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Queensland government utilities lead incumbents' fight against 5-minute rule, despite support from AEMO and others who say change will lower prices, encourage storage.

RUNAWAY STARS: New research suggests super-fast stars in the Milky Way are actually 'runaways' - from another galaxy.

Environmental legal group Client Earth says minsters failed to conduct their recent public consultation on clean air properly.

This quenda seems to have been a victim of land clearing. Colin Leonhardt/Birdseyeviewphotography.com.au, Author provided

Tens of millions of wild animals are killed each year by land clearing across Australia, according to our research on the harm done to animals when native vegetation is removed for agricultural, urban and industrial development.

As my colleague Nahiid Stephens and I point out in our study, this harm to animals is largely invisible, unlike the obvious effects of clearing on trees and other plants. But just because something is invisible, that does not mean it should be ignored.

We argue that reforms are necessary to ensure that decision-makers take wild animals’ welfare into account when assessing development proposals and land clearing applications.

How does land clearing harm animals?

Land clearing harms animals in two basic ways. First, they may be killed or injured when native vegetation is removed, typically through the use of earth-moving machinery. For example, animals may suffer traumatic injuries or be smothered when vegetation is cut or soil and debris are shifted.

Second, the removal of native vegetation puts animals in harm’s way. Those that survive the clearing process will be left in an environment that is typically hostile, unfamiliar or unsuitable. Animals are likely to find themselves in landscapes that are devoid of food and shelter but filled with predators, disease, and increased aggression from members of their own species as they struggle to make a living.

Land clearing causes animals to die in ways that are physically painful and psychologically distressing. Animals will also suffer physical injuries and other pathological conditions that may persist for days or months as they try to survive in cleared areas or other environments to which they are displaced.

Many reptiles and mammals are territorial or have small home ranges, and thus have strong associations with small areas of habitat. Koalas in urban areas, for example, tend to rely on particular food trees. Likewise, lizards and snakes often rely on particular microhabitat features such as logs, rocks, and leaf litter to provide the combination of temperature and humidity that they need to survive.

Laws are not protecting animals

Land clearing remains a fundamental pressure on the Australian environment. While the regulatory frameworks for land clearing vary greatly across the Australian states and territories, the principal statutes that govern native vegetation clearance in most jurisdictions typically contain some sort of express recognition of the harm that land clearing causes, such as the loss or fragmentation of habitat, land degradation, and salinity.

Habitat lost: land cleared for the now-discontinued Perth Freight Link road project. Colin Leonhardt/Birdseyeviewphotography.com.au, Author provided

Yet these regulations are uniformly silent on the issue of how land clearing harms animals. No state or territory has developed a clear framework to evaluate this harm, let alone minimise it in future development proposals.

This failure to recognise animal welfare as a significant issue for decision-making about land clearing is troubling, especially given the scale of current land clearing. In Queensland, for example, an estimated 296,000 hectares of woody vegetation was cleared in 2014-15, nearly all of which was for the purpose of converting native vegetation to pasture. In our study we estimate that, on the basis of previous studies and current estimates of clearing rates, land clearing in Queensland and New South Wales combined kills more than 50 million birds, mammals and reptiles each year.

What reforms are necessary?

We suggest that two basic reforms are required. First, state and territory parliaments should amend the laws that govern environmental impact assessments and native vegetation clearance, to require decision-makers to take animal welfare into account when assessing land clearing applications.

Second, we urgently need accurate ways to evaluate the harm that proposed clearing actions may cause to individual animals. Animal welfare is broadly recognised as an important social concern, so it makes sense that in a situation where we know animals are being harmed, we should take steps to measure and prevent that harm.

The basic aim of any reform should be to ensure that the harm that land clearing causes to individual wild animals is appropriately considered in all forms of environmental decision-making and that such evaluations are based on clear and objective criteria for animal welfare.

At a minimum, those who apply to clear native vegetation should be required to provide an estimate of the number and type of native animals that will be killed by the proposed land clearing. This would ensure that all parties – applicants, decision-makers, and the community – understand the harm that the clearing would cause. These estimates could be made by using population density information for species that are likely to be affected – an approach that has been already been used.

We also need to revise our perceptions about the usefulness and necessity of land clearing in Australia. A better idea of what is “acceptable” would include not only the environmental costs of clearing an area of native vegetation, but also the individual suffering that animals will experience.

Issues of causation and responsibility are critical here. While it’s unlikely that someone who wants to clear land actually wants native animals to suffer, such suffering will nevertheless be an inevitable consequence. The relevant question is not whether animals will be killed and harmed when land is cleared, but how much of that harm will occur, how severe it will be, and whether it ought to be avoided.

If such harm is deemed necessary – based on an accepted system for weighing the potential benefits and harms – the next question is how the harm to animals can be minimised by, for example, keeping the amount of vegetation to be cleared to a minimum.

Hugh Finn 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.

The new research funding body sets out its vision for the future amid the changing world of science.

