A “heartbreaking” stand of “skeletons” along one of the Sunshine Coast’s most popular scenic drives is sobering evidence that bunya pine dieback is spreading, while a team of experts search for ways to save the iconic trees.
Hairy-nosed otters and cats that catch fish are among the startling diversity of creatures making their home in threatened habitats
One of the most comprehensive biodiversity surveys ever carried out in a mangrove forest has revealed that an astonishing array of wildlife makes its home in these key, threatened habitats.
Hundreds of species – from bats to birds and fish to insects – were identified during the study of the Peam Krasop sanctuary and the adjacent Koh Kapik Ramsar reserve in Cambodia. Hairy-nosed otters, smooth-coated otters, large-spotted civets, long-tailed macaques and fishing cats, as well a wide range of bat species, were among the residents recorded by the survey, which was funded by the conservation group Fauna & Flora International. The variety of wildlife has staggered biologists.
Paris agreement negotiator Todd Stern attacks premiers who say that decarbonisation programmes are unrealistic and should be slowed down
Political leaders who present themselves as “grownups” while slowing the pace of climate action are pushing the world towards deeper catastrophe, a former US climate chief has warned.
“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic,” said Todd Stern, who served as a special envoy for climate change under Barack Obama, and helped negotiate the 2015 Paris agreement.
While Luke Campbell was looking for a job, a friend joked he should become a camel train driver. Now he can’t imagine doing anything else.
Neil Preston decided to hand build his four-bedroom home from “hempcrete” after learning it would be hypoallergenic, sound insulating and cosy all year round.
Being paid to get rid of weeds sounds like a farmer’s ultimate dream, and it may just become reality for a group of graziers in rural Australia.
The marine mammals are increasingly endangered as warmer waters push them into ship traffic and fishing gear
A North Atlantic right whale has been spotted entangled in rope off New England, worsening an already devastating year for the vanishing animals, federal authorities said.
Right whales number less than 360 and are vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships. The entangled whale was seen on Wednesday about 50 miles (80km) south of Rhode Island’s Block Island, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.
Bulldozed tracks and informal byways in tropical forests and palm-oil plantations ‘almost always’ an indicator of future deforestation, say researchers
A vast network of undocumented “ghost roads” is pushing into the world’s untouched rainforests and driving their destruction in the Asia-Pacific region, a new study has found.
By using Google Earth to map tropical forests on Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea islands, researchers from James Cook University in Australia documented 1.37 m kilometres (850,000 miles) of roads across 1.4m sq kilometres of rainforest on the islands – between three and seven times what is officially recorded on road databases.
Liz Sunshine spends more time thinking about the way we dress than most. But her shopping advice is simple: “Slow down.”
Simon Kennedy has openly backed the Liberal Party’s push to introduce nuclear power to the national energy grid as the Opposition prepares to announce up to six possible sites for nuclear plants.
Blue tits, starlings, wood pigeons and blackbirds next most sighted in RSPB survey involving 600,000 participants
A friendly if slightly tuneless chirp is the most ubiquitous birdsong in British gardens with the house sparrow topping the Big Garden Birdwatch charts for the 21st consecutive year, according to the annual RSPB survey.
Blue tits, starlings, wood pigeons and blackbirds were the next most-sighted birds by more than 600,000 participants in the world’s largest wildlife garden survey.
Next week, more than 100 green energy, technology, education and finance companies from Australia and Vietnam will gather in Ho Chi Minh City. The meeting is billed as the first “green economy summit” between the two nations.
The conference builds on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s pledge at last month’s Australian ASEAN Special Summit to invest A$2 billion in Southeast Asia. There’s a focus on boosting clean technology.
So what’s on the agenda at this week’s meeting? And what are the prospects for success?
We are in Vietnam for the summit, drawing on our experience in economics, banking and finance to lead sessions on clean technology supply chains and green finance. This is the culmination of nine months of work with Australia’s National Centre for Asia Capability to increase regional prosperity while reducing emissions.
