The Conversation

This is the first piece in our new Three Charts series, in which we aim to highlight interesting trends in three simple charts.

Australia is embarking on a transition from an electricity system that relies largely on coal to one that may one day be 100% renewable. Last week’s closure of the Hazelwood coal-fired generator was an important milestone on this path.

The development of the renewables sector has not, however, been a smooth ride.

Estimates released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggest that the number of direct full-time equivalent jobs in renewable energy activities has continued to fall from its 2011-12 peak. Over a period in which the Australian economy saw around 600,000 additional people get jobs, employment in the renewables sector has been going backwards.

A small employer

The renewables sector is estimated to have directly provided only 11,150 full-time equivalent jobs in 2015-16. The Australian labour force exceeds 12.6 million people. The sector thus makes a small contribution to national employment, although one that is quite important in some local economies.

Around half of the jobs in renewables in 2015-16 were in installing (and maintaining) rooftop solar systems. Hydroelectricity generation provides 1,840 full-time equivalent jobs, a number that is likely to increase if pumped storage is to make a larger contribution to smoothing Australia’s electricity supply. Biomass provides 1,430 full-time jobs, and the wind industry around 620.

The fact that renewables is a small employer - especially once installations are up and running - is not a bad thing. If renewables were labour-intensive, they would be expensive.

Up then down

The rise and then fall in renewables jobs is primarily a result of what has happened to installations of rooftop solar. The annual number of small-scale solar installations (PV and solar water heaters) skyrocketed over the four years to 2011. This rapid growth was spurred by generous feed-in-tariffs, rebates, and rules for federal government solar credits. There was also a national program to install solar panels on schools.

When these arrangements were curtailed, uptake fell. Annual installations of small-scale solar PV and water heaters are down by more than 60% from their peak. We are still installing a lot of new systems (more than 183,000 in 2016), but fewer than before. Employment estimates for small-scale solar closely track installation rates. The decline in employment in the wind energy sector is also worth noting.

The largest fall in renewables jobs has been in Queensland, a state that substantially tightened its feed-in-tariff scheme for rooftop solar in several steps from 2011 on. Queensland also holds the title of having Australia’s highest residential rooftop solar PV penetration rate (32%). South Australia is not far behind, at 31%.

Ramping up large-scale renewables

Recent years of policy uncertainty and backtracking have not helped the rollout of large-scale renewables. The termination of Australia’s carbon price and downwards renegotiation of the Renewable Energy Target had chilling effects on investment.

Those events are now behind us. With continued reductions in the cost of renewables, brighter days for the sector appear to be ahead, especially if our governments get policy settings right.

We can expect particularly rapid growth in jobs installing large-scale solar PV. Just last week, for example, it was announced that South Australia is to have a large new solar farm.

Paul Burke receives funding under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researcher Award scheme.

After decades of sustainability initiatives, key environmental indicators keep getting worse. The Capital Wind Farm, REUTERS/Jason Reed/File Photo

In 1992, more than 170 countries came together at the Rio Earth Summit and agreed to pursue sustainable development, protect biological diversity, prevent dangerous interference with climate systems, and conserve forests. But, 25 years later, the natural systems on which humanity relies continue to be degraded.

So why hasn’t the world become much more environmentally sustainable despite decades of international agreements, national policies, state laws and local plans? This is the question that a team of researchers and I have tried to answer in a recent article.

We reviewed 94 studies of how sustainability policies had failed across every continent. These included case studies from both developed and developing countries, and ranged in scope from international to local initiatives.

Consider the following key environmental indicators. Since 1970:

• Humanity’s ecological footprint has exceeded the Earth’s capacity and has risen to the point where 1.6 planets would be needed to provide resources sustainably.

• The biodiversity index has fallen by more than 50% as the populations of other species continue to decline.

• Greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change have almost doubled while the impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly apparent.

• The world has lost more than 48% of tropical and sub-tropical forests.

The rate at which these indicators deteriorated was largely unchanged over the two decades either side of the Rio summit. Furthermore, humanity is fast approaching several environmental tipping points. If crossed, these could lead to irreversible changes.

If we allow average global temperatures to rise 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, for example, feedback mechanisms will kick in that lead to runaway climate change. We’re already halfway to this limit and could pass it in the next few decades.

What’s going wrong?

So what’s going wrong with sustainability initiatives? We found that three types of failure kept recurring: economic, political and communication.

The economic failures stem from the basic problem that environmentally damaging activities are financially rewarded. A forest is usually worth more money after it’s cut down – which is a particular problem for countries transitioning to a market-based economy.

Political failures happen when governments can’t or won’t implement effective policies. This is often because large extractive industries, like mining, are dominant players in an economy and see themselves as having the most to lose. This occurs in developed and developing countries, but the latter can face extra difficulties enforcing policies once they’re put in place.

Communication failures centre on poor consultation or community involvement in the policy process. Opposition then flourishes, sometimes based on a misunderstanding of the severity of the issue. It can also be fed by mistrust when communities see their concerns being overlooked.

Again, this happens around the world. A good example would be community resistance to changing water allocation systems in rural areas of Australia. In this situation, farmers were so opposed to the government buying back some of their water permits that copies of the policy were burned in the street.

These types of failure are mutually reinforcing. Poor communication of the benefits of sustainable development creates the belief that it always costs jobs and money. Businesses and communities then pressure politicians to avoid or water down environmentally friendly legislation.

Ultimately, this represents a failure to convince people that sustainable development can supply “win-win” scenarios. As a result, decision-makers are stuck in the jobs-versus-environment mindset.

What can we do?

The point of our paper was to discover why policies that promote sustainability have failed in order to improve future efforts. The challenge is immense and there’s a great deal at stake. Based on my previous research into the way economic, social and environmental goals can co-exist, I would go beyond our most recent paper to make the following proposals.

First, governments need to provide financial incentives to switch to eco-efficient production. Politicians need to have the courage to go well beyond current standards. Well-targeted interventions can create both carrot and stick, rewarding eco-friendly behaviour and imposing a cost on unsustainable activities.

Second, governments need to provide a viable transition pathway for industries that are doing the most damage. New environmental tax breaks and grants, for example, could allow businesses to remain profitable while changing their business model.

Finally, leaders from all sectors need to be convinced of both the seriousness of the declining state of the environment and that sustainable development is possible. Promoting positive case studies of successful green businesses would be a start.

There will of course be resistance to these changes. The policy battles will be hard fought, particularly in the current international political climate. We live in a world where the US president is rolling back climate policies while the Australian prime minister attacks renewable energy.

Michael Howes has received funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, the Commonwealth government, the Queensland government, and Griffith University.

Ten years ago today, Kevin Rudd spoke at the National Climate Summit at Parliament House, in Canberra, famously declaring climate change to be “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

One of Kevin Rudd’s most famous quotes.

Rudd, in alliance with Julia Gillard, had toppled Kim Beazley as Labor leader the previous December. This focus on climate change was part of Rudd’s brilliantly executed electoral assault on John Howard, who had spent his period in office kicking climate action into the long grass.

Malcolm Turnbull, then Howard’s newly minted environment minister, was underwhelmed by Rudd’s speech. “It’s all designed to promote Kevin Rudd. I mean, he doesn’t care what the summit says. He’s having his media conference at 10 o'clock. The conference delegates will have barely had their coffee and had the first session,” he sniffed.

On the same day Ross Gittins published a piece titled Carbon trading v taxes — a winner eases ahead in the Sydney Morning Herald. A decade on, it makes for painful, and eerily prescient, reading:

A key question - for advocates of action as well as politicians anxious to keep their jobs - is which instrument would be harder to introduce politically. This, I suspect, is the reason so many governments favour trading schemes. The trouble with a carbon tax is that everyone hates new taxes, whereas a trading scheme doesn’t sound as if it’s a tax.

The dizzying and stomach-churning backflips over the past ten years have been described as a “power failure” and a policy bonfire.

While hopes for bold and timely action in Australia may have bleached like the Great Barrier Reef, the question that Rudd raised - one of climate change ethics, of how we navigate “the perfect moral storm” – remains alive.

Debts to pay

From my point of view, the key questions are: what do we owe to future generations; what do we owe to other species; and how are we living up to those obligations?

The thinker and novelist Alice Walker once described activism as “my rent for living on the planet”.

The celebrated linguist and US dissident Noam Chomsky agrees. In September 1991, during an interview in which he was asked what motivated him in his tireless work decrying US foreign policy and the influence of the mass media on democratic societies, he replied: “Looking in the mirror in the morning and not being appalled.” For Chomsky, intellectuals have a responsibility, “to speak the truth and to expose lies”.

But of course some would say that this is not enough - the point is not to describe the world but to change it.

There are costs, however. Consider this passage from Marge Piercy’s extraordinary novel Vida, about a Vietnam War-era activist on the run from the FBI:

Yet she had no feeling of accomplishment, because every morning in the Times, every evening on television, the war was stronger, and she was closer to exhaustion. They had not done enough, they had not risked enough, they had not tried everything, they had not fought hard enough, they had not, because the proof was before her every morning and every evening the war went on. It was raining blood outside whether she looked out the window or not; the blood was splattering down, and the hot wind that blew across the city smelled of ashes, of burning flesh. Obviously they had not tried hard enough if the war still went on.

Personally, I have tried activism (and usually done it badly, if persistently). I found that if I stopped altogether I felt worse and “acted out” in silly ways, so now I do just enough to avoid that, but with zero expectation that anything will change

In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht combined the Latin word solacium (comfort) with the Greek root –algia (pain) to create the word solastalgia, which he defined as:

The psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change.

That grief and anxiety is catching up with many of us. For a psychoanalytic perspective, see this interview with Rosemary Randall.

What should we do?

So, reader, I’m interested in finding out your coping strategies, since mine are often inadequate and maladaptive. I’ve a few questions:

• Where do you think your environmental concern came from?

• How many of you spent significant time in unstructured play in natural environments before the age of 11 (so-called “significant life experiences”), as I did?

• How do you who try to stay active on this mother of all issues cope with the seemingly uninterrupted flow of ever greater defeats?

• How do you cope with the guilt of having failed (thus far) to have done enough?

• How do you cope with the grief for the things we are definitely going to lose, no matter what (starting with coral on the Great Barrier Reef)?

• And for the climatologists and climate writers out there, how do you cope with the anxiety of knowing that conveying the end of human civilisation is your day job?

