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Malcolm Turnbull says he wants to take ideology out of energy but he shows every sign of another manufactured political fight

If you’ve watched the inglorious spectacle of the failure of Australian politics on climate and energy policy over the last 10 years, it’s a bit hard to look out on the wreckage without feeling sick to the stomach.

But look we must and, if we look now, we are able to chart the consequences of abject failure in highly specific ways.

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A new global online matchmaking platform – described as being like a dating site for the renewable energy industry – will be launched in Sydney tonight.

Global infrastructure and renewable energy leader ACCIONA has made its first major investment in an Australian company with the acquisition of Victoria’s leading diversified civil engineering services business, Geotech Group.

Twenty businesses across the state will share in $200,000 of NSW Government funding as part of a program to help companies adopt renewable energy and be more energy efficient.

Surge in October last year helped greenhouse gas emissions fall by 3.57m tonnes in December quarter

A sharp drop in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions at the end of last year came courtesy of a spike in renewable energy generation in a single month, according to a new study.

Australia’s emissions fell by 3.57m tonnes in the three months to December, putting them back on track to meet quarterly commitments made in Paris after a blowout the previous quarter.

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Tesla's launches 14kWh Powerwall 2, confirming pricing and predicting 100% of solar homes will have battery storage within 10 years.

Four female apprentices have started new careers in the energy industry at EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn power station in the Latrobe Valley.

Australian Energy Market Operator predicts shortfalls in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia ‘if we do nothing’

The Australian Energy Market Operator has warned that Australia is facing energy shortages if governments do not carry out national planning as exports continue to dominate the country’s gas supply.

The Aemo report predicts New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia will be impacted from the summer of 2018-19 and warns that the tightening of the domestic gas market will have flow-on effects to the electricity sector unless there is an increase in gas supplies and development.

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ABORIGINAL HERITAGE: Members of the Stolen Generations may finally find a way back to their country thanks to new research that reveals differences in Aboriginal DNA can be linked to specific geographic areas.

PALEO DIET: We might think of Neanderthals as meat-eating cave men, but DNA from prehistoric dental plaque shows some of our palaeo cousins were vegetarians who used plant-based medicines.

The Climate Institute, perhaps Australia's pre-eminent independent policy advocate and analysis group in the country, says it will close on June 30, due to a lack of funds.

The US electric car maker Tesla is also known for kicking off the current revolution in energy storage. And given the widespread take-up of roof-top solar panels in Australia, they believe it will be the biggest market for their Powerwall home energy storage system.

One of the flashpoints in Saturday’s Western Australian election is the Perth Freight Link, a policy to improve the access for trucks to the port of Fremantle. This includes an extension to Perth’s Roe Highway, known as Roe 8. The plan has met with years of protests by local government, environmentalists and residents who are concerned about the economic, social and environmental issues associated with the development.

In particular, Roe 8 will cut through the Beeliar Wetlands, home to threatened ecological communities and migratory shorebirds. Labor and the Greens have long opposed this plan and have developed an alternative freight strategy. But this was discarded by the incoming Liberal government led by Premier Colin Barnett in 2008, which reverted to an older plan to extend Roe Highway.

Work has begun on clearing the site. However, a Senate inquiry report released on Tuesday recommended that action be suspended. WA Labor has promised to cancel Roe 8 and the Perth Freight Link project, while the Liberal Party is holding fast on the issue.

The controversy around Roe 8 has highlighted the lack of effective consideration of biodiversity values, not just at the Beeliar wetlands but across the city.

Why intact wetlands are important

In a recent radio interview, Premier Barnett stated that Roe 8 “will not damage the environment of the Beeliar Wetlands other than you will see a major road going between two lakes”.

The proposed extension of the Roe Highway. Man Roads WA

This displays an ignorance of natural systems. Fragmentation is a serious threat to our remaining biodiversity, along with climate change and declining rainfall.

Wetlands aren’t swimming pools with neatly tiled boundaries. Wetlands function because open water areas are linked to their fringing vegetation and woodlands. This is how pollutants are filtered before the water passes into the lake, how turtles maintain sustainable populations by nesting in woodlands, and how they exchange genetic material with turtles in other wetlands.

Nor is it difficult to enable these linkages. Examples include refitting drains to become living streams, and creating wildlife corridors along road verges with natural vegetation and trees.

It is essential that we retain our few remaining natural assets intact and enhance the connectivity between them. In assessing the Roe 8 proposal, the WA Environmental Protection Authority concluded that habitat fragmentation was a major issue of the development and that there was no easy solution to it.

Wetlands have been lost throughout the state. When the WA Environment Protection Authority released its State of the Environment Report in 2007 it noted that more than 80% of the original wetlands on the Swan Coastal Plain had been lost to development since 1829. Furthermore, it reported that wetland loss was continuing at an average rate of about four hectares (two football fields) each day.