Read more: Albanese to announce $2 billion financing facility to boost economic relations with Southeast Asia
As Albanese has said, “Australia and Vietnam share an ambitious agenda across climate change and sustainability”. And there is “enormous potential to be realised through closer ties” between our two countries.
Both have net zero goals for 2050, both want to develop clean technology industries and minimise supply chain disruption. There are shared challenges around decarbonisation, as large agriculture and manufacturing sectors try to shift away from fossil fuels. And both know our broader Indo-Pacific region is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
Currently, global supply chains for clean energy technology and associated critical minerals are highly concentrated in China, especially for solar panels, wind and batteries. For electrolysers and heat pumps, the United States and the European Union play a larger role. But China still dominates the manufacturing and trade of these technologies.
This concentration of manufacturing in a limited number of countries highlights the need to diversify. As a global trade hub with progressive trade policies, Vietnam has an important role to play here. Vietnam is among the few countries outside China with existing significant solar PV manufacturing capabilities. This includes wafer production, cell manufacturing and module assembly.
Vietnam is well placed to support Australian companies in the green economy. It has policies for attracting green investment, along with an established regional supply chain and market for consumption. Then there’s the increasingly educated and skilled labour force. All will be useful in the commercialisation and scale-up of Australia’s latest solar research, as Australia begins to invest in manufacturing facilities in Vietnam.
Vietnam is also a strong export market for Australia, with the highest rate of solar uptake in Southeast Asia. Australia wants to export more solar panels to Vietnam and therefore compete with China for this export revenue.
Australian companies will soon need to account not only for their own direct greenhouse emissions and indirect emissions from electricity, but also indirect emissions from upstream and downstream activities (“scope 3 emissions”). These may come from materials sourced overseas or investments outside Australia.
This is part of Treasury’s proposed bill introduced to parliament in March. It will encourage large companies to invest in green technology and renewables, rather than polluting projects or products manufactured using fossil fuels.
Australia’s $2 billion investment includes plans to support companies to invest overseas, through regional “landing pads”.
The landing pads act as regional hubs to drive Australian technology exports and investment into the region. This is intended to help businesses scale up their technology and break into new markets. Ideally these companies will be able to use these opportunities to reduce their scope 3 emissions.
So far, Australian companies have had limited involvement in clean energy projects in Vietnam. The most notable exception was Macquarie’s green investment group Corio Generation’s partnership with FECON, a Vietnamese company, to develop an offshore wind farm in the Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu province.
The existing pool of investors in Vietnam’s renewable market is concentrated among Southeast Asian and East Asian companies, particularly from Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Japan.
It is unlikely this pool of investors will be sufficient to facilitate the significant volume of generation, transmission and storage infrastructure required to achieve Vietnam’s climate targets. This will provide opportunities for Australian investors.
Unfortunately many Australian investors are not yet familiar with overseas markets. This leads to higher costs of capital for renewables projects in many emerging markets.
The increase in cost due to perceived risks can stem from things such as:
Increasing business-to-business connection and helping Australian investors understand this opportunity will help reduce perceived risks. This will in turn lower the cost of capital and help ignite green economy collaboration and investment into the future.
Having the right policy settings in place can help foster trade and investment around new technology. There is an opportunity here to nurture the emerging green economy in Southeast Asia.
The Australia-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership announced in March, along with existing multilateral trade pacts, is most welcome.
Bringing businesses in green economy sectors together for the summit will provide a stronger case for both countries to decarbonise faster. This is crucial given Australia’s economy is still dependent on fossil fuel exports. Vietnam’s industrialised economy is grappling with growing energy demands.
As the world races towards net zero emissions, it’s clear Vietnam is poised to play a significant role in the region’s decarbonisation. Now is the time for Australia to strengthen its strategic relationship with Vietnam and the broader Southeast Asia region.
The article refers to research findings and activities that are part of the Australia Vietnam Green Economy Program, a joint initiative between Asialink and Climateworks Centre. The program is funded and supported by the Australian Government. Trang is the Southeast Asia Lead for Climateworks Centre, which receives funding from philanthropy and project-specific financial support from a range of private and public entities including federal, state and local government and private sector organisations and international and local non-profit organisations. Climateworks Centre works within Monash University's Sustainable Development Institute. Trang is also an independent Board Member for Asian Australian for Climate Solutions.
