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Developing countries score significant victory for greater transparency from outside parties at UN climate negotiations

A push from developing countries to force fossil fuel lobbyists taking part in UN climate talks to declare their conflicts of interest has won a significant battle against resistance from the world’s biggest economies including the European Union, US and Australia.

The UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) has agreed to enhance “openness and transparency” for outside parties and will accept submissions from any stakeholder – which could be any person or group affected by climate change or climate change policy – on how it could do so.

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UK cements its position as global leader in wind technology as increasing scale drives down costs

The planet’s biggest and most powerful wind turbines have begun generating electricity off the Liverpool coast, cementing Britain’s reputation as a world leader in the technology.

Danish company Dong Energy has just finished installing 32 turbines in Liverpool Bay that are taller than the Gherkin skyscraper, with blades longer than nine London buses. Dong Energy, the windfarm’s developer, believes these machines herald the future for offshore wind power: bigger, better and, most importantly, cheaper.

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It is difficult to overstate just how profound the impacts of wide-scale, low-cost energy storage will be on the utility sector.

Rooftop solar likely saved nearly $1 billion in electricity costs during the February heatwave in NSW, as well as helping to keep the lights on. But solar households and businesses got little reward for their contribution.

Dartmoor A lone traveller, the beetle made progress, jointed legs paddling the ground as it hefted its giant abdomen onward

At the western edge of Dartmoor high terrain that rises in exposed granite peaks gives way to the gentle swell of undulating farmland. Step from rough ground over the cattle grids that mark the national park perimeter and the verges become thick with vegetation.

In warm weather the roadside flowers are busy with flying insects, and I take lazy pleasure in knowing such diversity is beyond my naming abilities.

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ANU researchers develop butterfly wing-inspired nano-technology that could improve the efficiency of solar cells.

A remote South Pacific island has the highest density of plastic debris reported anywhere on the planet, our new study has found.

Our study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimated that more than 17 tonnes of plastic debris has washed up on Henderson Island, with more than 3,570 new pieces of litter arriving every day on one beach alone.

Our study probably actually underestimates the extent of plastic pollution on Henderson Island, as we were only able to sample pieces bigger than two millimetres down to a depth of 10 centimetres. We also could not sample along cliffs. Jennifer Lavers, Author provided

It is estimated that there are nearly 38 million pieces of plastic on the island, which is near the centre of the South Pacific Gyre ocean current.

Henderson Island, marked here by the red pin, is in the UK’s Pitcairn Islands territory and is more than 5,000 kilometres from the nearest major population centre. That shows plastic pollution ends up everywhere, even in the most remote parts of the world. Google Maps

A 2014 paper published in the journal PLOS One used data from surface water all over the world. The researchers estimated that there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the top 10 centimetres of the world’s oceans.

Plastics pose a major threat to seabirds and other animals, and most don’t ever break down – they just break up. Every piece of petrochemical-derived plastic ever made still exists on the planet.

The Henderson research program was funded through overseas agencies, primarily UK based philanthropy. A complete list is in the acknowledgements of the published paper here http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/05/09/1619818114.abstract. For the Henderson Island project, Jennifer Lavers is affiliated with the University of Tasmania, the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the United Kingdom.

Korean Zinc refiner says 116MW solar plant it's building near Townsville will underpin the expansion of its north Queensland operations.

Tesla has begun taking orders for its transformative new solar roof, marking the final piece in Elon Musk’s vision for a grand unification of his clean-energy ambitions. Cost is key.

Wärtsilä will support the development of the latest WaveRoller wave energy convertor, designed by Finnish company AW-Energy, with a series of sub-assemblies for a prototype.

Australia continues to put lipstick on the pig of CCS, a tiny pittance of research dollars intended to provide air cover for the emissions of the coal industry.

Record $7.5 billion in large scale solar and wind investment pushes Australia up to number 5 in global renewable energy investment rankings.

The Department is seeking comments on the Draft National Recovery Plan for the Macquarie Perch (Macquaria australasica). The consultation period closes 1 September 2017.

The Department is seeking comments on the Draft Recovery Plan for Clay pans of the Swan Coastal Plain ecological community. The consultation period closes 1 September 2017.

Scientists suggest smaller plants are better at absorbing air pollution around tall buildings.

Church and climate: two issues that are close to many Pacific Islanders' hearts. Seaphotoart/Shutterstock.com

Unless you are cocooned in a tourist bubble, it is hardly possible to miss God when you visit the Pacific Islands. In every village and on every main street there seems to be a church or temple, packed to bursting point on holy days. It is testament to the considerable influence of spirituality on the way people live in the Pacific.

Yet almost every well-intentioned outside agency – including those of foreign governments such as Australia and the European Union – that seeks to help the region’s people adapt to the effects of future climate change is drawing up its plans in secular ways, and communicates using secular language.

Over some 30 years, most such interventions have failed, proving neither effective nor sustainable. The answer to the question “why” may in part lie in the sidelining of God.

