...Australia’s first commercial EV fast-charging stations rolled out in Qld
Fossil fuel generators demand king’s ransom for energy security
Large-scale solar could meet two-thirds of Australia’s renewable target
Bitcoin-inspired peer-to-peer solar trading trial kicks off in Perth
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