An underwater bloom of toxic algae has wreaked havoc off the coast of South Australia since mid-March 2025. After eight months, this harmful algal bloom is the longest and one of the most environmentally devastating events ever recorded in Australian waters.

The algal bloom is predominantly in Gulf St. Vincent and has affected 30% of South Australia’s coastline. The bloom has affected more than 390 species, with more than 87,000 dead animals reported to the iNaturalist database.

There is still no end in sight for this environmental disaster. It’s impossible to know exactly what might happen to this vast toxic bloom this summer, as the ocean heats up.

But we have models and scientific knowledge to guide our predictions.

Algal rollercoaster

The algal bloom has led to troubling times in South Australia. The commercial and recreational fishing sectors, tourist industry, the public and even politicians have suffered from its detrimental effects.

The algal bloom saga is full of surprise twists and turns, including the initial identification of the algae as Karenia mikimotoi, government speculation about its causes (frequently aired in television ads), and the resignation of South Australia’s Environment Minister Susan Close.

This was followed by a statement from South Australia’s Premier, Peter Malinauskas, that the algal bloom was not toxic (it is). Then came the dangerous relocation of algae-affected oysters that could have introduced the algae to other pristine waters.

The saga continued, with Malinauskas announcing in late October that the algal bloom may eventually disappear, which turned out to be overly optimistic and incorrect.

Then came the recent discovery of a novel brevetoxin-producing species, K. cristata that appears to have dominated the algal bloom since July. Recently, the algal bloom reappeared near Victor Harbor, while the worst fish kill since the bloom started occurred along Adelaide’s beaches.

There have been federal and state senate inquiries into the algal bloom, and now important research on the algal bloom won’t be able to continue as six researchers in this space, including myself, have lost their positions at Flinders University in a restructure.

The turning point

From the beginning, state authorities were optimistic about the algal bloom. They said storms and colder waters would make it soon disappear and downplayed potential public health impacts, claiming the algae did not produce a toxin.

The release of my modelling was a turning point.

In the worst-case scenario, the model predicted the algal bloom would initially weaken and shrink over the cooler winter months but intensify and affect new areas, including Spencer Gulf, the following summer.

My modelling predictions, based on the known growth characteristics of K. mikimotoi, were the first science-based research suggesting the algae may become an ongoing problem.

The game changer

Shauna Murray, a marine biologist at the University of Technology Sydney, and her colleagues eventually unravelled several Karenia species that were previously prematurely grouped as K. mikimotoi. This discovery, which was made public in a pre-print article that has not yet been peer-reviewed, was another significant game changer for two reasons.

First, unlike K. mikimotoi, three species in the mix of algae – K. cristata, K. brevisulacata and K. papilionacea – produce toxins that affect human health. These include brevetoxins, which cause illness.

For instance, K. brevisulcata featured in a devastating toxic algal bloom in Wellington Harbour, New Zealand, in 1998. It caused long-term ecological damage and respiratory distress in harbour bystanders.

The growth characteristics of these species may also differ from that of K. mikimotoi. Unlike K. mikimotoi, K. cristata may grow better in colder water, which could could extend the life of the algal bloom mix.

A new hope?

Cell counts of Karenia species are published on the state government’s algal bloom water testing open data dashboard. Over the entire measurement period, K. cristata, which dominates the algal bloom mix, showed very high concentrations of several million cells per litre in Gulf St. Vincent.

Such high algal concentrations are different to my modelling predictions. Based on the growth characteristics of K. mikimotoi, these suggested a decrease in algal levels over the winter months.

In comparison, Spencer Gulf and the northwest marine region had low toxic algal concentrations during the entire period, which my model predicted. Relatively high levels (>100,000 cells per litre) near the Arno Bay jetty, which could be due to human influences rather than current, are still concerning.

Recent declines in algal cell counts of K. cristata along South Australian metropolitan beaches gave the state government a new reason to believe the algal bloom may eventually disppear. But could this be false hope?

Possible future scenarios

It is not possible to predict the future development of toxic algal bloom in South Australian waters with any certainty. However, it seems the worst-case scenario of my predictions still holds. This suggests the algal bloom will remain a permanent feature of the two gulfs for many years.

The important difference could be that K. cristata (not included in the model yet) will flare up during the colder months, when it may grow best. And other Karenia species such as K. mikimotoi may dominate the algal bloom during the warmer months, in a never ending cycle. Only good scientific monitoring and high-quality research can verify this hypothesis.

It’s difficult for me to imagine the scientific mechanisms that would see the algal bloom disappear. While the bloom cannot be controlled by human intervention, continued scientific studies are required to understand how it functions. Like many others, I too hope the algal bloom will eventually disappear.

Jochen Kaempf, Associate Professor of Natural Sciences (Oceanography), Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

At the last possible minute, Australia has backed away from its bid to host the United Nations COP31 climate summit next year in Adelaide alongside Pacific nations.

Under a compromise struck with rival bidder Turkey, the 2026 talks will be held in the Turkish city of Antalya. In return, Australia will shape the agenda and federal Minister for Climate and Energy Chris Bowen will preside over the two weeks of formal negotiations. The Pacific will host a pre-COP event ahead of the summit.

Struck in the final days of the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, the compromise deal comes as a bitter disappointment to many – including me. It follows three years of concerted Australian diplomacy to host the world’s biggest climate talks. The deal does salvage some important wins for Australia and the Pacific.

At a press conference in Brazil, Bowen said: “Obviously, it would be great if Australia could have it all. But we can’t have it all. This process works on consensus.” He described Australia’s role as COP President as a “significant concession” offered by Turkey.

Australia will have a central role to play over the next year in maintaining global momentum in shifting away from fossil fuels and accelerating the renewable rollout even faster. Pacific island countries also have a chance to shape summit outcomes and attract vital investment as they push to reach 100% renewables.

Bowen will be holding the gavel in Anatalya instead of Adelaide, but his workload will begin now. Australia will need to carry forward the agenda set in Brazil, where the COP30 presidency is working toward the first-ever global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.

How did this happen?

The Australia-Pacific bid was widely favoured to win. Minister Bowen has effectively been auditioning to head the talks by taking on key roles in recent years.

What happened? Partly United Nations procedure and partly domestic politics.

The annual summit is rotated between five different UN country groupings.

In 2026, Australia’s grouping – “Western Europe and Other” has its turn. By convention, countries choose a host country by consensus. Australia’s bid had overwhelming support within our UN grouping, as 26 of 28 countries in the group backed it publicly.

But Turkey simply refused to give way. This was deeply frustrating for Bowen and Pacific island leaders. Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Jr called for Turkey to “clear the way” for an Australia-Pacific summit.

After withdrawing an earlier bid in 2020, Turkey’s leaders felt it was their turn. It’s not how the process formally works, but it meant Turkey wouldn’t give up.

For well over a year, Australian and Turkish diplomats engaged in drawn-out negotiations. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year and wrote to him in recent days to ask him to withdraw his bid. Bowen and Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently discussed the issue with their Turkish counterparts.

If neither Turkey or Australia had backed down this week, the talks would have reverted to Bonn, Germany, the home of the UN climate process. As negotiations reached a crunch point at COP30, Australia struck a deal.

The long-runnning saga took a domestic political toll. Internal support within the Labor government had reportedly dropped in recent months.

What does this mean for Australia?

The backdown is a significant economic and diplomatic blow. It’s a major loss for Adelaide especially. The South Australian government had estimated hosting the talks would be a A$500 million boon, from tourism receipts to a chance to attract vital investment for Australia’s ongoing energy transition and for future clean energy industries such as critical minerals and green iron.

UK government analysis of the 2021 Glasgow talks found the net benefit of hosting was double the cost, bringing around A$1 billion in benefits, including trade deals and foreign investment. Australia will miss out on much of this.

Having an Australian president of the COP31 talks is more than a consolation prize. Minister Bowen will hold the pen when the world decides a path forward for climate action next year.

This will be useful in attracting investment. More than 70% of all investment in clean energy in Australia comes from international sources.

It’s unusual for a host country to not preside over the COP talks, but it has been done before.

What does this mean for the Pacific?

For Pacific nations, the news will come as a blow. Pacific nations have been instrumental in pushing the world to go faster on climate. The region is hugely exposed to climate threats, from rising sea levels to intensified natural disasters to coral bleaching to acidifying oceans.

Australia had hoped to host COP31 for strategic reasons as well as economic. Hosting would have shown Canberra’s commitment to address the Pacific’s key security threat at a time of increasing geostrategic rivalry.

As the deal stands, Australia has salvaged a commitment to hold a pre-COP meeting in the Pacific. This will showcase Pacific plans to become the first region powered 100% by renewables. Australia should work with Pacific leaders to ensure this is a serious event shaping expectations for COP31.

It will likely also act as a pledging conference for countries to commit finance to the Pacific Resilience Facility, a Pacific fund to help island nations adapt to changes already arriving.

What’s next?

As the COP30 talks head toward their conclusion, Brazil is hoping to broker an unexpected breakthrough: a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva surprised observers by calling for this roadmap to be a signature outcome. While countries had already agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” at climate talks in 2023, leaders had yet to agree on a plan to actually do this. The roadmap wasn’t expected to be central to this year’s talks, but has increasingly become so.

If President Lula secures a roadmap in Belém, it would likely be developed in greater detail at next year’s talks and beyond as countries hash out measures to phase out fossil fuel production and consumption in the national climate plans required under Paris Agreement obligations.

There’s welcome progress here. Over 80 countries now back the call for a roadmap, including major fossil fuel producers such as Norway. But Australia, the world’s largest exporter of coal and one of the largest of liquefied natural gas, has yet to add its support.

As Bowen and his colleagues reckon with the COP31 compromise deal, they will have to take a position. Will an Australian COP president be able to drive the urgently needed shift away from the fossil fuels which steadily worsen climate change?

If so, it will show Australia is ready to carry the baton from Brazil – and deliver the change its Pacific neighbours and the wider world needs.

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Plastics are everywhere, and the ocean is no exception: 11 million metric tons of plastics enter the ocean every year, where they spread far and wide, making their way to the deepest trenches and remote Arctic islands.

We have long known that marine animals can mistake plastic bags and other plastic pollution for food. To date, every family of marine mammal and seabird, and all seven species of sea turtles, have been documented to ingest plastics — nearly 1,300 species in total.

We also know that eating plastics can prove fatal for wildlife. When swallowed, macroplastics — plastics larger than five millimetres in size in any single direction — can block or puncture an animal’s organs or cause lethal twisting of the digestive tract, also known as torsion.

But understanding the link between ingestion of these large plastics and animal death has long been difficult. In an effort to investigate this connection, our team at the Ocean Conservancy non-profit collaborated with experts at the University of Toronto, the Federal University of Alagoas and the University of Tasmania to answer a deceptively simple question: how much ingested plastic is too much?

This question led us to undertake an ambitious effort to compile more than 10,000 animal autopsies — called necropsies — where both cause of death and data on plastic ingestion were known. These necropsies had been reported in peer-reviewed literature, in stranding network databases (collections of information about marine wildlife that have become stranded) and in two original datasets.

What we found

Our dataset included 31 species of mammals, 57 species of seabirds, and all seven species of sea turtles. We then modelled the relationship between plastics in the gut and likelihood of death for each group, looking both at total pieces of plastics as well as volume of plastics.

Our findings are sobering.

First, we found that plastic consumption was common among all types of animals: nearly half of sea turtles, over one-third of seabirds and one in eight marine mammals had plastic in their guts. For sea turtles who ingested plastic, roughly five per cent died directly as a result — an alarming figure given that five of seven sea turtle species are already endangered.

Second, we found that the lethal dose was much smaller than we had initially guessed, especially for small seabirds.

For example, if an Atlantic puffin consumes plastic around the size of three sugar cubes, it faces a 90 per cent chance of death.

A loggerhead sea turtle that consumes just over two baseballs’ worth of plastic has the same odds. And for a harbour porpoise, consuming a soccer ball’s worth of plastic is fatal 90 per cent of the time.

Third, we found that not all plastics cause equal harm. When modelling lethal ingestion thresholds, we looked at the number of plastic pieces and the volume of plastic, and found that the type of plastic is actually very important, as each impacts the gastrointestinal tract differently.

For seabirds, rubber materials like balloons were the deadliest; consuming just six pea-sized shards could be lethal. For marine mammals, lost fishing gear — also known as ghost gear — posed the greatest risk: as few as 28 tennis ball-sized pieces could kill a sperm whale.

Nearly half of the individual animals in our dataset who had ingested plastics were red-listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature — that is, near-threatened, vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered.

Protecting marine life from plastics

The most impactful way to protect ocean wildlife is to reduce how much plastic enters the ocean in the first place. By pinpointing which plastics are deadliest to key marine species, we can help guide targeted actions such as bans on some of the most dangerous items like balloons, fishing line and plastic bags.

Last year, Florida banned the intentional release of balloons with major implications for protecting seabirds and manatees, which also featured heavily in our dataset.

The research also demonstrates the potentially significant impact of removing plastics from shorelines, waterways and the ocean through cleanups and other removal efforts.

By modelling lethal doses, providing our data open-access for anyone to search or us and generating this new framework to help guide risk-assessment efforts, we hope our findings will inform the continued development and implementation of solutions that protect vulnerable ocean species from the dangers of ocean plastics.

Britta Baechler, Adjunct Professor, Department of Physical & Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto and Erin Murphy, Adjunct Faculty, Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (sometimes referred to as COP30) is taking place in Brazil.

Amid all the talk with politicians, policy experts and scientists, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the state of Earth’s climate – a kind of long-term average of weather conditions – what’s driving the changes we’re seeing, and where we’re heading next.

We have understood the fundamentals of Earth’s climate for many decades, but scientists like us are constantly working to extend our knowledge.

In 2025, we have seen plenty of advances, including the ability to more clearly link individual greenhouse gas emitters with the impacts of their emissions.

The how and why of Earth’s changing climate

The planet we inhabit is changing. That change, especially since the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th century, is largely due to human activities.

Many different forms of data allow us to observe changes to the climate. We have long-running weather stations we can use to track temperature and rainfall changes, as well as newer technologies such as satellite imaging, which helps us see how sea ice is changing in the Arctic and Antarctic.

We can also make estimates of changes over much longer timescales using environmental indicators linked to temperature, such as tree ring growth, the air bubbles in ice cores, and coral formation.

Taking all these lines of evidence together, we can see major changes in the Earth system. These changes have accelerated in recent decades as humanity burned more and more fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide when they burn.

Fossil fuels are substances such as coal, oil and gas which were formed millions of year ago from the remains of plants and other living organisms.

Why is this happening? We have understood for a very long time that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. This means when it is released into the atmosphere it acts to warm the planet because it traps heat, like a garden greenhouse.

Our fundamental understanding of the greenhouse effect came from the work of 19th century scientists including Eunice Foote, John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius. Then, in 1938, Guy Callendar used a collection of weather station data to identify warming of the planet. Since then, the scale of the changes in Earth’s climate have only become clearer.

Since the 1970s, scientists have proven the link between our greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Using observations and theoretical understanding, as well as newer tools such as computer models that simulate the world’s climate, global warming has been conclusively traced to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Science is uncovering how much humans are affecting the climate

More recently, we have gathered more observational data, increased our understanding of the climate system, and improved our ability to simulate the climate using numerical models. This has only increased our confidence in the human fingerprint on the changes to Earth’s climate that we are seeing.

It is also now possible to link regional and local climate changes to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. We can even see the mark of human climate change in extreme weather events and their impacts. This is called event attribution.

These analyses are performed by using advanced weather and climate modelling that simulates these extreme events, then compares these extremes between sets of simulations with and without the effects of humans on the planet.