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but the principal one is a lack of will by the state government to implement its own policies on wetland conservation. The Bush Forever Plan – which aims to protect a comprehensive and representative system of Perth’s amazing biodiversity – is still incomplete nearly 20 years after it was drawn up. The government’s draft Green Growth Plan proposes a massive downsizing of the urban conservation estate.

In 1997, the Coalition government released a Wetlands Conservation Policy for WA. It proposed many worthwhile measures, including a policy to protect wetlands from encroachment by urban and industrial development. A draft of this policy was released for public comment in 2005, but it has never been completed or implemented.

WA’s current environment minister, Albert Jacob, has revoked the Swan Coastal Plain Lakes environmental protection policy, which provided some protection to important wetlands. Inappropriate development now threatens many significant wetlands across Perth.

The only remaining protection they have is via clearing regulations, which are intended primarily to manage farming operations. Roe 8 was approved despite the fact that it breached the EPA guidelines on assessment. The state Court of Appeal ruled that the EPA and the government were not obliged to follow these guidelines.

Global hotspot Hatchling turtles cross woodlands to reach wetland habitats. Jane Chambers

More broadly, Perth sits in a biodiversity hotspot, one of 25 places globally that together contain nearly half of the world’s wildlife and a third of the plants, but cover less than 2% of the land. They are places with exceptional concentrations of species found nowhere else, which are now seeing exceptional habitat losses. The biodiversity of the Perth region is comparable to that of the whole of Great Britain.

The threat to Perth’s biodiversity is illustrated by the plight of the Banksia Woodlands, which once covered much of the Perth area. In September 2016, the Banksia Woodlands of the Swan Coastal Plain were listed nationally as an endangered ecological community, particularly due to continuing fragmentation.

With such an internationally recognised threatened treasure on our doorstep you might imagine that environmental protection in Perth would be among the best in the world, but you would be wrong. Instead, valuable ecological communities, fauna and flora are subordinated to short-term commercial and political interests.

Why should we care?

For many of us the concept of biodiversity is a pretty abstract one. You can recognise that a rainforest or the Great Barrier Reef is an amazing ecosystem. But how is biodiversity relevant to urban areas?

Access to natural places is essential for human well-being. Contact with nature has been shown to promote faster recovery from surgery, better pain control, fulfilment of emotional needs, lower self-reported stress, positive moods, increased vitality, reduced depression, prosocial behaviour and healthier family units. Psychological benefits are also higher in areas with greater biodiversity.

You inherently know this to be true. Visualise walking down a crowded city footpath, with traffic banked up among tall city buildings. Now visualise walking down a tree-canopied path with birds singing and the sunlight dappled through leaves. Feel your shoulders drop?

Why are areas of high biodiversity more effective? Because, unlike parks, natural ecosystems have diversity that changes constantly – birdsong and flowers that change with the season, a turtle heading off to nest, or the appearance of tadpoles sprouting legs and becoming frogs. This provides a new experience every time we visit.

If that’s not enough, natural areas like wetlands also provide a suite of “ecosystem services” that benefit the urban environment.

They improve aesthetics and amenity, increase property values, provide recreational opportunities, remove pollutants from air (by trees) and water (by wetlands and streams), reduce noise and wind, protect us from storm events through flood control, provide climate control (tree canopies reduce temperatures), and offer habitat corridors so you can enjoy birds and wildlife in your backyard.

For our cities to grow sustainably we must have increased density of housing, but we must also ensure quality of life by including quality public open space. Natural ecosystems need to be sympathetically integrated into urban development, to benefit people and wildlife.

Jane Chambers is a member of the Beeliar Group of Professors for Environmental Responsibility.

Philip Jennings is affiliated with the Wetlands Conservation Society and the Cockburn Wetlands Education Centre and the Beeliar Group of Professors for Environmental Responsibility.

It is wet season in Bali, Indonesia, a popular tourist destination for Australian, Russian, German, Chinese and Japanese visitors.

As the rain pounds down on banana leaves and rice fields, the rivers fill up and irrigation systems overflow. With it, the water masses bring trash in bulk: anything from food wrappers and plastic bags to bottles and other domestic waste.

To tackle the issue of marine pollution, several organisations got together in Nusa Dua – a popular tourist destination – and other locations across Bali to stage the largest beach clean-up the island has seen.

Around 12,000 volunteers collected 40 tons of garbage at 55 locations, according to the One Island, One Voice campaign page.

While the beach clean-up was a hugely successful awareness campaign and a great promotion which highlights the efforts done around the island, it is only a drop in the ocean of global marine pollution.

Plastic pollution in Indonesia

In recent years, Bali has seen growing environmental problems such as pollution and freshwater scarcity. Popular tourist destination Kuta beach is regularly covered in waste. Most of this is plastic that washes ashore during the rainy season.