Anna Skarbek is on the board of the Centre for New Energy Technologies, the Green Building Council of Australia, and the Asia-Pacific Advisory Board of the Glasgow Financial Alliance on Net Zero. She is a member of the Net Zero Economy Agency Advisory Board, the Grattan Institute’s energy program reference panel and the Blueprint Institute’s strategic advisory council. Anna Skarbek is CEO of Climateworks Centre which receives funding from philanthropy and project-specific financial support from a range of private and public entities including federal, state and local government and private sector organisations and international and local non-profit organisations. Climateworks Centre works within Monash University's Sustainable Development Institute.
Australia’s weather bureau copped harsh criticism after El Niño failed to deliver a much-vaunted dry summer in eastern Australia. Parts of northern Queensland in the path of Tropical Cyclone Jasper had a record wet December and areas of central Victoria had a record wet January. Overall, the summer was 19% wetter than average for Australia as a whole.
This led to debate in the media and during senate estimates around the Bureau of Meteorology’s ability to make accurate predictions as the climate changes. The value of seasonal forecasting in particular has been called into question.
Weather prediction has actually improved in recent years. And there are exciting developments on the horizon involving artificial intelligence. But the effect of future climate change on weather and seasonal prediction is not yet well understood.
As climate scientists, we know 7–14-day forecasts and seasonal predictions stack up pretty well when it comes to the crunch. That’s because agencies such as the Bureau check the success of their forecasts against reality and make this information public. While it’s possible climate change may pose challenges to weather and seasonal prediction in some regions, we believe improvements in forecasting far exceed any losses in accuracy.
Ever since the UK physicist Lewis Fry Richardson first envisaged the possibility in a 1922 book, weather forecasting has been growing more accurate and powerful.
The science of meteorology took a great leap forward with the boom in computing capability.
Now, highly detailed satellite data and weather observations feed into multiple computer simulations. This makes 7-day forecasts pretty accurate across the globe, although less so in poorer areas of the world.
As we can never know the state of the atmosphere perfectly at any given time, it is beneficial to run many simulations with slightly different starting conditions. This gives an idea of how the weather may change and how much confidence we have in those changes.
The same principles that govern weather forecasting also support seasonal climate forecasting. Models representing the atmosphere and ocean are cast forward in time to give a three-month outlook.
Beyond about ten days we’re not able to say with certainty what the weather will be like for a precise location at a specific time. But we can give an indication of the chances the weather will be significantly hotter, cooler, drier or wetter than the seasonal average.
Our ability to predict conditions over the coming season has greatly advanced in just the past 20 years. We now better understand how the various climate drivers influence our weather, and we have more computational power to run models.
However model-based seasonal forecasting – providing location-specific guidance on likely rainfall and temperature compared to the long-term average for months at a time – is still relatively new. It has further to go to provide reliable, usable information to decision-makers.
Meteorologists know whether their forecasts were right or wrong after the fact, because agencies such as the Bureau of Meteorology have entire teams dedicated to comparing their forecasts with what actually happened.
The table above shows a simple example of how scientists calculate how good a forecast is. From the number of hits, misses, false alarms and correct negatives we can calculate a range of scores.
This becomes more complex when we want to know not just whether the forecast correctly predicted it would rain, but also how much rain, and whether the quoted probability of rainfall was actually right.
Additionally, as models become more sophisticated and higher-resolution than they used to be, they can simulate more realistic-looking weather systems such as lines of thunderstorms. It’s like watching TV in high definition instead of grainy black and white. Assessing forecast capability gets more challenging at high resolutions because flaws we wouldn’t previously have seen are magnified too.
Overall, when we look at weather forecast skill over time, we see major improvements. These improvements are particularly large in the Southern Hemisphere, where there is less land for weather stations. In these remote areas, satellite data has vastly improved our knowledge of the state of the atmosphere – providing a better starting point for forecast simulations.
