Category Archives: Environment

Great Barrier Reef’s latest bleaching confirmed by marine park authority

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Severity of damage has increased, with areas spared in previous years experiencing moderate or severe bleaching

The government agency responsible for the Great Barrier Reef has confirmed the natural landmark has suffered a third mass coral bleaching episode in five years, describing the damage as “very widespread”.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said the assessment was based on information from in-water and aerial observations, and built on the best available science and technology to understand current conditions.

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Ranger captures moment grizzly bear emerges from hibernation in Canada – video

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A hulking grizzly bear has found online stardom after he was caught groggily emerging from hibernation on camera. Canadian ranger Nicole Gagnon filmed the end of Boo's hibernation on her phone, a moment she said she had been waiting to document for eight years. It has since been viewed over 100,000 times on Twitter. Boo, 18, draws thousands of tourists every year to his 20-acre enclosure near the town of Golden, Canada

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Global efforts on ozone help reverse southern jet stream damage

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Jet stream appears to have stopped moving south and may be moving back towards normal

International cooperation on ozone-depleting chemicals is helping to return the southern jet stream to a normal state after decades of human-caused disruption, a study shows.

Scientists say the findings prove there is the capacity to heal damaged climate systems if governments act promptly and in coordination to deal with the causes.

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Great Barrier Reef suffers third mass coral bleaching event in five years

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Renowned scientist Terry Hughes says huge swathes of reef have been affected in a ‘severe’ situation

The Great Barrier Reef has experienced a third mass coral bleaching event in five years, according to the scientist carrying out aerial surveys over hundreds of individual reefs.

With three days of a nine-day survey to go, Prof Terry Hughes told Guardian Australia: “We know this is a mass bleaching event and it’s a severe one.”

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Delay is deadly: what Covid-19 tells us about tackling the climate crisis | Jonathan Watts

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Rightwing governments have denied the problem and been slow to act. With coronavirus and the climate, this costs lives

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The coronavirus pandemic has brought urgency to the defining political question of our age: how to distribute risk. As with the climate crisis, neoliberal capitalism is proving particularly ill-suited to this.

Like global warming, but in close-up and fast-forward, the Covid-19 outbreak shows how lives are lost or saved depending on a government’s propensity to acknowledge risk, act rapidly to contain it, and share the consequences.

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‘Fright of her life’: Gold Coast woman finds five-metre python on her doorstep

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Queensland snake catcher says 80kg albino Burmese python found in Oxenford is the largest he has come across in 27 years

As a seasoned snake catcher, Tony Harrison is used to the people the claiming there is a five-metre snake on their doorstep. But for the first time on Monday, the caller wasn’t exaggerating.

“This was the largest snake I have come across in 27 years,” Harrison said. “The poor old lady who opened the front door to see it there got the fright of her life”

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Electric cars produce less CO2 than petrol vehicles, study confirms

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Finding will come as boost to governments seeking to move to net zero carbon emissions

Electric vehicles produce less carbon dioxide than petrol cars across the vast majority of the globe – contrary to the claims of some detractors, who have alleged that the CO2 emitted in the production of electricity and their manufacture outweighs the benefits.

The finding is a boost to governments, including the UK, seeking to move to net zero carbon emissions, which will require a massive expansion of the electric car fleet. A similar benefit was found for electric heat pumps.

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Cattle gridlock: EU border delays add to coronavirus strain on meat trade

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Possible slaughterhouse shutdowns and staffing issues put pressure on ‘vulnerable’ supply chains, as campaigners call for restriction of live exports

Campaigners have called for the suspension of all live animal shipments out of Europe, and a restriction to the shortest possible journeys within Europe, over welfare and animal diseases concerns – as meat supply chains face potentially debilitating strain.

Last week queues of up to 60km (37 miles) formed at the Polish/German border on Wednesday after Poland announced that it was shutting to foreigners. Although the closure was supposed to apply solely to people, cargo experienced a knock-on effect, with some trucks reportedly taking as long as 18 hours to get through border controls. More queues formed at the Bulgarian/Turkish border.

Sabine Fisher of German animal welfare group Animal Angels said: “One driver told us that it had taken him three hours to travel 300 metres. There were trucks of sheep, bulls, cows. I’ve never seen a queue like it.”

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The isolated tribes at risk of illness from Amazon missionaries

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As evangelical Christians use their influence with Brazil’s government to cast their net ever wider, indigenous people vulnerable to common diseases face a growing threat

A radical group of evangelical Christian missionaries set on converting every last tribe on Earth has raised fears that deadly diseases – and even the coronavirus – will spread in the Brazilian Amazon. The group has based its newly bought helicopter right beside a reserve with the world’s highest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, who have little resistance to common illnesses.

There are more than 100 isolated indigenous groups in Brazil, all highly vulnerable to common diseases such as measles and flu, and 16 of them live in the same reserve in the Javari Valley, a vast, remote area the size of Austria. Covid-19 could wipe out any of them.

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Energy storage boom stalls in Europe

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Slowdown in large-scale clean energy projects started before coronavirus crisis due to lack of state support

Europe’s energy storage boom stalled last year due to a slowdown in large-scale schemes designed to store clean electricity from major renewable energy projects, according to the European Association for Storage of Energy (Ease).