Over to you – answers in the comments.

The Hazelwood mine will fill with water once it's closed. AAP/Country Fire Authority

The Hazelwood coal mine and power plant has employed generations of families in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley since the end of the second world war. With the mine to close at the end of March 2017, hundreds of local residents face unemployment. When the mining stops, the pit at Hazelwood will eventually become a “pit lake” as it fills with groundwater.

Several options are on the table for the Hazelwood lake, and questions have been raised about the cost of rehabilitating the mine.

There are thousands of pit lakes on every inhabited continent, but few have been designed for people to use for recreation. Although Australians are increasingly embracing these lakes for swimming and boating, most pit lakes are unsafe and are on private property.

Germany’s brown coal mines

Depending often on the local geology, pit lakes can have poor water quality and unstable banks, which pose risks to nearby communities and the environment. However, pit lakes can also be sources of income through recreation or industry, particularly for local communities after the mining stops.

The challenge for the residents of the Latrobe Valley (and other mining regions) is to decide how new pit lakes can benefit the local economy. The challenge for scientists is how to rehabilitate these lakes for community benefit.

The coal mines of former East Germany have developed into pit lakes and can provide a vision of what Australian pit lakes might become.

Lusatia pit lake in the former East Germany is now an economic asset for the community. Melanie Blanchette, Author provided

Lignite (brown coal) mines were closed in East Germany after reunification in 1990, causing regional economic collapse and emigration. In an attempt to boost the local economy, the German government tasked a state-owned company with rapidly rehabilitating the landscape and filling the pits with river and groundwater for recreational use.

In 2009 the annual economic benefit of the lake district was between €10.4 million and €16.2 million. Current lake activities include swimming, boating and scuba diving. Businesses use the steep slopes of slowly filling pit lakes as vineyards, while spa hotels with lakeside boulevards cater to upmarket clientele.

Germany’s experience shows that pit lakes can lead to public benefit. However, many of these lakes require expensive ongoing active treatment, such as liming and pumping water through treatment facilities.

Due (in part) to the remoteness and low population density of Australia, this level of active treatment is unlikely to be economically feasible.

Natural rehabilitation

But active ongoing treatment isn’t the only option for improving pit lakes. Pit lakes have the capacity to change over time and become similar to natural lakes.

Pit lakes can naturally improve over decades (as seen in the coal-strip lakes of the US Midwest), if they are exposed to “passive” treatments that increase the amount of nutrients, beneficial microbes, seeds and insect larvae.

Every pit lake has a unique suite of biological and physical characteristics that make it easier or more difficult to rehabilitate. The US coal-strip pit lakes would be considered “easy” to rehabilitate because they were shallow, had large catchments and significant amounts of organic matter. However, the lakes still took decades to recover.

It’s hard to say exactly how Hazelwood will stack up on this scale without seeing modelling, but we can assume that its large size will create difficulties, as will any potential water quality issues. On the other hand, because the pit is still dry there’s an opportunity for pre-filling treatments that improve biodiversity and water quality.

For example, using heavy earthmoving equipment to “sculpt” the edge of the pit creates more natural habitats that encourage aquatic life to take hold. Careful introduction of appropriate wetland plants can enhance the system. Working with hydrologists and engineers, drainage lines connecting the pit lake to the wider catchment can provide the lake with sources of terrestrial nutrients to kickstart ecosystem development.

Passive processes tend to be slow. The challenge for scientists is to speed them up. However, many of the ecological processes that underpin pit lake development (as described above) are well-studied in artificial and natural lakes.

Turning an abandoned pit lake into a resort is not a far-fetched idea. As Germany’s mine pit projects show, communities can embrace a changing economy, and the science indicates that passive treatment systems can improve pit lakes.

The legacy of past mines and our demand for resources will ensure that more pit lakes will be produced. Ultimately, we will have to decide how we want to co-exist with these new lakes.

Melanie Blanchette receives funding from the Australian Coal Association Research Program and is a member of the International Mine Water Association.

Mark Lund receives funding from the Australian Coal Association Research Program and the mining industry. He is a member of the International Mine Water Association.

The roar of the furnaces, the rattle of the conveyors, and the occasional whoop of a siren marked out both day and night at Hazelwood. The pungent smell of brown coal permeates the air, and the fine particles would work their way into your clothes, hair and shoes.

On quiet evenings you could hear it all the way over in the nearby town of Churchill, seven kilometres away. That distant hum has been a comforting one as the station produced power in all weathers, day and night, for more than five decades. For many in Churchill and the other coal towns of Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, the noise also represented continuity of employment for more than 450 workers.

Those old certainties are now disappeared. The eight units that make up the 1,600 megawatt power station were progressively decommissioned this week, all now shut off ahead of Hazelwood’s official closure on March 31. While some 250 workers will remain, the distant hum has settled to a whisper.

When the brand new Hazelwood power station was officially opened on March 12, 1971, it represented a new and confident future for the Latrobe Valley region and the state of Victoria. Plans for this major infrastructure project were first made in 1956 and the first contracts signed in 1959. Victorian Premier Sir Henry Bolte spoke of the Latrobe Valley as the “Ruhr of Australia”.

The first six generating units were constructed between 1964 and 1967, and the plant was eventually expanded to include another two. All eight were operational by the time of the official opening in 1971. The station was fed by the Morwell open cut brown coal mine, and was built right next door to the mine’s open-cast pit. The Morwell mine eventually grew to such mammoth proportions that the nearby Morwell River had to be diverted three times. Each day, the mine fed more than 55,000 tonnes of brown coal into Hazelwood’s eight furnaces.

The Hazelwood station was planned, built and operated by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV). This government-owned body was formed in 1921 and had overseen the development of the power generation network in the Latrobe Valley. The first power station at Yallourn (now decommissioned) began providing Victoria with power in 1924, and was followed by further expansion at Yallourn with newer units that still operate today. The Morwell power station and briquette factory were completed in 1959 (and shut down in 2014), and the nearby Hazelwood completed the picture by 1971.

A postwar coal community

These power stations, along with the Morwell and Yallourn coal mines, defined the industrial heart of the Latrobe Valley as part of a postwar push to create entire communities in the region, centred on the coal industry. The SECV and then the state government had a meticulously planned vision, deciding on the location of new developments and entire new towns. By 1981 electricity generation and mining employed more than 10,000 workers in an overwhelmingly male-dominated workforce.

It had not all been plain sailing. Completion of the Morwell power station was delayed by financial constraints and then technical problems. Coal from the Morwell mine proved to be unsuitable for briquette manufacture and so the SECV reverted to using Yallourn coal in the briquette furnaces. The SECV also met with considerable local criticism over its decision to close the planned township of Yallourn so as to dig out the coal underneath it. Polluted though it was, many Yallourn residents had no desire to leave their tree-lined community.

The new town of Churchill, built to house the industrial workforce and their families, would accompany the Hazelwood development. Churchill was a model town located to avoid the prevailing winds from existing power stations, perched on a hill with views across the Latrobe valley, the distant Baw Baw ranges, and newly created lakes of Hazelwood Pondage. Churchill joined other new public housing developments in nearby Moe and Morwell to house the expanding workforce.

Yet life in the coal heartland came with its own problems. Issues with air quality began to become evident as early as the 1970s, while the privatisation of Hazelwood and the other power stations from 1996 led to 8,000 job losses. A 2004 WWF report named Hazelwood as the dirtiest power station in Australia, producing the most greenhouse emissions per megawatt of energy.

Hazelwood became a powerful political symbol and rallying cry for those concerned about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on global warming. It has been credited with producing 5% of the nation’s power and 3% of its carbon dioxide emissions.

The media image of Hazelwood today, its eight stacks standing as a visual image of greenhouse emissions and industrial pollution, was forged in the decade since the WWF report. Worse was to come when it became the site of a coalmine fire that blazed for 45 days in February-March 2014, showering Morwell with smoke and ash and creating a major public health disaster.

The confident, modernist image of 1970s Hazelwood went up in smoke, but this image has not been forgotten by many in the Latrobe Valley who lived through it.

Federation University, through the Centre for Gippsland Studies, is planning to take part in a project to record the memories and experiences of Hazelwood workers. The author thanks Engie, who approved a site visit to research this article, and Mark Richards, a Hazelwood worker and CFMEU delegate who acted as a tour guide.

Erik Eklund 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.

US President Donald Trump has followed through on his promise to undo Barack Obama’s climate policies, signing an executive order to review his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan and any other regulations that “burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources”. The move potentially paves the way for the United States to walk away from its commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement.

America’s leadership on climate change has been patchy at best, yet under Obama the country made an important diplomatic shift – one that now looks to be fundamentally unravelling. Trump’s executive order, released on Tuesday, aims to dismantle the network of institutions and laws that regulate greenhouse emissions, and those that conduct globally important research to track climate change. The consequences, both at home and abroad, will be severe.

The order comes as little surprise. Trump, after all, has previously claimed that climate change is a conspiracy perpetrated by the Chinese government to gain economic advantage at America’s expense, and made a campaign promise to undo the Paris deal. His administration has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a former chief executive of ExxonMobil. Trump also greenlit the controversial Dakota Access pipeline.

Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) caused alarm among environmental activists and EPA staff alike. Pruitt has a history of suing the EPA during his time as Attorney General of Oklahoma, and hundreds of recently released emails attest to his close relationship with the oil and gas industry.

The new executive order signals that Trump does not want climate research to be carried out by government agencies such as the EPA, NASA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In a speech to Congress earlier this month, he outlined plans to slash the EPA’s budget. He has also pledged to reinvigorate the coal industry, and the Republican-controlled House has already rolled back an Obama-era regulation that prevented coal companies dumping their waste in rivers.

China leading the climate race

The irony is that while Trump may believe that the emissions targets agreed upon in Paris would weaken the US economy, particularly against China, the reverse is actually closer to the truth.

As my colleague Ben Habib recently argued, China now leads the world in renewable energy investment, a trend that will see it dominate the market in the decades to come. The Paris targets are one way that other countries can similarly encourage clean energy investment.

Meanwhile, China’s plans to move away from its heavy use of coal-fired electricity generation means the price of coal will continue to fall, making America’s cherished coal industry less profitable and exacerbating the economic and social costs to coal mining communities. With many analysts warning of a potential “carbon bubble”, Trump is in danger of backing the wrong horse.