Just this year, scientists have gone further in showing not only that humanity’s collective greenhouse gas emissions are damaging the climate, but even company-level or individual project-level greenhouse gas emissions have detectable consequences. A trio of studies published in April, September and October this year linked emissions from fossil fuel companies and projects with big impacts.

The most recent of these papers showed that the approved Scarborough gas project off the coast of Western Australia is likely to result in hundreds of additional heat-related deaths and millions of lost corals, for example.

Where is our climate heading?

So the body of evidence that the climate is changing due to humanity’s actions is large and ever-growing. However, we haven’t yet taken the required steps to limit these changes by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.

In fact, our emissions remain at record high levels. We are still shifting the planet’s climate further away from its pre-industrial state into dangerous new territory.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom. Since the Paris Agreement of 2015 we have seen a shift in course. In the past decade, global greenhouse gas emissions haven’t increased as fast as they were expected to before 2015. Instead, it looks like emissions may be peaking and set to fall substantially through the 2030s.

So where does that leave us?

According to the latest UN Emissions Gap report, current policies still have us on a path for peak global warming of 2.8°C. If countries can fully enact their commitments to reducing emissions and reaching net zero, only then will peak global warming be limited to around 2°C.

Every time we avoid releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we reduce future climate impacts and risks and leave the planet more habitable for future generations.

Millions of people will be hoping the outcomes of COP30 and subsequent meetings see more ambition and more action to help limit global warming and its impacts.

Andrew King, ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor in Climate Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather, The University of Melbourne and Aditya Sengupta, PhD Candidate, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Over the past week we’ve witnessed the many political discussions that go with the territory of a COP – or, more verbosely, the “Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”.

COP30 is the latest event in annual meetings aiming to reach global agreement on how to address climate change. But political events such as COP base the need for action on available science – to understand recent changes and to predict the magnitude and impact of future change.

This information is provided through other international activities – such as regular assessment reports that are written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These reports are based on the best available scientific knowledge.

But how exactly do they evaluate what will happen in the future?

Climate futures

Predictions of future climate change are based on several key planks of evidence. These include the fundamental physics of radiation in our atmosphere, the trends in observed climate and longer-term records of ancient climates.

But there is only one way to incorporate the complex feedbacks and dynamics required to make quantitative predictions. And that is by using climate models. Climate models use supercomputers to solve the complex equations needed to make climate projections.

The most sophisticated climate models are known as Earth system models. They ingest our knowledge of climate physics, radiation, chemistry, biology and fluid dynamics to simulate the evolution of the entire Earth system.

Climate centres from many different nations develop Earth system models, and contribute to a global data project known as CMIP – the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. This data is then used by scientists worldwide to better understand the possible trajectories of, and to study the reasons for, future change.

Regional climate changes

Data from Earth system models cover the whole globe, but there is a catch. The computational expense of these models means that we run them at low resolution – that is, aggregating information onto grid boxes that are about 100 kilometres across. This puts the entirety of Melbourne, for example, within a single grid box.

But the climate information that we need to guide future adaptation needs more detailed information. For this, scientists use tools known as “downscaling”, or regional climate projections. These take the global projections and produce higher resolution information over a limited region.

This high-resolution information feeds into products such as the recently released National Climate Risk Assessment from the Australian Climate Service. Similar climate information is used by local governments, businesses and industry to understand their exposure to climate risk.

We’re doing it all again

Each iteration of CMIP, which began in 1995, has brought about improvements which have helped us to better understand our global climate.

For example, CMIP5 (from the late 2000s) helped us to understand carbon feedbacks and the predictability of the climate system. The CMIP6 generation of climate models (from the late 2010s) provided more accurate simulation of clouds and aerosols, and a wider set of possible future scenarios.

Now we are doing it all again – to create what will be known as CMIP7. Why would we do this?

The first reason is that more climate information has become available since CMIP6. CMIP simulations use “scenarios” to look at the range of plausible futures of climate change under different socio-economic and policy pathways.

For CMIP6, the “future” scenarios were started from the year 2015, using the information available at the time. We now have an extra decade of information to refine our projections.

The second reason is that CMIP7 shifts more to emissions-driven simulations for carbon dioxide, allowing models to calculate atmospheric concentrations on the fly.

Simulating how atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases interact with the land and ocean (known as the carbon cycle) allows feedbacks and potential tipping points to be calculated. However, this also requires a more complex Earth system model.

Australia’s CMIP7 contribution aims to incorporate new science and knowledge with a refined carbon cycle which includes Australian vegetation, bushfires, land use change and improved ocean biology.

Thirdly, this time around we aim to run models at higher resolution – such as having 16 grid boxes over Melbourne, instead of one. This is possible thanks to advances in computational capability and modelling software.

We’ve started the process

This week, Australia’s newest Earth system model version – known as ACCESS-ESM1.6 – is initiating the first phase in the CMIP7 contribution process, which is supported through the National Environmental Science Program Climate Systems Hub.

This includes a long “preindustrial spinup”, where we run the model for about 1,000 virtual years using greenhouse gas levels from before the industrial revolution until the stable conditions are reached and available observations are matched. The spinup is required to ensure that all subsequent simulations start from a physically consistent state.

In the next phase we’ll run a “historical” simulation that emulates the last 200 years of civilisation. Only then can we implement a range of future scenarios and complete our climate projections.

This work is a partnership between CSIRO and Australia’s climate simulator (ACCESS-NRI), with support from university-based scientists and the Bureau of Meteorology. It’s an exercise that will take multiple years, consume hundreds of millions of compute hours on high performance supercomputers of the National Computational Infrastructure, and will produce about 8 petabytes of data – or 8 million gigabytes – to be processed and submitted to CMIP7.

As the only Southern Hemisphere nation submitting to past CMIPs, Australia has a unique and crucial perspective.

This data will also be used for higher resolution regional climate projections, which will then be used for future climate risk assessments and adaptation plans. It will also inform IPCC’s next assessment report.

Ultimately, a future COP will translate this evidence into global action to further refine our climate targets.

The authors acknowledge the work of Christine Chung and Sugata Narsey from the Bureau of Meteorology in preparing this article

Andy Hogg, Professor and Director of ACCESS-NRI, Australian National University and Tilo Ziehn, Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In recent years, more and more lobbyists from the oil, gas and coal industries have taken part in international climate negotiations. Estimates of lobbyist numbers have risen sharply, from 503 at the 2021 Glasgow talks to 1,773 at last year’s talks in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku.

Ahead of this year’s climate talks, host nation Brazil moved to tackle climate disinformation and delay tactics with a simple but clear approach: asking participants to publicly disclose who funded them to attend.

Even so, around 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists arrived at the COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil. If taken as a bloc, they would outnumber every national delegation other than the host nation.

This shows the size of the challenge Brazil took on as the first COP host in 30 years to push back against the tide of fossil fuel lobbying and climate misinformation. If this isn’t tackled head on, climate negotiations will keep avoiding the core issue: phasing out oil, gas and coal, the commodities doing most damage.

Lobbying and disinformation in the spotlight

The reason lobbyists are sent is to protect existing revenue streams. Fossil fuel companies invest in lobbying because it works – and not just on climate. In August, the UN talks on plastic pollution collapsed for the second time. Hundreds of fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists had registered to attend. Many lobbied to expand recycling rather than reducing the production of new plastics.

This year, Brazil launched the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change. The aim is to foster:

concrete solutions to address disinformation and related tactics seeking to delay and derail climate action.

It’s the first time lobbying and disinformation have been targeted in this way. The UN has launched new guidelines asking participants to disclose funding for their attendance – and to sign a pledge confirming their objectives align with the Paris Agreement goals of holding climate change to 1.5°C.

The guidelines are optional and don’t include lobbyists participating as part of a national delegation. But it’s an encouraging sign the UN recognises the need to improve transparency and accountability.

On the first day of the talks, UN experts drew on the influential recent findings by the International Court of Justice that states and companies could be held legally liable for damage caused by extraction of fossil fuels. They called for a ban on fossil lobbyists and more transparency.

How fossil fuel lobbying corrupts climate negotiations

Brazil’s efforts to draw attention to the problem comes after decades of obstructionist tactics.

In 1988, big companies created the Global Climate Coalition to represent the oil, gas, coal, utility and agriculture industries. The group had a clear goal: block or delay efforts by the United States government to limit the use of fossil fuels. It worked.

Researchers have shown these lobbying efforts were instrumental in then US President George W. Bush’s 2001 decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol. The move influenced Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s decision not to ratify Kyoto a year later. The decision set back the negotiations for years, as US support for climate negotiations became increasingly uncertain.

The names of these obstructionist coalitions have changed over the years. But as my colleagues and I describe in our recent book, many of the original companies paying to block climate action are still supporting similar groups.

At international forums such as the UN climate talks, lobbyists funded by these companies can play a double game. They can point to a lack of international action as a reason for not acting on climate change at home, while using diplomatic strategies to obstruct progress at the same international talks.

The petrostate problem

It’s not just corporations seeking to blunt climate ambition. Nations do too.

According to the Carbon Tracker Initiative, 13 nations derive more than 50% of their GDP from fossil fuels. Alongside highly-dependent petrostates are other major fossil fuel exporters such as Russia and the US.

Not all petrostates lobby to block climate action. But many do. For example, one of the world’s largest oil producers, Saudi Arabia, has repeatedly worked to undermine the science on climate change at international negotiations.

At the 2023 climate talks in the United Arab Emirates, the Climate Action Network NGO coalition gave its Fossil of the Day award to Saudi Arabia for “repeated blocking across negotiation tracks”.

At these talks, the COP President, Sultan Al Jaber, claimed there was “no science” supporting a fossil fuel phase out to meet Paris Agreement goals, though he later walked this back. Al Jaber also heads up Abu Dhabi’s national oil company.

Over the years, many countries have switched between advancing and derailing negotiations. A US-China deal helped get the historic Paris Agreement over the line in 2015 under President Barack Obama. But under President Donald Trump, the US has withdrawn twice from the Paris Agreement.

What can we expect next?

Many of these issues have not been solved. As the US retreats from international environmental agreements, fossil fuel lobbyists from companies and countries are still showing up in numbers in environmental negotiations to try to get favourable outcomes.

Brazil’s effort to tackle climate misinformation and lobbying begins the work to rebuild integrity and public trust in these negotiations.

If Australia’s bid to co-host COP31 alongside Pacific nations is successful, the government would be well-advised to build on Brazil’s work.

For weeks, an Australian parliamentary inquiry into climate misinformation has heard of sophisticated political campaigns designed to obstruct climate action at home.

The time is ripe to tackle this problem abroad as well.

Christian Downie, Professor of Political Science, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Few diplomatic organisations punch above their weight quite like the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis). With no fixed budget, no permanent secretariat and no formal charter, it has still managed to shape some of the most important climate agreements of the past few decades – including the 1.5°C target that underpins the Paris agreement.

Founded in 1990, Aosis represents 39 small island and low-lying coastal states. Its members are among the most vulnerable to rising seas and extreme weather, yet together they have become the moral voice of global climate diplomacy.

The now familiar 1.5°C limit of global warming was far from guaranteed when countries gathered in Paris in 2015. Many expected the summit to be less ambitious and settle for a 2°C target – at best.

But Aosis had been working behind the scenes since a disappointing climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, pushing for a scientific review of the costs and benefits of a 1.5°C target. That review, published in 2015, proved vital in securing the inclusion of 1.5°C in the Paris agreement. “One-point-five to stay alive” became the rallying cry of the small island nations: and it was having an impact.

How Aosis works

Aosis is a negotiating group rather than a formal organisation. It works through consensus and cooperation among its members, who vary widely but all share high vulnerablity to climate change.

Its work is spread between the chair’s team and member states’ permanent representatives at the UN, as well as heads of state and ministers. The role of chair rotates through the New York-based representatives, with Ilana Seid from the Pacific island nation of Palau currently serving.

Members meet frequently to develop joint positions ahead of major summits, pooling technical expertise and diplomatic resources that would otherwise be out of reach for many small states. While consensus building comes with compromise, the alliance ensures even the smallest states can consistently and actively engage in international diplomacy.

Past wins

Aosis has been influential from the very outset of the UN’s climate process. At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (which paved the way for Paris), it arrived with 12 key objectives and walked away having achieved ten, including a specific article in the UN’s climate convention acknowledging that small island and low lying coastal states are particularly at risk.

Since then, Aosis has secured designated seats on key climate bodies, including the UN bureau that supports the summits, and boards of the Green Climate Fund, Adaptation Fund and Clean Development Mechanism.

The group also played a significant role in establishing the loss and damage fund in 2022, to help vulnerable countries recover from climate-related disasters. Aosis had first proposed funding for loss and damage back in 1991.

From island diplomacy to global courts

The influence of small island nations now extends into international law. A few years ago, Vanuatu, an Aosis member of only 300,000 people, led a campaign for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an advisory opinion on states’ obligations to tackle climate change.

The ICJ’s ruling, issued earlier this year, confirmed that states have legal duties to reduce emissions and protect people from climate change. This affirmed a principle Aosis had long argued for: the world’s most polluting nations have not just a moral duty to act, but legal obligations to fellow states and their citizens.

As Margaretha Wewerinke-Sing, part of Vanuatu’s legal team, put it: “The law seems to be catching up with the science. The question is now, will the policy catch up with the law?”

The agenda for Cop30

The annual UN climate summit currently taking place in Belém, Brazil – Cop30 – is the first since the ICJ advisory opinion. It should give some initial insight as to how Aosis plans to use this ruling.

First, it is seeking greater commitments to reduce emissions. Under the Paris agreement, countries were due to submit revised climate plans this year, but only 86 have been submitted, out of 197. Of the 64 fully analysed so far, less than a quarter are in line with the Paris agreement’s temperature goals. Aosis will use the ICJ opinion to stress that stronger targets are not just necessary but legally required.

Second, adaptation to climate change is becoming increasingly critical for island nations already living with rising seas and stronger storms. Aosis is calling for clearer targets and better tracking of adaptation finance under the Global Goal on Adaptation.

Third, Aosis wants developed countries to triple the volume of public climate finance by 2035 and leverage further funds to meet the US$1.3 trillion (£1 trillion) target under the “Baku to Belém Roadmap”. Without predictable finance, small islands cannot plan for the future.

Aosis made clear its stance ahead of this summit: “[we] will not join in a consensus at Cop30 that makes us co-signatories to our own destruction”. But as with the previous 29 Cops, long days and multiple agenda items mean small island delegations will be stretched thinly. The benefits of collaboration are therefore crystal clear.

Emily Wilkinson, Principal Research Fellow, ODI Global and Kira-Lee Gmeiner, Political Science PhD Candidate, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The world is losing vast swaths of forests to agriculture, logging, mining and fires every year — more than 20 million acres in 2024 alone, roughly the size of South Carolina.

That’s bad news because tropical forests in particular regulate rainfall, shelter plant and animal species and act as a thermostat for the planet by storing carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere where it would heat up the planet. The United Nations estimates that deforestation and forest degradation globally contribute about 11% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the years, countries have committed to reverse that forest loss, and many organizations, governments, and Indigenous and local communities have worked hard to advance those goals. Many of their efforts have been at least partly successful.

For instance, Brazil credits stronger law enforcement and better monitoring at the state and national levels for helping reduce illegal land clearing and deforestation in the Amazon. The deforestation rate there fell by 31% from 2023 to 2024.

Funding from governments and the private sector is helping communities restore land that has already been cleared. Other programs protect forests through payments for ecosystem services, such as paying landowners to maintain existing forests and the benefits those forests provide. These programs provide money to a government, community or landowner based on verified results that the forest is being protected over time.

And yet, despite these and many other efforts, the world is falling short on its commitments to protect tropical forests. The planet lost 6.7 million hectares of tropical forest, nearly 26,000 square miles (67,000 square kilometers), in 2024 alone.