Seasonal forecasting capability is also improving, but there is less study of these changes. Skill of seasonal outlooks varies depending on the time of year and on whether major climate influences such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (the year-to-year swing between El Niño, neutral and La Niña phases) are active.
Seasonal forecasts are the best in spring when the El Niño-Southern Oscillation is at its peak and El Niño or La Niña is often providing a strong and predictable push to seasonal rainfall and temperatures. In contrast, seasonal forecasts are typically worse in autumn when the El Niño-Southern Oscillation transitions between phases and the drivers of wet or dry conditions are less predictable.
Read more: What does El Niño do to the weather in your state?
Climate change is certainly changing our weather. But it’s not clear if that’s making weather harder to predict. There hasn’t been much research into this yet.
Some changes could affect predictability, particularly if more rain falls from isolated thunderstorms and less from larger-scale weather systems. This is the general expectation with climate change and already appears to be happening in parts of Australia. Such a change is not well understood but would likely make local rainfall totals harder to predict.
We already see lower seasonal prediction skill in summer when more rain falls in small-scale systems not strongly tied to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Changes in the strength of the relationship between climate influences, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and Australian climate could also make seasonal prediction easier or harder.
Given the rate of improvement in weather prediction has been so high, it’s unlikely anyone would notice any effect of climate change on weather forecast skill any time soon. As weather forecasting and seasonal prediction continue to improve due to scientific and technological advances this will likely drown out any climate change effect on prediction.
Read more: Here’s why climate change isn’t always to blame for extreme rainfall
Andrew King receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program and the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.
Kimberley Reid receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
Michael Barnes receives funding from ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
Nick Earl-Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Australia is one of the last places on the planet free from high pathogenicity bird flu. But authorities warn there’s an increased risk of an outbreak here as scientists say the world is in an animal pandemic.
China has the world’s fastest train but it wants to push speeds even higher. It has recently run a train through a low-vacuum tube at speeds of more than 600 kph — but the designers want it to ultimately reach a blistering 4,000 kph.
Employees at SBTi have called for their CEO to resign over controversial plans which they fear will enable greenwashing
Staff at one of the world’s leading climate-certification organisations have called for the CEO and board members to resign after they announced plans to allow companies to meet their climate targets with carbon offsets.
They fear that companies will use the offsets for greenwashing, while avoiding making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – without which the world faces climate catastrophe.
Marine researcher ‘devastated’ by widespread event that is affecting coral species usually resistant to bleaching
Concern that the Great Barrier Reef may be suffering the most severe mass coral bleaching event on record has escalated after a conservation group released footage showing damage up to 18 metres below the surface.
Dr Selina Ward, a marine biologist and former academic director of the University of Queensland’s Heron Island Research Station, said it was the worst bleaching she had seen in 30 years working on the reef, and that some coral was starting to die.
Protected areas have been the cornerstone of efforts to conserve nature for more than a century. Most countries have some form of protected areas, national parks being the best-known examples. A key element of protected areas is that they are dedicated, through legal or other effective means, to long-term conservation of nature.
Australia has taken an innovative and diverse approach to growing its protected area estate. It includes Indigenous Protected Areas and privately protected areas in the form of conservation covenants and land bought by land trusts. As a result, the country’s protected area estate has grown from 7% in the mid-1990s to 22% of the continent today.
Despite this progress, the Australian government has released new draft guidelines for other forms of area-based conservation, with potentially troubling implications. It suggests 25 years of “intention” to deliver biodiversity outcomes is enough for that land to count for the 30% protected area target.
Our newly published research has looked at what types of land use might qualify in line with international guidelines. We found two problems with the proposal to include 25-year plans for biodiversity outcomes.
First, such plans are non-binding, so protection can lapse at any time. Second, they do not satisfy international and Australian principles of long-term protection. Proceeding with this proposal would undermine the goal of long-term conservation in this country.