The Chinese government’s desire to move away from fossil fuels is driven partly by serious domestic pollution and health issues. Instead of cutting research funds, the US should pay similar attention to the health of its own citizens.

America’s huge size and geographical diversity means it is likely to experience many different climate impacts, from coastal flooding and severe storms to drought and wildfires.

Global impacts

The Pentagon has repeatedly warned that climate change is a threat to global security that will make existing challenges even harder to deal with.

Competition over scarce resources such as food and water have already contributed to the civil war in Syria, and increasingly violent conflicts over food and farmland in the Horn of Africa. These conflicts have contributed to a growing mass migration crisis, and longer droughts and irregular rainfall in agricultural regions will impact global food prices.

People in the Pacific Islands will likely lose their homes to sea level rise, potentially adding further to the migration of refugees from around the world. Some of the poorest countries in the world, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, will also face the impacts of sea-level rise, yet lack the resources to adapt to the changing environment. More frequent and intense storms and extreme weather events such as cyclones will create humanitarian crises that will require an international response.

Many of these crises will require an American response, whether through the provision of disaster relief and support, or through managing increased migration. When it comes to violent conflict as a result of climate-related tensions, it is likely that America would face immense global pressure to intervene.

It is clear that Trump has less appetite for international intervention than his predecessors. But nor does the White House appear to place any value on managing America’s own vulnerability to climate change.

If Trump’s climate policy takedown is successful, he may well find himself presiding over a country that is weakened economically, socially and politically, both at home and abroad.

Kumuda Simpson is affiliated with the NTEU Climate Action Network.

The Night Parrot is unquestionably one of Australia’s most enigmatic, elusive and enthralling species. The final frontier of Australian ornithology, this cryptic parrot eluded dedicated expeditions to find it for nearly half a century.

Last week, a momentous chapter in the Night Parrot story was written, with the first photograph of a live Night Parrot in Western Australia. The photos come in the wake of several other recent sightings, including the parrot’s rediscovery in Queensland in 2013.

Despite media reports, the parrot has never been officially listed as extinct, with sporadic evidence of its existence throughout the 20th century.

But now we know for sure that the parrots are alive and found across the continent, we can move on to making sure they remain so in the future.

Mystery bird

We know that Night Parrots favour spinifex or tussock grasslands, often close to inland wetland systems. But the areas of potential habitat are vast throughout inland Australia.

The Night Parrot has been listed as endangered in the Action Plan for Australian Birds since 1992. It is listed as endangered under federal legislation.

It has never been listed as “presumed extinct” or “extinct”. Reliable ongoing reports and the well-known cryptic nature of the species meant that the ornithological community considered it likely to have survived, albeit incredibly hard to spot.

The Night Parrot has been known to exist in WA since at least 2005, when a colleague and I clinched the first peer-accepted sighting in recent Australian history during an environmental impact assessment for the Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) Cloudbreak mine.

Fortescue Marshes, where the Night Parrot was first seen again in WA in 2005. Robert Davis

This was by no means the first sighting of Night Parrots in WA, with regular and reliable reports since at least the 1980s. But until 2005 none had provided sufficient detail to eliminate other possibilities. Further sightings have been monitored at another location in the arid zone since 2009 and that work is pending publication.

The significance of the latest find is immense. A dedicated team of birdwatchers (Adrian Boyle, Bruce Greatwich, Nigel Jackett and George Swann) has confirmed the existence of a population in WA. The discovery, resulting from a well-planned expedition, is the start of a real dialogue about Night Parrot conservation in WA.

The latest record cements the fact that Night Parrots are present at several locations in WA and potentially throughout arid Australia, including in regions rich in mineral resources.

In contrast to the Queensland populations, which have so far been found in national parks and pastoral leases, the WA situation sets up a quandary for how to manage development, Night Parrots and mining.

Mining and conservation

Our 2005 sighting was important because, given the parrot’s endangered status, FMG was required to provide offsets for potential disturbance to Night Parrot habitat. The offsets included avoiding areas of likely habitat on the Fortescue Marshes, and funding follow-up surveys throughout the areas surrounding the proposed mine. These unfortunately did not find further evidence of Night Parrots.

Research offsets from FMG also funded the writing of a national research plan for Night Parrots. This was later followed by on-ground research on Night Parrots at Pullen Pullen Reserve in Queensland, the population found by naturalist John Young in 2013.

Recent developments by other WA resource companies have seldom considered Night Parrots. My personal experience is that surveys usually look for endangered mammals such as Northern Quolls and Bilbies, but rarely search properly for Night Parrots. This is likely due to two main reasons.

The first is the incredibly cryptic nature of the Night Parrot. Clearly the species has evaded detection for so long because it is difficult to find.

The second is what I term “the Thylacine factor”. The only equivalent species in Australia that has the same degree of scepticism and mythology is the Thylacine.

Thylacines have (so far) not been rediscovered. But developers, consultants and regulators take the same attitude to Night Parrot sightings. The parrots are often seen as a mythical animal that doesn’t exist. The idea of looking for them is met with mirth.

Finding the parrots

Recent findings from research by Steve Murphy in Queensland, and other recent work in WA, are slowly providing us with the tools to overcome both of these issues. With better knowledge of their specific habitat requirements, including a need for long-unburned grasslands close to water sources, we can reduce the daunting challenge of Night Parrots potentially existing anywhere that spinifex is found.

Fire is one of the threats facing the Night Parrot. Robert Davis

The recent release of calls from the Queensland population and a new recording of calls from the WA population provide the most powerful tool yet for doing surveys. Playing back the calls can be used to elicit a response from any Night Parrots in the area. The call can also be used to identify calls from deployed remote recording devices.

As more populations are discovered and more evidence becomes available, this will help convince the public and decision-makers that the parrots are (hopefully) found across a wide range and need careful management, despite the difficulty of observing them.

Let’s hope government bodies will strongly enforce the requirement to search for Night Parrots in all areas of potential habitat within their known current and historic range. This should ensure that we don’t lose any parrots before they are even found.

Robert Davis 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.

Tropical cyclone Debbie has made landfall in Queensland as a category 4 cyclone with winds of more than 150 kilometres per hour.

The cyclone crossed the coast near Airlie Beach on Tuesday afternoon. Reports of wind gusts in excess of 200km per hour and rainfall of more than 200mm of rain have been made in some areas along the central Queensland coast.

The Bureau of Meteorology forecasted an average to above-average number of Australian cyclones in its October severe weather outlook. Australia receives 11 cyclones on average each year, with about four of those in Queensland. Debbie is the fifth cyclone of the season for Australia as a whole and the most intense of the season so far.

Anomalously high moisture, warm ocean temperatures, and low environmental pressures seem to have created the conditions that allowed TC Debbie to form and grow in intensity.

Perfect storm

Tropical cyclones are low pressure systems that form over warm tropical oceans. The warmth and moisture of the oceans are what gives a cyclone its energy. The low pressure, which meteorologists measure in “hectopascals”, draws in the surrounding warm, moist air, which then rises into deep thunderstorm clouds. As the air is pulled into the centre of low pressure, Earth’s rotation causes it to spin cyclonically and it continues to intensify.

TC Debbie formed at the eastern end of an active monsoon trough extending from the Indian Ocean across the top of Australia and into the Coral Sea. The monsoon trough is a region of low air pressure and thunderstorms that forms over northern Australia in the summer months, bringing with it the wet season. On March 22, a large region of active thunderstorms began to organise into a weather disturbance off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea.

Over the following two days the thunderstorms organised about a circulation centre as sea level pressures began to drop and moist air converged into the area. By late on March 24 a tropical depression, a forerunner of a cyclone, had formed and begun to drift south, making a long S-shaped track.

Tropical Cyclone Debbie was named on March 25. It then came under the influence of the subtropical ridge, a zone of stable high pressure that gives much of Australia fine weather during the summer. This drove Debbie west-southwest towards the Queensland coast while it gradually intensified further.

Because of the relatively high amounts of moisture in the atmosphere, and relatively warm ocean waters, Debbie intensified to category 4 by 10 pm on March 27, with the strongest wind gusts reaching 225-280km per hour. On Tuesday afternoon Debbie was a strong category 4 cyclone with a central pressure of 943 hectopascals and surface sustained winds of 185 kilometres per hour. The Bureau of Meteorology downgraded TC Debbie to a category 3 at 4:00 pm EST.

To put Debbie in context, there has been only one cyclone since 1980 to have made landfall in Queensland with a lower central pressure. That was Yasi in 2011.

Of the 46 cyclones to have made landfall in Queensland since 1980, only three others arrived at the coast with pressures of less than 960 hectopascals: Dominic in 1982, Winifred in 1986, and Ingrid in 2005.

Predicting cyclones

Tropical cyclone forecasters use a variety of tools to forecast the storm’s track, intensity, storm surge, and rainfall. Because it is difficult to obtain observations of wind at ocean’s surface under a cyclone, meteorologists have developed tools based on satellite imagery to estimate a storm’s intensity, location, and where the strongest and most destructive winds are found.

Several models are also used to aid in making forecasts – from the complex numerical weather prediction models, to statistical models. Models start by using observations of the atmosphere, and then use these data to make a forecast.

Depending on their level of complexity the models can predict the future track, intensity, rainfall, wave height, and/or storm surge. The forecasters access all of this information to then make their forecast.

Cyclone forecasts have improved considerably over time. In particular, track forecasts have improved so that the 48-hour forecast is now more accurate than the 24-hour ones were back in the early 1990s. Track forecasting has become so reliable that the US National Hurricane Centre now produces 120-hour track forecasts.

Intensity forecasts have improved more slowly, but as models have become more refined and satellite technology has improved, the ability of forecasters to accurately estimate and predict intensity is also getting gradually better.

The prediction of rainfall, the extent of the damaging wind field, and storm surge forecasts are also slowly improving. Now that they are receiving more attention, we can expect considerable improvements in these over the next decade.

Liz Ritchie-Tyo receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Hazelwood's closure does not mean imminent blackouts for Victoria. Takver/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Victoria’s Hazelwood power station will be shut down this week after nearly 50 years of supplying electricity.

The imminent closure has led to concerns about blackouts, raised most recently by Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, and rising electricity prices.

So what does the evidence suggest?

Blackouts ahead?

Last week The Age reported that Victoria is facing “72 days of possible power supply shortfalls over the next two years”. While that sounds bad, it does not mean the state is facing imminent blackouts.

