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Three recent news items tell the story that a game-changing decline in the cost of grid storage is happening much faster than anticipated.

PM tells National Press Club energy is "a key debate" in 2017 parliament. Here are Malcolm Turnbull's key comments on the subject.

Australian researchers say their discovery could significantly lower the material's cost to produce.

Conservationists say the nets are killing too many dolphins and turtles.

Queensland government-owned Ergon Energy Retail inks another solar PPA, this time for 12 years with FRV's 100MW Liliyvale Solar Farm.

Scientists in China say they have produced cloned cattle with increased resistance to bovine tuberculosis.

As renewables are used as a political football, investors and energy companies are getting on with the job, with major Asian investor group Equis announcing 200MW of 'battery ready' solar projects in Australia, with plans for another 1000MW in the near future.

E/One sets new standard in safe and environmentally sound production of utility energy storage.

When keen bushwalker Jon Marsden-Smedley first started telling people of his plan to rid southwest Tasmania's coast of sea spurge—an invasive weed—he was told he was dreaming.

The coal, oil and gas industries have raised 'lots of dark money' for Scott Pruitt, President Trump's pick as head of the US EPA, says Earth Justice.

Oil and gas concession overlaps 1.3m hectare “protected area” inhabited by indigenous peoples in “isolation”

One of the almost 100 resolutions adopted by the World Conservation Congress (WCC) held in Hawai’i in September 2016 was that “protected areas” such as national parks should be “no go” for mining, oil and gas operations, agriculture, dams, roads and pipelines. Another resolution was that indigenous peoples’ territories overlapped by “protected areas” should be recognised and respected, calling upon International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) members, non-member States and others to do so.

While it might not seem particularly significant or startling to demand that “protected areas” should be, er, protected from such damaging activities as oil operations, and while WCC resolutions aren’t legally-binding on anyone, such calls do urgently need to be made. Take as an example Peru, the country that, according to the IUCN, established more “protected areas” than any other in 2016. Undoubtedly its most important conservation achievement in recent years has been the creation of the 1.3m hectare Sierra del Divisor National Park, although approximately 40% is included in an oil and gas concession ultimately controlled by a Canadian-headquartered company, Pacific Exploration and Production.

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‘Silent pandemic’ of air pollution affects UK children and there is no indication protection against toxic waste will be retained after Brexit

Air pollution is a crisis that “plagues” the UK, particularly children, according to the UN’s special rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes.

Baskut Tuncak, who was appointed by the UN human rights council and completed a 15-day mission to the UK on Tuesday, said there was an “urgent need for political will by the UK government to make timely, measurable and meaningful interventions”.

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Paul Ferber, an ex-British policeman who lives on Koh Seh in the Gulf of Thailand, tells World Service how he catches illegal fishermen plundering Cambodia's ecosystem.

Ancient proteins dating back 195 million years have been found inside a dinosaur bone.

Orangutan Samboja will be shown males on a touchscreen in experiment aimed at learning more about mating choices

A Dutch zoo hopes to increase the breeding chances of a female orangutan by seeing if she will choose a preferred mate on a touchscreen before they are introduced.

In a four-year experiment it has called “Tinder for orangutans”, the Apenheul primate park in Apeldoorn will show Samboja, an 11-year-old female, pictures of possible partners from an international great ape breeding programme.

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Land totaling the size of Connecticut has been targeted in a new bill in the Republican House, uniting hunters and conservationists in opposition

Now that Republicans have quietly drawn a path to give away much of Americans’ public land, US representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah has introduced what the Wilderness Society is calling “step two” in the GOP’s plan to offload federal lands.

The new piece of legislation would direct the secretary of the interior to immediately sell off an area of public land the size of Connecticut. In a press release for House Bill 621, Chaffetz, a Tea Party Republican, claimed that the 3.3m acres of national land, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), served “no purpose for taxpayers”.

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Long treated as a bottomless resource pit, over-exploitation of the ocean, pollution and rising sea levels are having a catastrophic impact on life in the bay

The Bay of Bengal’s basin contains some of the most populous regions of the earth. No less than a quarter of the world’s population is concentrated in the eight countries that border the bay1. Approximately 200 million people live along the Bay of Bengal’s coasts and of these a major proportion are partially or wholly dependent on its fisheries2.

For the majority of those who depend on it, the Bay of Bengal can provide no more than a meagre living: 61% of India’s fisherfolk already live below the poverty line. Yet the numbers dependent on fisheries are only likely to grow in years to come, partly because of climate change. In southern India drought and water scarcity have already induced tens of thousands of farmers to join the fishing fleet3. Rising sea levels are also likely to drive many displaced people into the fishing industry.

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The Trump Administration keeps trying to go after scientists, and being forced to retreat

During the George W. Bush Administration, political appointees censored climate science reports from government agencies, and mostly got away with it by gagging the scientists. A survey found that nearly half of 1,600 government scientists at seven agencies ranging from NASA to the EPA had been warned against using terms like “global warming” in reports or speeches, throughout Bush’s eight-year presidency.

Unaccustomed to being strong-armed by their own administrators, some government scientists reacted with what former US Climate Change Science Program senior associate Rick Piltz called “an anticipatory kind of self-censorship.” As a result, the Bush Administration’s efforts to smother scientific findings concerning global warming in government reports were remarkably effective.

