Category Archives: Environment

New Zealand unveils plan to tackle climate crisis by adapting cities to survive rising seas

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Proposals to prepare the country for more floods, massive storms and wildfires include building away from high-risk areas and protecting cultural sites

The New Zealand government has released new plans to try to prepare the country for the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis: sea level rise, floods, massive storms and wildfires.

The proposals, released for consultation on Wednesday, outline sweeping reforms to institutions, councils and laws to try to stop people building in hazardous areas, preserve cultural treasures, improve disaster responses, protect the financial system from the shocks of future disasters, and reform key industries including tourism, fisheries and farming.

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Landfill tax rises boosting fly-tipping, says spending watchdog

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National Audit Office says tax has increased amount of money criminals can make from waste crime

Organised criminals have accidentally been given incentives by the government to fly-tip, a damning report by the National Audit Office has found.

Fly-tipping has increased year-on-year in England since 2012-13 and reached 1.13 million recorded incidents in 2020-21 – at a cost of £11.6m to clear large-scale incidents.

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Parched southern California takes unprecedented step of restricting outdoor watering

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The resolution will limit watering to just one day a week, affecting millions in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties

Southern California officials declared a water shortage emergency Tuesday, and adopted new unprecedented restrictions on outdoor watering that will impact millions of people living in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

Metropolitan water district of southern California’s resolution will limit outdoor watering to just one day per week for district residents supplied by a stressed system of canals, pipelines, reservoirs and hydroelectric power plants called the State Water Project, which supplies water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland.

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Janjaweed militia blamed for attacks that left at least 200 dead in Darfur

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Death toll likely to rise, say witnesses to indiscriminate attacks on Kreinik and El Geneina by Sudan’s notorious Rapid Support Forces

At least 200 people are now known to have died in West Darfur in the latest attack on civilians and local forces blamed on Janjaweed militia.

Darfur, the semi-arid western region of Sudan where a vicious civil war erupted in 2003, has seen a new outbreak of fighting over the past few months as rival groups clash over water and grazing land, shortages of which are being exacerbated by the climate crisis.

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Matt Canavan declares net zero by 2050 is ‘all over bar the shouting’ after PM tries to quell divisions

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Labor earlier jumped on climate crisis split between Liberals and Nationals after Colin Boyce said emissions target had ‘wiggle room’

Queensland Nationals senator Matt Canavan has declared net zero by 2050 “all over bar the shouting” only hours after Scott Morrison attempted to hose down internal divisions – insisting the mid-century target was “absolutely” Coalition policy.

Labor criticised the “spectacular” split between inner-city Liberals and rural Nationals on the policy, criticising the Coalition for running a “fear campaign” on the opposition’s policy around coal jobs.

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EU unveils plan for ‘largest ever ban’ on dangerous chemicals

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Up to 12,000 substances could fall within the scope of the new ‘restrictions roadmap’

Thousands of potentially harmful chemicals could soon be prohibited in Europe under new restrictions, which campaigners have hailed as the strongest yet.

Earlier this year, scientists said chemical pollution had crossed a “planetary boundary” beyond which lies the breakdown of global ecosystems.

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Tories could lose 1.3m voters if net zero target ditched, says poll

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Report finds strong support for climate policies among Tory voters despite some MPs’ negative stance

The Conservative party could lose more than 1.3 million voters if the government scraps its net zero target, research suggests.

A report by the centre-right thinktank Onward, which counts the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, among its supporters, has found there is strong support for tackling the climate crisis among Tory voters despite attempts by some on the right of the party to campaign against the measures.

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Replacing NSW coal plant with renewables would create thousands more jobs than gas, report says

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Solar and wind could bring ‘jobs boom’ to regions that have previously depended on coal, Australian Conservation Foundation says

Replacing Australia’s largest coal-fired power station with renewable energy would create tens of thousands more construction jobs than replacing it with gas, a new analysis has found.

The Eraring coal-fired power station in the Lake Macquarie region of New South Wales is scheduled to close in 2025.

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Queensland plan to build cabins in beachside national park angers communities

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State government proposes ‘eco-tourism’ accommodation in Sunshine Coast national park

A government proposal to build luxury cabins in the Great Sandy national park poses a threat to its pristine natural beauty and Aboriginal cultural heritage, locals say.

The Queensland government plans to construct “eco-tourism” accommodation in locations along the Cooloola Great Walk, which runs from Noosa North Shore through Cooloola to Rainbow Beach.

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After the relentless rain, South Africa sounds the alarm on the climate crisis

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Many are still missing after this month’s floods. Extreme weather is becoming more frequent, and it can be devastating

Survivors of South Africa’s devastating floods have described “sheet upon sheet of relentless rain” that washed away entire houses, bridges and roads, killing about 450 people and making thousands homeless.

The storm, which delivered close to an entire year’s usual rainfall in 48 hours, took meteorologists by surprise and has been blamed by experts on climate change. The new disaster comes after three tropical cyclones and two tropical storms hit south-east Africa in just six weeks in the first months of this year.

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Could Anglesey’s tidal energy project drive a new energy revolution?