This was based on a report from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which is in charge of making sure that Australia’s energy markets work.

Every week, AEMO produces something called the Medium Term Projected Assessment of System Adequacy. This report assesses the expected supply and demand of electricity for the next two years.

In a recent report, AEMO did indeed forecast a “reserve shortfall” for 72 days in Victoria in the coming two years. AEMO has actually been forecasting many days of reserve shortfall, since early November last year when Engie announced the closure of Hazelwood.

AEMO has also been forecasting an even greater number of days of reserve shortfalls in South Australia for well over a year.

The shortfall forecast is based on a combination of factors. This includes the amount of local energy supply, the import and export of electricity from other states, the maximum daily demand for electricity, and the “reserve requirement”. The reserve requirement is essentially “spare” capacity that can be used to maintain a reliable supply if something goes wrong.

If there is not enough supply to meet this requirement, there is a reserve shortfall.

Forecasting maximum demand is incredibly challenging and uncertain. AEMO does it by using probabilities. This gives us a measure of the probability of a particular demand forecast being exceeded in a year.

For example, a 10% chance would be expected to be exceeded one year in ten. A 50% chance would be expected to be exceeded one year in two.

To illustrate the point, AEMO forecast that demand over the past summer in Victoria had a 10% chance of exceeding 9,900 megawatts. In reality, the maximum demand was only 8,747MW. That’s not to say the forecast was wrong, but rather that it was not an exceptional (one year in ten) summer.

In the recent outlook, AEMO has found 72 days on which a reserve shortfall might occur. The likelihood of this happening on any one of those days is low. For a reserve shortfall to actually occur 72 times over two years is incredibly unlikely.

However, AEMO still plans for this possibility. Indeed, this is largely the point of producing these forecasts: signalling potential capacity shortfalls so the market and operator can respond.

What will happen when Hazelwood closes?

Another way of illustrating the role of Hazelwood and the effect of its closure on the broader Victorian energy system is shown below.

In this figure, I’ve plotted the 10% and 50% thresholds for exceeding maximum demand in the coming summer, and also the “load duration curve” for previous years. This curve shows that the periods of greatest demand are also the least common (the left side of the graph). The vast majority of demand is much lower, and the “base load” is about 4,000MW.

† Interconnection capacity (from other states) at times of peak demand is much less than the total theoretically possible. ‡ Firm wind is about 7.5% of total rated capacity in Victoria. Author

I’ve also included “firm capacity” (the minimum power we know we can get) with and without Hazelwood, to the right.

As can be seen, there is more than enough capacity in Victoria to meet the base load. There is even enough local firm capacity to meet the peak load and reserve requirements for the one-in-two-year maximum demand event. For the one-in-ten-year event, power needs to be imported from other states to ensure secure supply at the peaks.

AEMO reaffirmed security of supply in a media statement last week. As noted, Victoria and other states have available power generation resources that are not switched on or are operating at less than full capacity. This electricity can be made available to replace the power that Hazelwood supplies.

What about prices?

The question of what replaces Hazelwood brings us to prices. Many, including AEMO, expect to see increased generation from currently underused power plants. These include New South Wales’ black coal power plants. Last year NSW’s black coal was used at 56% of its total capacity. Bumping up these stations’ output would also reduce NSW’s reliance on Victorian exports.

Reducing the capacity of brown coal will mean logically that Victoria relies on more expensive forms of generation such as black coal or gas. This is particularly so if the availability of cheap imports is limited, and more expensive local generation such as gas is needed.

Black coal power stations generate electricity comparatively cheaply. Even so electricity prices are already so high that an increase in black coal generation may not have a dramatic impact on prices. With NSW prices averaging A$137 per megawatt hour this year, it is clear that the cost of coal is not determining electricity prices.

The Victorian wholesale market will also become a more concentrated market. As a result, there may be more opportunities for market power to be exercised. Perhaps the recently announced ACCC inquiry into power prices will put generators on their best behaviour.

Any price rise may be short-lived. The Australian Energy Market Commission, which sets the rules for the energy market, has reported that more renewable energy supply is expected to reduce wholesale electricity prices.

Hazelwood’s closure should not compromise the security of the Victorian electricity system over the next few years. This is not to say that there definitely won’t be a blackout. A one-in-50-year storm, a plant failure, a flooded mine pit, an interconnector outage – any of these events could strain the system beyond what is manageable.

At this stage, what ultimately happens to prices is anyone’s guess. Whatever the case, it is clear that Victoria has plenty of supply to meet the state’s base load. New capacity might be required to meet the maximum demand – and that new capacity could take the form of energy storage.

Dylan McConnell has received funding from the AEMC's Consumer Advocacy Panel and Energy Consumers Australia.

Flora and fauna can adapt to climate change, but some are more successful than others. allstars/shutterstock

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing Australia’s wildlife, plants and ecosystems, a point driven home by two consecutive years of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

Yet among this growing destruction there is a degree of resilience to climate change, as Australian animals and plants evolve and adapt.

Some of this resilience is genetic, at the DNA level. Natural selection favours forms of genes that help organisms withstand hotter and drier conditions more effectively.

Over time, the environmental selection for certain forms of genes over others leads to genetic changes. These genetic changes can be complex, involving many genes interacting together, but they are sufficient to make organisms highly tolerant to extreme conditions.

Some of this resilience is unrelated to DNA. These are “plastic” changes – temporary changes in organisms’ physical and biochemical functions that help them deal with adverse conditions or shifts in the timing of environmental events.

Plastic changes occur more quickly than genetic changes but are not permanent – the organisms return to their previous state once the environment shifts back. These changes also may not be enough to protect organisms from even more extreme climates.

What about Australia?

In Australia there is evidence of both genetic and plastic adaptation.

Some of the first evidence of genetic adaptation under climate change have been in vinegar flies on the east coast of Australia. These flies have a gene that encodes the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase. This gene has two major forms: the tropical form and the temperate form. Over the past 30 years, the tropical form of the gene has become more common at the expense of the temperate one.

Plastic adaptation due to climate change has been demonstrated in common brown butterflies in southern Australia. Female butterflies are emerging from their cocoons earlier as higher temperatures have been speeding up their growth and development by 1.6 days every decade. According to overseas research, this faster development allows butterfly caterpillars to take advantage of earlier plant growth.

Higher temperatures are causing the common brown butterflies in southern Australia to come out of their cocoons earlier. John Tann/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In many cases, it is not clear if the adaptation is genetic or plastic.

The average body size of Australian birds has changed over the the past 100 years. Usually, when comparing birds of the same species, birds from the tropics are smaller than those from temperate areas. In several widespread species, however, the birds from temperate areas have recently become smaller. This might be the direct result of environmental changes or a consequence of natural selection on the genes that affect size.

In the case of long-lived species like eucalypts, it is hard to see any adaptive changes. However, there is evidence from experimental plots that eucalypts have the potential to adapt.

Different eucalypt species from across Australia were planted together in experimental forestry plots located in various environments. These plots have unwittingly become climate change adaptation experiments. By monitoring the plots, we can identify species that are better at growing and surviving in extreme climatic conditions.

Plot results together with other forms of DNA-based evidence indicate that some trees unexpectedly grow and survive much better, and are therefore likely to survive into the future.

What’s next?

We still have much to learn about the resilience of our flora and fauna.

There will always be species with low resilience or slow adaptive ability. Nevertheless, plastic and genetic changes can provide some resilience, which will change the predictions of likely losses in biodiversity.

Much like how our worst weeds and pests adapted to local climate conditions, as demonstrated many years ago, our local plants and animals will also adapt.

Species with short generation times – a short time between one generation (the parent) and the next (the offspring) – are able to adapt more quickly than species with longer lifespans and generation times.

For species with short generation times, recent models suggest that the ability to adapt may help reduce the impacts of climate change and decrease local extinction rates.

However, species with long generation times and species that cannot easily move to more habitable environments continue to have a high risk of extinction under climate change.

In those cases, management strategies, such as increasing the prevalence of gene forms helpful for surviving extreme conditions and moving species to locations to which they are better adapted, can help species survive.

Unfortunately, this means doing more than simply protecting nature, the hallmark of our biodiversity strategy to date. We need to act quickly to help our animals and plants adapt and survive.

Ary Hoffmann receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, and Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. He is affiliated with the Climate Change Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

So many ways to win. Bignai/Shutterstock.com

In July 2018, Queensland will launch a container refund scheme, in a bid to boost recycling and reduce litter and pollution.

It will join South Australia, the Northern Territory, New South Wales (later this year) and other places around the world in offering a small refund on all eligible drink containers deposited at designated collection points.

Many of the details have been decided already, including the size of the refund: 10c a bottle.

But is Queensland missing a trick here? Economic evidence suggests that the scheme could be cheaper to run, and boost recycling more, if it was run as a lottery instead, with every recycled bottle representing a “ticket” to a prize draw.

In it to win it

Boosting recycling relies on people changing their behaviour. One of the strongest drivers of behavioural change is economics; that’s why container refund schemes exist at all.

But economists also know that the type and size of this financial reward can have a large bearing on people’s behaviour. For many decades, researchers have focused on working out which rewards prompt the most effort. One key question is whether participants respond better to small, reliable rewards, or to being offered a chance of a big windfall.

Research suggests that contests can be easily designed to incite higher levels of effort than the more humdrum piece-rate rewards. Such contests have already been shown to work well in other environmental contexts, such as allocating pollution permits to companies.

Instead of getting 10c per container, Queenslanders could instead be given an electronic ticket for each container recycled. These tickets – which could perhaps be linked to a householder’s council rates account or other personal identifier – could then be entered into a quarterly lottery. The state government would need to decide on the size and number of prizes, as well as the eligibility rules.

Eyes on the prize

Several benefits are clear. First, there is evidence that it is very easy to incite more recycling using a contest approach.

Lotteries are also more flexible – the prizes can be adjusted relatively easily to increase or decrease participation. If recycling rates are too low, the prize value in the next lottery could be increased. In contrast, adjusting the 10c container refund would be far more difficult once it has already been set up.

The scheme might end up costing less overall, too. As the lottery may have only one prize (or a few), the administrative costs would be minimal compared with a per-unit payment. Depending on the size and number of the prizes, the prize fund could also be smaller than the cost of paying millions of 10c refunds.