Law enforcement is not enough by itself. When enforcement is weakened, as happened in Brazil from 2019 to 2023, illegal land clearing and forest loss ramp back up. Programs that pay landowners to keep forests standing also have drawbacks. Research has shown they might only temporarily reduce deforestation if they don’t continue payments long term.

The problem is that deforestation is often driven by economic factors such as global demand for crops, cattle and minerals such as gold and copper. This demand provides significant incentives to farmers, companies and governments to continue clearing forests.

The amount of money committed to protecting forests globally is about US$5.7 billion per year – a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars banks and investors put into the companies that drive deforestation.

Simply put, the scale of the deforestation problem is massive, and new efforts are needed to truly reverse the economic drivers or causes of deforestation.

In order to increase the amount of funding to protect tropical forests, Brazil launched a global program on Nov. 6, 2025, ahead of the annual U.N. climate conference, called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, or TFFF. It is an innovative approach that combines money from countries and private investors to compensate countries for preserving tropical forests.

As an environmental law scholar who works in climate policy development, including to protect tropical forests, I believe the design of the program has real promise. But I also see room to improve it by bringing in states and provinces to ensure money reaches programs closer to the ground that will pay off for the environment.

What makes the Tropical Forest Forever Facility different?

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility seeks to tackle the deforestation problem by focusing on the issue of scale – both geographic and economic.

First, it will measure results across entire countries rather than at the smaller landowner level. That can help reduce deforestation more broadly within countries and influence national policies that currently contribute to deforestation. It focuses on the amount of forest area protected rather than estimating the amount of carbon in the trees.

Second, it seeks to raise billions of dollars. This is important to counter the economic incentives for clearing forests for agriculture, livestock and timber.

The mechanics of raising these funds is intriguing – Brazil is seeking an initial $25 billion from national governments and foundations, and then another $100 billion from investors. These funds would be invested in securities – think the stock and bond markets – and returns on those investments, after a percentage is paid to investors, would be paid to countries that demonstrate successful forest protection.

These countries would be expected to invest their results-based payments into forest conservation initiatives, in particular to support communities doing the protection work on the ground, including ensuring that at least 20% directly supports local communities and Indigenous peoples whose territories often have the lowest rates of deforestation thanks to their efforts.

Finally, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility recognizes that, like past efforts, it is not a silver bullet. It is being designed to complement other programs and policies, including carbon market approaches that raise money for forest protection by selling carbon credits to governments and companies that need to lower their emissions.

What has been the reaction so far?

The new forest investment fund is attracting interest because of its size, ambition and design.

Brazil and Indonesia were the first to contribute, committing $1 billion each. Norway added $3 billion on Nov. 7, and several other countries also committed to support it.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility still has a long way to go toward its $125 billion goal, but it will likely draw additional commitments during the U.N. climate conference, COP30, being held Nov. 10-21, 2025, in Brazil. World leaders and negotiators are meeting in the Amazon for the first time.

How can the Tropical Forest Forever Facility be improved?

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility’s design has drawn some criticism, both for how the money is raised and for routing the money through national governments. While the fund’s design could draw more investors, if its investments don’t have strong returns in a given year, the fund might not receive any money, likely leaving a gap in expected payments for the programs and communities protecting forests.

Many existing international funding programs also provide money solely to national governments, as the Amazon Fund and the U.N.’s Global Environment Facility do. However, a lot of the actual work to reduce deforestation, from policy innovation to implementation and enforcement, takes place at the state and provincial levels.

One way to improve the Tropical Forest Forever Facility’s implementation would be to include state- and provincial-level governments in decisions about how payments will be used and ensure those funds make it to the people taking action in their territories.

The Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force, a group of 45 states and provinces from 11 countries, has been giving feedback on how to incorporate that recommendation.

The task force developed a Blueprint for a New Forest Economy, which can help connect efforts such as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility to state- and community-level forest protection initiatives so funding reaches projects that can pay off for forest protection.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility is an example of the type of innovative mechanism that could accelerate action globally. But to truly succeed, it will need to be coordinated with state and provincial governments, communities and others doing the work on the ground. The world’s forests – and people – depend on it.

Jason Gray, Environmental Attorney, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, University of California, Los Angeles

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Producing and distributing food is responsible for roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But food systems are highly vulnerable to the droughts, floods, fires and heatwaves made more intense by climate change. Agriculture is both culprit and victim.

As negotiators try to thrash out progress on climate in Brazil during the COP30 talks, agriculture will be a defining battleground. Hundreds of lobbyists for big agribusiness are present, while outside the conference halls, people’s movements push for low-impact farming.

In energy and transport, power sources and vehicles can be shifted to clean options to cut emissions. But it’s harder to cut emissions from farming. Agricultural emissions come largely from animals, crops and food processing – methane from cattle, sheep and goats, nitrous oxide created by microbes in fertilised soils and carbon losses from degraded land, where soil disturbance and erosion accelerate release of carbon dioxide.

Many countries have included agriculture as a way to tackle climate change in their national commitments. The question is how. One solution is to focus on making farming regenerative rather than extractive.

Our research has laid out an approach centred on net zero, nature positive and nutritionally balanced farming (3N for short). The goal: moving away from a narrow focus on cutting emissions to rebuild soil carbon, restore biodiversity and improve human nutrition simultaneously. Many people are already farming like this around the world, but rarely in a joined up way or at scale. Here’s what it looks like.

Farming for net zero

Farmers can help achieve net zero and cut costs by reducing emissions and building soil carbon stocks.

Imagine a wheat and livestock farm using precise ways to apply nitrogen fertilisers only when and where plants can absorb it. Soil sensors and satellite imagery guide decisions about fertilising and irrigating. New technologies create fertiliser out of the nitrogen in the air without the large carbon footprint of traditional methods.

Planting nitrogen-fixing legumes on fallow fields restores soil organic matter and cuts how much expensive fertiliser is needed. Beneficial microbes are added to soils to boost carbon storage. Livestock are fed methane-reducing additives, while electric or hydrogen-powered tractors cleanly handle field operations. Animal manure and crop residues are transformed from waste into fertiliser and renewable energy.

The result: fewer emissions, healthier soils and lower bills for farmers.

Farming for nature positive

Because agriculture takes up half the world’s habitable land, it makes sense to bring back nature wherever possible. But restoring habitat and bringing back species isn’t just decoration – it’s infrastructure. Instead of bare fencelines and bulldozed creekbeds, a 3N farm weaves nature through its working landscape. Hedgerows, shelterbelts and native vegetation corridors link habitats and encourage the return of birds, insects and pollinators.

For farmers, this has real utility. Trees shade livestock, groundcovers cool soils, beneficial insects pollinate crops and eat pests and vegetation belts filter runoff, reducing nutrient pollution in dams and waterways. Livestock are moved around so paddocks can recover, allowing native grasses to thrive. Soil organisms and organic matter rebuild, improving how the soil holds water, and reducing erosion. Farm productivity remains high while resilience rises.

Farming for nutritional balance

Healthier, more nutritious food comes from farms with healthier soils and landscapes. To boost nutrition levels, farmers can shift from planting a single crop every year to a rotation including pulses, oilseeds and vegetables, improving soil fertility, nutrient cycling by microbes and plant health.

This nutrient-balanced farming approach boosts levels of essential nutrients in crops. But it has other benefits. By matching fertiliser inputs to crop needs, recycling organic residues and encouraging soil microbes and creatures to return, levels of nitrogen and phosphorus fall. This reduces the chance of polluted waterways or emissions of nitrous oxide. On Australian dairy farms, programs such as DairyUP work to produce more nutrient-rich milk while lowering emissions and energy use.

It’s possible to boost nutrient levels rapidly but temporarily though biofortification, which includes adding nutrient-rich soil supplements and adding beneficial microbes which increase nutrient uptake. Longer lasting improvements to nutrient levels are possible through genetic tweaks.

When net zero, nature positive and nutrient-rich farming coexist, the benefits compound. Farmers can cut costs, regenerate landscapes, cut emissions, build carbon stocks in soils and give people nutrient-rich food at the same time.

Which way forward?

Agriculture appears prominently in Brazil’s COP30 Action Agenda, but only in broad strokes. What’s missing is a clear framework which links climate, nature and nutrition. The 3N farming approach could help fill that gap.

Technologies are not the barrier. We already have precision agriculture to cut fertiliser use, feed additives to reduce methane, cover crops to rebuild soil nitrogen naturally, accurate biodiversity monitoring using eDNA and digital twin technology able to test management decisions and predict outcomes on models without risking losses on real farms.

The real challenge is uptake. These methods have to be scaled up rapidly, aided by government policies and incentives.

At the ongoing COP30 talks, agriculture has shown some signs of moving from the margins to the centre of climate solutions, such as work on building resilient food systems. But as yet there’s not a unified pathway laying out how to make agriculture the solution it can be. A key gap is soil security – ensuring soils are healthy enough to keep producing.

The farm of the future is not a fantasy. It is already emerging in New Zealand dairy sheds, Australian trials helping farmers make data-backed decisions about pasture varieties, European paddocks combining trees and agriculture and Indigenous land-stewarded landscapes worldwide.

No other sector of the economy can do so much. Only farming can tackle climate change, restore habitats and give people nutritious food. Agriculture isn’t a problem – it’s an essential part of the solution.

Budiman Minasny, Professor in Soil-Landscape Modelling, University of Sydney; Alex McBratney, Professor of Digital Agriculture & Soil Science; Director, Sydney Institute of Agriculture, University of Sydney, and Damien Field, Associate Professor, Institute of Agriculture, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On the eve of COP 30, Brazil seeks to assert itself as an environmental and food power, but it carries contradictions that weaken this narrative. In a speech at the opening of the 80th UN General Assembly, President Lula declared that this will be the “COP of truth”, the moment when world leaders must prove the seriousness of their commitments to the planet. For decades, the country has been trying to position itself as an emerging power based on two pillars — the environment and food.

In the environmental field, Brazil claims the role of “guardian of the Amazon” and a central player in global climate regulation, as well as a leader in biofuels and renewable energy. This position was further weakened in October 2025 with the approval by Ibama of the first licence to drill an exploratory well 500 km from the mouth of the Amazon River, on the Brazilian Equatorial Margin.

In the food sector, the country is reviving the image of the “breadbasket of the world”, based on the promise of intensified production, claiming that economic growth and environmental preservation can go hand in hand. This position is fraught with internal contradictions: although indicators point to an overall reduction of 32.4% in deforestation between 2023 and 2025, the Cerrado and Caatinga biomes show a high percentage of deforested areas.

FAO announced that Brazil was removed from the hunger map in 2025, although we still have 35 million people (16.5% of the population) struggling to feed themselves, according to the same source.

Half of the world’s soybeans

As is well known, Brazil has become one of the main players in the agricultural commodities market (products traded on the international market). Forecasts by the OECD and FAO indicate that we will maintain this leading role in the production and export of these goods. In less than a decade, the country is expected to account for about half of the soybeans and two thirds of the sugar exported worldwide, in addition to leading exports of corn and meat.

This trend has led Brazilian agribusiness to claim that its exports are central to ensuring global food security, arguing that they would feed around 800 million people.

But this claim represents only one side of the coin. The deepening integration of Brazilian agribusiness into the global food system accentuates the interdependence between the external and internal markets and brings new challenges for the country’s development. In particular, with regard to food security, land inequality and biodiversity.

Due to the stimulus of the food crisis in the mid-2000s, the (new) growing demand for biomass, China’s significant presence in international trade, or even as a reflection of the international energy and financial crises, whatever the reasons, the Brazilian agricultural sector is experiencing continuous expansion in the areas dedicated to the production of these commodities (soybeans, coffee, corn, rice and beef, among others).

And the prices of these commodities on the world market determine food prices in the domestic market. They replace land that previously produced food for local and regional trade, impacting our food security and sovereignty and putting pressure on rural property prices.

This extreme appreciation of Brazilian agribusiness opens up a new front of social and environmental conflicts in rural areas, straining conceptions of rurality that are based on the strengthening of family farming, agroecological production, or the territorial dimension.

Growth vs. preservation

At the same time, the expansion of commodity production leads to a continuous loss of forest cover. Despite the recent decline in deforestation in all Brazilian biomes in 2025, over the last 40 years, Brazil has experienced a continuous process of loss of natural areas (equivalent to 13% of the territory).

Today, deforestation is present in the Cerrado, with the advance of the grain frontier, and in the Caatinga, with the expansion of agriculture and livestock farming and wind and solar energy projects.

This situation exacerbates the climate crisis. According to the Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals Estimation System (SEEG), in 2023, agriculture would be responsible for 74% of emissions in Brazil, 46% of which would be derived from changes in land use.

Suspicious narrative

All of this leads us to be suspicious of the narrative that advocates reconciliation between economic growth and environmental preservation. The concept of land sparing (sustainable intensification), although not a scientific consensus, is repeatedly used to justify the increase in productive activities under the label of sustainability.

However, due to the rebound effect and the coupling between different activities and/or regions, this intensification is accompanied by an increase in the spatialisation of agricultural production. In other words, the same modernised grain agribusiness that intensifies its activities applies its gains to the purchase of cheaper land in frontier areas – previously occupied by livestock and/or forests – which requires further deforestation or occupation of reserves.

Reprimarisation of the economy

This movement has resulted in a “reprimarisation” of our economy and exports. Since 2018, the share of primary products in total exports has been over 50%, weakening Brazil’s external position by concentrating foreign exchange generation in low value-added goods and prices subject to enormous instability. This reinforces dependence on foreign markets that can bring surprises. Such as the “tariff hike” recently applied by the United States.

In addition, we recall that the productive logic of agri-food chains is increasingly associated with and conditioned by processes of financialisation of agriculture and land.

In these chains, new financial instruments targeting agriculture and natural resources are growing around the world. There were 43 in 2005, and this number jumped to 960 in 2023, according to data from Valoral Advisors. With special attention to Brazil, making rural areas a source of speculative gains, reinforcing the pressure for land control. A similar process is observed in the case of environmental assets (green bonds), based on a sustainable taxonomy that needs to be better discussed.

Conclusion

Brazil exposes contradictions when it aims to combine the position of “breadbasket of the world” and “centrality in the sustainability of the planet”. The COP 30 presidency postulates a “new generation of climate conferences” that operate as systemic platforms for accelerating processes toward a future defined by results, solidarity, and common purpose.

But the success of the conference will not be measured solely by the speeches in Belém. Rather, it will be measured by the ability of Brazil and the rest of the world to address the contradictions that today fuel hunger, accelerate deforestation and erode our climate future - requiring an urgent review of this productive and financialised model.

This article comes from a partnership between The Conversation Brasil and the Pulitzer Center in the United States.

Karina Kato, Professora do Programa de Pós-Graduação de Ciências Sociais em Desenvolvimento, Agricultura e Sociedade (CPDA), Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ) and Sergio Pereira Leite, Professor Titular do Programa de Pós-Graduação de Ciências Sociais em Desenvolvimento, Agricultura e Sociedade (CPDA), Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Indigenous peoples are on the vanguard of climate action. Longstanding relationships with land means they endure the direct consequences of climate change. And their unique knowledge offers effective solutions to climate problems.

But despite this, international climate policies have fallen short of encouraging Indigenous leadership. With the UN climate summit hosted in the Amazon for the first time, COP30 marks an unprecedented effort to elevate Indigenous voices.

Returning to Brazil again after the 1992 and 2012 Rio conferences, COP30 has the largest Indigenous delegation in the summit’s history. More than 3,000 Indigenous representatives from around the world are in the Amazonian city of Belém.

Inside and outside the negotiation rooms, Indigenous organisations and coalitions have brought an unprecedented agenda to the summit: pressure for climate justice centred on the recognition of land rights and fair financing mechanisms.

Indigenous voices in diplomacy

A new form of climate diplomacy is emerging. This shift marks the creation of space for Indigenous delegates to participate in formal discussions that were previously exclusive to government officials.