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Controversial statements angered environmentalists who insist courts have an obligation to recognize the science about manmade climate change

A Washington state judge has sparked outrage for remarks questioning the existence of climate change and the role of humans in global warming.

During the high-profile trial of Ken Ward, a climate activist facing 30 years in prison for shutting down an oil pipeline, Judge Michael E Rickert said: “I don’t know what everybody’s beliefs are on [climate change], but I know that there’s tremendous controversy over the fact whether it even exists. And even if people believe that it does or it doesn’t, the extent of what we’re doing to ourselves and our climate and our planet, there’s great controversy over that.”

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The Simien mountains in Ethiopia are one of the world's most threatened natural heritage sites. Simien mountains image from www.shutterstock.com

Would we knock down the pyramids or flatten the Acropolis to make way for housing estates, roads or farms? You would hope not. Such an indictment would deprive future generations of the joy and marvel we all experience when visiting or learning about such historic places.

Yet right now, across our planet, many of the United Nations’ World Heritage sites that have been designated for natural reasons are being rapidly destroyed in the pursuit of short-term economic goals.

In our paper published in Biological Conservation, we found that expanding human activity has damaged more than 50 of the 203 natural sites, and 120 have lost parts of their forests over the past 20 years. Up to 20 sites risk being damaged beyond repair.

So how can we better look after these precious sites?

Jewels in the crown

Globally recognised areas that contain the Earth’s most beautiful and important natural places are granted natural World Heritage status by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). Each natural World Heritage site is unique and therefore irreplaceable.

Current sites include iconic landscapes such as Yosemite National Park in the United States, and important biodiversity conservation areas such as Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

Wildebeest gather at the river’s edge on migration in Serengeti National Park. Wildebeest image from www.shutterstock.com

The World Heritage Convention strives to protect natural World Heritage sites and keep their condition as close to pristine as possible. As with those hundreds of cultural World Heritage sites such as Petra and Masada, no human modification or damage is acceptable. These sites are the natural world’s crown jewels.

We examined the degree of human pressure (including roads, agriculture, urbanisation and industrial infrastructure) and direct forest loss across areas with natural World Heritage status.

These changes are not compatible with maintaining the natural heritage of these places. And should sites be damaged beyond repair, we will have lost some of the common heritage of humankind forever.

Chitwan National Park, Nepal. Rhino image from www.shutterstock.com Which sites fared worst?

We found that human pressure within sites has increased in every continent except Europe over the last two decades. Asia is home to the worst-affected sites, including Manas Wildlife Sanctuary in India, Komodo National Park in Indonesia, and Chitwan National Park in Nepal. Development has also badly affected Simien National Park in Ethiopia and it has been listed as World Heritage “in danger”. European sites, such as St Kilda, were already highly modified 20 years ago and have largely remained as such since then.

Change in human footprint between 1993 and 2009 across natural World Heritage sites inscribed prior to 1993. Sites that experienced an increase (which may threaten their unique values) are shown in red, while sites that experienced a decrease are shown in green. Site boundaries are not to scale and have been enlarged for clarity. Allan et al. 2017

A majority of the sites have lost areas of forest. Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada lost 2,581 square kilometres (11.7%) and Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras lost 365 square km (8.5%) of forest since 2000.

The processes behind why the sites lost forest cover are diverse. In the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, also “in danger”, illegal drug trafficking created insecurity and instability in the region, which allowed widespread illegal deforestation and illegal settlement to occur.

Deforestation in Patuca National Park in Honduras. J.Polisar

In North America, even celebrated places like Yellowstone have been affected, losing some 6% of forest cover. This, and the losses in Wood Buffalo National Park, is almost certainly due to the largest pine beetle outbreaks on record. These are stripping trees of foliage and making them more susceptible to fire.

Although pine beetle damage is a semi-natural phenomenon, it is being assisted by human-caused climate change, as winters are no longer cold enough to kill off the beetles. This is notoriously hard to manage on the ground, but instead requires the United States and Canada to strengthen their efforts to fight climate change nationally and on the global stage.

Time to stop paving paradise

The 192 signatories to the World Heritage Convention need to respond to these findings. The World Heritage Committee must use information like this to immediately assess these highly threatened sites and work with nations to try to halt the erosion.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee meets again this July in Poland. It is not too late; with urgent intervention most sites can still be retained.

A mining site in Kahuzi Biega Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo. A K Plumptre WCS

The method we have used makes it much easier to identify natural World Heritage sites that may need to be added to the “in danger” list so extra attention and resources are channelled towards saving them.

Sites such as Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, which have lost so much forest in such a short time, need to be identified and those nations supported in averting further decline. Ultimately, World Heritage status can be retracted if the values a site is listed for are undermined. This would be an international embarrassment for the host nation.

The global community can play a role by holding governments to account so that they take the conservation of natural World Heritage sites seriously. We already do this for many of our cultural sites, and it is time to give natural sites the equal recognition and support they deserve.

Just as we would defend the Colosseum in Rome, Petra in Jordan, or Mont St Michel in France, we must fight against the planned highway across the Serengeti in Tanzania, uranium mining in Kakadu and logging of the Styx Valley in Australia, and forests being cleared for agriculture in Sumatra, Indonesia. This work is a call to action to save our natural world heritage.

James Watson receives funding from The Australian Research Council. He is the Director of Science and Research Initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society,

James Allan receives a stipend from The Australian Research Council

Sean Maxwell receives a stipend from The Australian Research Council.