Finally, the government can control the geographical placement of container points. This would allow it to influence the number of participants and also the ability to focus on citizens that may have certain preferences for recycling, or risk preferences that enjoy lottery contests. Indeed, research shows that risk attitudes and citizens’ preferences have an important impact on contest outcomes.

Lucky chance

A poorly designed lottery might conceivably work too well – recycling rates might become so high that they overwhelm the infrastructure or cause a glut of recycled materials. This has been shown to be possible when lottery-style contests are used in other environmental regulatory contexts. For example, contests that use pollution reduction as a lottery criterion can be too successful - driving down emissions hugely but at a significant cost to economic output.

Choosing the right-sized prize is crucial. If it’s too small, few people will be enticed to change their behaviour and take part. But if it’s too big, many people might stop using their kerbside recycling facilities altogether, “saving up” their recycling for the lottery. This would present a problem of “additionality”: the scheme would be capturing lots of bottles that would have been recycled anyway.

These are mere details, and the challenges of getting it right shouldn’t stop the Queensland government seriously considering giving the idea a go. It might make recycling a whole lot more exciting.

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

Chemistry has been getting greener since the '80s. Chemistry image from www.shutterstock.com

The development and evolution of the chemical industry is directly responsible for many of the technological advancements that have emerged since the late 19th century.

However, it was not until the 1980s that the environment became a priority for the chemical industry. This was prompted largely by stricter environmental regulations and a need to address the sector’s poor reputation, particularly due to pollution and industrial accidents.

But the industry is now rapidly improving, and this changing mindset has provided the backdrop for the emergence of green chemistry.

What is green chemistry?

Sustainability is becoming increasingly important in almost every industry and chemistry is no different.

Green chemistry aims to minimise the environmental impact of the chemical industry. This includes shifting away from oil to renewable sources where possible.

Green chemistry also prioritises safety, improving energy efficiency and, most importantly, minimising (and ideally) eliminating toxic waste from the very beginning.

Important examples of green chemistry include: phasing out the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in refrigerants, which have played a role in creating the ozone hole; developing more efficient ways of making pharmaceuticals, including the well-known painkiller ibuprofen and chemotherapy drug Taxol; and developing cheaper, more efficient solar cells.

The need to adapt

Making chemical compounds, particularly organic molecules (composed predominantly of carbon and hydrogen atoms), is the basis of vast multinational industries from perfumes to plastics, farming to fabric, and dyes to drugs.

In a perfect world, these would be prepared from inexpensive, renewable sources in one practical, efficient, safe and environmentally benign chemical reaction. Unfortunately, with the exception of the chemical processes found in nature, the majority of chemical processes are not completely efficient, require multiple reaction steps and generate hazardous byproducts.

While in the past traditional waste management strategies focused only on the disposal of toxic byproducts, today efforts have shifted to eliminating waste from the outset by making chemical reactions more efficient.

This adjustment has, in part, led to the advent of more sophisticated and effective catalytic reactions, which reduce the amount of waste. The 2001 Chemistry Nobel Laureate Ryoji Noyori stressed that catalytic processes represent “the only methods that offer the rational means of producing useful compounds in an economical, energy-saving and environmentally benign way”.

A secret to cleaner chemistry

Catalysts are substances that accelerate reactions, typically by enabling chemical bonds to be broken and/or formed without being consumed in the process. Not only do they speed up reactions, but they can also facilitate chemical transformations that might not otherwise occur.

In principle, only a very small quantity of a catalyst is needed to generate copious amounts of a product, with reduced levels of waste.

The development of new catalytic reactions is one particularly important area of green chemistry. As well as being more environmentally friendly, these processes are also typically more cost effective.

Catalysts take many forms, including biological enzymes, small organic molecules, metals, and particles that provide a better surface for reactions to take place. Roughly 90% of industrial chemical processes use catalysts and at least 15 Nobel Prizes have been awarded for catalysis research. This represents a tremendously important and active area of both fundamental and applied research.

What’s the outlook?

In the past 20 years since green chemistry was established, there have been tremendous advances in the industry. Nevertheless, there remains considerable room for improvement.

The chemical industry faces a number of significant challenges, from reducing its dependence on fossil fuels to playing its part in addressing climate change more generally.

Specific challenges include: capturing and fixing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; developing a greater range of biodegradable plastics; reducing the high levels of waste in pharmaceutical drug manufacture; and improving the efficiency of water-splitting employing visible light photocatalysts.

History suggests that society can develop creative solutions to complex, intractable problems. However, success will most likely require a concerted approach across all areas of science, strong leadership, and a willingness to strategically invest in human capital and value fundamental research.

Alex Bissember received a 2015 Green Chemistry for Life Grant from PhosAgro/UNESCO/IUPAC.

Have you ever found yourself facing your recycling bin, completely befuddled about whether or not you can put a particular item in it? You’re not alone. According to Planet Ark, nearly half of Australians find recycling confusing.

Australia’s recycling rules can seem horrendously complicated, but fortunately they are becoming more simple.

In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to some of the golden rules of kerbside recycling, plus what to do with materials that can’t go in your recycling bin.

The Conversation, CC BY-ND

As the first rule above says, most papers, plastics, metals and glasses can be recycled, but there are a few exceptions and rules for special handling. To find out more, click on each material below. This will also tell you how else you can recycle the items that can’t go in your kerbside recycling bin.

Other helpful sources for recycling rules include:

• Planet Ark’s mobile app, online guide and National Recycling Week website.

• The Victorian government’s Get it right on bin night and the South Australian government’s Recycle right campaigns.

• Sydney’s Garbage Guru, which lets you look up any item and see the best thing to do with it – it’s likely to be applicable to many other cities across the country.

Why do some things need special treatment?

Some items need special handling before they can go in kerbside recycling. These are generally either very small items, or complex/composite items.

Small items, like scraps of paper or foil, steel bottle caps or plastic bottle lids and coffee pods, can cause problems if simply placed in a recycling bin. Because they are small, they can literally fall through the cracks in sorting machines, causing damage to the machines or ending up in landfill.

Combined or composite items are complex items that contain multiple materials, such as newspapers or magazines in plastic wrap, or composite items like Pringles tubes. Automated recycling machines can cope with very small amounts of different materials, such as staples in paper, plastic windows on envelopes, paper labels on glass jars, or slight residues of food on containers. But items with multiple materials can confuse the machines and end up in the wrong category, introducing contamination.

Why is contamination an issue?

Contamination is when things that can’t be recycled through kerbside recycling systems end up in the recycling system.

Contamination can create many problems: recyclable materials may need to be dumped in landfill; the output of recycled materials is less pure; workers at recycling facilities can be put at risk; and in some cases machinery can be damaged. All of these lead to increased costs of recycling that may be passed on to residents.

For example, glass recycling programs are designed only to process glass bottles and jars, which are crushed and then melted down and re-used. Drinking glasses, ceramics, plate glass (window panes) and oven-proof glass melt at higher temperatures than normal glass bottles and jars. When these are incorrectly placed in recycling, this tougher glass can remain solid among the melted glass, leading to impure glass products and damaged machinery.

Better technology is helping to remove contaminants during sorting. But it’s always best to get it right at the source. Planet Ark says that a good recycler’s motto is: “If in doubt, leave it out.”

What about things that can’t be recycled at home?

Just because something can’t be recycled through kerbside collections, that doesn’t mean it can’t be recycled at all.

New channels for recycling more complex items have been pioneered by organisations such as Planet Ark and TerraCycle, as well as by local councils, industry and government under schemes such as the Australian Packaging Covenant and the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme.

Most councils have drop-off locations for larger items that can’t go in kerbside bins, such as electronics, batteries, light bulbs, chemicals and hazardous waste, as well as pickups for white goods and mattresses.

Many supermarkets in metro areas have REDcycle bins that accept soft plastics like plastic bags, soft plastic packaging, biscuit packets and trays, dry cleaning bags, and other “scrunchable” plastics.

Industry take-back programs include Fridge Buy Back, TechCollect for electronics, and ReturnMed for unwanted or expired medicines.

Some big companies now have collection points, such as Ikea which take used batteries, light bulbs, mattresses and allen keys, and Aldi which also takes used batteries.

Free Terracycle recycling programs. Adapted from TerraCycle (http://www.terracycle.com.au)

Recycling is vital to reducing resource use and waste to landfill, and so getting it right is crucial.

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

At first glance, Australians appear to be good recyclers: ABS figures report that in 2012 about 94% of households participated in some way in kerbside recycling. State waste authorities also report a consistent increase in the volume of materials recovered for recycling.

However, these figures do not justify complacency. Our total household waste is increasing and our kerbside recycling rate – the amount of materials collected for recycling as a percentage of the total waste generated – is actually relatively low by global standards, and is only growing slowly.

The recycling rate increased from 45% in 2007 to 51% in 2011, just creeping above the average of 50% across comparable countries.

One reason our kerbside recycling rate isn’t higher is because many people find the rules confusing: a Planet Ark survey found that 48% of Aussies struggle to figure out what can and can’t be recycled, and many incorrectly identified materials that could be recycled. Much of this is likely due to the variation in rules in different places, and the extent to which recycling has changed in the 35 years since it began in Australia.

Many people are confused about what can and can’t be recycled. Adapted from Planet Ark, 7 Secrets of Successful Recyclers Why is there variation in recycling rules?

Every local council makes its own decisions about what it collects for recycling, based on factors like population density, economics, local infrastructure and facilities, waste contracting services available, and potential end markets.

For example, the volume and value of recyclables collected from smaller or remote populations might be too low to be economic, once the costs of collection and transport are factored in. In other words, one size will not fit all council areas.

The type of facilities available to a council also affects what can be collected. For example, combination products like Tetra Pak juice cartons are made of multiple materials: cardboard, plastic and foil linings. Specialised machinery is needed to separate the product into its component materials before it can be recycled and this may not be available in all areas.

In the past the variation between councils was big, as some got access to facilities and new technologies quicker than others.

The good news is things are getting simpler as councils move towards much greater consistency. Now more than 80% of people can place the same things in their recycling bins, by following a few golden rules.

How has recycling changed over time?

Household kerbside recycling schemes were introduced in the 1980s, initially in Sydney, and then spread to the other major centres. By the early 1990s nearly half of households had kerbside collections, and by 2014 94% of Australians had access to kerbside recycling.

