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Conservationists hope remediating landowners’ sunken gullies could lead to a significant improvement in reef water quality

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Strathalbyn station is cattle country, about 34,000 hectares of north Queensland grazing land, and the site of a pilot program that has demonstrated the potential to drastically improve water quality flowing towards the Great Barrier Reef.

At Strathalbyn, which is more than 200km from the coast, bulldozers and graders work to remediate sunken gullies where sediment flows into the Burdekin river catchment. It looks more like a construction site than an environmental program.

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Insects are the backbone of a healthy global ecosystem – but their numbers are facing catastrophic decline due to climate change. So, what can you do to help?

Already beset by degraded landscapes and a toxic environment, insects are going to suffer a catastrophic decline in numbers unless climate change is controlled, according to new research from the University of East Anglia. This is on top of the alarming collapse reported in Germany, where 75% of the flying insect biomass has vanished from protected areas in less than 30 years.

Insects are the backbone of a healthy ecosystem and the consequences of their absence will be global. Is there anything we can do other than despair? Insects will need stepping stones to move around the country as the climate changes. Here are some ways you can help.

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Most of us feel the itch of the primitive from time to time—to run without shoes, try a paleo diet, or just ditch the smartphone. The primitivist ideal exerts a seductive pull in tech-obsessed contemporary western society, but is the ideal based on a highly questionable set of philosophical assumptions?

Insect Armageddon. Is it happening...or not?

UK’s ‘reputation could suffer if environmental protections are weakened after leaving EU’

The United Nations has warned the government that Britain’s reputation is at risk over plans that would significantly weaken protections for the environment after Brexit.

In a stern intervention, Erik Solheim, executive director of the UN’s environment programme, called on the environment secretary Michael Gove to honour his promise to deliver a “green Brexit”, ensuring the environment would not suffer from Britain’s EU departure.

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What is it about AI that unnerves us? Alan Finkel suspects it’s a combination of things.

How a remote Australian town found itself at the vanguard of a global revolution.

Report finds Narrabri has “enormous potential” for renewables, with scope for between 1GW and 4.5GW of large-scale solar and wind, that would create 500-2,600 permanent local jobs.

Automaker behind world's best selling EV unveils Nissan Energy Solar – a home solar, storage, smart control package – including 2nd-hand EV batteries.

Easton Hornstocks, Northamptonshire: A thousand years ago, mastiffs were allowed here if their front claws had been removed. Now it’s a national nature reserve, all dogs are banned

The dawn light astonishes but mostly it’s the smell: sharp, delicate, wild garlic, the last of the bluebells, dewy grass. Dappled light is spilled up the trees and on the ground, and swirls, as the leaves casting it sway, like reflections off water. Silver birch limbs, knotted with birch polypore fungus, lie pale on beds of fat-bladed grass. I find an ornate snail on one. Falling leaf litter. Birdsong. This place quietly seethes with life.

I’ve never needed a permit to go for a walk in England before. Easton Hornstocks is an old wood of lime and ash trees close to my home. It’s a national nature reserve, and I had to ask for access. It was easy. Free. I had to carry the permit. No bikes; fine, I don’t own one. No dogs; ditto. But I didn’t know how I felt about the idea. Rankled by the restriction? Or thankful for its sense of privilege?

Easton is a village, but Hornstocks is an unfamiliar word, certainly for a wood. There are other odd suffixes to woodland reserves in these parts: Everden Stubbs, Castor Hanglands, Bedford Purlieus. Archaic generics that had fallen obscure in the way that chase or heath hadn’t, maybe. One, purlieu, is a relic of the Forest Law, meaning an agricultural area on the edge of the trees.

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Scientists strap tiny bum-bags onto geckos in the middle of the night on an outback cattle station. They are tracking how cattle grazing impacts tiny lizards. PLUS BONUS #FieldWorkFail

Vanessa Pirotta will represent Australia at the Famelab final in Cheltenham.

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

The Netherlands said it will shut two of its coal power plants in 2024 and the other three before 2030 unless they switch fuels, adding further pressure to big-emitting generators ahead of the implementation of a planned domestic carbon floor price for power from 2020.

Several Californian agencies are discussing raising the carbon reduction target for natural and working lands (NWLs) in the state in order to meet the state’s 2030 GHG targets, which the departments laid out at a workshop on Friday.

Family sells off a vintage machinery collection; go fly fishing in Tasmania; indigenous language comes alive at Taree High; and a local shearing clothing brand turns 30.

EU carbon recovered from a mid-afternoon sell-off on Friday, with prices ending slightly lower in choppy trade after a bullish auction to hold above €15 for a 4.2% weekly rise.

The Senate version of a bill that would implement a carbon tax and rebate programme in New York was defeated in a legislative committee this week, the second such carbon pricing initiative to fall on the US east coast this week.

Readers respond for and against George Monbiot, including Tony Juniper of WWF

The natural world is an incredible wonder that inspires us all, but despite our love of wildlife and wild places, there is no doubt that it is facing catastrophic decline, here and abroad. George Monbiot (The UK government wants to put a price on nature – but that will destroy it, 15 May) suggests that in efforts to save the natural world there are grave dangers in putting a “price on nature”.

Yet one reason we are failing to do what is necessary is because nature is still seen as “nice to have”, rather than essential in sustaining our health, wealth and security. Many companies, economists and governments regard environmental destruction as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of economic growth – the “price of progress”. If we don’t change this mindset, then there will be little prospect for the revolution in ideas that is needed to avoid a mass extinction event and disastrous climatic changes. 

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Renewably generated hydrogen could supply energy storage at scales many times beyond which even the largest battery systems could attain, writes Mike Koefman; while John Ellis says it’s time for joined-up thinking on our future energy strategy

There is truth in Professor Underwood’s assertion (Letters, 16 May) that nothing can surpass the “round trip” efficiency of lithium-ion batteries from, for example, solar input to final user’s output. But in focusing on this undoubted advantage he omits the overriding issue of energy storage at very much larger scales. It is this concern which has driven the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (not in the “gas industry’s pocket”, by the way) to take a serious look at hydrogen, which used to be a substantial component of our former “town gas”, derived rather filthily from coal, but which can now can be derived very cleanly from solar and wind power, directed through the water-splitting magic of modern electrolytic machinery. Such renewably generated hydrogen could supply energy storage at scales many times beyond which even the largest battery systems could attain, and could do so both in the UK and in diverse economies throughout the world. Batteries will always be needed for specific uses, but in order to displace the carbon-laden fossil fuels which now imperil climate, ocean and the whole biosphere something rather different must be adopted – something storable at all scales, transmissible, fully functional as a fuel, and climate-neutral. Only hydrogen fills this particular bill.
Mike Koefman
Director, Planet Hydrogen, Manchester

• Professor Underwood correctly asserts that the efficiency of a Li-ion and heat pump system in terms of heat generation is far better than electrolysing water to make hydrogen. But the purpose of storing hydrogen was, it seems, to smooth out the supply of electricity from renewables in dead periods, not generate heat per se. Electricity generation is usually provided by turbines which are driven by steam at high temperatures. I may be wrong, but I thought heat pumps did not generally reach much above 80C and would not be suitable for electricity generation.

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