Feed aggregator

MPs say ministers are not doing enough to demonstrate how third runway would meet obligations on noise and air quality

The government is set to “water down” limits on aviation emissions and is shifting targets to meet its pledge to mitigate the environmental impact of expanding Heathrow, MPs have said.

The cross-party environmental audit committee said ministers were not doing enough to demonstrate a third Heathrow runway could be built without breaching laws on air quality and carbon emissions.

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Vestas leads a group of three major manufacturers, but a “big four” will emerge this year.

Pilot program will allow homeowners to tap into a network of ‘virtual’ power stations made up of smart grids of rooftop solar and batteries

Australian homeowners with solar panels and batteries could soon trade their electricity in a digital marketplace developed by a consortium of electricity providers, energy tech startups, energy retailers and energy agencies.

The Decentralised Energy Exchange – or deX – was launched on Thursday with the promise to “change the way energy is produced, traded and consumed at a local level in Australia”.

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The call for applications for funding through Community Heritage and Icons Grants 2016-17 (the Program) is now open.

The installation oatthe Longyangxia Dam Solar Park currently has the capacity to generate 850 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power roughly 140,000 U.S. homes.

Carnegie says it will consider a wave farm - eventually up to 100MW - off the coast of Albany if Labor wins power and delivers funding promise.

Biggest challenge in moving to 100% renewable energy will be meeting the 2-3 hours of peak demand during evenings. This will require a mix of different technologies and strategies.

ALIEN SOLAR SYSTEM: Seven Earth-sized planets, some of which could harbour life, have been discovered orbiting a dwarf star in our own galactic neighbourhood.

This year, the retail part of the electricity sector will be getting lots of official attention. Deservedly so, because the "cheap offers" are no longer so cheap.

Queenslanders would pay much less for power if the generation sector was split up. The use, or non-use, of the Wivenhoe pumped hydro storage facility illustrates why.

Australia can be the energy capital of Asia, but policy vandalism by the Coalition government means we have lost our ranking in top 10 renewable investment countries.

There'll be a snap hearing into the Roe 8 highway extension this week, as contractors continue to clear land in the Beeliar Wetlands.

Green shoots: a mangrove in Cairns enjoys the wet. Not all of Australia was so lucky. Guillaume Blanchard/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

After several dry years, vegetation across much of Australia received much-needed rains in 2016. But this broad pattern of improvement belies some major environmental damage in parts of the country – particularly in Tasmania, which was scorched by bushfire, the Gulf Coast and Cape York, which missed out on the rains’ return, and on the Great Barrier Reef, which suffered massive coral bleaching.

That is the conclusion of our report on Australia’s Environment in 2016, released today. It’s a summary of the state of the nation’s environmental indicators, which we compiled by analysing huge amounts of satellite imagery, ground data, and water and landscape modelling.

The report and the accompanying Australia’s Environment Explorer website summarise those data into graphs and plots for 13 environmental indicators. With most data extending back to at least the year 2000, this makes it possible to see how the environment is changing.

The overall story is one of rainfall boom after four years of bust. The national average rainfall in 2016 was again well above average, albeit not quite as much as in the bumper years 2010-11.

Our report last year showed soil moisture conditions had reached a six-year low in 2015, as Australia was dragged back towards the conditions experienced during the Millennium Drought.

The rains of 2016 seem to have put at least a temporary end to this. Over the past year the soil moisture in Australia’s landscapes has bounced back to levels not seen since 2012. Vegetation growth, leaf matter and soil protection all followed the same pattern.

Despite major bushfires in Tasmania in January, there were fewer fires overall than in previous years. As a result, carbon emissions from bushfires were the lowest since 2010, meaning that 2016 was overall a good year for land-based carbon emissions.

Scorecard: winners and losers

We combined the data to produce an overall “environmental scorecard” for each state and territory, as well as for the nation as a whole. Inevitably, this introduces subjective judgements, but because so much of the environment’s health is linked to water availability, the overall pattern would remain similar even if we were to calculate the index differently.

Environmental scores in 2016. based on data on www.ausenv.online

The national environmental score increased to above average (6.7), but the improvements were uneven. Scores fell in Tasmania and the Northern Territory, in the aftermath of dry conditions that had already started in 2015 or before, whereas other states improved by varying amounts.