Early recycling collections used council-provided bags and crates, or boxes or other bins that were provided by the householder. But mobile garbage bins, better known as “wheelie bins”, have steadily gained in popularity and are now the major form of recycling bin provided by councils. This shift was in part driven by waste service contractors desiring greater cost-efficiency.

Initially, recycling had to be sorted into paper and plastic/glass. Over the past 15 years many councils have moved towards “comingled” recycling, in which all recyclables are placed in the one bin. For example, in 2006, only 47% of Sydney councils had comingled recycling, while in 2012, 95% of councils across NSW did.

Research suggests, however, that while comingled recycling is more convenient for households, it leads to lower recovery rates and more contamination than separated recycling.

Again, the shift to comingled recycling is partly due to a desire for reduced costs. While sorting was traditionally done by hand, recycling is increasingly sent straight to automated machines in materials-recovery facilities, which use the physical properties of different materials to separate them from each other.

Is recycling enough?

Like most conversations about recycling, so far we have only discussed the “supply” side: how things get recycled. It is also important to recognise the “demand” side: what happens to recycled material.

A strong recycling system requires a closed loop, where there is demand for products made from recycled material. Increased demand supports a more circular economy by providing an incentive for investment in recycling collection schemes and infrastructure.

People who want to be super successful recyclers can increase demand by “buying back” their recycling; looking for products with recycled content, such as toilet paper, wrapping and copy paper, boxes, plastic containers and packaging, as well as bigger items like outdoor furniture and carpet underlay.

Recycling also needs to be considered in its appropriate place in the scheme of things. While it is extremely important to ensure useful materials don’t go to waste in landfill, many might be surprised to know that recycling sits below a number of waste avoidance actions. Recycling and other waste management should be more of a last line of defence.

The ‘waste hierarchy’ prioritises actions by those with the greatest environmental benefit. UTS: Institute for Sustainable Futures

Most of us only think about recycling when we’re disposing of something. However it’s much more effective to think about recycling where we’re acquiring it. For most of us, that is in the supermarket when buying groceries.

When considering a product, if we think about the waste that will be produced when we get home, we could choose refuse to purchase products with too much packaging, thus reducing the amount of waste that needs to be recycled. Similarly, we could buy reusable items instead of single-use, disposable items.

New social movements are also trying to encourage people to be even more creative about how they can avoid waste, introducing concepts like “repair” and “re-gifting” back into our consciousness. They are trying to create an extended waste hierarchy with more emphasis on waste avoidance.

An extended waste hierarchy, focusing on waste avoidance. UTS: Institute for Sustainable Futures

Recycling is vital to reducing resource use and waste to landfill, and getting it right is crucial. But it’s also important for recycling to take its place alongside waste-avoidance actions for a more sustainable lifestyle.

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

The Whanganui River: now a legal person. Joerg Muller/Ulanwp/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

In the space of a week, the world has gained three notable new legal persons: the Whanganui River in New Zealand, and the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India.

In New Zealand, the government passed legislation that recognised the Whanganui River catchment as a legal person. This significant legal reform emerged from the longstanding Treaty of Waitangi negotiations and is a way of formally acknowledging the special relationship local Māori have with the river.

In India, the Uttarakhand high court ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers have the same legal rights as a person, in response to the urgent need to reduce pollution in two rivers considered sacred in the Hindu religion.

What are legal rights for nature?

Legal rights are not the same as human rights, and so a “legal person” does not necessarily have to be a human being. Take corporations, for example, which are also treated in law as “legal persons”, as a way to endow companies with particular legal rights, and to treat the company as legally distinct from its managers and shareholders.

Giving nature legal rights means the law can see “nature” as a legal person, thus creating rights that can then be enforced. Legal rights focus on the idea of legal standing (often described as the ability to sue and be sued), which enables “nature” to go to court to protect its rights. Legal personhood also includes the right to enter and enforce contracts, and the ability to hold property.

There is still a big question about whether these types of legal rights are relevant or appropriate for nature at all. But what is clear from the experience of applying this concept to other non-human entities is that these legal rights don’t mean much if they can’t be enforced.

Enforcing nature’s legal rights

What does it take to enforce the legal personhood of a river or other natural entity? First, there needs to be a person appointed to act on its behalf.

Second, for a right to be enforceable, both the “guardians” and users of the resource must recognise their joint rights, duties, and responsibilities. To possess a right implies that someone else has a commensurate duty to observe this right.

Third, if a case requires adjudication by the courts, then it takes time, money, and expertise to run a successful legal case. Enforcing legal rights for nature therefore requires not only legal standing, but also adequate funding and access to legal expertise.

And finally, any actor seeking to enforce these rights will need some form of legislative independence from state and national governments, as well as sufficient real-world power to take action, particularly if such action is politically controversial.

Both New Zealand and India face considerable challenges in ensuring that the new legal rights granted to the rivers are successfully enforced. At present, New Zealand seems significantly better prepared than India to meet these challenges.

In New Zealand, the new system for managing the river will slot into existing systems of government, whereas India will need to set up completely new organisations in a matter of weeks.

Granting legal rights to New Zealand’s Whanganui River catchment (Te Awa Tupua) has taken eight years of careful negotiation. The new legislation, introduced at the national level, transfers ownership of the riverbed from the Crown to Te Awa Tupua, and assigns a guardian the responsibility of representing Te Awa Tupua’s interests.

The guardian will consist of two people: one appointed by the Whanganui Iwi (local Māori people), and the other by the New Zealand government. Substantial funds have been set aside to maintain the health of the Whanganui River, and to establish the legal framework that will be administered by the guardian, with support from independent advisory groups.

In contrast, almost overnight, the High Court in India has ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers will be treated as minors under the law, and will be represented by three people – the director general of Namami Gange project, the Uttarakhand chief secretary, and the advocate general – who will act as guardians for the river. The court has requested that within eight weeks, new boards should be established to oversee the cleaning and maintenance of the rivers. Few further details of the proposed institutional framework are available.

Big questions remain

In both cases, there are still big questions about the roles and responsibilities of the rivers’ guardians.

How will they decide which rights to enforce, and when? Who can hold them to account for those decisions and who has oversight? Even in the case of the Whanganui River, there remain biting questions about water rights and enforcement. For instance, despite (or perhaps because of) longstanding concerns about levels of water extraction by the Tongariro Power Scheme, the legislation specifically avoids creating or transferring proprietary interests in water.

Ultimately, both of these examples show that conferring legal rights to nature is just the beginning of a longer legal process, rather than the end. Although legal rights can be created overnight, it takes time and money to set up the legal and organisational frameworks that will ensure these rights are worth more than the paper they’re printed on.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s plan for a A$2 billion upgrade and expansion of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, announced last week, will be an impressive engineering achievement. Snowy Hydro 2.0 will increase the scheme’s capacity by 50%.

Meeting this extra capacity will depend entirely on the natural water supply available in the Snowy Mountains. But the current environmental conditions of these mountains, and the Australian Alps where they are located, are compromising both water delivery and water quality.

The only way to maintain water flow is to control the threats that are actively degrading the high country catchments. These include introduced animals, wetland loss, and climate change.

Restoration and management

The remarkable Snowy Hydro Scheme was developed over 25 years from the 1940s. During this period the NSW Soil Conservation Service and later NSW National Parks effectively managed soil and restored areas damaged by grazing.

Conservation efforts focused on looking after topsoil, stabilising wetlands, and restoring vegetation after decades of grazing. This ensured good amounts of high-quality water for both hydro power and irrigation downstream.

More recent efforts have focused on the impacts of building the original Snowy scheme. This includes restoring areas cleared for roads and construction sites, and areas where rock and soil from blasting and cutting were dumped.

Before and after revegetation works in the 1970s, following the removal of cattle. Current ecological change is likely to be far more significant and could require new types of intervention. Image courtesy of Roger Good Threats to mountain catchments

The Australian Alps are the nation’s water towers. They provide water for growing food and hydroelectricity, but face several threats.

Across the Alps, despite well-informed and committed control programs, feral horses, pigs and deer are destroying wetlands, degrading streamside vegetation, and causing moisture-holding peat soils and stream channels to erode. This leads to more evaporation, more rapid runoff and erosion, less water flow, and lower water quality.

There is currently no effective response to this damage. We estimate that more than 35% of the high mountains’ wetlands have been affected, and the problem is getting worse.

The Alps are also recognised as extremely vulnerable to climate change. Climate models suggest that alpine areas that currently receive at least 60 days of snow cover will shrink by 18-60% by 2020.

Temperatures in the alps are already increasing by 0.4℃ per decade, an increase of 1.79℃ since records began. Climate change projections for the Australian Alps indicate the hottest summer days will be around 5°C warmer in 2100, minimum temperatures will rise by 3-6℃, and precipitation (rain and snow) will decrease by up to 20%, with less falling as snow. These changes are already putting pressure on iconic mountain ecosystems including the peatlands, snowgum woodlands and alpine ash forests.

The Australian Alps are also likely to experience more extreme events such as heatwaves, storms, fires and severe frosts. All of these affect high mountain ecosystems, making the environment more vulnerable to disturbances such as more fires, weeds and disease outbreaks.

For example, the root-rot fungus, Phytophora cambivora, recently appeared in the alps. The fungus killed large areas of shrubs following unusually warm springtime soil temperatures.

New weeds are an additional concern for the alps as these may compromise the existing plant communities and their ability to deliver services such as water. Alpine peat soils, which build up over thousands of years, can also burn in drought.

Reliable water depends on functioning ecosystems

A stable water supply from the Alps is crucial for energy and food production. This relies on intact vegetation.

Back in the 1950s, it became clear to the researchers at the Soil Conservation Service that hard-hooved animals, in this case domestic cattle, were severely damaging the alpine catchments.

The success of the original Snowy scheme depended on removing cattle from alpine areas, controlling soil erosion that resulted from prior grazing and hydro works, and carrying out extensive revegetation works across the whole of the nearby mountain ranges.

However, land managers to this day are still controlling a legacy of disturbance and weed invasions from both the Snowy scheme itself and years of previous grazing. Snowy 2.0 must consider these lessons from the past, and work to improve mountain catchments.

Alpine plants and animals often live close to their environmental tolerances, meaning they are not necessarily able to cope with change. For some species, climate change is likely to exceed these thresholds. Vegetation communities will change as current populations decline and colonisers from different species move in to occupy the gaps, including invasive species.