The island’s garbage dumps are reportedly overflowing,. This makes solid waste management a pressing issue. Substantial groundwater resources are predicted to run dry by 2020, threatening freshwater resources.

On top of that, Indonesia is the world’s second-biggest marine polluter after China, discarding 3.22 million metric tons of waste annually. This accounts for 10% of the world’s marine pollution.

The effects marine pollution has on ecosystems and humans are beginning to be well documented. Marine scientists have found harmful consequences of marine pollution to sea life, ecosystems and humans.

Plastic can kill ocean mammals, turtles and other species that consume it. It can also poison food and water resources, as harmful chemicals leach out of the plastic.

It poses threats to human health as well. Plastics leach cancerous toxins. After being consumed by marine species, they enter the food chain, eventually ending up in fish we eat.

Marine plastic pollution is a global problem and Indonesia’s beaches present pressing examples to study the socio-economic effects this has on coastal communities.

Most vulnerable to marine pollution left out of global discussions

Last month, The Economist held the fourth Oceans Summit in Bali.

The summit was attended by state leaders such as Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla, representatives of major global economic organisations such as Citigroup managing director Michael Eckhart, and celebrity and entrepreneur Adrian Grenier.

Speakers and panels discussed a number of topics, including the “blue economy” and how companies and governments can participate in this marine-based sustainable industry.

During the summit, the Indonesian government announced it will pledge US$1 billion to curb ocean waste by 70% by 2025. It’s an ambitious objective, which shows dedication and commitment to a plastic-free future.

But not all voices are heard in this global debate. Many Bali-based environmental organisations engaged in education programs were not represented at the summit. Those economically most vulnerable to pollution – such as beach vendors, fishermen and others employed in the marine tourism trade – appear to be left out of the conversation.

Marine pollution and tourism

The Indonesian government plans to boost tourism and increase national visitors from 9.7 million in 2015 to 20 million by 2020. Such increases in visitor numbers and population will raise consumption and waste production, further pressuring the island’s infrastructure and ecosystems.

With tourism as the island’s largest economic sector, many Balinese people depend on foreign visitors to earn an income. Some tourism operators are concerned that if the plastic problem increases it will damage this industry. They fear tourists will stop coming to Bali if it is too polluted.

Marine communities may also suffer negative socio-economic consequences, as fishermen can lose their livelihood and tourism operators lose their customers.

While some tourism operators understand that clean beaches are key in attracting international tourists, the expected growth is likely to further stress Bali’s environment.

What is being done?

Efforts by activists, community groups and NGOs to clean beaches play a key role in protecting Bali’s environment. But they are only a temporary fix and don’t tackle the causes of this global problem.

Such groups are leading the fight against over-development and pollution through protests, clean-up events and educational programs.

Campaigners from Bali-based environmental youth group “Bye Bye Plastic Bags” advocate for an island-wide ban on plastic bags. They also spoke at the Ocean Summit.

And while they convinced Bali’s governor to commit to make the island plastic-bag-free by 2018, continued development of legislation, regulation and industry guidelines is needed to save Indonesia’s waterways from drowning in waste.

Thomas Wright 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.

Renewables now the cheapest source of reliable power generation in Australia, RepuTex says

“Clean” coal technologies won’t be commercially viable before 2030 without government subsidy and are fundamentally out of sync with the move towards more flexible power generation, according to the energy market analysis firm RepuTex.

In a new analysis released on Thursday, RepuTex argues that the rising price of gas, coupled with the falling cost of energy storage, has now made renewable energy the cheapest source of reliable power generation in Australia.

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Chairman says cost of inaction on climate change is clear and issue shouldn’t be used to fight ‘political and ideological battles’

The Climate Institute will shut its doors after 12 years of providing independent advocacy and research towards climate change solutions, citing lack of funding.

Australia’s first non-government organisation focused solely on climate change has a reputation for independence but its chairman, Mark Wootton, used its closure to take a parting shot at “some in government” who have used the environment as a proxy for ideological battles.

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Neanderthals dosed themselves with painkillers and possibly penicillin, according to a study of their teeth.

You can super size your memory to make it more like the brain of a world memory champion, a scientific study suggests.

Scottish physicist Ronald Drever, one of the architects behind the discovery of gravitational waves, has died at the age of 85.

Britain’s wildlife crime head says urgent security checks are needed to protect 111 rhinos in UK after attack near Paris

Police are visiting every zoo and wildlife park in the UK that houses rhinos to offer security advice after poachers shot dead a white rhinoceros and sawed off its horn at a French zoo.

The head of Britain’s National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) said the French attack, the first of its kind in a European facility, was a wake-up call, and urgent security checks needed to be made to protect the 111 rhinos in captivity in the UK.

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