Large parts of Queensland had been suffering through several years of drought but bounced back with good rains and growth conditions. Despite this, much of the state remains officially drought-declared – although not, ironically, Cape York. Such contrasts are not unusual; it often takes more than a year of good rain for drought declarations to be lifted.

Meanwhile, the Channel Country and many of the Murray-Darling Basin rivers received their best flows since the Big Wet of 2010–12, replenishing floodplains and wetlands along the way.

The bad news

Continued dry conditions in northwestern Tasmania created the conditions for massive bushfires in the first two months of 2016. The fires affected an estimated 95,000ha across the state, including 18,000ha of vulnerable alpine ecosystems in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Although that is less than 1% of the total World Heritage Area, the ancient vegetation may have changed permanently. Characteristically for Australia, the fires were followed by a deluge, restoring soil moisture levels from May onwards but also causing major flood damage.

In the Top End, areas around the Gulf of Carpentaria missed out on the rains and continued a dry run that has lasted for four years in some places. Cape York was left high and dry, with historically low rainfall records at some locations.

Mangrove trees died in large numbers along 700km of coast on the Gulf of Carpentaria. The record temperatures and ongoing dry conditions were a likely factor. Mangroves provide breeding grounds for many sea organisms and protect the coast from erosion, and their demise may cause knock-on effects into the future.

Evidence of mangrove dieback along a short stretch of Gulf Coast, NT. Google Timeline

To Australia’s east, high sea temperatures played an important role in large-scale bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Reefs and mangroves have been wiped out and recovered before, such as after cyclones. But the sheer scale of last year’s damage was unusual and set against an unmistakable climate warming trend. The big question is whether these ecosystems will be able to recover before suffering the next setback.

So, while all of our national headline environmental indicators suggest signs of general recovery, not everything is easily summarised or understood. The full consequences of the damage done to the Great Barrier Reef, tropical mangrove forests and Tasmania’s wilderness may take several years to become clear.

Worryingly, the factors that drove them into decline are likely to become stronger in future. Add to that the record heatwaves this year, and it becomes clear that climate change will not just quietly disappear.

Albert Van Dijk receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. He has previously received funding from the Bureau of Meteorology.

David Summers receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He has previously received funding from the Bureau of Meteorology.

Several fires were lit at the Dakota Access pipeline protest campsite in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, early Wednesday ahead of a deadline from authorities to abandon the area. For months, hundreds of Native Americans and environmental activists have occupied the site as they protest the pipeline’s construction, but Donald Trump has signed an executive order clearing the way for construction to move ahead

• Police surround Standing Rock camps in push to evict remaining activists

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Seven planets orbiting a single star have been discovered in a solar system 40 light-years from Earth.

Astronomers have discovered seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a single star - a record number.

Researchers will have to deal with attacks from a range of powerful foes in the coming years – and for many, it has already started

A little less than seven years ago, the climate scientist Michael Mann ambled into his office at Penn State University with a wedge of mail tucked under his arm. As he tore into one of the envelopes, which was hand-addressed to him, white powder tumbled from the folds of the letter. Mann recoiled from the grainy plume and rushed to the bathroom to scrub his hands.

Fortunately for Mann, the FBI confirmed the powder was cornstarch rather than anthrax. It was perhaps the nadir of the vituperation hurled at Mann by often anonymous critics who accuse him and others of fabricating or exaggerating the dangers of climate change.

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Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" as scientists fail to reproduce others' work, it is claimed.

Documents suggest former Oklahoma AG followed lobby group’s guidance on challenging environmental regulations, and put letterhead to oil firm complaints more than once

The close relationship between Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and fossil fuel interests including the billionaire Koch brothers has been highlighted in more than 7,500 emails and other records released by the Oklahoma attorney general’s office on Wednesday.

The documents show that Pruitt, while Oklahoma attorney general, acted in close concert with oil and gas companies to challenge environmental regulations, even putting his letterhead to a complaint filed by one firm, Devon Energy. This practice was first revealed in 2014, but it now appears that it occurred more than once.

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New video is released of the Antarctic ice crack that promises to produce a giant berg.