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The 13m-long, 20-tonne Nauka laboratory is finally going into orbit after a delay of 14 years.

Natural England biodiversity metric will let valuable wildlife habitat be logged as ‘degraded’ land and penalise rewilding, warn ecologists

The government’s new metric for biodiversity will have to be urgently improved if it is going to be fit for purpose, academics and conservationists have warned.

The biodiversity net gain (BNG) metric, published by Natural England in July, outlines how new roads, houses and other building projects must achieve no net loss of biodiversity, or achieve a 10% net gain elsewhere if nature is damaged on site.

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A wildfire in Washington state has lit up portions of a forestry offset project that has generated the second most credits to date under California’s WCI-linked cap-and-trade programme, according to data and sources.

Swedish utility Vattenfall’s EU ETS-covered power output fell nearly 2% year-on-year in H1, despite a near 3% increase in the company's overall generation, the company said in its quarterly results on Tuesday.

Australia’s Woodside and a quartet of Japanese companies are exploring the possibility of using Australian natural gas to produce ammonia for the Japanese market, with associated CO2 emissions to be offset from CCS or bio-sequestration projects.

Despite having some of the world's best offshore wind resources, Australia is letting an untapped abundance of clean energy go to waste, new research says.

The post Australia has massive offshore wind opportunity, if only government would get out of the way appeared first on RenewEconomy.

EUA prices edged up on Wednesday, giving back earlier gains amid moderately firmer energy and equities and following an improved auction result.

WA told its recent whole of system energy plan needs to be revised to focus on best opportunities for wind, solar and battery storage.

The post WA told to produce better plan for wind, solar and storage in net zero target appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Commodity trading house Glencore has set up an emissions desk in Singapore, with a former BP carbon trader heading up operations.

Oil and gas firm Sinopec on Wednesday bought 100,000 CO2 permits from industrial conglomerate China Resources Holdings in the first off-screen block trade since China's national emissions trading market launched last week.

Slow-moving storms such as recent deluge in Germany could become 14 times more frequent by 2100

Catastrophic floods such as those that struck Europe recently could become much more frequent as a result of global heating, researchers say.

High-resolution computer models suggest that slow-moving storms could become 14 times more common over land by the end of the century in a worst-case scenario. The slower a storm moves, the more rain it dumps on a small area and the greater the risk of serious flooding.

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Japan will double the share of renewables in its energy mix by 2030 and make large cuts in LNG and coal consumption, according to a proposal released by the nation’s industry ministry Wednesday.

One quarter of monitored social housing properties recorded winter temperatures below World Health Organisation standards for more than 80% of winter, new research shows. Daniel Daly, Research Fellow at the Sustainable Buildings Research Centre, University of Wollongong Federico Tartarini, Associate research fellow, University of Wollongong Gordon Waitt, Professor of Geography, University of Wollongong Michael Tibbs, Energy Efficiency Researcher, University of Wollongong Paul Cooper, Senior Professor, Sustainable Buildings Research Centre (SBRC), University of Wollongong Theresa Harada, Research Fellow at Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, University of Wollongong Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

NSW tries to please all – and fails – with plan to cancel out unused gas exploration licences while re-approving those in areas set to see an explosion of new gas projects.

The post NSW kills “zombie” gas licences, but brings Narrabri back from the dead appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Scientists are excavating one of the most important Jurassic sites ever discovered in the UK.

Odfjell Oceanwind is renting out its WindGrid technology – mobile offshore wind units of 11MW each that serve microgrids powering oil and gas rigs.

The post How floating wind microgrids are powering oil and gas rigs appeared first on RenewEconomy.

As Australians have been preoccupied by coronavirus, a wider environmental calamity has unfurled. The emergency isn’t over, it’s only just beginning

Build back better. In the early days of Covid-19, that slogan rang out everywhere: a pledge to harness disruption for positive change.

For a time, everything felt possible. There are no atheists in foxholes and, we discovered, no free marketeers in a pandemic, as even the most conservative governments pledged to spend on a scale previously unimaginable.

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Both spend similar amounts of money but men use cars much more, Swedish analysis shows

Men’s spending on goods causes 16% more climate-heating emissions than women’s, despite the sum of money being very similar, a study has found.

The biggest difference was men’s spending on petrol and diesel for their cars. The gender differences in emissions have been little studied, the researchers said, and should be recognised in action to beat the climate crisis.

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Water that should be crystal clear has become a green-brown slop of microscopic algae because of industrial farm waste

There’s more below the surface than we thought – something even worse than the water companies’ disgusting habit of filling our rivers with raw sewage. After a deep dive into the data, the team that made Rivercide last week discovered that while sewage now dominates our perceptions of river pollution, it’s not their major cause of death.

On the border between Wales and England, we found a great river dying before our eyes. The Wye is covered by every possible conservation law, but in just a few years it has spiralled towards complete ecological collapse. The vast beds of water crowfoot, the long fluttering weed whose white and yellow flowers once bedecked the surface of the river, and which – like mangroves around tropical seas – provide the nurseries in which young fish and other animals grow and adults hide and breed, have almost vanished in recent years. Our own mapping suggests a loss of between 90% and 97%.

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The McGowan Government has become a founding member of the Smart Energy Council's Zero Carbon Certification Scheme to boost the State's fledgling renewable hydrogen industry.

The post WA joins Zero Carbon Certification Scheme for hydrogen appeared first on RenewEconomy.