Groups say cancellations could restrict debate as host country tightens security for opening days
Civil society organisations and governments may have to cancel events at the UN climate summit in November as the Egyptian hosts have tightened security for the opening days.
Cop27 will open on Sunday 6 November in Sharm el-Sheikh, and on the Monday and Tuesday world leaders are due to descend on the conference centre for talks to direct their negotiating teams.
Continue reading...Americans discarded 51m tons of plastic in 2021 – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere
Only 5% of the mountains of plastic waste generated by US households last year was recycled, according to new research by Greenpeace.
Americans discarded 51m tons of wrappers, bottles and bags in 2021 – about 309lb of plastic per person – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere in tiny toxic particles.
Continue reading...The Department of Conservation is looking for a biodiversity supervisor on the wild, remote coast of the South Island, a Unesco world heritage site
A NZ$90,000 salary, a helicopter commute, and a Unesco world heritage site as your playground. It sounds like a dream job. But despite the considerable perks, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation has been struggling to attract candidates to be their new biodiversity supervisor in Haast on the wild, remote coast of the South Island. Now, the search is going global.
The job is based in Te Wāhipounamu – an area encompassing 26,000 square kilometres of mountain ranges, isolated beaches and native forests, classed as a Unesco World Heritage Area in 1990. Its mountain ranges formed the backdrop for the White Mountains/Ered Nimrais in Peter Jackson’s adaption of the Lord of the Rings.
Continue reading...Two protesters pelt painting with potatoes and glue their hands to wall at Museum Barberini in Potsdam
Claude Monet has become the latest artist to be the focus of food-related climate protests, after members of a German environmental group threw mashed potatoes over one of his paintings in a Potsdam museum on Sunday.
Nine days after Just Stop Oil emptied tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, two activists from Letzte Generation (Last Generation) entered the Museum Barberini and doused Monet’s Les Meules (Haystacks) with potato before glueing their hands to the wall.
Continue reading...Flood waters in Victorian border towns reach record levels as residents of several NSW towns are urged to evacuate. This blog is now closed
Taylor: potential inflation decrease ‘a good thing’
Taylor is now discussing inflation and says the Coalition believes inflation will be down to 2.5% in the next financial year according to Labor’s forecasts.
I’ve got to say many of the investments I’ve seen out in regional New South Wales have added to productivity, very significant impact.
Continue reading...Volunteers place 195,000 sandbags in and around Echuca, which could reach devastating 1993 flood levels. This blog is now closed
Australian ultrarunner on pace to break daily marathon world record
Did you know that you have the genes to be a long distance runner?
If you go back to our early genetics, basically, everyone has the genes to be a distance runner. Back 50,000 years ago, our survival depended on us being able to walk and jog long distances to be able to get food, and catch animals.
Continue reading...Water is spilling over a levee in the Murray River border town of Echuca-Moama, as residents anxiously wait to see if it will hold back flood’s peak
Lismore residents have been warned to brace for another round of flooding as heavy rain falls along the east coast, and the Murray River town of Echuca-Moama anxiously waits to see if its levees will hold back the forecast peak on Sunday.
The Murray River at the Echuca Wharf gauge was expected to exceed the 1993 flood levels of 94.77 metres AHD on Saturday afternoon, and reach a peak of 95m on Sunday or Monday.
Continue reading...Investigators believe teen was exposed in warm waters at Lake Mead but epidemiologist says disease is ‘very, very rare’
Experts have said that the death of a teenager in the Las Vegas area from a rare brain-eating amoeba should prompt caution, not panic, among people at freshwater lakes, rivers and springs.
“It gets people’s attention because of the name,” Brian Labus, a former public health epidemiologist, said on Friday of the naturally occurring organism officially called Naegleria fowleri but almost always dubbed the brain-eating amoeba. “But it is a very, very rare disease.”
Continue reading...Quitting the ECT, which protects fossil fuel investors from policy changes that might threaten their profits, was ‘coherent’ with Paris climate deal, Macron said
France has become the latest country to pull out of the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT), which protects fossil fuel investors from policy changes that might threaten their profits.
Speaking after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday, French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “France has decided to withdraw from the energy charter treaty.” Quitting the ECT was “coherent” with the Paris climate deal, he added.
Continue reading...Authorities partly blamed after months of deadly flooding in African nation; jet stream causes temperature divide in US
Nigeria has found itself at the centre of devastating floods over the past week, with poor preparation from authorities partly blamed for the damage caused. At least 600 people have died across the west African nation, with two-thirds of states affected by the disaster.
An estimated 1.3 million people have been displaced, with up to a quarter of a million homes reportedly destroyed. The floods are a culmination of months of above average rainfall, with the first floods having occurred in summer.
Continue reading...Large parts of both states put on notice as emergency services forecast large hailstones and heavy rain
Severe thunderstorms will bring large hailstones and a flash-flood risk to large parts of New South Wales and Queensland, with coastal regions in both states to be hit by heavy rain belts.
“We’re bracing for significant rainfall right across NSW,” the NSW flood recovery minister, Steph Cooke, said.
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Continue reading...Victoria is expecting the worst flooding from Sunday as NSW braces for more extreme weather. This blog is now closed
Plibersek is asked to explain a little bit more about the funding. Labor pledged a similar amount before the election, so is this new money?