In 2010, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity added a new, slightly unwieldy term, “other effective area-based conservation measures”. These conservation areas (OECMs for short) complement protected areas in achieving global conservation targets. An OECM is a geographically defined area that is not already a protected area, “which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity”.
In 2022, the world lifted ambitions for protection and conservation to 30% of land and water areas by 2030 as part of the convention’s Global Biodiversity Framework. There’s been a surge of interest in OECMs to help meet that target.
International guidance on OECMs has been developed only relatively recently. This creates an urgent need for country-specific analysis.
In our peer-reviewed paper in the journal Conservation, we explore policy issues related to OECMs in Australia. We looked at what types of land use might qualify, with a focus on longevity.
The Australian government has released a draft set of principles to guide OECM development in Australia. The consultation period closes on April 17.
These principles are largely in line with global guidance. However, a couple of significant deviations could compromise Australia’s leadership in area-based conservation.
The most notable deviation relates to the definition of “long-term”. It’s fundamental to whether a site meets the criteria for contributing to global targets. The proposed principles suggest 25 years of “intention” to deliver biodiversity outcomes is enough.
This is a problem for two reasons. First, “intention” does little for biodiversity if the landholder chooses to sell their property a few years after being recognised as an OECM and the new owner has no such conservation interest.
In contrast, conservation covenants are a tool that all states already use to counter against this very scenario. The covenants are attached to the land title and bind future landholders forever. For this reason, these are considered privately protected areas.
Second, a 25-year timeframe is at odds with long-established Australian policy for defining “long-term” for protected areas. A minimum timeframe of 99 years is required if permanent protection is not possible.
The proposal is also inconsistent with the 2023 Nature Repair Act. This law added provision for a 100-year agreement (in addition to its original 25-year agreement) during consultations. This change was based on feedback that 25-year agreements did not equate to long-term.
So where did the 25-year proposal come from? It seems to misinterpret global guidance for privately protected areas. Regardless, adoption of a 25-year “intention” would be a significant backslide for conservation policy in Australia.
Defence land and protected water catchments on public land are often suggested as good candidates in Australia and overseas. Many contain large and significant ecosystem values. The primary use is often compatible with those values.
These areas are also usually permanent fixtures of the landscape, meeting a long-term public need. Thus they would likely qualify as OECMs.
Many local government reserves protect important areas of bushland and manage it for that purpose. Typically, they have not been classified as protected areas. Many are likely to qualify as OECMs.
On private land, it’s a little more challenging. Long-term carbon agreements and biodiversity offset agreements are likely to qualify – despite controversy at times over their primary use.
Land for Wildlife is a successful, high-profile program for engaging landholders with wildlife habitat on their property. Their distinctive blue-diamond-shaped signs adorn over 14,000 properties around the country.
However, these agreements are non-binding. A landholder could remove them at any time. This means they cannot be considered long-term or qualify as an OECM.
Regardless of the assessments above, each site would need to undergo an individual assessment to ensure it meets the criteria.
Ultimately, more land managed for conservation is good and all forms of area-based conservation should be encouraged. However, not all forms of area-based conservation qualify for inclusion in global biodiversity targets. Long-term outcomes are fundamental.
Australia has a proud history of innovative protected area policy and approaches. The development of OECM policy in Australia needs to complement and advance that, not erode the standards for long-agreed definitions of long-term.
James Fitzsimons is Senior Advisor, Global Protection Strategies with The Nature Conservancy, is a Councillor of the Biodiversity Council and a member of the Australian Land Conservation Alliance's policy and government relations committee.
Concern that the Great Barrier Reef may be suffering the most severe mass coral bleaching event on record has escalated after a conservation group released footage showing damage to the reef deep below the surface.
Dr Selina Ward, a marine biologist and former academic director of the University of Queensland’s Heron Island Research Station, says it is the worst bleaching she had seen in 30 years working on the reef. ‘It’s absolutely heartbreaking,’ she says.
Ward says Australia can’t expect to save the reef while opening new fossil fuel developments. ‘We really are running out of time. We need to reduce our emissions immediately.’