Feral horses make it even more difficult for native species to respond to a changing climate, by exacerbating environmental degradation and impacts on water.

Part of the solution is restoring and re-vegetating degraded high country landscapes. For example, restoring snowgum communities, which were severely affected by burning and grazing, may lead to increases in the amount of water trapped as drifting fog.

But climate change will demand new research and management partnerships to find species that will survive well into the future and to develop adaptation pathways to respond to uncertain conditions.

This will be a new and different world. We are currently ill-prepared to maintain high-quality water yield in the future, to predict the impacts of climate change, or to effectively protect our alps for future generations.

But we are confident these questions can be answered with adequate investment in the environmental infrastructure needed to underpin the engineering. We estimate that between A$5 million and A$7 million per year is needed to research and develop new management structures. You could see this investment as royalties returned to the system that provides the water and power.

Turnbull’s plan may deliver more power, but only if the environment is carefully managed. Otherwise Snowy Hydro 2.0 may be left high and dry.

Adrienne Nicotra receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the NCCARF. She is a member of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Science Advisory Council and the Ecological Society of Australia.

David Freudenberger receives funding from Whitehaven Coal to conduct mine site rehabilitation research. He is a board member of the Society for Ecological Restoration Australasia, a member of the Australian Ecological Society and a member of the ACT Natural Resource Management Advisory Council

Geoff Cary currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Bushfire and Naturals Hazard CRC, and has recently received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Greenhouse Office/Department of Climate Change Greenhouse Action in Regional Australia funding schemes, NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, and the Bushfire CRC. He is affiliated with the International Association of Wildland Fire.

Geoffrey Hope has received funding from the Office of Environment and Heritage, NSW Government and the ACT Government for research on mountain wetland ecology. He is affiliated with the Australian Institute of Alpine Studies and is a member of the Kosciuscko National Park Wild Horse Management Plan Review Independent Technical Reference Group. . .

Sam Banks receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Susanna Venn receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

Pollution and debris off the Sri Lankan coast. David Jones/plasticoceans.org

We live in a world of plastic. Shopping bags, drink bottles, your toothbrush and even your clothes are among the everyday items made from plastic. But plastic isn’t fantastic, and neither is the current state of our environment.

Humans have been mass-producing plastic since the 1950s. We produce hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic every year and production is only increasing. Unfortunately, most of it is used only once and then thrown away.

Only a small proportion of plastic is recycled. The majority ends up in landfill or, in the worst case scenario, our oceans.

A Plastic Ocean is a documentary film directed by the Australian journalist Craig Leeson. It dives into and investigates the devastating impacts that plastic has caused to our environment, especially our marine life.

What starts off as an adventure to film the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet, leads to the shocking discovery of a thick layer of plastic debris floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Craig, alongside Tanya Streeter, a world record-breaking free diver and environmental activist, then travel across the globe to report on the havoc caused by decades of plastic use.

The film presents beautiful shots of the marine environment. This contrasts with footage of heavily polluted cities and dumps full of plastic rubbish. The juxtaposition between these images sends the message that our actions and choices can severely impact the planet. Throughout the film, experts are interviewed to provide further insight into some of the problems derived from plastic.

Impacts of plastic use

Plastic is so widely used because it is durable and cheap. Unfortunately, this durability is the same quality that makes it so detrimental to the environment. Most plastics do not break down chemically. Instead, they break into smaller and smaller pieces that can persist in the environment for an extensive period of time.

Because it is so affordable, developing countries use plastics extensively. However, many regions lack proper waste management, and much of the rubbish is washed into the ocean when it rains. As a result, a large percentage of all plastics in the ocean are due to only a handful of countries. Scientists estimate that more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are currently floating in our oceans.

Throughout the film, we are shown footage of numerous marine species that have been affected by plastic debris. Marine animals and sea birds often mistake floating plastic for food. Large pieces of plastic, when eaten, can obstruct the animals’ digestive tracts of the animals, essentially starving them to death.

When smaller “microplastics” are ingested, toxins are released and become stored in their tissue. These toxins accumulate up the food chain and can eventually end up on our dinner tables. The consumption of the contaminated seafood can cause many health problems including cancer, immune system problems, and even childhood developmental issues. This is a major problem, as almost a fifth of the world’s population relies on the ocean for their primary source of protein. Society’s huge appetite for plastic is literally poisoning us.

The future of plastics

There is no quick fix for a problem that has grown hugely over the past few decades. The use of plastics is so ingrained in society that it is all but impossible to eliminate them completely.

The film does, however, offer various strategies that can be implemented to reduce the impact of plastics.

Ideally, avoid plastic-containing products as much as possible. Avoid single-use plastic products and recycle whatever you can. Local governments also need to implement a refund scheme for the return of plastic bottles to incentivise recycling.

For unrecyclable plastics, new technology has been developed to convert them into fuel, providing a second life for those plastics.

It is up to us to embrace these changes and move away from the plastic culture. We need to get this problem under control, as it will only become worse as the human population increases. Our marine animals deserve to live in a blue ocean, not a plastic soup.

A Plastic Ocean is touring internationally, including screenings in Brisbane on March 25 and Cairns on March 27.

Gary Truong 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.

Just think of it as a battery that can also take you to the shops. Steve Jurvetson/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

A key question amid the consternation over the current state of Australia’s east coast energy market has been how much renewable energy capacity to build, and how fast.

But help could be at hand from a surprising source: electric vehicles. By electrifying our motoring, we would boost demand for renewable energy from the grid, while smoothing out some of the destabilising effects that the recent boom in household solar has had on our energy networks.

Australia’s electricity infrastructure was built largely without renewable energy in mind, and primarily to maintain reliability for when demand peaks. The high uptake of solar panels, while good for reducing carbon emissions, has reduced grid demand by 5-10% in Australia, and as a side-effect has lowered the value of network assets, raised power prices, and made the grid trickier to manage.

Electric vehicles can ease the pressure on spikes in electricity prices by adding storage capacity. They are effectively a distributed storage system - with smart meters they can feed electricity back into the grid when prices are high. These vehicles’ battery reserves can thus help with the balancing of the grid and provide energy in the peak period. Electric vehicles would also add battery storage to the grid at the same time, which can reduce the need to size the grid for demand peaks.

One way to think of electric vehicles is essentially as batteries you can drive. So before the government pursues plans such as spending A$2 billion on expanding the Snowy Hydro scheme, it should do a cost-benefit analysis comparing the returns from similar infrastructure investment in electric vehicles.

According to the Office of the Chief Economist, Australia produced 6 billion kilowatt hours of solar PV in 2015 – enough to run almost 2 million cars, equivalent to 10% of Australia’s total current passenger vehicle fleet. Increasing demand for grid-sourced electricity will put downward pressure on network prices, which typically are roughly half of the cost of a household energy tariff. At a time when demand has declined and policy settings have created lots of investor uncertainty, the increased demand will also encourage investment in new generation capacity.

Electric vehicles can also increase economic activity in Australia and improve air quality and health. Australia has nearly 20 million cars that together drive 280 billion km each year. Passenger vehicles alone consume 20 billion litres of fuel each year in Australia. At A$1.50 per litre, that is A$30 billion per year that is burned, with roughly half the revenues going to multinational oil companies and the other half going into federal coffers as fuel tax.

The health costs of pollution from vehicle emissions adds a further A$1,450 per household per year in major cities, an annual impost of some A$14.5 billion on household and government budgets – roughly the same as what the government earns in fuel tax.

If all vehicles were electric, the same distance could be driven with electricity costing less than A$15 billion, because electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines (although this is slightly offset by minor grid losses). This would thus deliver a double saving, in terms of both household fuel bills and reduced health costs.

Changing gear

Of course this won’t happen overnight, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The electricity grid will need time to adjust and add extra renewable capacity, as the cost of electric cars comes down and coal power stations get old.

Both economic analysis and recent political experience suggest that encouraging investment in renewable energy is expensive, especially if the only driving factor is the need to cut greenhouse emissions (important though that is).

Here is where electric vehicles can really help the grid. Swapping petrol or diesel cars for electric ones on a large enough scale will increase Australia’s flatlining electricity demand, making it more lucrative for energy suppliers to invest in new generation capacity. Given the increasing cost of gas, and the declining support for coal, on balance most of this demand will be met with new renewable capacity, facilitated by the addition of all these new “batteries you can drive”.

A suggested pathway to energy sustainability via electric cars. Adapted from Andrich et al. Inequality as an obstacle to sustainable energy use, Energy for Sustainable Development

Government policy should be to set some high-level national interest objectives, such as maintaining gas for domestic use, and then simply not interfere with the market as much as possible. But political leaders are struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in technology and the market. The pathway to sustainability would have been smoother and faster if governments had looked to WA for a gas reservation policy, not intervened by closing coal, and reduced the subsidies that allowed solar power to grow so disruptively fast (particularly in wealthier households).

Making more effort to promote electric cars would also have allowed a more successful transition to renewable energy and reduced the price shocks being suffered by eastern Australia in areas such as the gas market. Fortunately, it is not too late.

Hitting the road

Investing in a new car is not a decision most households take lightly. This is especially true of electric cars, which are expensive, are not marketed widely, are available in only a limited range of models, and are subject to concerns about charging and range.

Presently, electric vehicles are only affordable for higher-income households, which is ironic given the benefits they would offer lower-income households in terms of fuel budgeting and reduced exposure to urban pollution and health costs.

One-third of an electric vehicle’s cost is batteries, which are rapidly coming down in price. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that by 2022, electric models will cost the same as their petrol counterparts. That will be the point of liftoff for sales.

Meanwhile, electric cars have an undoubted cool factor. Buying one is a powerful way to show you care about your community’s future. Pardon the pun, but just look at the way Tesla founder Elon Musk electrified the debate over South Australia’s electricity problems.

For governments, electric vehicles offer an opportunity to make significant inroads on environmental and health problems, not to mention urban planning and infrastructure. The demand for car batteries could also boost related industries, such as lithium mining, in which Australia is a world leader.

Feeling electric

Simple, inexpensive policies could encourage electric vehicle uptake, such as reducing registration fees and stamp duty on electric cars and allowing them to drive in bus or other priority lanes, while also hiking the tax on diesel cars that cause cancer.