This is additional because it’s in our first budget, so it’s delivering on the promise we made.
We agreed with that billion dollars of spending and we’re saying that’s not quite enough.
We need to spend $1.2bn over coming years and it’ll mean things like a new research centre in Gladstone, employing scientists to do really critical work on coastal ecosystems.
Well, it means that we can do important projects like stabilising riverbanks, replanting mangroves, reed beds and seagrass meadows to improve the water quality that’s coming from the land into the reef.
It means that we can work with traditional owners who are controlling crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks.
Together we hope to these measures can start to turn around the health of the reef, it is a still a beautiful natural wonder of the world. We’ve got a little bit of a breathing space in the last couple of years. We’ve seen some of those corals come back because we’ve had cooler weather and we need to build on that to protect and restore.
Continue reading...Heavy rain and rising waters continue to take a deadly toll in countries including Nigeria, Thailand and Vietnam
It has been a drenched 2022 for many parts of the world, at times catastrophically so. A year of disastrous flooding perhaps reached its nadir in Pakistan, where a third of the country was inundated by heavy rainfall from June, killing more than 1,000 people in what António Guterres, the UN secretary general, called an unprecedented natural disaster.
While floods are indeed natural phenomena, a longstanding result of storms, the human-induced climate crisis is amplifying their damage. Rising sea levels, driven by melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of water, are increasingly inundating coastal areas, while warmer temperatures are causing more moisture to accumulate in the atmosphere, which is then released as rain or snow.
Continue reading...Greens leader Adam Bandt asked senator to step down from leadership team due to error of judgment. Follow the day’s news live
SES Victoria’s Tim Wiebusch is speaking with ABC News about the Victorian floods.
In Echuca, where the Murray River is sitting at 94.4 metres above sea level, Wiebusch says:
It’s a very slow, creeping rise that’s occurring there on the Murray downstream of Barnham, through Echuca. And at this stage, the Bureau is still wait indicating that we could see a peak of around 95 metres, which means a that it will be above the October 1993 flood level. So it will really come down to a matter of centimetres as we’ve seen in a number of other locations. Significant volumes of water coming into the Murray, both from the Victorian northern rivers but also the southern rivers in New South Wales.
Nearly 200,000 sandbag have now been used in and around Echuca to try to protect properties or get it ready for protection. And then to the downstream communities from there, over the coming days and weeks.
What people can expect to see on Tuesday night is an improved budget position over the next couple of years. But after that, when the budget assumes commodity prices go back to more normal levels, and when some of these structural pressures, these spending pressures, make a big impact over the latter years of the forward estimates and into the medium term, and that is not covered by this temporary near-term increase in commodity prices.
Continue reading...Stage three of New Hope Group’s open-cut mine granted a water licence, allowing work to proceed
Work can begin on the expansion of the controversial New Acland thermal coalmine after the Queensland government granted a water licence for the project.
Stage three of New Hope Group’s open-cut mine was on Thursday granted a water licence, clearing the final hurdle for work to start.
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Continue reading...Bureau of Meteorology warns of heavy rain, flash-flooding and possible damaging hail in parts of Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia
Rain, thunderstorms and giant hail are forecast for much of the east coast, raising the risk of flash-flooding in areas already reeling from extreme weather.
The Bureau of Meteorology has warned of showers and thunderstorms from northern Queensland, down through New South Wales and into northern Victoria and eastern South Australia into the weekend.
Continue reading...Modellers say those within 4km of an infected piggery potentially vulnerable, meaning 740,546 people at risk of mosquito-borne virus
Warming temperatures combined with flood waters could leave almost 750,000 Australians vulnerable to Japanese encephalitis – a disease that until last year was confined to Asia and far-northern Australia.
The mosquito-borne disease was first detected on the Australian mainland in 1998, but its range expanded dramatically earlier this year. Cases were reported in dozens of southern piggeries (pigs are one of the main carriers of the virus) and there were also 31 confirmed cases in humans and six deaths.
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Continue reading...Mining co-ops – with oversize influence in the government – are moving into the Amazon’s Madidi national park
The footage is jerky, perhaps shot covertly. It shows a river running through a jungle: on the far side there is still thick forest, but the near bank is a mess of churned earth and muddy tracks – yet more evidence that gold miners have moved into the Madidi, Bolivia’s most famous national park.
Such mining provides a living for hundreds of thousands of people. But as miners push into the Amazon and other protected areas, the Bolivian government’s support of the industry sits awkwardly with its environmentalist rhetoric.
Continue reading...Lack of rainfall takes toll on Canada’s ‘wet coast’ as experts warn of further extreme weather events fueled by climate change
Nearly a year ago, flood waters inundated swaths of south-western British Columbia. Mudslides destroyed sections of highways and swollen, turbid rivers washed away houses and bridges.
Now, the region has the opposite problem: months of drought have begun to take a toll on what was once dubbed Canada’s “wet coast”.
Continue reading...Opposition motion drafted to make it very difficult for government to ignore or allow mass abstentions
Labour will attempt to force a binding vote on fracking on Wednesday, as Tory MPs mull backing a bid which would allow the opposition to put down a bill banning shale gas extraction.
The motion submitted by Labour for its opposition day debate is drafted to make it very difficult for the government to ignore the vote or allow mass abstentions.
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