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Amid a series of reports detailing the poor state of the reef, Malcolm Turnbull is promising improved water quality and clean energy for the region

Malcolm Turnbull has promised that a re-elected Coalition government will protect the Great Barrier Reef by tackling its two biggest challenges – climate change and water quality.

The prime minister will pledge to set up a new $1bn reef fund with $1bn – taken from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s $10bn special account – to invest in projects that will improve water quality, reduce emissions and provide clean energy in the reef catchment region.

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Controlling our homes with the tap of an app may have hidden energy costs. Smart home image from www.shutterstock.com

Light globes that change colour with the tap of an app, coffee machines you can talk to, and ovens that know exactly how long to cook your food: our homes are getting smart. These devices, just a few examples of what is known as “the internet of things” (or IOT), have been called the “next great disruptor” and “the second digital revolution”.

One of the great hopes of this revolution is that it will help households save energy. Sensors can turn off lights and appliances when not in use, or turn the heating down when people go to bed. Smartphone apps can provide households with more insight into the energy use of their appliances.

While estimates vary widely, industry proponents suggest that emerging connected home technologies could help households reduce their energy bills by 10-25%. Such claims are largely speculative given the absence of robust “before and after” research.

Social research from Australia and the UK is revealing ways in which IOT might also increase energy demand. We have identified three “hidden” energy impacts which are rarely considered in IOT research or energy-saving predictions.

New updates and hardware

Estimates of the true energy and data costs of IOT are currently vague. In part, this is due to the variety of possible impacts within the home, within distributed information infrastructures, and in the production, transportation and disposal of goods.

For example, one estimate suggests that the data servers required to power the internet already produce as much greenhouse gas as the airline industry (around 2% of global emissions). Some predict that server electricity use will treble in the next decade.

While IOT is still a relatively small (and largely unknown) part of this growth, its share is likely to increase substantially in coming years.

As with smartphones and other computers, updates for connected devices add to growing data traffic and hence energy consumption by data centres and transmission networks.

There may also be more energy demand from the increasing need for data centres, control rooms and home networks located within people’s homes (as observed in some of our research). This hard infrastructure takes up space, runs on energy and may require air-conditioned cooling or heating to keep it operating normally.

The rapid emergence of new software for household appliances such as fridges and washing machines may encourage more frequent upgrading of these devices – as seen with televisions and computers over recent years.

Given that it also takes energy to make appliances, discarding and upgrading devices that aren’t smart enough would undermine policies intended to reduce electronic waste (e-waste) and reduce embedded energy.

New needs

Like the industrial revolution of the home, which raised cleanliness expectations and resulted in more energy and water consumption overall, devices like smart thermostats might also raise expectations for comfort, particularly if air-conditioned heating and cooling is used more often and in more rooms.

For example, home automation company Lutron promotes the creation of “pleasance” - a seductive concept promising the perfect combination of luxury, relaxation, pleasure and comfort - all enabled by smart tech.

This vision permeates a range of ambience and aesthetic connected technologies, such as mood and scene lighting, automated water fountains, smart toilets and whole-house audio-visual systems.

By themselves, such features may be relatively low-power. But they add to existing services and are likely to require a degree of always-networked, always-ready standby power consumption.

In one recent estimate, connected devices were forecast to grow globally from 10 billion in 2014 to between 30 billion and 50 billion by 2020. With potentially billions of networked devices in the not-too-distant future, globally these impacts could be considerable.

With more devices at our fingertips, we are also using them more often. Instead of watching only one television, multiple family members can use their tablets and smartphones at the same time. Even though each individual device might be super efficient and battery-powered, it may add up to more energy demand overall.

Even devices marketed to save energy might increase it. For example, some smart apps allow householders to switch their heating or cooling off remotely when they forget.

However, they also provide new opportunities to turn it on remotely. As one article suggests: “if you want the aircon roaring before you come home … use the app to turn it on before you get home”.