Since 2019, the UN’s Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform has expanded the Indigenous role in official negotiations. At this year’s summit, more than 900 Indigenous delegates – a record number – are participating in official debates.

Led by Brazil’s Minister for Indigenous Peoples, Sônia Guajajara, the COP30 presidency has encouraged Indigenous leadership in decision-making. This includes giving Indigenous delegates seats in negotiation rooms and embedding their demands in climate pledges and finance mechanisms.

“Indigenous Peoples want to take part, not just show up”, said Guajajara. “We want to lead and be part of the solution. So far, the investments driven by COP decisions have failed to deliver results – the 1.5°C goal is slipping out of reach”.

But turning community participation into political influence requires more than participation. Initiatives such as Kuntari Katu in Brazil assist Indigenous leaders in connecting their priorities with broader climate policies. Such training provides modules on topics such as carbon market mechanisms and equips Indigenous representatives with tools to communicate their priorities in climate debates.

Indigenous influence at COP30 is not confined to formal diplomacy. Protests inside and outside the COP venue have amplified long-sidelined demands. Under the rallying cry “Our land is not for sale”, one of the demonstrations occupied areas of the COP30 venue with direct confrontation with the security staff.

Thousands of activists also joined a four-kilometre march in the host city of Belém to call for action from leaders to stop environmental destruction. These protests have brought global attention to injustices that climate politics have long tried to contain. They highlight unresolved land-tenure conflicts and the rising violence faced by Indigenous communities on the frontline of climate impacts.

Land rights as climate solutions

Indigenous territories deliver some of the world’s most effective responses to the climate crisis, from curbing deforestation to storing vast amounts of carbon. Yet much Indigenous land remains without formal recognition, leaving it exposed to invasions by illegal mining, agribusiness expansion, and land grabs, including for renewable energy projects.

COP30 has brought commitments to recognising Indigenous territories as climate solutions. During the opening ceremony, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva emphasised the centrality of Indigenous territories to promote effective climate action. World leaders pledged to secure 160 million hectares of Indigenous and community lands by 2030.

Indigenous organisations say pledges remain far from sufficient given the threats to their lands. The Munduruku Indigenous community, an indigenous people living in the Amazon River basin, made this clear with a major blockade at COP30. Their action created long queues at the summit entrance, delaying thousands of delegates. The disruption compelled the COP presidency to meet with Munduruku leaders, who pressed for the demarcation of their territories and the right to be consulted on development projects in their territory.

Fair climate finance

One of COP30’s major negotiation challenges is finalising the Baku-Belém Roadmap, which aims to unlock A$1.5 trillion in climate funding. Yet climate finance mechanisms have a long history of undervaluing Indigenous knowledge and governance. Indigenous organisations say that fairness must be central to these pledges.

At the Leaders’ Summit, a multilateral coalition launched the Tropical Forests Forever Fund. This commits A$7.6 billion to protect over one billion hectares of forests. With backing from 53 nations and 19 sovereign investors, the fund earmarks 20% of its finance for Indigenous projects. The Forest Tenure Funders Group also renewed its pledge, with a commitment of A$2.7 billion to secure Indigenous land rights.

Still, Indigenous advocates warn climate finance must go beyond dollar amounts. They want a shift in who controls the funding and how projects are governed. Placing Indigenous leadership at the centre of financing means making sure Indigenous communities can receive funding directly and have fair agreements that protect them from financial risks.

Transformative leadership

UN climate conferences have long been criticised for delivering incremental progress but little systemic change. Yet signs of political transformation are emerging.

Beyond climate debates, significant Indigenous leadership is gaining momentum across other international environmental policies. In 2024, the UN’s meeting to combat desertification formalised a new caucus for Indigenous Peoples, while the Convention on Biological Diversity established a permanent Indigenous subsidiary body.

These growing political shifts reveal that effective environmental actions depend on dismantling power inequalities in decisions. Inclusive leadership in policymaking may not completely address the environmental crisis, but it marks a turning point as historically silenced voices begin to lead from the centre.

Danilo Urzedo, Research fellow, The University of Western Australia; Oliver Tester, Indigenous Liaison Manager, Curtin University, and Stephen van Leeuwen, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Plant Biology, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 2021, Australia’s Coalition government pledged to reach net zero by 2050.

Four years later, the Coalition have reversed course. After successive election losses, the Liberal and National parties have settled on a new climate strategy: give up on net zero and keep coal plants running longer.

If the Coalition is elected and puts this plan into action, it would mean radical change. Many policies focused on carbon emissions or climate change would be scrapped. It does plan to honour Australia’s pledges under the Paris Agreement, although it’s unclear whether the current commitment to cut emissions by 62-70% below 2005 levels by 2035 would remain.

The Coalition claim emissions would still fall under their plan. But this is questionable, given extending coal would mean more emissions, and nuclear power would take decades to build. While emissions have fallen in the electricity and land use sectors, all other key sectors have risen over the last 20 years. Per capita emissions remain among the highest in the developed world at 22 tonnes per person as of 2023.

So what are the current government’s policies meant to do? And what would happen if they were removed?

Policies old and new

Australia’s emissions reduction policies range from economy-wide to those focused on sectors.

At a national level, there’s the economy-wide legislated target of cutting emissions 43% by 2030 and the 2050 net zero emissions target.

Then there’s the renewable energy target aiming to have 82% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030, the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard and the heavy-industry Safeguard Mechanism.

These would likely be on the chopping block.

The Coalition’s plan to wind back Australia’s efforts to reach net zero would also likely mean stripping out mention of cutting emissions from the national electricity objectives which guide the energy market regulator, removing fringe benefit tax exceptions for electric vehicles and lifting the moratorium on nuclear power.

Renewable Energy Target

The Renewable Energy Target was introduced in 2001 by the Howard Coalition government. It sets a goal for how much renewable power feeds into the grid each year.

It began with a modest target of 2% renewable energy. In 2007, the Rudd Labor government increased the target to 41 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030, expected to be around 20% of total electricity generation.

In 2015, the target was lowered to 33 TWh by 2025 following a review by the Abbott Coalition government. This goal was met in 2021. The policy remains in place until 2030. Wind and solar generators continue to receive renewable energy certificates for each unit of electricity they generate, but demand for these certificates has fallen now that the target has been reached. This means the renewable energy target legislation is no longer the key driver of new renewable investment.

Capacity Investment Scheme

Launched in late 2022, the Capacity Investment Scheme has been underwriting new renewable energy projects. It’s responsible for the significant pipeline of new projects alongside state government renewable energy targets and incentives. The scheme is intended to help get to the goal of 82% renewables and an additional 40 gigawatts of power generating capacity by 2030.

The scheme has been aided by economics. Renewables are now the lowest cost way of generating electricity, even after the cost of adding storage to “firm” output.

This means the push to replace old coal generators before they have to be retired due to unreliability, increasing maintenance costs or because they can’t compete with renewables will continue regardless. Removing either of these two policies is unlikely to stop the shift away from coal.

Safeguard Mechanism

Electricity is now only responsible for 30% of Australia’s total emissions. Fossil fuel use in buildings and industry accounts for 24%, transport 19%, agriculture 16% and waste and fugitive emissions 12%. Policies exist for some of these sectors.

One of the biggest is the Safeguard Mechanism, a scheme first introduced in 2016 by a Coalition government and then significantly modified by the current Labor government in 2023. It covers a significant portion of industrial energy use, applying to 215 of the largest emitting companies in Australia. Under the mechanism, the government’s baseline target for emissions is reduced 5% per year. Companies doing better than this target earn certificates able to be traded with other companies who exceed their targets. It works much like a price on carbon.

Without the mechanism, there is little incentive for these companies to reduce emissions.

Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme

Australia’s carbon credits scheme works by awarding certificates for activities which cut carbon emissions in sectors not covered by other policies. Agriculture is a particular focus. These certificates can be sold privately, to the government or traded through the Safeguard Mechanism to offset industrial emissions. The Coalition’s proposed new policy would create a variation of the scheme to be known as the Accountability and Baseline Credit scheme. This would be voluntary and unlikely to create incentives to cut emissions.

New Vehicle Efficiency Standard

Australia’s transport emissions are climbing. On current trends, it will go from the third largest sector in Australia to the largest within five years. In July, the government introduced the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard – the first laws passed which require new vehicles sold in Australia to meet minimum average efficiency across a carmaker’s fleet.

Before this, Australia was the only OECD country without efficiency standards. The target requires a roughly 50% cut in average emissions for new passenger vehicles across a carmarker’s fleet by 2030 compared to 2025. It is expected to drive EV uptake. But as the standard only applies to new vehicles, the sector’s emissions will come down gradually. If the standard is cancelled, it’s unlikely emissions from the car fleet will come down at all.

Where does this leave us?

If the Coalition is elected, their backdown on net zero suggests many if not all of these policies would be scrapped.

Cheap renewables and storage mean the electricity sector will likely continue to get cleaner even without government policies. But that means about 70% of Australia’s total emissions would be left without policy incentives to drive them down.

That’s not to say the current government’s policies are sufficient to meet long term targets. There are still major gaps for areas such as agriculture, trucking and aviation, while policies targeting industrial emissions leave a significant portion of the sector unchecked.

If the current set of policies were to be scrapped, it’s hard to see how Australia could ever meet its international commitments to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement.

Roger Dargaville, Assoc Prof. Renewable Energy, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you follow news about climate change, you’ve probably seen the term “primary energy”.

This phrase refers to the raw energy in fuels and natural resources – the energy content of oil in a barrel, gas in a pipeline, or sunlight hitting a solar panel.

Primary energy is often used to show how much energy humanity uses. The numbers are staggering — billions of tonnes of coal, oil and gas. When graphed, zero-emission options such as renewables and nuclear seem tiny and the sheer bulk of fossil fuels too huge to ever shift. Australia still gets more than 90% of its primary energy from fossil fuels.

But this is misleading. The reason is that truly enormous amounts of energy contained in fossil fuels go to waste. As the world goes electric, it will need much less primary energy for the same result.

From orange to orange juice

To make a glass of orange juice, you start with a whole orange. That’s primary energy. But after peeling, squeezing and straining, the bit we want – the juice – ends up in the glass. This is known as useful energy.

What we actually care about isn’t primary energy – it’s useful energy, the chunk of primary energy that actually powers our appliances, heats our buildings or turns our wheels.

Primary energy and useful energy are often very different. To get energy to our homes, cars or factories, it must first be converted, transported and delivered. Along the way, a surprisingly large fraction is lost – especially from fossil fuels.

Coal power stations burn coal to produce steam to spin turbines to make electricity. Energy is lost every step of the way. As a result, only 35–41% of the energy in coal ends up converted into electricity.

Burning fossil fuels is inherently wasteful. It’s like carrying water in a bucket full of holes — you start with a lot, but by the time it reaches your glass, most has leaked away.

Primary energy has a counting problem

Global energy statistics make renewables look smaller than they really are, not because they produce less electricity, but because of the way primary energy is counted.

Measuring primary energy involves complex assumptions and calculation methods that can lead to unwarranted conclusions.

Take a simple example. Coal, nuclear and solar can all deliver the same 100 units of electricity. But in statistics compiled by the International Energy Agency or European Union, coal and nuclear each show up as 303 units of “primary energy”, while solar shows only 100 units.

This is because the wasted heat from coal and nuclear is counted, but the free fuel of sunlight and wind isn’t.

The result? On paper, renewables look substantially smaller than they really are.

Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency

When we compare energy sources, looking at raw numbers only tells part of the story. For coal, gas, nuclear and biomass power stations, the amount of primary energy used depends on how much potential heat is in the fuel and how efficiently the plant converts this heat into electricity.

When coal is measured on fuel density and conversion, it does well. But by the time coal is dug up, transported, refined, burned and electricity produced and transmitted, much of this potential is lost as waste heat. Older coal power plants are particularly inefficient.

At first glance, solar panels look weak by comparison. They only convert about 20% of sunlight into electricity, while wind turbines seem about as strong as coal, converting about 40% of the energy in wind into electricity.

But solar and wind generate electricity directly. There’s no need to supply fuel, so we avoid the massive conversion losses of thermal power plants or internal combustion engines.

This means that while solar and wind “efficiency” numbers look lower, these energy sources often deliver more usable energy per unit of primary energy than coal does.

In Australia, the economics are now firmly with solar and wind. Even without subsidies, they’re the cheapest way to build new electricity generation, beating coal and gas.

Electrification plugs the leaky bucket

There’s even better news. Across heating, transport and industry, switching from fossil fuels to electric options gives a major boost to energy efficiency, slashing how much energy we need for the same outcome.

Petrol cars convert just 16–25% of the energy in the fuel into actual motion. The rest is wasted — mostly as heat from the engine or as power is transferred to the wheels.

Electric vehicles are much more efficient, using 87–91% of energy supplied by the battery and regenerative braking to move.

Hot water heat pumps are vastly more efficient than gas hot water. For every unit of electricity used, heat pumps deliver 3–5 units of heat. That is, they’re 300–500% efficient. By contrast, gas heaters can have efficiencies between 30% and 80%.

Electricity is a much more efficient way to heat air than gas. Modern gas heaters still waste 10–40% of the heat they generate. Reverse-cycle air conditioners are much more efficient and are the cheapest way to heat a space.

Electricity is also a more efficient way to cook. Induction cooktops transfer 84% of the energy to the pan, compared with 71% for electric coils and just 40% for gas burners.

Going electric is like swapping a leaky bucket for a shiny new one with no holes. Most of the energy you put in is energy you can actually use.

Useful energy, not primary energy

Graphs of primary energy make it seem almost impossible to end our long reliance on fossil fuels.

But primary energy doesn’t really matter. If we focus instead on useful energy, the task ahead is much more doable. Instead of asking how we can replace all of today’s primary energy, the real question is how much useful energy we need, and how clean electricity can provide it more efficiently. Clean, efficient electric options make it possible to double global GDP by 2050 – while using 36% less primary energy.

Renewables, storage and electrification make it possible to deliver energy much more efficiently. This means renewables don’t have to replace every joule of potential fossil fuel energy – just the part we actually use, with far less waste and far fewer emissions.

Asma Aziz, Senior Lecturer in Power Engineering, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The federal Liberals and their National partners have scrapped their commitment to net zero emissions. While many Liberal conservatives are celebrating, it has left other Liberals unhappy and in a tough position with voters.

One strong critic of the policy change is South Australian Senator Andrew McLachlan, who prides himself on independent thinking and deeply-held conservationist views.

McLachlan has been in the Senate since 2020, but previously served as president of the Legislative Council in South Australia. He joins us to discuss the Coalition’s new climate policy and why he’ll continue to support a net zero emissions target.

On Liberals dumping the target, McLachlan is defiant:

I don’t agree with the policy and I have the advantage of being in the Liberal Party, which allows a backbencher to speak their mind. I don’t believe you can continue to advocate publicly for a policy position and then fall silent, particularly one of this importance.

I come to it from two perspectives. One, as a conservative, I believe we must be committed to nature. In saying that, I mean leaving the world in a much better place than we inherited it. And secondly, as a former financial services executive, who lived every day working to targets, I know the importance of targets […] driving change.

As for how the Coalition can sell its new policy to voters, McLachlan says “at this point in time, I’m dubious”.

Modern Australia wants a strong commitment to not only restoring nature but protecting it. And that includes reducing emissions. This policy seems to be one – and forgive me, it is relatively new, and I’m still unpacking the consequences if it was ever implemented – but it seems to me it’s a policy that is carefree with emissions. And I don’t agree with that.

Despite his outspoken environmentalism, McLachlan insists he’s in the right party – and that it’s some of his colleagues who are out of step:

I think I’m in the right kennel. I question whether they’re in the right kennel. On net zero, I have argued for our policy suite not to change, which has served us well under Abbott, Morrison and Dutton. So I think the question should be asked of them, why have they changed? Why are they running away from modern Australia?