Other emerging transport trends, such as car-sharing clubs and ride-sharing apps, could also hasten the uptake of electric vehicles. Sharing increases the number of kilometres driven by each individual vehicle, meaning that the upfront costs are paid back more rapidly, leaving the owner with a car that is paid off and cheaper to run than a petrol or diesel model.

These facts are not lost on the car manufacturers themselves. But given the potential co-benefits to the electricity grid and community health, we might expect power utilities and health agencies to join the push to actively promote electric vehicles – not to mention politicians who are looking to deal with our energy issues and win a few votes along they way.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Soils play an important role in the nutritional value of our food.

The next time you bite into an apple, spare a thought for the soils that helped to produce it. Soils play a vital role, not just in an apple’s growth, but in our own health too.

The formation of soil, pedogenesis, is a very slow process. Creating one millimetre of soil coverage can take anything from a few years to an entire millennium.

But with soils around the world under threat, we’re in danger of losing their health benefits faster than they are replaced.

Healthy soils for healthy plants

A healthy soil is a living ecosystem in which dead organic matter forms the base of a food web consisting of microscopic and larger organisms.

Together, these organisms sustain other biological activities, including plant, animal and human health. Soils supply nutrients and water, which are vital for plants, and are home to organisms that interact with plants, for better or worse.

In the natural environment, plants form relationships with soil microbes to obtain water, nutrients and protection against some pathogens. In return, the plants provide food.

The use of mineral fertilisers can make some of these relationships redundant, and their breakdown can lead to the loss of other benefits such as micronutrients and disease protection.

Certain farming practices, such as tillage (or mechanical digging), are harmful to fungi in soils. These fungi play important roles in helping plants obtain crucial nutrients such as zinc.

Zinc is an essential micronutrient for all living organisms. Zinc deficiency affects an estimated one-third of the world’s population, particularly in regions with zinc-deficient soils. If food staples such as cereal grains are grown on zinc-deficient soils and further lack their fungi helpers, they become deficient in zinc.

If the way food is grown affects the composition and health of plants, could farming practices that focus on soil health make food more nutritious? A recent review on fruits says yes.

The researchers found that fruits produced under organic farming generally contained more vitamins, more flavour compounds such as phenolics, and more antioxidants when compared with conventional farming. Many factors are at play here, but pest and soil management strategies that benefit soil organisms and their relationship with plants are part of the equation.

The composition and function of animals and humans reflects, to some extent, what they eat. For example, the fish you eat is only rich in omega-3 fatty acids if the fish has eaten algae and microbes that manufacture these oils. The fish itself does not produce these compounds.

Increasing numbers of studies are demonstrating the link between nutrition and human health issues. We know, for example, that antioxidants, carbohydrates, saturated fat content and the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids contribute to immune system regulation.

We do not produce some of these nutrients; we must obtain them through our food. Therefore, how food is grown is a matter of public health.

Beyond nutrition

Soil is the greatest reservoir of biodiversity. A handful of soil can contain millions of individuals from thousands of species of bacteria and fungi, not to mention the isopods, rotifers, nematodes, worms and many other identified and yet-to-be-identified organisms that call soil home.

Soil microbes produce an arsenal of compounds in their chemical warfare for dominance and survival. Many widely used antibiotics and other drugs were isolated from soil. It may hold the answers to our battle with antibiotic resistance and other diseases including cancer.

It has also been suggested that exposure to diverse microbes in the natural environment can help prevent allergies and other immune-related disorders.

The road to healthy soils

Unfortunately, we are doing a poor job of looking after our soils. About two-thirds of agricultural land in Australia is suffering from acidification, contamination, depletion of nutrients and organic matter, and/or salinisation. And in case anyone forgets, soil is every bit as non-renewable as oil because soil formation is such a slow process.

On the other hand, soil erosion can happen very quickly. For a taste of what happens when soils are destroyed, nothing beats sitting through a dust storm and watching day turn into night. Dust storms inspired George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road.

In the 2009 Red Dawn in Sydney, some 2.5 million tonnes of soil were lost within hours to the ocean in a 3,000km-long, 2.5km-high dust plume.

Australia’s major cities began on fertile land. Melbourne’s food bowl can supply 41% of the city’s fresh food needs. Such secure access to fresh and whole food needs our protection.

Healthy soils are part of the solution to some of our dilemmas – poverty, malnutrition and climate change – as they underpin processes that gives us food, energy and water. If we want to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, soil health is a linchpin we cannot ignore.

From this perspective, agricultural practices to maintain healthy soil are clearly an important target for policymakers. Looking after our soils ultimately means looking after ourselves.

Ee Ling Ng works at the Australian-China Joint Research Centre: Healthy Soils for Sustainable Food Production and Environmental Quality. She receives funding from the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science.

Deli Chen receives funding from Australia Research Council, Meat Livestock Australia, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

Orange-bellied parrots are one of the species included in the government's Threatened Species Prospectus. JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA

Southern cassowaries, orange-bellied parrots, Leadbeater’s possums, and Australia’s only purple wattle are among the threatened species the government is seeking conservation investment for under its recently released threatened species prospectus. The prospectus seeks business and philanthropic support in partnership with the government and community groups to raise around A$14 million each year.

The government has proposed 51 projects, costing from A$45,000 to A$6 million. At first glance the prospectus is a positive initiative.

But it also highlights that the current government is unwilling to invest what’s needed to assure the conservation of our threatened plants, animals and other organisms.

The good news

The government’s partial outsourcing of conservation investment and responsibility might have some benefit. Raising broader awareness about the plight of Australia’s threatened species, particularly among Australia’s leading companies and donors, could lead to valuable conservation gains. It could translate to pressure for greater financial investment in conservation and less damaging actions by big companies.

The prospectus includes an excellent range of critically important projects. These include seed banks for plants facing extinction, and projects to control feral animals and create safe havens for mammals and birds.

These projects could help to save species on the brink of extinction, such as the critically endangered Gilbert’s potoroo, the Christmas Island flying fox and the orange-bellied parrot.

The projects have a high chance of success. Community groups and government are already on board and ready to take action, if only the funds materialise.

Why do so many species need urgent help?

The State of the Environment Report released in early March shows that the major pressures on wildlife have not decreased since 2011 when the previous report was released. The prospects for most threatened species have not improved.

Habitat loss is still the biggest threat. The homes of many threatened species are continually under threat from developments. Coal mines threaten the black-throated finch, urban sprawl eats away at the last 1% of critically endangered Victorian grasslands, and clearing for agriculture has spiked in Queensland.

Grasslands, such as these in Melbourne, are being lost to development. Takver/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Feral animals are widespread and control programs have been inadequate. New diseases are emerging, such as the chytrid fungus that has devastated frog populations worldwide.

The horticulture industry, for example, introduced myrtle rust to Australia. The disease was poorly managed when it was first detected. It now infects more than 350 species of the Myrtaceae family (including eucalypts).

We have so many threatened species because national and state governments don’t invest enough money in protecting our natural heritage, and environmental protections have been rolled back in favour of economic development.

Show us the money

Over the past three years the federal government has invested A$210 million in threatened species. This annual investment of A$70 million each year is minuscule compared with the government’s revenue (0.017% of A$416.9 billion).

It includes projects under the National Landcare Program, Green Army (much of which didn’t help threatened species) and the 20 Million Trees program.

The A$14 million that the prospectus hopes to raise is a near-negligible proportion of annual revenue (0.003%).

Globally, the amount of money needed to prevent extinctions and recover threatened species is at least ten times more than what is being spent.

In Australia, A$40 million each year would prevent the loss of 45 mammals, birds and reptiles from the Kimberley region.

Most species in the government’s threatened species strategy, like this northern quoll, are charismatic. S J Bennett/Flickr, CC BY

The inescapable truth is that Australia’s conservation spend needs to be in the billions, not the current and grossly inadequate tens of millions, to reverse the disastrous state of the environment.

Can we afford it? The 2016 Defence White Paper outlines an expansion of Australia’s defence expenditure from A$32.4 billion in 2016-17 to A$58.7 billion by 2025, even though the appropriate level of investment is extremely uncertain.

We are more certain that our biodiversity will continue to decline with current funding levels. Every State of the Environment report shows ongoing biodiversity loss at relatively stable, low-level funding.

And what will happen if industry won’t open its wallets? Will the government close the funding gap, or shrug its shoulders, hoping the delay between committing a species to extinction and the actual event will be long enough to avoid accountability?

In the past few years we’ve seen the extinction of the Christmas Island forest skink, the Christmas Island pipistrelle, and the Bramble Cay melomys with no public inquiry. Academics have been left to probe the causes, and there is no clear line of government responsibility or mechanism to provide enough funding to help prevent more extinctions.

Popularity poll

Another problem is the prospectus’s bias towards the cute and cuddly, reflecting the prejudice in the Commonwealth Threatened Species Strategy. The strategy and prospectus make the assumption that potential benefactors are inclined to fork out for a freckled duck, but not for a Fitzroy land snail.

The prospectus includes almost half of Australia’s threatened mammals (listed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act) and one-fifth of the threatened birds.

Other groups are woefully represented, ranging from 13% of threatened reptiles to just 1% of threatened plants and none of the listed threatened invertebrates. The prospectus does not even mention spectacular and uniquely Australian threatened crayfish, snails, velvet worms, beetles, butterflies, moths and other insects.

The allocation of funds is equally problematic. We found that birds received the most money (A$209,000 per species on average), followed by mammals and plants.

Raising new funds to help save iconic species is valuable, and can help other species. This focus on birds and mammals wouldn’t be a problem if the government were to pick up the tab for the less popular threatened species.

But it hasn’t. That means our threatened species program will continue to be exceptionally biased, while many more species vanish forever, with little acknowledgement.

We think that the prospectus, despite its biases, is a positive initiative. It is vital to engage society, including business and wealthy philanthropists, in the care of Australia’s natural heritage. But it also highlights how little the government is willing to invest in preserving our threatened wildlife and ecosystems.

This work arose from discussions held by the communications team of the Ecological Society of Australia (ESA). Don Driscoll is president of the ESA. He has recieved funding to undertake research aimed at reducing extinction risks in the Christmas Island Giant Gecko and the Baw Baw frog.

Bek Christensen is vice president of the Ecological Society of Australia, and chair of their Policy Working Group. She works for the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, which is a research infrastructure project funded under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

Euan Ritchie receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Euan Ritchie is a Director (Media Working Group) of the Ecological Society of Australia, and a member of the Australian Mammal Society.