Having more connected devices can also create more complexity. This is opening up markets for new devices that integrate and consolidate technologies across the home.

For example, virtual helpers like Amazon’s Echo (Alexa) and the Google Home Assistant can do everything from turning on your lights to playing your favourite music. These devices are new additions for most homes, consuming small amounts of energy in their own right, but adding to the energy demands of distant data servers.

New services

New services are also emerging, such as smart versions of mattresses and fridges that monitor health and assist with sleep, diet and medication patterns.

The security industry is also rapidly evolving to provide surveillance features which allow constant home monitoring from a distance and enable lights and appliances to be switched on to deter burglars. Devices also provide live-stream video sent to smartphones and tablets so householders can check on the activities of their children and pets.

All these devices involve various forms of energy demand, which includes powering the devices themselves. They also transmit data over the internet and make greater use of streamed media content; another key component of the growing energy used by the internet.

That does not mean that IOT has nothing to offer: the devices we have described above arguably have many benefits.

But we do need to pay more attention to these hidden impacts as governments and households embrace these technologies for their promoted energy-saving benefits.

Yolande Strengers receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Energy Consumers Australia. She is affiliated with the Sociological Association of Australia (TASA).

Janine Morley and the DEMAND Centre receive funding from the RCUK Energy Programme and EDF as part of the R&D ECLEER Programme.

Larissa Nicholls receives funding from Energy Consumers Australia.

Mike Hazas receives funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Professor Andrew Blakers says Australia receives thousands of times more solar energy from the sun each year than all the fossil fuel use combined.

The 19th century glassblower’s intricate sculptures of marine life are a window on the ocean 150 years ago, says ecology professor Drew Harvell

In the 1860s, when the Bohemian glassblower Leopold Blaschka began sculpting models of underwater creatures, the Industrial Revolution, population growth and climate change had yet to take their toll on marine biodiversity. Over three decades, using techniques that still baffle experts, Leopold and his son, Rudolf, handmade about 10,000 marine sculptures, each one rendered in minute detail: impossibly delicate anemones, livid orange cuttlefish – creatures at once alien and unnervingly lifelike.

In a world before scuba diving, underwater photography or ocean life surveys, the Blaschkas’ models proved an invaluable educational resource, with universities worldwide purchasing collections of glass specimens. One of the largest, with 570 models, belongs to Cornell University in the US, where until recently it was all but forgotten, stowed in a warehouse in a state of disrepair. As a young professor in the 1990s, Dr Drew Harvell began cataloguing the collection, discovering a “time capsule” of 19th-century marine biology. “There’s value in the entire collection,” she says. “It’s what you could see 150 years ago, frozen in time.”

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Every hour 10,000 people are born. Fortunately a new crop of eco innovations will help tackle the pressures on our planet

The regularity with which I’m contacted by population worriers – people who think it’s pointless discussing green energy, climate change and ethical pensions when the elephant in the room is actually the new human in the room – is impressive. They say that the planet needs fewer people. End of.

The numbers are indeed eye catching. Today there are 7 billion humans alive (twice the number who were alive in 1965) – and each hour we add 10,000 more. By 2050, UN demographers predict, there will be at least 9 billion of us putting a strain on life-sustaining resources.

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The shipping industry burns fossil fuels on a grand scale, and scarcely even tries to reduce its emissions

A seafaring adage goes: “If the winds are shifting, adjust your sails.” But even with the disturbing winds of climate change, the shipping industry, with its combustion of fossil fuels (accounting for 2.4% of global emissions), remains outside binding emissions-reduction agreements.

There have been some eco efforts, but the Carbon War Room points out that ship owners feel little need to green their fleets, as those hiring the vessels pay the fuel costs. When the price of bunker fuel (the sludgiest oil left over from refining) drops, as it has, eco resolve disappears.

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A pioneer of marine science in Australia says this could be the end of the reef as we know it, even if we act now.