A new study by consultants Delta-EE for Ease found that the European market grew by a total of 1 gigawatt-hours in 2019, a significant slowdown compared with 2018, when the energy storage market exceeded expectations to grow by 1.47GWh.

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Great Barrier Reef watchers anxiously await evidence of coral bleaching from aerial surveys

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Planes will this week cover areas in the southern half of the reef that escaped earlier bleaching but may have undergone high levels of heat stress

The full impact of coral bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef will become clearer this week as aerial surveys of hundreds of reefs are completed in the bottom two thirds of the world’s biggest reef system.

An aerial survey carried out last week over almost 500 individual reefs between the Torres Strait and Cairns revealed some severe bleaching of corals closer to shore, but almost none on outer reefs.

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Poor water infrastructure is greater risk than coronavirus, says UN

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On World Water Day, UN warns that more than half the global population lacking access to safely managed sanitation

Decades of chronic underfunding of water infrastructure is putting many countries at worse risk in the coronavirus crisis, with more than half the global population lacking access to safely managed sanitation, experts said as the UN marked World Water Day on Sunday.

Good hygiene – soap and water – are the first line of defence against coronavirus and a vast range of other diseases, yet three quarters of households in developing countries do not have access to somewhere to wash with soap and water, according to Tim Wainwright, chief executive of the charity WaterAid. A third of healthcare facilities in developing countries also lack access to clean water on site.

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Dolphins and fish: nature moves into spaces left empty by Italian coronavirus quarantine – video

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Video shared on social media shows clear and calm water in Venice as animals take advantage of the lockdown in Italy to move into usually crowded spaces. Dolphins and wild boar have been spotted as ports and roads have been quiet as the country remains under strict quarantine at least until 3 April

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‘No-waste’ Japanese village is a peek into carbon-neutral future

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For 20 years Kamikatsu has led the way in the world’s second biggest producer of plastic waste

The residents of a remote village on the Japanese island of Shikoku have spent almost two decades reusing, recycling and reducing, united behind a mission to end their dependence on incinerators and landfill as the world struggles to tackle the climate emergency and the plastic waste crisis.

Although Kamikatsu, an hour’s drive from the nearest city, Tokushima, and 370 miles from Tokyo, has not managed to banish waste altogether, its heroic efforts have inspired other communities in Japan and further afield to take up the zero-waste challenge.

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‘Nature is taking back Venice’: wildlife returns to tourist-free city

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With the cruise ships gone and the souvenir stalls closed, the coronavirus lockdown has transformed La Serenissima’s waterways

Look down into the waters of the Venice canals today and there is a surprising sight – not just a clear view of the sandy bed, but shoals of tiny fish, scuttling crabs and multicoloured plant-life.

“The water is blue and clear,” said Gloria Beggiato, who owns the celebrated Metropole Hotel a few steps from St Mark’s square and has a view over the Venice lagoon. “It is calm like a pond, because there are no more waves caused by motorised boats transporting day-tripper tourists. And of course, the giant cruise ships have disappeared.”

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Mexico’s deadly toll of environment and land defenders catalogued in report

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At least 83 murdered in 2012-2019, with a third of attacks targeting opponents of energy mega-projects

At least 83 Mexican land and environment defenders were murdered between 2012 and 2019, while hundreds more were threatened, beaten and criminalized, according to a new report.

Latin America is the most dangerous continent in the world to defend environmental, land and human rights, with Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala ranking worst.

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Locust crisis poses a danger to millions, forecasters warn

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Experts fear swarms like those seen in Africa will become more common as tropical storms create favourable breeding conditions

The locust crisis that has now reached 10 countries could carry on to endanger millions more people, forecasters have said.

Climate change created unprecedented conditions for the locusts to breed in the usually barren desert of the Arabian gulf, according to experts, and the insects were then able to spread through Yemen, where civil war has devastated the ability to control locust populations.

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Taxi! Endangered New Zealand seabirds get a lift to safety after crash landing in fog

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Volunteer army led by a local taxi driver scours the streets in the middle of the night to save endangered birds

A taxi driver in New Zealand has swapped drunken revellers for wayward seabirds in an attempt to halt the decline of one of the nation’s endangered species.

Local cabbie Toni Painting leads a volunteer army that scours the streets of the South Island town of Kaikoura in the middle of the night in search of Hutton’s shearwater chicks that crash-land onto the road – mistaking the shiny bitumen for the sea.

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Cambodia scraps plans for Mekong hydropower dams

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Campaigners welcome decision which allays fears for fragile biodiversity and communities dependent on river for livelihood

A Cambodian government decision to postpone building new hydropower dams on the Mekong river has been welcomed by campaigners, who say it will provide welcome relief to the tens of thousands of people whose livelihood depend upon its rich resources.

Cambodia announced on Wednesday that it would not build any new hydropower dams on the mainstream Mekong for the next decade, allaying fears that the river’s fragile biodiversity could be further devastated by development projects.

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Win for conservation as African black rhino numbers rise

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Slow recovery due to relocating groups and stronger protection through law enforcement

Numbers of African black rhinos in the wild have risen by several hundred, a rare boost in the conservation of a species driven to near extinction by poaching.

Black rhinos are still in grave danger but the small increase – an annual rate of 2.5% over six years, has swollen the population from 4,845 in 2012 to an estimated 5,630 in 2018, giving hope that efforts put into saving the species are paying off.

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