One of Brazil’s top scientists, Eneas Salati, once said, “The best thing you could do for the Amazon rainforest is to blow up all the roads.” He wasn’t joking. And he had a point.
In an article published today in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperilling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The roads we’re studying do not appear on legitimate maps. We call them “ghost roads”.
What’s so bad about a road? A road means access. Once roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers arrive. Once they get access, they can destroy forests, harm native ecosystems and even drive out or kill indigenous peoples. This looting of the natural world robs cash-strapped nations of valuable natural resources. Indonesia, for instance, loses around A$1.5 billion each year solely to timber theft.
All nations have some unmapped or unofficial roads, but the situation is especially bad in biodiversity-rich developing nations, where roads are proliferating at the fastest pace in human history.
For this study, my PhD student Jayden Engert and I worked with Australian and Indonesian colleagues to recruit and train more than 200 volunteers.
This workforce then spent some 7,000 hours hand-mapping roads, using fine-scale satellite images from Google Earth. Our team of volunteers mapped roads across more than 1.4 million square kilometres of the Asia-Pacific region.
As the results rolled in, we realised we had found something remarkable. For starters, unmapped ghost roads seemed to be nearly everywhere. In fact, when comparing our findings to two leading road databases, OpenStreetMap and the Global Roads Inventory Project, we found ghost roads in these regions to be 3 to 6.6 times longer than all mapped roads put together.
When ghost roads appear, local deforestation soars – usually immediately after the roads are built. We found the density of roads was by far the most important predictor of forest loss, outstripping 38 other variables. No matter how one assesses them, roads are forest killers.
What makes this situation uniquely dangerous for conservation is that the roads are growing fast while remaining hidden and outside government control.
Not even parks and protected areas in the Asia-Pacific are fully safe from illegal roads.
But safeguarding parks does have an effect. In protected areas, we found only one-third as many roads compared with nearby unprotected lands.
The bad news is that when people do build roads inside protected areas, it leads to about the same level of forest destruction compared to roads outside them.
Our findings suggest it is essential to limit roads and associated destruction inside protected areas. If we can find these roads using satellite images, authorities can too. Once an illegal road is found, it can be destroyed or at least mapped and managed as a proper legal road.
Keeping existing protected areas intact is especially urgent, given more than 3,000 protected areas have already been downsized or degraded globally for new roads, mines and local land-use pressures.
The impact we have on the planet differs from place to place. To gauge how much impact we’re having, researchers use the human footprint index, which brings together data on human activities such as roads and other infrastructure, land-uses, illumination at night from electrified settlements and so on. You can use the index to make heat-maps showing where human impacts are most or least pronounced.
We fed our ghost road discoveries into the index and compared two versions for eastern Borneo, one without ghost road information and one with it. The differences are striking.
When ghost roads are included in mapping the human impact on eastern Borneo, areas with “very high” human disturbance double in size, while the areas of “low” disturbance are halved.
Researchers investigating other biodiversity-rich developing regions such as Amazonia and the Congo Basin have found many illegal unmapped roads in those locales too.
Ghost roads, it seems, are an epidemic. Worse, these roads can be actively encouraged by aggressive infrastructure-expansion schemes — most notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative, now active in more than 150 nations.
For now, mapping ghost roads is very labour-intensive. You might think AI could do this better, but that’s not yet true – human eyes can still outperform image-recognition AI software for mapping roads.
At our current rate of work, visually mapping all roads – legal and illicit – across Earth’s land surface just once would require around 640,000 person-hours (or 73 person-years) to complete.
Given these challenges, our group and other researchers are now testing AI methods, hoping to provide accurate, global-scale mapping of ghost roads in close to real time. Nothing else can keep pace with the contemporary avalanche of proliferating roads.
We urgently need to be able to map the world’s roads accurately and often. Once we have this information, we can make it public that so authorities, NGOs and researchers involved in forest protection can see what’s happening.
Without this vital information, we’re flying blind. Knowing what’s happening in the rainforest is the first step to stopping the destruction.
Read more: The global road-building explosion is shattering nature
Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic bodies. He is a former Australian Laureate and director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University.