[…] I see no reason not to advocate for the natural world. I see no reason why I shouldn’t continue to embrace a conservatism which is based on compassion and kindness. And I’ll continue to do so as long as I’m in public life and long after.

About half a year since the last federal election, McLachlan outlines where he thinks the Liberal Party should be headed.

We have to listen to the electorate […] I’m not sure we’ve listened to them on the environment, for example, and I think we may be walking in the opposite direction to modern Australia. I think they want a party that will not only keep them safe and run the economy well, but they also want a commitment from the conservative side of politics, or centre right politics, of compassion and kindness.

I think you just can’t, as we did in the last election, on a wish and a prayer, [hope] that the government of the day was going to fail. I think we should have gone into the last election with more aspiration and set out clearly what we wanted modern Australia to look like and how we were going to get there.

On the next big policy fight within the Coalition – immigration – McLachlan says he approaches the issue from a “positive perspective”:

It’s underpinned our economy and our prosperity. And coming from a very multicultural community in South Australia, it’s fantastic to have migrants enrich our community.

So I don’t come from it from a negative perspective. I come from it, I suppose, setting the levels, from a purely economic perspective. We don’t want to invite people to our country and have them live in poverty. We want them to be able to come here and live meaningful and happy lives.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is sold to the world as frozen romance and pure nature. But the real story today is at its feet, not its peak.

That’s because Kilimanjaro is a great real-world place for scientists to study how and why biodiversity is changing. The mountain has many different land uses, from forests to farms to towns, so researchers can see in real landscapes, not just in computer models or theories, how human activity affects nature in practice.

I’ve been researching east Africa and Kilimanjaro’s vegetation for 36 years. I joined scientists from Tokyo and Helsinki to look at historical maps of the mountain, 46 years of satellite imagery between 1976 and 2022, census data from 1913 onwards, and nearly 3,000 plant species recorded in 1,600 field plots across the mountain.

We wanted to find out whether Kilimanjaro’s biodiversity (the composition and number of plant species) had changed and why.

We found that, in the populated areas below the national park, 75% of Kilimanjaro’s indigenous plants had been wiped out over the last century. The main cause: intensive land use by farmers and builders; the loss of the plants’ natural habitats; and increasing numbers of non-indigenous, partly invasive plants.

Our findings put an uncomfortable fact on the table. The biggest destroyer of biodiversity on Kilimanjaro is not climate change. It is us: our farms, our houses, our roads, our conversion of land.

Our research shows that the mountain’s lower slopes – the part most people see when they fly into Kilimanjaro airport or drive to Moshi, the town at the foot of the mountain – have been stripped of their natural ecosystems at an astonishing rate.

In 1911, 90% of the lower slopes were still natural habitats for mainly savanna woodlands and forests. Today, most of this natural vegetation has been converted into agriculture and built-up areas, and only 19% remains.

The driving force behind these trends is the 28-fold increase in population over the last 130 years. Around 50,000 people lived on and around the mountain in 1890, 130 years ago. Now the number is over 1.4 million.

Since biodiversity is the base of ecosystem services, the destruction of Kilimanjaro’s natural habitats affects not only plants and animals living in natural habitats but also humans whose well-being depends on this.

This trend has to be stopped.

Why people, not climate change, are to blame

If climate change had been the primary driver of the destruction of Kilimanjaro’s plants, we would expect to see negative impacts on subsistence agriculture and agroforestry too. Yet these sectors have grown.

Towns around the foot of Kilimanjaro have exploded in size. House construction has grown even faster than human population. The savanna grasslands that once ringed the foot of Kilimanjaro have been almost completely converted to smallholder and commercial farms.

Our core conclusion is that the main driver of the mountain’s biodiversity decline is land use change, driven by population growth and economic development. Climate change, despite the prominence it gets in global environmental debate, is not what killed biodiversity on Kilimanjaro’s lower slopes.

To be clear, Kilimanjaro’s climate is warming. The glaciers on the top of the mountain are shrinking. But in the areas where most species have been lost (the lower parts of the mountain) rainfall hasn’t really changed, and the warming is slow. Instead, most of the biodiversity loss is happening where people have cleared land for farming, built towns and used the land more intensively.

Although the total number of plants on Kilimanjaro hasn’t changed much, the mix of plants has. Between 1976 and 2022, native plants from natural areas dropped by nearly half, while non-native plants increased by 25%. Many native species are limited to small areas and some are endangered. In contrast, non-native species can spread widely and sometimes crowd out native plants, putting indigenous vegetation at greater risk.

How a different approach to Kilimanjaro would work better

Kilimanjaro is not a freak case. It is the rule. Across tropical Africa, and increasingly in Asia and parts of Latin America, biodiversity loss is happening because of intensive use of land for farming, grazing, building and expanding towns.

There are solutions though. Land can be used in ways that are productive and biodiversity-supporting. In this way, indigenous plants survive. For example, Kilimanjaro’s Indigenous Chagga people have home gardens on the southern and eastern slopes that combine fruit trees and crops. The trees provide shade, the native plants attract wildlife, and people grow a mixture of food and cash crops that can be sold.

Our research also found that when land is protected and managed (for example in Tanzania’s Rau Forest Reserve or in the private Namalok reserve, fenced off in 2010) species richness per hectare is dramatically higher than in sugar cane fields or intensive rice farming.

We are not doomed to choose between development and nature. The mountain already has working evidence of models that protect both.

Stop destroying the land that species live on

These governance choices must be made right now:

• The remaining fragments of the mountain where natural vegetation grows must be protected because they are irreplaceable.

• Agroforestry – growing food crops and trees together – must get more support.

• Governments should not rely on carbon markets or selling carbon credits to protect nature. They should pay local people directly for taking care of biodiversity.

• Decisions about where to build farms and towns must be made with protecting the environment as the first priority, not just as a secondary concern after economic development.

There is also something psychologically important here. The Kilimanjaro data punctures a comfortable myth: that biodiversity loss is a distant, abstract, greenhouse-gas problem. In fact, it is mostly a land politics problem, right here on the ground.

Global nature loss won’t be stopped only by governments phasing out fossil fuels or climate conferences like COP30. Preventing nature loss is work that must be done locally, in areas that need help, through physical labour.

Mount Kilimanjaro is a physical embodiment of the world’s ecological dilemma. Its story is not about altitude and ice. It is about people and land. Kilimanjaro shows the fastest way to save species is to stop destroying the land they live on.

Andreas Hemp, Research Associate Plant Systematics, Bayreuth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With much talk this week about the end of the Whitlam government, Liberal conservatives might do well to read Gough Whitlam’s 1967 speech to the Victorian Labor Party, at the start of his climb to power.

Like the Liberals now, federal Labor had been trounced at the 1966 election. Whitlam was the new leader, and he took on Victorian hardliners who put ideology ahead of electability.

“Certainly, the impotent are pure,” Whitlam told the delegates at the conference, in a line that echoed down the years.

The Liberal conservatives’ success in forcing their party to dump its commitment to the net zero emissions reduction target has been a triumph of ideology over pragmatism, worthy of those 1960s Labor zealots.

Walking away from the commitment is ill-judged and politically dangerous. It’s also unnecessary.

Many political players, including in Labor, don’t think net zero by 2050 is attainable. But the timeframe is a generation away. Given that, why is it so urgent to reject the target?

Especially when, as Liberal federal director Andrew Hirst told the party room on Wednesday, among voters net zero has become a “proxy” for action on climate. Hirst did talk about possible arguments that could be mobilised if net zero was dumped. For those listening, however, his message, based on research, was clear: ditching net zero was high-risk politics. The conservatives didn’t care.

But the party, with its moderates, had to be held together. On Thursday, when the Liberal shadow ministers met, the leadership stuck a tiny plaster on the gaping wound. Bottom line: commitment to the target is out, but if net zero happened to be achieved, that would be “a welcome outcome”.

The Liberals are in a dreadful state and a climate and energy policy that’s all over the shop can only worsen things. No one thinks they can return to power in under two elections. Even for that they’d have to pick up a significant number of seats in 2028.

At present, the Coalition is on 24% primary vote (in Newspoll). The Liberals will never do well with young voters, but to be competitive overall they have to at least make inroads with them. That’s to say nothing of the women’s vote, on which Labor has a stranglehold.

The Liberals have hardly any urban seats and, apart from Goldstein, the formerly Liberal teal seats stayed solidly independent at the last election.

Net zero resonates with young voters, women, urban dwellers and those in teal electorates, whether or not it is pie in the sky. By dropping it, the Liberals have delivered a slap in the face to these voters. They are saying, in effect, “you might have rejected us at two elections, but we still know better than you do”.

A commonsense voice came ahead of Wednesday’s meeting from Gisele Kapterian, who failed by a handful of votes in the traditional Liberal Sydney seat of Bradfield. It went to a teal. In an email to Liberals on Tuesday, Kapterian described herself as “a concerned Liberal, a technology executive, a former international trade lawyer, a millennial, and […] the former Liberal candidate in the most marginal seat in the country”.

She wrote, “In my experience, echoed throughout the most marginal, winnable, metropolitan seats, our party must remain firmly committed to the language of a ‘net zero’ emissions target as part of an energy policy that is differentiated from the ALP. Retreat is an electoral liability.

"My experience on the ground is that a credible, technology-focused climate policy is essential to securing the many discerning voters in key urban and suburban seats.”

What will all these constituencies take out of the new policy? That the Liberals don’t believe in net zero, that’s what. Not that they have found some great ways to bring down power bills.

And who is going to sell persuasively the messy new policy? Not Sussan Ley, who struggled with its contradictions at her news conference on Thursday. Far from being a conviction politician, Ley didn’t even give a personal view to Wednesday’s party meeting. Nor is the affable energy spokesman, Dan Tehan, likely to convince many people. He looks out of his depth.

The divisions in the party will remain obvious. Even if the moderates stay in line, their views are on the record because they have previously been talking their heads off – as have the conservatives.

The loud voices in the Nationals, who’ve had a massive win, leading the Coalition by the nose, will come across as clear and unconflicted. Can anyone miss the irony that Barnaby Joyce, thought to be on his way to One Nation, has had a triumphant hurrah?

To return to Whitlam: he led from the front and imposed himself on his party, even willing to risk expulsion. Ley is at the opposite end of the leadership spectrum.

Despite once having extolled net zero, Ley decided a while ago to go with the flow in the interests of preserving her job. Was there an alternative? A brave (maybe crazy brave) leader might have stepped out and argued for a position.

Yes, given the dominance of the conservatives (including in the party branches), she might have been rolled on the issue and, sooner rather than later, as leader. But at least she would have stood for something, and gone down fighting.

As for losing the leadership, most Liberals see that as inevitable – it’s only a matter of timing.

Some point out it would look bad to bring down the party’s first woman leader. Let it be recorded, however, that a couple of high-profile Liberal women are among those with political knives out for Ley. The front row of the conservative phalanx who marched into the party meeting comprised three women: Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Sarah Henderson and Jessica Collins.

The conservatives are in charge of the Liberal Party and, when it suits them, they will install a conservative leader. The problem for him (and it will be a him) is he will be operating in an Australian electorate that is progressive, both now and for the foreseeable future.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On Thursday, the Liberals reversed their commitment to net zero by 2050. While it’s impossible to predict precisely what this decision means for climate action in Australia, the policies and laws already in place suggest momentum will continue.

There’s no question the climate policies of opposition parties matter – especially for investor and business confidence. But understanding the policies and laws already in place helps understand where progress will happen regardless.

Just this year, Australia published a Net Zero Plan, set its 2035 target and published six sector plans that include electricity and energy, transport and agriculture. These set out the frameworks and investments already locked in that are guiding progress towards Australia’s targets.

Existing targets

Australia has already legislated federal emissions-reduction targets, with the states and territories also having their own commitments to net zero alongside interim targets. The federal opposition reversing support for achieving the net zero goal won’t change what is already in place. In addition, most other countries are still working towards the goal of net zero by 2050.

In both the House of Representatives and the Senate, those who support climate action are in the majority – Labor, the Greens and climate-progressive independents, including the “Teals”. In the lower house they form a strong majority.

Yes, new policies and laws will be required to achieve Australia’s climate targets. However, given the current Labor government has the numbers to pass legislation through the lower house and the Senate, with the backing of the Greens, the Coalition alone won’t be able to play a blocking role.

Transition gathering steam

The economic transition from fossil fuel power generation to clean technologies is already well underway. Yes, there have been headwinds in recent years, including in the United States, but the momentum is still there. And the main Australian industry groups – the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry – are all still calling for net zero by 2050.

Industry wants consistency and clarity to help finesse their investment and business strategies. This also provides the clarity needed for long-term decisions. It’s worth noting the Department of Treasury, under successive governments, has found that action to reduce emissions and manage climate risks is more attractive to international investment and expected to lower the cost of finance.

This was set out in the Treasury modelling that underpins the decision to set the 2035 target – Australia’s Net Zero Transformation: Treasury Modelling and Analysis. That is why interim targets and a clear timeline really matter.

Renewable energy is becoming much cheaper in Australia and globally, and is expected to become the majority of electricity generation within Australia as early as next year. It has already reached nearly an 80% share for short periods.

And it’s the detail of the transition that industry and investors are focused on. They want to know: is it cheaper to build renewable energy as coal-fired generators age and have to be shut down? What’s the cheapest way to provide energy in the years ahead? What about technology costs? What policies will drive investment?

There’s no question that industry and communities respond well when the major parties act together - across the different levels of government. But a multitude of factors affect investment far more than opposition policy.

Diplomatic shifts

Under the Paris Agreement, countries are expected to set interim emissions targets every five years. If countries backtrack or drop out, that can bring diplomatic and economic impacts, including with some of Australia’s key trade partners and neighbouring countries in the Pacific and South East Asia.

As an influential middle power, Australia can punch above its weight. Australia is also in the top 20 global emitters, and even moves much higher up the list if you add the emissions impacts of fossil fuel exports. So, what Australia does and says is important. At the moment the government is clear it wants to be seen as a good partner in supporting emissions reductions in the region, and that has been well received.

If Australia wins its bid to host COP31, it will need to demonstrate that a high-emitting economy is genuinely embarked on a transition. That the electricity sector is already above 40% share of renewables, at least in the connected grids, is a clear sign. The next step will be showing how Australia can make the most of its clean energy and mineral resources in a future economy that’s focused on net zero, rather than the economy of the past.

What now?

The clean energy transition isn’t only about having cheaper electricity or paying less for fuel. It’s about our health more generally. If you live in a well-insulated house that you can heat and cool at a reasonable cost, your health and welfare benefits.

For instance, our research shows that with climate-aligned home energy upgrades and appliance electrification, Australian households could save up to $2,000 a year, equating to average energy bills savings of as much as 50% per home.

The latest figures from the United Nations show how far the world has come. Without the Paris Agreement, the world was on track to reach about 4°C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100. To date, the commitments through the Paris agreement have reduced that to projections of limiting warming to 2.3–2.8°C. This is still above safe levels, but every fraction of a degree matters, for climate damage, for our health and our wellbeing.

It’s up to everyone who thinks climate action matters to ensure the public understands the economic, short- and long-term personal benefits a planned transition will bring.

Anna Malos, Climateworks Centre Country Lead, Australia, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This year’s fire season in Australia feels unpredictable. One week brings torrential rain, the next a burst of heat, followed by a sharp cold snap.

This kind of “climate whiplash” – rapid swings between wet and dry conditions – is making it harder to know when the landscape is safe and when it’s ready to burn.

The latest official forecast reflects that same uncertainty. While large areas are likely to experience wetter-than-normal conditions for the rest of spring, parts of inland Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria face an elevated risk of fire due to persistent soil dryness and above-average temperatures.