The slug has an impressive physiology, engages in acrobatic sex and is a handy scavenger of waste – TV naturalist Chris Packham is right to stick up for them

Slugs are much maligned. Having the temerity to wear their slime on the outside of their bodies, they are about as far removed from our notion of cute and cuddly as is possible without being tapeworms. But they are misunderstood and persecuted beyond necessity – with ecological knock-on effects for the slow-worms, thrushes, hedgehogs, badgers and other animals further up the food chain. True, some slugs will eat your plants, but naturalist Chris Packham recently made a plea for greater tolerance for the mollusc: with that in mind, here are five reasons to admire slugs:

1. Most slugs are scavengers, but that can be handy. They eat that catch-all substrate, “decaying organic matter”, which includes dead and rotting plants; leaf litter; fungoid wood; fallen fruit; animal droppings; carrion; deliquescent toadstools; and mouldering compost. If they sometimes nibble idly at a leaf, it is probably because the leaf is already damaged or diseased.

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Researchers unlock the chemistry of Roman concrete which has resisted the elements for thousands of years.

Researchers have described new fossils belonging to an extinct crocodile-like creature that had a set of serrated teeth like those of a T. rex.

最新调查显示，中国的象牙交易禁令的效果初步显现：越南象牙价格暴跌，而一些象牙贸易商也被迫退出。(翻译：子明/chinadialogue)

• China’s ivory ban sparks dramatic drop in prices across Asia

《卫报》拿到的一份最新研究显示，自从中国政府宣布计划取缔国内象牙交易之后，亚洲的象牙原料价格大幅走低。但是，偷猎现象目前并未因此减少。

过去三年，野生动植物正义委员会（WJC）的卧底调查员一直在走访河内的象牙贩子。2015年，他们了解到的象牙原料平均价格是每公斤1322美元，2016年10月降到了750美元，而到今年2月份价格再次下跌到660美元，比两年前降了一半。

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In my single-handed fight I have collected 180,000 items – 50 pieces of litter a day for 10 years. If only the world didn’t find this weird

Who’s that weirdo? Sadly, the answer is me. I can feel the question following me as I dive into the gutter or duck around the feet of my fellow Londoners to sweep up the bottles and cans and newspapers they have abandoned.

The question hasn’t changed in the the decade or so that I’ve been waging what seems a lone fight against the plastic tide threatening to engulf us. And I doubt it will change now, even as the Guardian reports that a million plastic bottles around the world are bought every minute – that’s a staggering 20,000 every second.

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Since January, the White House, Congress and EPA have engineered a dizzying reversal of regulations designed to protect the environment and public health

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate deal may have followed months of anguished division amongst his closest advisers, but his administration has proceeded with quiet efficiency in its dismantling of other major environmental policies.

The White House, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency have dovetailed to engineer a dizzying reversal of clean air and water regulations implemented by Barack Obama’s administration.

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Warming temperatures caused perilous ice up to eight metres thick to drift south from the Arctic to clog the coasts of Newfoundland, Labrador and Quebec. It trapped boats and ferries as late as June, with Canadian scientists blaming climate change. These dramatic photos capture the rare event.

All photographs by Louis Helbig unless otherwise credited

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Oil companies planning to drill near mouth of the river have calculated that the unique ecosystem has a 30% chance of being affected in the event of a spill

Oil companies planning to drill near a vast coral reef at the mouth of the Amazon river have calculated that the unique ecosystem has a 30% chance of being affected in the event of an oil spill.

Related: 'We are rewriting the textbooks': first dives to Amazon coral reef stun scientists

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The new head of UK research has said that he won't centrally direct scientific research.

Opposition parties increase pressure for deposit return initiative to boost recycling and keep litter off streets and beaches

The UK government is under growing pressure to introduce a money-back return scheme for plastic bottles, in order to tackle huge volumes of waste in a country where 400 bottles are sold every second.

Opposition parties have called on ministers to introduce a deposit return scheme that experts say would drastically reduce the number of plastic bottles littering streets and seas around the UK. Similar schemes have been successfully introduced in at least a dozen countries.

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Buxton, Derbyshire One summer we dammed the brook by the bridge where the dippers bred and swam with the tiddler trout

Hogshaw Brook, which runs below my late mother’s house, is part of the very first landscape in my story as a naturalist. Every night when I went to bed, I’d hear its ceaseless journey to join the river Wye. I remember one year how we dammed it by the bridge where the dippers bred, and its four-inch flow rose eventually up to the heaving chest of my nine-year-old self. We swam in it that summer, along with its tiddler brown trout and the caddis fly larvae that we loved to uncover beneath the cold stones.

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The ability of wind power to deliver significant price falls in South Australia has been eroded by new rules that require more expensive gas generators to operate at times of high wind output. The days of "negative pricing" may be over.

Don Harwin tells Committee for Economic Development of Australia the ‘self-indulgent climate culture war’ should end

The Liberal New South Wales energy minister has delivered a speech marking a sharp departure from his federal colleagues saying the coal-fired power industry should accept the clean energy target that will see the industry close in the coming decades as “the best deal that coal will get”.

He also ridiculed claims that expanding gas exploration in NSW was the key to fixing Australia’s gas crisis, saying such an idea was “curious”, and pointedly called for an end to the “self-indulgent climate culture war”.

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Netherlands-based solar developer reveals plans to build largest solar farm in NSW – and one of biggest in Australia – a 316MW project near Gunning.

Garth Heron, who is now the head of Wind Power Development at Neon Australia, shares his blunt assessment of what incumbents will do next in their war against renewables in Adelaide.