This white paper examines the current challenges for clean energy infrastructure and identifies solutions that industrial clusters, transport and logistics industries, and the wider clean energy value chain can jointly explore in order to accelerate its deployment. Thirteen new industrial clusters from Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, …
Ministers today agreed to release an exposure draft of the National Electricity Law amendments for the National Energy Guarantee (Guarantee) – a key reform for the security, reliability, and affordability of Australia’s energy future – following confirmation at a teleconference on 14 August 2018. The Energy Council noted the detailed …
Australia’s Westpac Banking Corp said on Thursday it would disburse A$100 million ($74.2 million) in cheap loans to farmers as a record dry spell hits parts of the nation, while the country’s lenders fight to regain public trust amidst an ongoing misconduct inquiry. The drought in Australia’s east, one of …
The driest start to a year in five decades and a dimming outlook for better-than-average rainfall in coming months have prompted the Berejiklian government to declare all of NSW to be in drought. The spreading and intensifying dry spell also prompted federal Labor to weigh in, pledging to create a …
Prior to the back-to-back bleaching events that hit the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017, the UNESCO World Heritage Site had suffered two other bouts of extensive bleaching in the past two decades, one in 1998 and another in 2002. The damage done to the Great Barrier Reef by …
It's a question that has prompted a global call to action: how do you best eliminate single-use plastic bags, before they further pollute our oceans? Australia is among places grappling with bans, but it has struck teething pains amid what many have likened to "tantrums" by change-averse customers. Now a …
From ground level, Australia’s drought looks like a featureless, brown dustbowl, but from the air it transforms into an artistry of color and texture as the land cracks under a blazing sun. Circular dry plow tracks resemble the concentric circles in Aboriginal dot paintings that tell of an ancient mythology, …
Millions of tonnes of illegally logged timber, felled from forests across Papua New Guinea, are being exported to China and from there to the world as finished wood products, a new report from Global Witness has revealed. Global Witness’s investigation has found that the majority of logging operations in PNG …
Habitat for the critically endangered swift parrot is being “knowingly destroyed” by logging because of government failures to manage the species’ survival, according to research. Matthew Webb and Dejan Stojanovic, two of the Eureka prize finalists from the Australian National University’s difficult bird research group, say governments have stalled on …
An Australian government plan to lock in electricity emissions targets may breach a key commitment to the Paris Agreement. A paper on the national energy guarantee circulated to state ministers on Tuesday, seen by Climate Home News, explains key elements of the proposed national policy. A critical element of the …
The Great Barrier Reef has become a notorious victim of climate change. But it is not the only Australian ecosystem on the brink of collapse Our research, recently published in Nature Climate Change, describes a series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred recently across Australia. These changes, …
More than half a million hectares of forest was cleared in the Great Barrier Reef catchments over four years – an area more than twice the size of the Australian Capital Territory. Official environment and energy department data shows that 596,000 hectares of forest was cleared between 1 July 2012 …
This working paper profiles seven of Australia’s largest emitting sectors, focusing on whether emissions are going up or down in each sector and the reasons for the observed trends. It also assesses what opportunities and policies each sector has to reduce emissions. This working paper also analyses the magnitude of …
As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the atmospheric circulation changes. These changes vary by region and time of year, but there is evidence that anthropogenic warming causes a general weakening of summertime tropical circulation. Because tropical cyclones are carried along within their ambient environmental wind, there is a plausible a priori …
Sydney was blanketed in a smoky haze on Tuesday morning, after weekend hazard reduction burns left parts of the city with air quality so poor it was more than twice the hazardous level, and more than five times as bad as the air quality in Beijing. Smoke from weekend hazard …
For Father Peter Smith, the choice of adding solar panels to his presbytery roof in inner-Sydney's Leichhardt wasn't just about cost savings but also protecting the environment. His 7.2-kilowatt system should repay the $8000 cost in five years but, more importantly, help him promote the "Caring for Creation through Solar" …
Independent experts advising the Turnbull government have called for changes to the Coalition’s Direct Action climate policy to prevent tens of millions of dollars of public money going to projects that would have gone ahead anyway. The recommendation is in a review of the $2.55bn emissions reduction fund, the central …
NEW DELHI: In the wake of Nipah virus cases in Kerala, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) has written to the Queensland government in Australia asking it to provide an antibody developed there to test if it can "neutralise" the virus in humans. The antibody has not been tested …
Countries rely on out-of-pocket (OOP) spending to different degrees and employ varying techniques. The article examines trends in OOP spending in ten high-income countries since 2000, and analyzes their relationship to self-assessed barriers to accessing health care services. The countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, …
Freshwater availability is changing worldwide. Here we quantify 34 trends in terrestrial water storage observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites during 2002–2016 and categorize their drivers as natural interannual variability, unsustainable groundwater consumption, climate change or combinations thereof. Several of these trends had been lacking thorough …
Societies face the challenge of keeping people active as they age. Walkable neighborhoods have been associated with physical activity, but more rigorous analytical approaches are needed. Researchers used longitudinal data from adult residents of Brisbane, Australia (40–65 years of age at baseline) to estimate effects of changes in neighborhood characteristics …
