While sustaining friendships from afar can be challenging, they may offer unexpected benefits for environmental conservation. A new study found that these social ties can positively influence community-based conservation. While the study focused on 28 fishing villages in northern Tanzania, it has potential broader implications for global conservation efforts.
Breaking Waves: Ocean News
12/10/2024 - 09:00
Exclusive: Glenn Platt says opposition leader’s ‘lazy’ response to report undermines science
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A former CSIRO energy director has said Peter Dutton’s attempt to politicise the national science agency’s work on the likely costs of nuclear reactors is “incredibly disappointing” and “absurd”.
The opposition leader attacked the CSIRO after its latest GenCost report reaffirmed that electricity from nuclear energy in Australia would be at least 50% more expensive than power from solar and wind, backed up with storage.
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12/10/2024 - 08:42
Friends of the Earth calls on government to rein in growth of datacentres for fear they could increase fossil fuel use
Ireland has allowed itself to become a “data dumping ground” for big technology companies such as Amazon and Meta which are monopolising clean energy generation for their datacentres, campaigners claim.
They say the growth of the cloud storage sector in Ireland is so rapid it is threatening the country’s legally binding decarbonisation commitments.
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12/10/2024 - 08:19
Campaign group will pay no money to oil and gas company, but will donate £300,000 to RNLI
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Shell has agreed to settle its controversial multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Greenpeace after its campaigners boarded an oil rig last year as part of a peaceful protest.
The oil company threatened to sue Greenpeace for $2.1m (£1.6m) in damages in one of the biggest legal threats against the group after its campaigners occupied a moving oil platform off the coast of the Canary Islands for 13 days to protest against the damage to the climate caused by Shell.
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12/10/2024 - 07:00
Filter performs well in removing plastic pollution from water and Chinese researchers say it appears to be scalable
A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report suggests.
Just as importantly, the filter’s production appears to be scalable, the University of Wuhan study authors said in the paper, which was peer-reviewed and published in the journal Science Advances. That would address a problem that has stymied the use of previous microplastic filtration systems that were successful in controlled settings, but could not be scaled up.
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12/10/2024 - 06:00
Backers of blocked Utah railway proposal want justices to narrow scope of 50-year-old environmental legislation
The future of environmental safeguards protecting communities, wildlife and waterways from harm will be considered by the US supreme court on Tuesday, in a case about a proposed oil train that threatens to upend five decades of legal precedent.
The case brought by Utah’s Seven County Infrastructure Coalition and Uinta Basin Railway LLC is asking the supreme court to overturn a federal appeals court decision blocking the approval of an 88-mile railway through the Uinta Basin in north-eastern Utah. The railway’s backers want the court to narrow the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa) – the country’s landmark environmental legislation passed by Congress and signed by Richard Nixon in 1970.
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12/10/2024 - 00:00
Government should point to evidence of FSA licensing of additive, says chair of environment and climate change committee
The government must urgently reassure consumers that feed additives given to cattle to reduce methane emissions are harmless, and a vital tool in tackling the climate crisis, the chair of an influential parliamentary committee has warned.
Lady Sheehan, chair of the environment and climate change committee of the House of Lords, called on ministers to step up as a row has blown up over the prospective use of the additive Bovaer in British dairy herds supplying Arla, the dairy company.
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12/09/2024 - 16:25
New research has revealed less than a quarter of the remaining tropical rainforests around the globe can safeguard thousands of threatened species from extinction.
12/09/2024 - 16:25
Freshwater fish populations that dwell nearer the poles are outperforming their equatorial counterparts, researchers have found.
12/09/2024 - 12:42
European Commission scientific advisers say technology to offset global heating could wreak havoc on weather
Europe should ban space mirrors, cloud whitening and other untested tools being touted to reflect the sun’s rays, the European Commission’s scientific advisers have warned, but said the door should be left open for research into their development.
The scientists said the risks and benefits of solar radiation modification (SRM) – also known as solar geoengineering – were “highly uncertain”. They called for an EU-wide moratorium on using it as a way to offset global heating.
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