At this point, conversations with representatives of donor organisations often become awkward. Why, they ask, should spirituality have any role in a problem like climate-change adaptation or disaster risk management, which is so clearly framed in human, secular terms?

The answer lies in who does the framing. Far fewer people in most donor programs are spiritually engaged than in the Pacific.

A recent survey of 1,226 students at the highly regarded University of the South Pacific found that more than 80% attended church at least weekly, 35% of them more often than that. Bear in mind that this is a sample of the region’s educated urban elite – its future leaders.

Among the wider population, churchgoing seems to be almost universal. For example, Fiji’s 2007 census and Tonga’s 2011 census both showed that less than 1% of the population stated they had no religion. That’s much lower than in donor countries like Australia, Europe and the United States, where at most around 40% of people are habitual churchgoers.

Besides being spiritually engaged, the student survey revealed significantly higher “connectedness to nature” among educated Pacific Islanders than among people in richer countries, as well as deep concerns about climate change and what it might mean for their future and that of their descendants.

The survey revealed widespread pessimism that not enough was being done about climate change in the Pacific. Yet within the responses were two interesting points. The first was “spatial optimism bias”, a widely expressed belief that familiar environments were in a better condition that less familiar ones. The other was a “psychological distancing” of environmental risk – the belief, often spiritually based, that other places were more vulnerable than places to which the respondent had ties.

Earlier this year, I attended Sunday church in a village in Fiji where I was conducting research. The village had escaped the fury of Severe Tropical Cyclone Winston the year before, despite being only 50km from the storm’s centre. The preacher told his congregation that it was their relationship with God that had saved them – because they were pious they had been spared the cyclone’s wrath.

It is easy to ridicule these views, but it would be a mistake to ignore them, given their prevalence among the communities that foreign agencies are trying to help.

My research suggests that one reason for the failure of external interventions for climate-change adaptation in Pacific Island communities is the wholly secular nature of their messages. Among spiritually engaged communities, these secular messages can be met with indifference or even hostility if they clash with the community’s spiritual agenda.

There are examples from all around the world. In the colonial history of Africa, the spiritual value of land was dismissed by colonisers who saw it solely in economic terms. More recently, the Dakota Access Pipeline has become a political flashpoint, pursued by the US government in the name of economic development, but resisted by Native Americans because of the sacredness of the land.

For communities in many poorer countries, including in the Pacific Islands, the most influential messages are those that engage with people’s spiritual beliefs, and the most influential communication channels are often those that involve religious leaders.

In April 2009, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) issued the Moana Declaration that presciently accepted that climate change and sea-level rise would force people from vulnerable coastal locations to less vulnerable areas elsewhere.

After this, the PCC set up a climate change unit and drove initiatives to put climate change into Sabbath sermons across this vast region.

But more needs to be done. My ongoing research, including projects with the PCC and the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, suggests that this lack of effective engagement with the religious community is still a key failing.

Church leaders can heavily influence practical discussions at every level of the community. That makes them an important potential target for agencies aiming to make a real difference in how Pacific Islanders cope with climate change.

I acknowledge my collaborators in this project: Dr Kate Mulgrew, Dr Bridie Scott-Parker and Professor Doug Mahar (University of the Sunshine Coast), Professor Don Hine and Dr Tony Marks (University of New England), and Dr Jack Maebuta and Dr Lavinia Tiko (University of the South Pacific).

Patrick D. Nunn receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change

Electoral register and young people | Typefaces | Nottingham’s peregrines | Names for grandparents | 35mm film canisters

Warnings about young people dropping off the electoral register were issued a long time ago (Report, 15 May). The next government needs to take swift action and automatically register 16-year-olds when they receive their national insurance number. Policies were set out last year by the all-party parliamentary party in its report on the Missing Millions and have cross-party support. Urgent action is needed so that next generation of citizens are included in the democratic process.
Dr Toby James
Senior fellow to the all-party parliamentary group on democratic participation, University of East Anglia 

• Mrs May’s battlebus has lettering in the Swiss typeface Akzidenz. Voters may wish that Akzidenz will happen (but it doesn’t translate so helpfully). Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche uses the British Gill Italic, which leans to the right. Read the runes.
Richard Hollis
London

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Scientists have decoded the genome of a snail involved in the spread of a deadly parasitic disease.

A leaked letter throws doubt on the legal basis for sharing 1.6 million patient records with DeepMind.

Hint: the elephant is the obstructionist political party’s symbol

There was tremendous outcry when the New York Times hired opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who has a long history of making misinformed comments about climate change. Stephens didn’t assuage those fears when he devoted his first column to punching hippies, absurdly suggesting that our lack of progress on climate policy is a result of greens being too mean to climate deniers.

Stephens lamentably stayed on the subject of climate change in his second and third Times columns as well. In those pieces, he used corn-based ethanol subsidies as an example of where climate policy has gone wrong:

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