Even regions showing a “normal” outlook aren’t immune; catastrophic fires can still occur under the right mix of heat, wind and fuel dryness.

But what if we could see how dry the vegetation is in near real time before fires start? That’s now possible thanks to a publicly available tool implemented by Geoscience Australia.

This tool draws on more than a decade of research that began when I was a PhD student in Spain and has evolved thorough collaborations with colleagues at the Australian National University and emergency services.

It’s a glimpse into the future of bushfire management, where satellites and other technologies act like a nervous system for the continent, constantly sensing and responding to changes in the landscape long before smoke fills the sky.

As Australia faces longer, more erratic fire seasons, tools like this may help us all for staying one step ahead of the flames.

How do we measure fire danger?

Fuel moisture content is the percentage of water inside leaves and twigs compared with their dry weight. When it drops below a certain level, vegetation ignites more easily, burns hotter and spreads faster.

It is one of the key predictors of fire danger because, for example, it strongly influences whether a source of ignition such as a lightning strike stays small or grows into a fast-moving wildfire.

Traditionally, measuring fuel moisture content relies on cutting samples in the field and weighing them wet and dry. This is a precise but time-consuming method that can only cover small areas.

Satellite-based estimates have existed for years, providing valuable, continent-wide data for seasonal bushfire outlooks.

But their coarse resolution means they’re too broad for guiding local decisions such as planning prescribed or cultural burns and only a few of these earlier approaches were made operational.

Turning satellite light measurements into moisture maps

The new bushfire management tool my team helped developed fixes this problem.

It uses a machine-learning model trained on fuel moisture content estimates developed as part of a precursor tool – the Australian Flammability Monitoring System.

This older system produced continental fuel moisture content at 500-metre resolution every four days since 2001 using data from NASA’s MODIS satellite sensor. It was validated and calibrated using extensive field measurements and biochemical reference data.

This provided a solid foundation for the new model, which provides near-real-time, 20m-resolution maps showing how wet or dry vegetation is across the continent. It does so by drawing on satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites, updated every five days with historical coverage from 2015 onward.

The new version applies the same physical principles to higher-resolution imagery.

Water in leaves strongly absorbs radiation in the shortwave infrared region. This means dry vegetation reflects more light than hydrated, green plants. Meanwhile, as plants lose moisture, the amount of visible and near-infrared radiation they reflect also changes. Chlorophyll breaks down, leaf structure deteriorates, and the red and infrared light signals weaken.

By learning from these patterns, the model can infer how much water is inside the vegetation. This effectively turns satellite light measurements into maps of live fuel moisture across Australia.

To cross-calibrate cultural indicators of flammability, such as plant colour, scent and seasonal cues with satellite observations, we have collaborated with Indigenous fire practitioners.

Indigenous-led field surveys across New South Wales have confirmed strong alignment between these traditional indicators and satellite results.

This two-way learning strengthens both scientific and cultural understanding. It ensures national monitoring systems are informed by generations of Indigenous knowledge about landscape health. It also enhances fire practice and community resilience through cutting-edge Earth observation tools.

Seeing the danger long before it ignites

With every update, the tool provides a continent-wide snapshot of how flammable Australia’s vegetation is.

Thanks to its higher spatial resolution, it can reveal subtle gradients in vegetation dryness that coarser sensors simply miss. This helps fire agencies and Indigenous communities pinpoint where prescribed or cultural burns can be carried out safely – and where fuels remain too moist to ignite.

The data are also being used in insurance and risk modelling for new developments to quantify the number of “flammable days” in a given region.

Meanwhile, the CSIRO is also collaborating with the Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence to better represent changing fuel conditions in fire-behaviour models. As part of this effort, our new fuel moisture content product is being integrated into the CSIRO’s fire spread simulation model.

In bushfire management, the advantage lies in seeing the danger long before it ignites. As Australia’s fire seasons lengthen and the weather swings between extremes, knowing how wet or dry our landscapes are may become as important as forecasting heatwaves or storms.

This marks a shift from reacting to fires to anticipating and preventing them. Other projects, such as OzFuel, will accelerate this by filling other crucial gaps in sustained, high-resolution monitoring of fuel conditions across Australia.

The author acknowledges the many scientists, fire practitioners and Indigenous partners whose work made the new fuel moisture content tool possible, and thanks Geoscience Australia for its operational implementation.

Marta Yebra, Director, Bushfire Resaerch Centre of Excellence, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Global fossil fuel emissions are projected to rise in 2025 to a new all-time high, with all sources – coal, gas, and oil – contributing to the increase.

At the same time, our new global snapshot of carbon dioxide emissions and carbon sinks shows at least 35 countries have a plan to decarbonise. Australia, Germany, New Zealand and many others have shown statistically significant declines in fossil carbon emissions during the past decade, while their economies have continued to grow. China’s emissions have also been been growing at a much slower pace than recent trends and might even be flat by year’s end.

As world leaders and delegates meet in Brazil for the United Nations’ global climate summit, COP30, many countries that have submitted new emissions commitments to 2035 have shown increased ambition.

But unless these efforts are scaled up substantially, current global temperature trends are projected to significantly exceed the Paris Agreement target that aims to keep warming well below 2°C.

Fossil fuel emissions up again in 2025

Together with colleagues from 102 research institutions worldwide, the Global Carbon Project today releases the Global Carbon Budget 2025. This is an annual stocktake of the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide worldwide.

We also publish the major scientific advances enabling us to pinpoint the global human and natural sources and sinks of carbon dioxide with higher confidence. Carbon sinks are natural or artificial systems such as forests which absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they release.

Global CO₂ emissions from the use of fossil fuels continue to increase. They are set to rise by 1.1% in 2025, on top of a similar rise in 2024. All fossil fuels are contributing to the rise. Emissions from natural gas grew 1.3%, followed by oil (up 1.0%) and coal (up 0.8%). Altogether, fossil fuels produced 38.1 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2025.

Not all the news is bad. Our research finds emissions from the top emitter, China (32% of global CO₂ emissions) will increase significantly more slowly below its growth over the past decade, with a modest 0.4% increase. Emissions from India (8% of global) are projected to increase by 1.4%, also below recent trends.

However, emissions from the United States (13% of global) and the European Union (6% of global) are expected to grow above recent trends. For the US, a projected growth of 1.9% is driven by a colder start to the year, increased liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, increased coal use, and higher demand for electricity.

EU emissions are expected to grow 0.4%, linked to lower hydropower and wind output due to weather. This led to increased electricity generation from LNG. Uncertainties in currently available data also include the possibility of no growth or a small decline.

Drop in land use emissions

In positive news, net carbon emissions from changes to land use such as deforestation, degradation and reforestation have declined over the past decade. They are expected to produce 4.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2025 down from the annual average of 5 billion tonnes over the past decade. Permanent deforestation remains the largest source of emissions. This figure also takes into account the 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon soaked up by human-driven reforestation annually.

Three countries – Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – contribute 57% of global net land-use change CO₂ emissions.

When we combine the net emissions from land-use change and fossil fuels, we find total global human-caused emissions will reach 42.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2025. This total has grown 0.3% annually over the past decade, compared with 1.9% in the previous one (2005–14).

Carbon sinks largely stagnant

Natural carbon sinks in the ocean and terrestrial ecosystems remove about half of all human-caused carbon emissions. But our new data suggests these sinks are not growing as we would expect.

The ocean carbon sink has been relatively stagnant since 2016, largely because of climate variability and impacts from ocean heatwaves.

The land CO₂ sink has been relatively stagnant since 2000, with a significant decline in 2024 due to warmer El Niño conditions on top of record global warming. Preliminary estimates for 2025 show a recovery of this sink to pre-El Niño levels.

Since 1960, the negative effects of climate change on the natural carbon sinks, particularly on the land sink, have suppressed a fraction of the full sink potential. This has left more CO₂ in the atmosphere, with an increase in the CO₂ concentration by an additional 8 parts per million. This year, atmospheric CO₂ levels are expected to reach just above 425 ppm.

Tracking global progress

Despite the continued global rise of carbon emissions, there are clear signs of progress towards lower-carbon energy and land use in our data.

There are now 35 countries that have reduced their fossil carbon emissions over the past decade, while still growing their economy. Many more, including China, are shifting to cleaner energy production. This has led to a significant slowdown of emissions growth.

Existing policies supporting national emissions cuts under the Paris Agreement are projected to lead to global warming of 2.8°C above preindustrial levels by the end of this century.

This is an improvement over the previous assessment of 3.1°C, although methodological changes also contributed to the lower warming projection. New emissions cut commitments to 2035, for those countries that have submitted them, show increased mitigation ambition.

This level of expected mitigation falls still far short of what is needed to meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2°C.

At current levels of emissions, we calculate that the remaining global carbon budget – the carbon dioxide still able to be emitted before reaching specific global temperatures (averaged over multiple years) – will be used up in four years for 1.5°C (170 gigatonnes remaining), 12 years for 1.7°C (525 Gt) and 25 years for 2°C (1,055 Gt).

Falling short

Our improved and updated global carbon budget shows the relentless global increase of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions. But it also shows detectable and measurable progress towards decarbonisation in many countries.

The recovery of the natural CO₂ sinks is a positive finding. But large year-to-year variability shows the high sensitivity of these sinks to heat and drought.

Overall, this year’s carbon report card shows we have fallen short, again, of reaching a global peak in fossil fuel use. We are yet to begin the rapid decline in carbon emissions needed to stabilise the climate.

Pep Canadell, Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Environment; Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO; Clemens Schwingshackl, Senior Researcher in Climate Science, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science, University of East Anglia; Glen Peters, Senior Researcher, Center for International Climate and Environment Research - Oslo; Judith Hauck, Helmholtz Young Investigator group leader and deputy head, Marine Biogeosciences section at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Universität Bremen; Julia Pongratz, Professor of Physical Geography and Land Use Systems, Department of Geography, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Mike O'Sullivan, Lecturer in Mathematics and Statistics, University of Exeter; Pierre Friedlingstein, Chair, Mathematical Modelling of Climate, University of Exeter, and Robbie Andrew, Senior Researcher, Center for International Climate and Environment Research - Oslo

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Picture dusk falling somewhere in the Solomon Islands. A fisher’s skiff glides home using a whisper-quiet electric outboard motor. In the Cook Islands, a big battery steadies the island grid. In Papua New Guinea’s highlands, solar kits bring electric light to homes for the first time.

These aren’t prototypes – they’re already up and running across the Pacific. Put together, these stories of quiet change point to something bigger.

For decades, Pacific island countries have led the global fight on climate change. These nations are highly exposed to the damage from rising sea levels, acidifying oceans and bleached coral reefs. Pacific leaders helped secure the 2015 Paris Agreement and the global goal of holding warming to 1.5°C.

Now the Pacific is leading the way again. Island leaders have a bold plan to become the world’s first region powered entirely by renewables and energy storage.

The move isn’t symbolic. It’s extremely practical. Pacific nations spend an eye-watering percentage of their GDP (10–25%) buying fossil fuels to run power plants, generators and vehicles. Ending reliance on imports and becoming energy independent will bring major dividends. Despite widespread support, the Pacific’s clean energy transition has not yet taken off in earnest due to transport costs and gaps in financing, skills and regulation.

Leaders will formally release a renewable roadmap next week at the COP30 climate conference in Brazil. Pacific nations and Australia are bidding to host the next climate talks in 2026. Island leaders hope to leverage the global summit to attract investment in their own energy transition.

Slashing fossil fuel imports will save billions

Right now, Pacific countries spend A$9–14 billion a year importing diesel for generators and fuel for vehicles and boats.

Sharp falls in renewable costs mean solar and battery systems are now clearly cheaper than fossil fuels for electricity generation.

Even with the Pacific’s logistical challenges, installed costs for solar have fallen more than five-fold since 2010. The cost of grid-scale and home batteries is falling quickly.

Replacing diesel generation with solar and batteries would cost an estimated $3–4 billion. These costs would be quickly recouped, given annual savings would be around $610–840 million.

The biggest challenge will be financing for large-scale renewables, grid infrastructure and energy storage. Many outer islands can move ahead faster by replacing diesel generators with solar and batteries. A rapid shift to electric vehicles (EVs) and vessels is also possible. Government incentives have triggered rapid uptake of EVs and hybrids in Fiji. Electric outboard motors are also ready for prime time.

Cost savings would free up funds for essential infrastructure, health, education and climate resilience. Renewables represent a powerful development strategy for the Pacific.

Global renewable uptake is key to survival for Pacific nations

Individual Pacific countries have set ambitious renewable energy targets in national commitments under the Paris Agreement. Fiji plans to be powered 100% by renewables by 2035, while Tuvalu is aiming to get there by 2030.

These national goals can contribute to a regional target for 100% renewable energy. Pacific leaders have agreed to establish a Pacific Energy Commissioner to coordinate the transition.

Pacific island countries are not major polluters, contributing just 0.02% of global emissions. Cutting the region’s emissions will do very little to limit warming.

The importance of this new plan is showing 100% renewables is now doable.

As Vanuatu climate and energy minister Ralph Regenvanu states:

if we can manage the rapid transition of our energy systems in the Pacific Islands, it can be a beacon for the rest of the globe. Our survival depends on it.

Holding warming to 1.5°C is critical for low-lying atoll nations. Climate resettlement is already under way, as Tuvalu residents enter ballots to move to Australia while Fijian villages are relocating to higher ground.

Two years ago, nearly 200 countries agreed to triple global renewable capacity and accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Reaching this goal is crucial to keep 1.5°C within reach. Pacific nations can show the way. But their survival isn’t in their hands – it depends on the world following suit.

Next year’s climate talks could drive the change

For several years, Pacific nations and Australia have been bidding to host the 2026 COP31 climate summit. But Turkey has a rival bid. A final decision is expected next week.

As Palau President Surangel Whipps has said, hosting COP31 in the Pacific cannot just be about symbolism – it must demonstrate “tangible benefits” to Pacific peoples.

If the joint bid for COP31 gets up, Pacific leaders will be pressing for progress on their 100% renewable plan by seeking investors and technology partners.

The COP talks are more than climate negotiations – they’ve become the world’s biggest trade fair. Thousands of delegates will be looking to invest in renewable energy. More than 70% of investment in renewables in Australia comes from abroad and COP31 could attract finance for both Australia and the Pacific.

Palau will host regional leaders next year at the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting. Whipps, the incoming chair, will focus on building a regional renewable Pacific partnership and is planning an investment meeting next year to help attract international investment ahead of COP31.

Some investment is likely to come from Australia, both private and public. Australia is rapidly replacing coal-fired power with renewables and storage at home and is already supporting Pacific clean energy projects. But Pacific leaders have also called on Australia to “stop approving new gas and coal projects” and stop subsidising fossil fuel production.

The Pacific’s plan to run on clean power makes clear sense on financial, energy security and climate leadership grounds. The question now is – will it happen?

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney and Scott Hamilton, Adjunct Associate Professor in Engineering, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It sounds like a gardener’s holy grail: beautiful and practical plantings that can turn cities into green spaces with benefits for people and biodiversity.

Our Australia-first collaborative research has made this dream a reality. Woody meadows have transformed urban spaces in Australian cities by adding green beauty and colour in public spaces at a much lower cost than other approaches.

Ours is a collaborative research project that engages with urban land managers, designers and horticultural crews to research and trial woody meadows under real-world conditions. Their popularity reflects the huge demand to green our urban places in a cost-effective way.

After ten years of success, failure and constant experimentation, we can now share our insights into how woody meadows can be both beautiful and hardy.

What is a woody meadow?

A uniquely Australian concept, woody meadows are diverse, naturalistic plantings of native groundcover, shrubs and small trees. They are designed for maximum visual and ecological function, and are robust to heat and drought. A beautiful corridor for nature, they can cool cities and reduce stormwater runoff into waterways. They differ from naturalistic meadow-like plantings popular in Europe and America, which only contain flowering herbs and grasses.

