The Conversation

Australia is lagging far behind other rich countries in dealing with the growing mountain of “e-waste” from discarded electrical and electronic products.

My research, carried out with my student Ashleigh Morris, shows that in comparison with leading nations like Japan and Switzerland, Australia’s management of e-waste is ineffective and poorly implemented. This means that precious metals are not being recycled and hazardous materials are going into landfill instead of being properly dealt with.

E-waste is growing in Australia. Fewer than 1% of televisions and around 10% of computers and laptops are recycled, while the consumer-driven culture and planned obsolescence of many electronic products have resulted in millions of tonnes of e-waste entering the waste stream.

Computers, televisions, smartphones, washing machines, air-conditioners, freezers, hairdryers, electric toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners – the list is huge.

Lots of e-waste contains valuable (and finite) metals such as gold, indium and palladium, as well as hazardous ones like lead, arsenic and mercury. Sending it to landfill is not just a threat to the environment – it’s also a significant waste of valuable resources.

Despite this, many Australians still throw their e-waste into their general waste wheelie bin. Their local council then takes the bin’s contents to landfill.

Those who do make an effort to recycle their e-waste face the challenge of not knowing which products can be recycled and where. The services on offer vary greatly between different local governments, and not everyone is within reach of a drop-off point.

Contrast that with Switzerland, which recycles 16 times more e-waste per person than Australia, recouping 75% of recoverable material. Recycling and recovery targets have been subject to significant debate in Australia, yet the Swiss system doesn’t have targets.

Recycling targets are pointless without measures to ensure that e-waste is properly handled and audited. Both Switzerland and Japan (another nation that performs impressively on e-waste) have multiple levels of independent controls to ensure recycling companies maintain high environmental and quality standards, and to check for theft or “free-riding” – companies that refuse to comply with recycling regulations.

If we want Australian households and businesses to take e-waste seriously, we first have to put some serious systems in place to handle the problem.

Fixing the problem

My research has identified five key issues faced by the Australian system:

• recycling laws don’t cover the full scope of e-waste

• poor services and public engagement

• outdated recycling and recovery targets

• weak auditing and compliance measures

• neglect of key stakeholders such as local governments.

Local governments are crucial here: they manage the most e-waste and have the closest and most influential relationship with the public when it comes to recycling. But they are neglected in the system, receiving no direct funding for the collection, recycling, and recovery of e-waste.

Meanwhile, there is no responsibility on consumers to recycle their e-waste. This reinforces the “out of sight, out of mind” attitude that many Australians have to their rubbish.

Another key problem is that recycling legislation does not even mention many types of e-waste. Televisions and computers have a dedicated national recycling collection scheme, but millions of other items simply end up in landfill or are shipped illegally to developing countries.

Hazardous materials are some of the most attractive items to ship illegally, because they tend to have the highest recycling costs. This problem threatens to undermine Australia’s obligations under the Basel Convention, which outlaws the unauthorised international shipping of hazardous waste.

If Australia is to be effective in managing e-waste, it needs to expand its National Waste Policy to include the recovery and recycling of a much wider range of electrical products. It needs better compliance and auditing. Key players such as local governments must be given the power to manage e-waste much more responsibly.

That would be a good start. Of course, to get right to the heart of the issue, Australia ultimately needs to move away from the linear “take, make, dispose” economic model, and embrace the circular economy.

As you finish reading this article on your phone, tablet or laptop, have a look at it and ask yourself where it will be in a few years' time. Let’s hope it’s not in your local landfill.

This article was co-written by Ashleigh Morris, an honours student in environmental management at UNSW Australia.

Graciela Metternicht receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the NSW Environmental Trust

Since the 1960s, environmentalism in Australia has largely focused on defending "wilderness". yophotography/flickr, CC BY-SA

This is part of our Reimagining New South Wales (NSW) series. For this series, vice-chancellors in NSW asked a select group of early and mid-career researchers to envisage new ways to tackle old problems and identify emerging opportunities across the state.

NSW finds itself contemplating life after the mining boom.

It’s a moment of significant challenge but also an opportunity to reflect on the environmental impact of the industry at the heart of Australia’s recent economic growth – and how we can change our relationship with the land for the better.

We envisage a NSW where necessary industrial innovation is coordinated in ways that are environmentally sustainable and socially just. Critical here will be the state’s capacity to drive knowledge-led and low-carbon innovation.

But we also need to rethink the way humans relate to the environment.

The legacies of past mining enterprises and the impacts of mining waste will likely be felt for many years to come. The NSW landscape is now pockmarked by the environmental traces of the mining boom. Its social and economic effects in local communities live on – and that’s before we even get to the broader global impacts of the carbon emission from coal mines.

What values might guide our future relationship with the NSW environment?

Beyond ‘wilderness’

Since the 1960s, environmentalism in Australia has largely focused on defending “wilderness”. Conceptualising nature as a pristine place devoid of humans has underpinned the establishment of many protected areas in NSW and around the world.

While this worldview is being challenged in academia, the notion that we’ve done our bit to protect the environment and biodiversity by declaring a protected area persists in the political realm. And too often areas are declared protected without recognition of, or agreement by, the Aboriginal custodians of the land.

However, protected areas in themselves are not stemming the destruction of biodiversity, and cutting humans out of the picture altogether is not realistic nor helpful.

