Aussie Enviro

From the article,

The four steps recommended are:

1. Legislate for ‘absolute net gain’: Australian law must ensure that any biodiversity loss from development is fully compensated and that conservation efforts result in an absolute net gain in biodiversity, not just improvements relative to ‘business as usual’. Currently, the Australian definition of nature positive deviates from the internationally accepted definition, which would allow biodiversity to continue to decline.

2. Limit and compensate for biodiversity loss: The study warned against allowing developers to compensate for environmental damage through payments that may not directly benefit the impacted ecosystems, which risks replacing more threatened and harder to replace habitats with ecosystems that are less threatened and/or easier to replace. Further, some biodiversity is irreplaceable, and so it is important to limit, and if possible, avoid negative impacts to irreplaceable biodiversity in the first place.

3. Secure net gains beyond development impacts: Australian law must address and reverse biodiversity decline beyond simply compensating for the loss of nature from development impacts. This will require a significant boost to conservation funding and resourcing.

4. Enforce transparent monitoring: Effective and transparent implementation of biodiversity policies is crucial. Dr Ward highlighted that many threatened species in Australia lacked proper monitoring, making enforcement of biodiversity protection laws difficult.

Greenhouse gas emissions from Australia’s main electricity grid increased for a third quarter in a row as higher power demand drove more use of black coal and gas plants, the Australian Energy Market Operator says.

Vote Green :(

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

“None of these models have factored in losses like extreme factors which have been observed, such as the wildfires in Canada last year that amounted to six months of US fossil emissions. Two years before, we wrote a paper that found that Siberia also lost the same amount of carbon,” says Ciais.

“Another process which is absent from the climate models is the basic fact that trees die from drought. This is observed and none of the models have drought-induced mortality in their representation of the land sink,” he says. “The fact that the models are lacking these factors probably makes them too optimistic.”

In Australia, huge soil carbon losses from extreme heat and drought in the vast interior – known as rangelands – are likely to push its climate target out of reach if emissions continue to rise, a study this year found. In Europe, France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Sweden have all experienced significant declines in the amount of carbon absorbed by land, driven by climate-related bark beetle outbreaks, drought and increased tree mortality.

Short run down of some potential renewables opportunities the Future Made in Australia legislation could support.

The state Labor government is steering Australia’s climate policy, letting emissions soar unbridled as it paves the way for massive fossil fuel projects

Original URL: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/refugees-in-their-own-country-starving-cockies-flood-perth-zoo-vets-amid-food-crisis-20241004-p5kfwv.html

Perth black cockatoo rehabilitation centres and Perth Zoo are dealing with an influx of starving and emaciated specimens of the endangered species.

[Professor Kingsley Dixon] said what Perth was now witnessing with the drying climate was “a catastrophic failure of the banskias to be setting seed, leading to the mass starvation of the bird.”

Dixon said 2 million banksias must be planted as soon as possible and meanwhile the government should set up an urgent multidisciplinary taskforce.

Related links:

• We need two million more banksia to save endangered cockies, scientist says | ABC Listen
• Image Resources gains environmental approvals to clear WA banksia forest | ABC News

Kind of inspirational, kind of reminds us humanity has always been a bit crap, but we know that, so can do something about it.

Conclusion, broad and ongoing community support and participation could lead to better organisational outcomes.

Each count takes just 20 minutes and helps BirdLife Australia’s scientists track how our urban bird populations are faring – and just by counting, you’ll go into the running to win some incredible prizes!

The weather is warming up and it’s good to put out water. Especially now I’ve got magpies here.

However I stopped doing it because of potential disease transmission with avian flu. (Especially owning a vulnerable elderly cat - who is kept indoors but could get sick if I tracked something in.)

I’m physically disabled so would have trouble cleaning and disinfecting the water containers daily.

What’s everyone else’s plan for managing this?

Once all upstream stages were factored in – extraction, piping to a processing facility, compression from gas into liquid form, shipping, decompression back to gas and burning for energy – he estimated the total climate pollution from LNG was 33% greater than that from coal over a 20-year period.

This is not an entirely new idea – previous studies have suggested the gas industry is dirtier than often claimed – but it is nevertheless a potentially extraordinary finding

Contrary to the legal method requirements, 95% of credited area cells are located on land that has not previously been comprehensively cleared, meaning the projects are trying to regenerate native forests on uncleared land which may have never contained forests.

Invasive Species Council says 5 million native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs are killed by feral and roaming pet cats a day in Australia

Keep your cat indoors...please.

What we have discovered is that even after almost five years, the trajectory is still in reverse. The impacts are accumulating and it hasn’t stabilised.”

Well, that was another horrific read :( We lived just down the road at the time and had visited the area to hike and swim many times in the years prior.

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/14438566

This is important I think. Show a bit of love for inseks.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/16468312

Over the past decade, however, scientists have become reacquainted with the historical reach of Australian flat oyster reefs, which decorated about 7,000 kilometers of the country’s coastline from Perth to Sydney and down around Tasmania. Australian flat oysters—not to be confused with the far more common European flat oyster, commonly known as the native oyster—form gigantic reefs comprised of billions of individuals that can be found as deep as 40 meters. “They’re like the trees in a forest or the coral in a tropical sea,” McAfee says. Besides providing habitat and boosting biodiversity, oyster reefs are known to filter water and bolster fish production.

On the back of this learning, scientists have been working to restore these lost ecosystems—an endeavor that got a major boost in 2020 when the nonprofit the Nature Conservancy Australia teamed up with the government of South Australia on an ambitious project to bring flat oyster reefs back to the coastline near Adelaide, one of the country’s biggest cities. That project, as McAfee and his team show in a recent study, has been a resounding success so far, with the restored reef now hosting even more Australian flat oysters than the last remaining natural reef in Tasmania. “It’s quite astonishing,” says McAfee.

Big Brother. Glider Edition