Woody meadows mimic the structure of natural shrubland communities and include wattles, grevilleas, melaleucas, goodenias and correas for year-round flowering. They are planted densely into low-nutrient materials such as crushed scoria or sandstone (which exotic species don’t like). This promotes rapid canopy coverage and requires less weeding, fewer chemicals and lower maintenance costs.

Woody meadow plants are managed by coppicing – hard pruning to around 15 centimetres every two to four years. This maintains diversity and ensures dominant plant species don’t take over. It also mimics disturbances such as fire and storm damage and stimulates dense new growth and lots of flowers.

We have tested more than 300 Australian plant species and shown most species can resprout after coppicing. This means that plants can be tailored for different climates and site conditions without high risk of failure.

From little things…

Ten years ago, we planted two small plots of native plants in inner Melbourne. We wanted to find a novel and low-cost approach to urban greening.

From this single pilot project, the concept of woody meadows has grown exponentially. Our partners include transport agencies, water authorities, cemeteries, government agencies and councils. They have shared their successes and failures through a growing national Woody Meadow Network, established as part of this project.

There are now more than 30,000 square metres of woody meadows in 59 urban locations across southern Australia. These meadows are part of major infrastructure projects including Melbourne’s level-crossing removal project, Sydney’s metro rail project, and the East Subiaco redevelopment in Perth.

Australian cities are investing millions of dollars in urban green spaces. This has wide-ranging benefits for health and wellbeing, biodiversity, reducing pollution and tackling urban heating. But maintaining urban vegetation is expensive, leading to overly simple plantings that are dull and provide few benefits.

Living laboratories

The popularity of woody meadows reflects the huge demand for cost-effective ways to green urban areas.

Each meadow serves as a living laboratory, with data on plant performance and maintenance informing future designs. Historically, most public landscapes have been designed without considering maintenance, so involving horticultural crews and bringing their expertise into the design of woody meadows has been crucial to their success.

Installation costs for woody meadows are comparable to business-as-usual plantings of low-diversity, low-functioning monocultures such as massed plantings of strappy leaf plants such as Lomandra or Dianella species or shrubs. But they require 75% less maintenance over time. Their adaptable design has overcome barriers to planting in hostile urban sites and transport corridors.

Plant it yourself

If you are keen to plant a woody meadow of your own, we have condensed 15 years of research and testing into free Woody Meadow Guidelines outlining how to design, install and maintain them.

New woody meadow plantings can be registered on our website so we can continue to gather data on what works best.

Claire Farrell, Associate Professor (Green Infrastructure) School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne and Rachael Bathgate, Green Infrastructure Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Frogs need water. Almost all of the world’s 7,900 known frog species breed in fresh water. And when it rains, these amphibians erupt into a chorus of calls – croaks, trills, cheeps and bellows – to attract a mate.

So you would assume a flood represents a windfall for frogs, right? But our new research finds they can have too much of a good thing.

Climate change is fuelling extreme weather, so we examined the impact of bushfires and floods on Australian frogs. We were surprised to discover that, in some cases, floods may pose a greater threat to Australian frogs than fire. This challenges our assumptions about how climate change will affect frogs in the future.

In the winter of 2021, frogs across eastern Australia were mysteriously found dead in gardens, creeks and backyards. The Australian Museum got hundreds of concerned emails from members of the public. We were stumped at the cause of this mass die-off.

Clue to mass frog deaths

Frogs play a vital role in the natural world. They control insect populations and also act as food for countless other species. And frogs are an indicator for a healthy environment, so when they start dropping dead it’s very concerning.

Our team collected thousands of dead frog specimens to test them for disease, and worked with collaborators to look for pesticides and other chemicals that might be to blame. So far, we haven’t found the factor likely to be responsible. Now, four years later, we have another clue.

In our search for answers, we wondered about recent extreme weather events in eastern Australia. The Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20 burned 24 million hectares, with an estimated three billion animals killed or displaced.

These years of fire and drought were immediately followed by record-breaking La Niña-driven rainfall and floods in 2021 and 2022. In the wake of these extraordinary climatic events, we asked: how do bushfires and floods impact frogs? Intuition told us fires would be a bigger threat to animals with such an affinity for water, but this assumption hadn’t been tested.

Thousands of helpers

Studying the effects of extreme weather is notoriously difficult, due to the unpredictable nature of natural disasters. Scientists often lack the critical baseline data they need. Without time to plan for disasters, we frequently can’t mobilise quickly enough to capture the immediate after-effects of the event either, particularly across vast tracts of land.

However, tens of thousands of people across Australia use the Australian Museum’s free FrogID app to record calling frogs. So we had access to a database of call recordings from before and after the fires and floods in NSW. By examining relative frog species “richness” – the number of frog species calling at once in recordings – we could compare how frogs responded.

Contrary to what you might expect, the number of frog species remained stable in burnt areas after the fires. This is actually in line with previous research by our team that documented the impressive short-term persistence of many frog species after the black summer bushfires.

Although good news for frogs, the long-term consequences of fires remain unknown, particularly for rainforest frog species that are not well represented in the FrogID dataset. Ongoing monitoring will be needed to track this over time.

Too much water

The real surprise in our research was the impact of floods. It appears it is possible for frogs to have too much of a good thing when it comes to water. Frog species richness was significantly lower in flooded areas after the floods.

The most obvious responsible factor is floodwaters washing away frogs, including their eggs and tadpoles, and destroying sensitive frog breeding habitats. It’s also possible that floodwaters spread chemicals: a third of the dead frogs we tested after the mass frog deaths contained traces of pesticides.

The waterlogged habitats left in the wake of floods may have also created favourable conditions for the spread of the chytrid fungus. This pathogen is responsible for the devastating infectious disease chytridiomycosis. This affects the skin of amphibians, leading to symptoms like lethargy and excessive skin shedding. It causes mass mortalities and extinctions in populations worldwide.

A future of fires and floods

In a volatile Australian climate, we can expect more frequent and severe bushfires and floods.

This new research highlights the need for ongoing monitoring across Australia to track how frogs respond to increasingly extreme weather. With help from citizen scientists, we will be able to detect and respond to emerging threats whether they come in the form of fire, flood or fungus.

Most of Australia’s species have evolved alongside extreme weather. But the frequency and intensity of modern climate catastrophes are testing their resilience: they may not respond in the ways we expect.

In this rapidly changing world, gathering data on how our wildlife copes is essential. Citizen science projects like FrogID are vital in monitoring and managing Australia’s biodiversity into the future.

Eli Bieri, PhD Student, Australian Museum; UNSW Sydney and Jodi Rowley, Curator, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation Biology, Australian Museum, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The female of the species has devil-like black horns, and a taste for extremely rare pollen. But until now, this Australian native bee has never been officially named or identified.

My discovery of Megachile (Hackeriapis) lucifer, underscores the lack of knowledge and investment in Australia’s unique native bees.

Whilst considerable funding and attention has been focused on the introduced European honey bee, Apis mellifera, there are still hundreds of native bees that are yet to be identified and named.

How was this bee found?

This fascinating new megachile (or leaf cutter) bee was first discovered while on a surveying trip in the Bremer Ranges in the goldfields region of Western Australia in 2019.

I was conducting surveys for pollinators – such as bees, other insects, flies and wasps – of a critically endangered plant called Bremer marianthus, or Marianthus aquilonaris, which is only known in this region.

Sadly, as is common for many threatened plant species, the pollinators for this straggly shrub with blue-tinged white flowers were completely unknown. One of the native bees collected on this visit immediately caught my attention because the female had large devil-like horns protruding from her clypeus – the broad plate on the front of a bee’s head.

When I investigated, it was clear this wasn’t a species that had been found before. Whilst some native bees have horns or prongs, none have the large and slightly curved horns of this one. Comparing it with museum specimens, along with DNA barcoding, confirmed this species was new to collectors and to science.

DNA barcoding also revealed a male native bee I had collected at the site was her partner, but he lacked horns. This is the opposite of the situation in much of the animal kingdom, where the males are more likely to be amoured.

Bringer of light

When you discover a new species, you have the honour of choosing a name. The first new species of native bee I “described” (or scientifically identified) in 2022, Leioproctus zephyr, is named after my dog, Zephyr. For this new species, the horns meant the name Lucifer was a perfect choice.

Lucifer is also Latin for “light bringer”, and I hope this new species brings to light the wonders of our native bees.

Australia has more than 2,000 species of native bees. They help keep our ecosystems healthy and play a crucial role in pollinating wildflowers.

We need to understand native bees

This new native bee, Megachile lucifer, is only one of an estimated 500 native bees that are not described. Far more attention has been given to the introduced European honey bee Apis mellifera. Whilst the honey bee is important for crop pollination, this species is not threatened, and can in fact harm our native bees.

The truth is honeybees compete with native animals for food and habitat, disrupt native pollination systems and pose a serious biosecurity threat to our honey and pollination industries.

Currently, there no requirement to survey for native bees in areas about to be mined, farmed or developed. Even if they are found, any species that has not been officially identified it has no conservation standing, which is one reason why taxonomic research is so important.

Protect the pollinators

Megachile lucifer was collected on a flowering mallee plant that attracted thousands of native bees and other insects. In subsequent years of surveying this site, the mallee was not flowering, Megachile lucifer was not seen, and far fewer insects were recorded.

With no monitoring of native bees, we also don’t know how their populations are faring in response to threatening processes, like climate change.

More interest and investment into the taxonomy, conservation and ecology of native bees, means we can protect both them and the rare and precious plants they pollinate.

Kit Prendergast, Postdoctoral Researcher, Pollination Ecology, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It is early evening in Australia’s top end, and a hunter stalks its prey. Keenly alert, the northern quoll follows the sound of rustling in the leaf litter. It must be some kind of frog, the small carnivorous marsupial decides, and pounces. But the quoll is seized by an immediate pain in the mouth, and drops its prey. It’s already too late.

The rustling was not a frog, but a poisonous cane toad. The toad’s toxin has sprayed into the quoll’s mouth and within seconds the quoll is vomiting. Within minutes it is incapacitated and spasming as its heart fails. And 20 minutes later the quoll is dead.

This scene has played out countless times in the 90 years since invasive cane toads were released on the Queensland coast and hopped west to Australia’s tropical north. They were originally native to South America, and brought to Australia to control beetle pests in sugarcane. And they kill not only quolls and their kin, but other predators such as freshwater crocodiles, goannas, and snakes.

What do we have to lose?

The cane toad is one of Australia’s worst feral animal invaders. They have nearly completed their conquest of northern Australia and in the next couple of years they are expected to reach Broome on the west coast, and head south. Our work shows that without intervention, the destruction will continue, as toads invade Australia’s unique Pilbara region in the north of western Australia.

The Pilbara is an ancient rocky landscape, with some of the oldest geology in the world. Many species are found here and nowhere else. With abundant waterholes and rivers in stunning rocky gorges, the Pilbara would be perfect habitat for cane toads.

Our research outlines what will happen if toads arrive in this unique landscape. It finds that with no intervention, cane toads will likely invade a further 27 million hectares, including almost all of the Pilbara, and spread further south towards Shark Bay.

A blow to animals and culture

Cane toads arriving in the Pilbara would cause populations of about 25 species of reptiles and mammals to crash in numbers. These include ten species of goanna, nine small marsupial predators like the Kaluta and northern quoll, three snakes, two blue-tongue skinks and one bat. For endangered northern quolls and vulnerable ghost bats, the Pilbara is the last toad-free stronghold. Several endemic goannas, blue tongue skinks and marsupial predators will likely join the threatened species list.

Many of these species are culturally important to the Traditional Owners of Country for stories, songlines and bush tucker. Toad invasion of the Northern Territory, for example, led to lost bush tucker such as goanna, crocodile, blue-tongue skink. It also meant increased reliance on store-bought food, and a loss of skills and knowledge around hunting activities where Elders spent time with younger generations.

Overall, it’s a bleak prospect if toads spread into the Pilbara. The good news is that there is an opportunity to avoid this future.

A wicked problem

Many people have attempted to solve the cane toad problem, via cracking its genetic code, teaching native animals not to eat toads and even putting the creatures on the menu.

None of these methods have stopped the toad invasion across the tropical north of Australia. There has simply been too much permanent water in the landscape that toads use as habitat.

But the situation is not the same in Western Australia. South of Broome, toads will hit a natural “bottleneck” where the Great Sandy Desert meets the ocean, on Karajarri and Nyangumarta country. This narrow stretch of naturally dry country represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to halt the toads’ progress further down the west coast.

Plumbing, not rocket science

Water is the toads’ Achilles heel. In the dry season, toads must sit in water every two to four days to stay alive. In the bottleneck between the Kimberley and the Pilbara, almost all permanent water sources are human made. And these create a connected watery tendril for invasion. Making these water sources inaccessible to toads by creating a “Toad Containment Zone” means toads cannot use these as stepping stones through this dry part of the country.

A collective of scientists, pastoralists and Traditional Owners has proposed to create this zone by toad-proofing cattle water sources (by upgrading ground-level water sources to tanks and troughs) in a 150 kilometre long by 50 kilometre wide stretch of country. This solution would create a “toad fire-break”. The containment zone covers three times the distance that toads travel each year, so every wet season toads will infiltrate the north of the zone but as the water dries up, they will perish in the dry season.

Bang for buck

Effective containment would prevent toads from accessing the water-abundant Pilbara and beyond, protecting 27 million hectares of Western Australia.

This is not a new idea – it’s been subject to 15 years of scientific rigour that shows preventing toads accessing water is the most effective way to stop them. It’s also one of the cheapest solutions: managing pest species after they have established is expensive and ineffective, and we are much better off preventing their spread.

Judy Dunlop, Research Fellow in Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University; Ben Phillips, WA Premier's Science Fellow, Curtin University, and Tim Dempster, Professor, Marine Biology and Aquaculture, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you live in a big city, finding a charger for your electric vehicle (EV) isn’t hard. But drive a few hours in any direction and the story changes.

For most regional Australians, the nearest public charger is still a detour, not a stop on the way. And for anyone planning a long road trip, the chargers along the route fade for hundreds of kilometres at a time.

A new interactive EV charging monitor I helped develop shows, for the first time, just how uneven the network really is. This map refreshes daily, pulling live information from the Open Charge Map database and plotting every public charger in the database across the nation.

When we overlay those chargers with population data, a clear pattern emerges: we’ve built a strong urban network, but a patchy national one.

Only about a third of Australia’s towns have a charger within 20 kilometres. Zoom in closer and the gap widens: more than two-thirds of towns have no charger within 5 kilometres.

Looks good on paper

Nationally, most Australians live close to a charger. By population, about 88% of people are within 5 kilometres of one, 93% within 10 kilometres, and 97% within 20 kilometres.

On paper, coverage looks good. But look at it from the town’s point of view, and the picture flips: most places still lack a charger, even if most people don’t.

It’s a subtle but important distinction. Around 90% of Australia’s urban centres have fewer than 10,000 residents. These are the small regional towns and rural communities that fill the spaces between cities. They account for a small share of the population but a large share of the country’s geography.

Nationwide, Australia now has around 1,250 public charging sites offering nearly 3,800 charge ports.

More than half of these are fast chargers (above 50 kilowatts). About a third are medium-speed chargers. The rest are slow chargers typically found at destinations or wall outlets.

That balance might look healthy. But most of the fast sites are concentrated in cities and along the eastern seaboard, leaving vast inland gaps.

Per capita access is even starker: across Australia there are only about one to two chargers for every 10,000 people.

On long regional routes, the gaps are impossible to miss. Between Melbourne and Darwin, for example, there are stretches of highway hundreds of kilometres long without a single fast charger.

These are the real “charging deserts” – areas where geography, cost and low traffic volumes still make investment difficult to justify.