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Experts say Wales has huge potential for generating renewable marine power, yet, so far, ambitious schemes have been ignored

On the stunning and craggy coastline of Holy Island in north Wales, work has started on a construction project to generate energy from one of the world’s greatest untapped energy resources: tidal power.

The Morlais project, on the small island off the west of Anglesey has benefited from £31m in what is likely to be the last large grant for Wales from the European Union’s regional funding programme. It will install turbines at what will be one of the largest tidal stream energy sites in the world, covering 13 square miles of the seabed.

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Tanzania’s Maasai appeal to west to stop eviction for conservation plans

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Thousands of Indigenous people sign letter to UK, US and EU protesting at appropriation of land for tourist safaris and hunting

Thousands of Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania have written to the UK and US governments and the EU appealing for help to stop plans to evict them from their ancestral land.

More than 150,000 Maasai people face eviction by the Tanzanian government due to moves by the UN cultural agency Unesco and a safari company to use the land for conservation and commercial hunting.

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Australia’s coal export boom forecast to end abruptly amid big drop in demand from China

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Study finds Chinese consumption will fall within two to three years as Australian coalmining communities warned to reduce dependence on industry

Australia’s coal export boom will come to an abrupt end because of an “imminent and substantial” drop in purchases by China, and local coal mining communities should brace for the change, the lead author of a new study says.

The peer-reviewed paper, published on Thursday in the journal Joule, forecasts China’s thermal coal imports will contract at least a quarter from 2019 levels of 210m tonnes by 2025, mostly as improved transport links will give local suppliers an edge.

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‘It will be hard to find a farmer left’: Sri Lanka reels from rash fertiliser ban

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Harvests have collapsed, and the way President Rajapaksa introduced the policy angered even organic farmers

Driving through the verdant landscape of Rajanganaya, a rural district in north Sri Lanka where the hibiscus flowers pop out of rich green foliage and the mango trees are already weighed down by early fruit, it is hard to imagine this is a community in crisis. Yet for many of those who have farmed this land since the 1960s, mainly with rice and banana crops, the past year has been the toughest of their lives.

“If things go on like this, in the future it will be hard to find a farmer left in Sri Lanka,” said Niluka Dilrukshi, 34, a rice paddy farmer.

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Biden launches $6bn effort to save America’s distressed nuclear plants

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Officials say nuclear energy remains vital as carbon-free source of power to help tackle the climate crisis

The Biden administration is launching a $6bn effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing, citing the need to continue nuclear energy as a carbon-free source of power that helps to combat climate change.

On Tuesday, a certification and bidding process opened for a civil nuclear credit program that is intended to bail out financially distressed owners or operators of nuclear power reactors, the US energy department told the Associated Press exclusively, shortly before the official announcement. It’s the largest federal investment in saving financially distressed nuclear reactors.

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Killers confronted: humpback whale turns on orca pod in rare encounter

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Footage shows five-year-old humpback in Canadian waters stalking and ambushing group more used to role of attackers

An aggressive humpback whale appeared to turn the tables on a pod of orcas off the Canadian coast, stalking then ambushing the group that more usually would have been attacking it.

The rare occurrence took place on the Salish Sea between British Columbia and Washington state and was witnessed and recorded by enthralled tourists on a whale-watching trip.

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Labour says it will insulate 2m houses in first year to cut bills

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Ed Miliband says move will ease energy price crisis and reduce dependence on Russian gas

Labour has said it would insulate 2m houses within a year to slash bills and reduce reliance on Russian gas, accusing Boris Johnson of a “shameful” failure to stop Britain’s homes leaking heat.

The government put major nuclear and onshore wind projects at the heart of its energy security strategy announced earlier this month, but faced criticism for failing to include any new measures on insulation despite the UK having some of the draughtiest housing in Europe.

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US calls on Australia to increase 2030 emission reduction pledge to help prevent ‘greater destruction’

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Senior official says US ‘determined that everyone raise ambition’ in tackling climate crisis and stresses need to keep heating below 1.5C

The US will urge Australia to increase its 2030 emission reduction pledge this year, with a senior official declaring it was “a long time ago” when the Abbott government set the target the Morrison government says is “fixed”.

The assistant US secretary of state for environmental affairs, Monica Medina, said the US was “determined that everyone raise ambition” in tackling the climate crisis in a bid to avoid “greater destruction”.

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Queensland government acknowledges subsidence caused by CSG could affect farmland

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Farmers in the Darling Downs say even minuscule changes to the flat black soil plains could disrupt soil drainage and farming methods

A Queensland government technical study has acknowledged for the first time that subsidence caused by coal seam gas drilling could have potential consequences for farmers in the fertile Darling Downs.

Relationships between some farmers and CSG companies have become strained in the past few years, amid claims that one company, Arrow Energy, drilled diagonally beneath farmland without notifying landholders.

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Australian wholesale power costs soaring despite Morrison government’s budget claims

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Spike in prices in part caused by coal-fired power plants cutting output, says analyst

Australia’s wholesale power costs are soaring, with prices for most of the national electricity market running at double the rate promoted by the Morrison government in last month’s budget.

April prices are forecast at $175 per megawatt-hour in Queensland, the most among the major east coast states, ASX futures data shows. New South Wales isn’t far behind at $173/MWh, while South Australia at $150 and Victoria just above $100.

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