Digital tracking of creatures from tiny birds to whales offers up new data on the epic trips some species make, and their role in ecology and economics

Aristotle thought the mysterious silver eel emerged from the earth fully formed. The young Sigmund Freud could not understand how it reproduced, and modern biologists puzzled for years over whether it ever returned to the Sargasso Sea, where it was known to breed.

Last year a team of Canadian scientists found conclusive proof of that extraordinary journey. They strapped tracking devices to 38 eels and followed as they migrated more than 900 miles at a depth of nearly a mile to the Sargasso, in the Atlantic near Bermuda. This year French researchers used geolocators to watch them descending European rivers and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, heading for the same spot.

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Change in government’s energy policy blamed for job losses just as solar power eclipses coal in electricity generation

The solar power industry says it has seen the loss of more than half its 35,000 jobs due to recent changes in government energy policy, just at a time when solar power has eclipsed coal as a major generator of Britain’s electricity.

Experts believe ministers had cut subsidies too far and too fast, praising the “seismic”, record-breaking growth of solar in recent years.

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Among elite mountain climbers, summiting Everest sans oxygen has become the latest challenge in an already grueling journey

Another climbing season has finished on Mount Everest, with the inevitable tales of tragedy and triumph.

Since 2000, an average of seven people a year have died on Everest. The past two years were especially grim: 19 people were killed by an earthquake-triggered avalanche in 2015, and 16 died in 2014.

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A plane powered only by the sun travels to New York City for a photoshoot at the Statue of Liberty, ahead of crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

The UK spends more than £2bn on cut flowers per year, but around 90% are imported. Now a new breed of growers are determined to grab more of that market, by persuading the public that local and seasonal are the ways to go

Georgie Newbery sometimes has to dodge a hunting barn owl when she rises at 5am to harvest flowers on her seven-acre plot near Wincanton in Somerset. Picking sweet rocket, foxgloves and cornflowers as dawn light streaks over the fields may sound idyllic, but grabbing a cup of tea on a late-May afternoon after despatching her exclusively British-grown posies and bouquets, Newbery laughs at the thought. “If you imagine it’s all standing around in a flower garden with a Roberts radio and a robin singing, you couldn’t be more wrong,” she says, possibly a little tartly.

Related: Is crowdfunding the future of horticulture?

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Vehicles are the source of a third of the air pollution in the Chinese capital, which restricts their use during episodes of heavy smog. Electric cars, buses, scooters and bicycles offer an alternative, cleaner form of transport

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South Uist The plant’s uses are many, but the sight of a sunlit field full of daisies is perhaps what we should value most

Daisies are one of our best known and most widely distributed wildflowers, and maybe this is why we sometimes pass them by with barely a second glance. This morning, though, they have stopped me in my tracks and brought a smile to my face.

They line the edge of the path, spangle the open grassland, and have so thoroughly covered one fenced pasture that almost all signs of grass have vanished beneath a blanket of white. In the warm sunshine each and every one turns a bright and open face skywards, a response that gave them their name “day’s eye”.

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Batteries, microgrids, and the possibility of self-sufficiency are now real options for individual households, and in some cases, whole towns.

A group of 13 Nobel prize-winning scientists warn leaving the EU poses a "key risk" to British science.

Australia's migratory shorebirds have just flown 5,000 kilometres northward to stopover in the Yellow Sea. What will they find when they arrive?

Comedian says she put out an announcement because of the need to protect oceans and the reef, and cannot understand what the fuss is all about

The US talkshow queen Ellen DeGeneres is bewildered her call to protect the Great Barrier Reef has sparked a backlash in Australia.

DeGeneres made headlines earlier in the week with the release of a video public service announcement as part of the Remember the Reef campaign.

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Astronaut Tim Peake is recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

From satellites giving information about soil quality to robotic fruit monitoring and water quality sensors for oysters - agricultural technology is being taken up at a rapid rate among Australia's farmers.