And even when chargers exist in these areas, they can be slow, or offline.

Voluntary and inconsistent reporting

The EV charging monitor draws on open data, and that comes with a big caveat.

Reporting to the Open Charge Map is voluntary. Some operators update their sites frequently. Others don’t. Each charger’s “status” can tell us whether it’s listed as operational, partial, or down, but it doesn’t reveal uptime – how often a charger is available and working.

Internationally, some countries already require major EV charging networks to meet published reliability standards. In the United Kingdom, rapid public charging networks must maintain at least 99% uptime and provide transparency on performance.

In Australia, there’s no national requirement for public reporting of charger uptime. A 98% reliability target applies to chargers built with federal funding, but for the rest of the network, reporting remains voluntary and inconsistent. The next step is to make reliability a shared measure – not just a promise from individual companies, but a national benchmark drivers can trust.

How does Australia compare internationally?

Other countries have set clearer rules for how far drivers should be from a fast charger. Across Europe, new regulations require sites at least every 60 kilometres along major highways. The United States funds chargers every 50 miles (about 80 kilometres) on key corridors.

New Zealand’s public network aims for coverage roughly every 75 kilometres for more than 97% of state highways, and a public charger in most towns with more than 2,000 people.

Against those yardsticks, Australia’s patchy regional network still has long stretches where chargers are hundreds of kilometres apart.

The road ahead

The pattern suggests two separate challenges. First, keep expanding charger coverage in regional areas to make every major route practical for EV travel. Second, lift reliability and reporting standards so drivers can depend on the network once it’s there.

A national backbone is a logical start: a fast-charging site at least every 150 to 200 kilometres along priority corridors, later tightening to every 100 kilometres.

This work is already underway through state programs such as Queensland’s Electric Super Highway and New South Wales’ regional charging rollout. But there’s still no consistent national standard for uptime, open access, or data reporting.

Regional support will matter too. Many small towns won’t attract private investment until there’s a guaranteed level of demand. Co-funding through state or federal grants can bridge that gap, especially where the local economy depends on tourism.

A single fast charger in a country town can unlock a chain of benefits for local businesses as passers-by “fill up on the way”.

The next frontier isn’t just installing more chargers – it’s installing them where they’ll make the biggest difference to confidence and coverage. 

Hussein Dia, Professor of Transport Technology and Sustainability, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It was the news that rippled around the nation – and then the world: at least three hours of free grid-supplied electricity for Australian households, every day.

The new Solar Sharer program announced by Federal Minister for Energy Chris Bowen would require retailers to offer at least three hours of free power daily during the sunniest period to homes with smart meters. It would begin next year in New South Wales, south-east Queensland and South Australia.

On the surface, this seems like a win. Australia now has so much solar that wholesale power prices are often very cheap or even negative during the sunniest periods with abundant supply.

But there’s a problem. Wholesale supply is only part of the cost. Mandating free retail power during some hours will require cross-subsidy of these other costs. Under Bowen’s plan this will inevitably raise prices for other customers and it is likely to destroy the rooftop solar market. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

What’s wrong with free power?

Minister Bowen’s plan borrows heavily from energy offers in the market now, which include three free hours of power.

Bowen’s policy will be delivered through the Default Market Offer, a unique regulated retail plan which retailers in Queensland, NSW and South Australia are obliged to offer. If you don’t choose a market offer, you will be placed on the default offer.

There’s nothing new about free electricity from the grid. Consumers can choose their electricity retailer in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and much of Queensland. In these states, it’s been possible for over a decade to find offers with free electricity at certain times. These deals typically offered free power for an hour a week, and usually on the weekend. Few customers chose them.

But in 2023, OVO Energy started offering a “three for free” deal with free power from 11am to 2pm daily. I was one of their first customers, and I calculated OVO would make a loss on me given I used the free power to charge my electric vehicle. Other retailers such as Globird and Red Energy have followed suit since AGL bought OVO’s Australian arm in 2024.

Power prices outside the free hours have roughly doubled since I took up OVO’s offer two years ago. But it’s still worthwhile for me as a way to charge my EV for nothing.

These offers make most sense for EV owners, as few customers can shift most of their consumption to the free period.

From market to regulation

Minister Bowen’s move might be seen as a form of mandatory expansion of these niche retail offers. But changing a niche to a mainstream offer will bring drastic change.

In the electricity market, retailers offering “three for free” deals recoup the costs of supplying “free” electricity by increasing prices charged in the “non-free” hours. These costs include the network use, renewable energy subsidies, generation costs and internal costs and margins which make up about 75% of the average bill.

To make his offer widely attractive, Bowen will pressure the Australian Energy Regulator to avoid significantly increasing power prices at other times in the default market offer. Otherwise, substantially higher prices outside the sunny period would discourage consumers and mean Solar Sharer would remain a niche product, just like existing three-for-free offers.

If retailers have to offer free power and keep their prices down at other hours, they will have to make up the difference in higher prices paid by all their other customers. Someone has to pay for the free lunch.

Bowen has form here, as he previously intervened in the regulator’s determination of default offer prices.

Hobbling rooftop solar?

Over the past 20 years, solar feed-in tariffs have fallen off a cliff as millions of Australians have added panels and solar system costs have collapsed.

This means the main reason to go solar is no longer exporting power to the grid, but rather to consume as much produced power as possible to avoid buying from the grid.

If Bowen’s policy comes into effect, it will hobble the market for the installation of rooftop solar. There’s little point installing solar if grid-supplied power is free at the times when most of the rooftop solar production occurs.

Will Australia’s four million existing solar homes be worse off? Not necessarily. Existing panels are a sunk cost, so households will likely continue using them as before.

But existing solar home owners may see this as a breach of trust, having spent thousands of dollars going solar to avoid pricey power from the grid – encouraged by ministers, including Bowen, to do this.

Will more Australians install household batteries to soak up free power? That’s unlikely. The government’s home battery subsidy only applies when paired with rooftop solar. If regulation undermines the economics of rooftop solar, battery-backed solar will be less attractive too.

Out of the blue

It’s not clear the government considered the wider effects of the policy before announcing it. Last week’s announcement took the industry by surprise. Australian Energy Council CEO Louisa Kinnear said retailers were “disappointed the Government didn’t consult with us ahead of time”.

The move is a sharp reversal of the retail pricing policies put in place when the energy market was created almost 30 years ago. These longstanding policies sought to ensure prices reflect costs, at least in regulated retail offers.

Australians love rooftop solar. It’s now the biggest source of clean electricity in Australia, growing even as fewer wind and solar farms proceed. The last time a politician tried to undermine rooftop solar was over a decade ago. Now we have a federal Labor minister who is an avowed fan of rooftop solar putting forward a policy which will effectively strangle it.

Bowen has backed himself into a corner. Making free electricity widely available will undercut the economics of rooftop solar and raise prices for other customers. Is this really what he intends?

Bruce Mountain, Professor and Director, Victoria Energy Policy Centre, Victoria University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Britain abolished slavery in its empire in 1833, it paid the equivalent of hundreds of billions today in compensation – not to the enslaved, but to the slave owners. It was an imperfect, morally uneasy compromise, but it helped achieve a historic transition that had seemed impossible.

Today, as the world struggles to phase out fossil fuels, many doubt such a transformation is still possible. Emissions keep rising, the Paris agreement isn’t properly enforced and powerful corporations continue to mislead the public and lobby against meaningful change.

Yet slavery was once seen as immovable. It was an institution that was accepted for thousands of years – far longer than fossil fuel-powered capitalism. Slavery was a significant source of wealth for many, and the rich and powerful opposed abolition. Yet it was abolished.

My colleague Nathan Wood and I recently published an academic paper on climate change and the lessons from the abolition of slavery. Based on our work, as a thought experiment, let us imagine a future where effective climate action unfolds the way slavery abolition once did. What might that look like?

Leadership and ‘persuasion’

Future historians might not point to a single moment of global unity, with all nations coming together to act as one. Rather, they’ll point to one nation – or a coalition – that took the lead. These early leaders might combine diplomacy, bribery and perhaps even the threat of military force or economic sanctions to “persuade” other countries to follow suit.

That’s how Britain pushed for the end of the slave trade: with a mix of idealism and hard power, with naval patrols and trade sanctions. A global fossil fuel phase out may unfold in a similarly non-ideal way.

Bottom-up pressure, top-down resistance

In this thought experiment, change will not start with governments. Rather, the demand for action will come from the bottom up. Activists will demand change and there will be huge public support but, at the same time, the rich and the powerful will continue to defend the status quo, lobbying against the introduction of stricter legislation.

The slavery abolition movement followed that pattern, with broad public support yet fierce opposition from those with most to lose. In Britain, slave owners were even compensated with £20 million (equivalent to “40% of state expenditure in 1834”) to secure their agreement to the loss of “their” property.

Something similar could happen in the climate fight. Perhaps fossil fuel companies will one day receive financial compensation to ease the transition away from fossil fuels – not because it is deserved, but rather as a pragmatic compromise.

The law as a tool for change

Legal action would also play a pivotal role. Governments and corporations will be (and, indeed, are already being) taken to court.

Abolitionists used the law in much the same way. A good example is a famous case in which enslaved Africans revolted and seized control of the ship La Amistad. The Africans were ultimately freed after reformers highlighted the contradiction between the idea of natural rights for all humankind in the US Declaration of Independence, and laws that allowed people to be private property.

As the historian David Brion Davis noted: “It was this contradiction that helped the reformers to pass laws for very gradual slave emancipation.” The Paris agreement, often dismissed as toothless, could gain real power through litigation in a similar way.

Why this thought experiment matters

Of course, this is not a real prediction. It is a thought experiment. Imagining that climate action will mirror the history of the abolition of slavery doesn’t guarantee that this is what will happen. But the comparison is valuable for several reasons.

It shows that historical precedent matters. Looking at what worked in the past can help us imagine what might work now. Massive moral change really has happened before, even despite entrenched interests working against it. As such, the example of the abolition of slavery offers hope.

It’s also realistic. Global cooperation would be ideal, but history suggests that change will be messier, potentially with some unpalatable compromise or confrontation.

The comparison poses some hard ethical questions. Is it ever justifiable to compensate fossil fuel companies? What forms of international pressure are morally acceptable?

The thought experiment can also sharpen our strategy. If this imagined future is unpalatable – if we’re ultimately not willing to send hundreds of billions to BP, Exxon and co – then it may motivate people to work for better solutions.

Perhaps most importantly, comparing slavery with climate change shows us that individual action still matters. You may feel powerless and want to know what you can do now. The history we have looked at suggests two things: support climate action publicly and, if you can afford it, provide financial support to groups like environmental law charity ClientEarth.

Abolishing slavery was messy and the strategy taken left many uneasy. Perhaps, when the time comes, significant action to mitigate climate change will involve similar controversies. But flawed solutions may be better than none.

Rob Lawlor, Lecturer in Applied Ethics, University of Leeds

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For decades, conservation was focused on stemming how much nature was being lost. But a new era of nature positive environmental policy is taking hold worldwide, shifting from preventing further harm to restoring what’s been lost.

In 2022, almost 200 countries signed up to the goal of 30 by 30 – restoring 30% of lands and seas by 2030. Globally, the goal is to restore an area almost the size of India. Australia is working towards this international goal of increasing protection and restoring the highest priority areas under its Strategy for Nature. Over the last two centuries, Australia has already lost much biodiversity.

Laws should play a key role in protecting and restoring nature. But Australia’s national Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is not currently fit for purpose. The 2020 Samuel Review concluded the existing laws do not “facilitate the maintenance or restoration of the environment”.

In 2022, the Australian government promised to reverse the decline of nature with new nature positive laws which would repair ecosystems and help species recover. Shortly afterwards, parliament created a national Nature Repair Market to provide incentives for land managers to restore degraded ecosystems.

After a failed attempt at reform last year, the federal government last week announced its long-awaited broader reform package. In introducing the bill, Environment Minister Murray Watt said the laws would enable “stronger environmental protection and restoration”. Will these reforms be a game changer for restoration? It’s not so clear.

What would the proposed laws do for restoration?

Labor’s reform bills run to over 550 pages. This level of complexity means it’s hard to give a definitive answer on what the reforms would do for restoration.

At this stage, it appears that while the package contains long-awaited reforms, it falls short on ecosystem restoration.

The cornerstone of the reforms will be a new power for the Environment Minister to create National Environmental Standards, as called for in the Samuel Review. Once in place, they would work by requiring environment approvals not to be inconsistent with any standard.

These standards have been watered down somewhat. The Samuel Review recommended binding national standards which would outline clear requirements for protecting endangered species and other nationally significant matters. Under the current reforms, the minister is not obliged to make any standards and environment approvals need only be “not inconsistent” with them.

The reform package continues Australia’s reliance on environmental offsets – the practice of allowing developers to destroy habitat in one place by “compensating” for it by restoring habitat elsewhere.

The text of the draft bills suggests a developer must compensate for any long-lasting significant impact through offsets or paying a restoration contribution. The goal is to have a net gain for nature.

This sounds promising, but the concept of “net gain” is unclear and the focus on offsets still assumes the loss of nature somewhere.

A better option would be if developers were legally required to explore ways to avoid or mitigate environmental damage first before relying on offsets. While the minister must “consider” this hierarchy of options in making decisions, they’re not actually obliged to apply it.

Overall, this is disappointing. Rather than creating new incentives for restoration at a landscape scale, restoration work will instead be linked to the traditional legal model of approval for specific, environmentally degrading projects through the use of offsets and restoration elsewhere.

The new “restoration contributions” scheme is even more troubling. It would allow developers to contribute to an offset fund rather than undertake the work themselves. This would be a shortcut, allowing developers to pay for environmental destruction.

Offsets should only be used where habitat can genuinely be replaced. But as they stand, these reforms don’t require assessment of whether offsets are even feasible for a particular project. Biodiversity offsets have also been thoroughly criticised for their failure to prevent loss of nature, let alone generate nature positive outcomes.

The reforms would also allow biodiversity certificates issued under the Nature Repair Market to serve as offsets, despite the government ruling this out in 2023. Linking the nature repair market to offsets may divert investment away from some types of restoration projects. It diminishes the net gain from voluntary restoration when the results merely compensate for a loss elsewhere.

Planning across landscapes

To boost ecological restoration, the Samuel Review recommended better planning at the national and regional scale. Taking a zoomed-out view would help environmental planners connect habitat, safeguard climate refuges and protect critical habitat on a landscape scale.

These new reforms seem to be a step forward on this front. The minister, though, would retain a power to make bioregional plans at their discretion. If plans are made under the environment laws, they should specify zones for development and areas where restoration will be undertaken.

It’s heartening to see restoration included in these plans. The problem is, restoration is still tied to land-degrading activities such as mining or land clearing. That is, it’s done as a response to new damage caused to the environment, not to repair already degraded landscapes.

Time for a new model

What’s missing from the proposed reforms is a positive agenda to address Australia’s deep historic losses of nature.

As the draft laws are debated in parliament, the best outcome would be if clear measures to actually restore nature at landscape-scale and to do it actively, rather than as a response to development damage.

An excellent example Australia could look to is the European Union’s Nature Restoration Law adopted last year. It sets ambitious targets to restore the EU’s heavily degraded ecosystems: 30% by 2030, 90% by 2050.

The targets would help restore biodiversity while combating climate change and boosting nature-based adaptation. Under the law, EU states must prepare their own national restoration plans. Prototype ecosystem restoration laws are also being developed by the international Society for Ecological Restoration.

After decades of decline and species loss, Australians deserve environment laws which genuinely protect and restore unique wildlife and ecosystems. The government’s proposed reforms have promise. But they don’t yet make restoration the national priority it must be.

Emille Boulot, Lecturer of Law, University of Tasmania and Jan McDonald, Professor of Environmental Law, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.