It is also important to remember that the majority of protected areas are marginal or “leftover areas” that were simply too hard to farm, mine or log. So congratulating ourselves on conserving one chunk of land, while intensively farming or developing another piece of land in environmentally unsustainable ways is not only unhelpful – it’s hypocritical.

A fresh approach

Instead of clinging to an old-fashioned view of “wilderness”, we should recognise that areas used intensively by humans can support significant biodiversity. We can also improve the design of these places to allow humans to better connect with their environment.

Recent work is re-valuating cities as sites of significant biodiversity. For example, studies on bee biodiversity suggest that cities may support more pollinators than was once thought.

And there is growing interest in the possibilities of urban agriculture as a source of local food production. The greening of cities brings with it huge possibilities: increased connection with nature, mental and physical health benefits and opportunities for engagement with food production.

At the same time, a move toward more sustainable agricultural practices can produce impressive yields while providing habitat for plants and animals. Production and biodiversity need to be treated in tandem in policy-making and practice, rather than presented as a binary choice.

Urban planning agencies could help by boosting the focus on creating green spaces that allow for humans to connect with nature in urban and rural environments – prioritising parks, green spaces and food production grounds close to homes and other buildings.

We could also consider a fresh approach to environmental impact assessments. Traditionally, these are written by consultants funded by developers; in the future, we could consider funding and even peer reviewing such assessments independently.

Inclusive and creative participation

We will need fresh ways to boost public participation in planning for the way humans relate to their environment.

After Hurricane Sandy hit the US in 2012, US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Rebuild By Design coalition in Northeast United States forged a collaboration between designers, researchers, community members, and government officials.

Through a series of design competitions, participants helped rebuild disaster-struck areas in ways that best suited their needs and relationships with local environments.

Sydney is collaborating with other global cities in building urban resilience, but more could be done to foster social inclusion and community participation – particularly Indigenous participation – in shaping our environments. We need to include people in the early design stages of urban planning, rather than just asking for feedback on preconceived proposals.

It won’t always be easy, but we envisage a future NSW where community participation is regarded as a vital asset rather than a problem to be overcome.

Further reading:

Reimagining NSW: how the care economy could help unclog our cities

Reimagining NSW: four ways to boost community well-being and why it matters

Reimagining NSW: how good governance strengthens democracy

Pascal Scherrer chairs the Northern Rivers Region National Parks Advisory Committee and is a member of IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.

Emily O'Gorman receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She works for Macquarie University.

Hannah Power has received funding from the NSW State Government under the NSW State Emergency Management Program Scheme.

Matthew Kearnes receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Sandie Suchet-Pearson receives funding from the ARC.

Tanya Latty receives funding the Branco Weiss Society in Science fellowship, the Australian Research Council, Commonwealth of Australia and the City of Sydney. She participates in the Australian Pollinator Think Tank.

How can we get Australian electricity heading down the right road? CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The past three weeks have seen considerable discussion of Australia’s wholesale electricity market, driven largely by severe price spikes in South Australia. Hugh Saddler, writing last week on The Conversation, and the Climate Council, in a report released yesterday, have each done a good job of busting the myth that this is all because of SA’s relatively large share of wind energy.

After outlining the growing lack of competitiveness in the SA electricity sector, Saddler called for “a fundamental rethink" of the National Electricity Market (NEM). What would this involve?

Wholesale prices

Wholesale electricity prices are determined for each half hour, and in the NEM are capped at A$14,000 per megawatt hour. Prices very rarely hit these stratospheric levels and, in any event, the wholesale price spikes do not directly or immediately filter down to households and other small consumers. However, industrial customers are beginning to complain about the strain.

One factor that seems largely to have escaped comment is that temporary high prices are a deliberate design feature of our electricity market. Occasional price spikes are precisely how the market attracts new investment, because in theory high prices represent tightening supply and therefore signal a gap in the market for new generators.

Certainly, this isn’t the only time that prices have spiked. In response to high prices in South Australia in 2008 (before most of the state’s wind farms were built), industrial consumers tried unsuccessfully to introduce rules preventing certain generators putting high price bids into the market. More recently, Queensland saw high prices in the summer of 2014-15, as did Tasmania earlier this year.

A market in transition

But while price spikes are neither unprecedented nor unexpected, there are nevertheless changes afoot in the electricity sector. The falling cost of renewable energy, and policies such as the federal Renewable Energy Target (and similar state and territory schemes), are encouraging new entrants into the market.

With one of the most emissions-intensive electricity sectors in the world and an ageing fleet of coal-fired power stations, traditional generators are spending increasing amounts on maintenance, upgrades and closures.

Wind and large-scale solar, meanwhile, are now the cheapest new-build generation technologies. This promises to turn the energy market on its head.

UNSW research on the implications of moving to 100% renewables has shown that to do so we will eventually need to ditch the idea of “baseload generation” (as delivered by 20th-century thermal power stations) in favour of “peaking generation” that is more responsive to changes in supply.

This might mean using a mixture of renewables such as solar and wind, backed up by gas-fired power stations that can be rapidly switched on and off, as well as “dispatchable” energy solutions such as storage, bioenergy and concentrating solar thermal.

As seen in the chart below, sourced from the UNSW report, with enough rapid-response options built into the system, traditional baseload generators would not be needed at all.

Obviously, moving seamlessly to this new approach will require changes to the way the market is run. One option might be to change the pricing window from 30 minutes to five minutes, which could entice a wider range of participants into the market.

Other fundamental changes also need to be made. Three deserve particular consideration:

• incentivising dispatchable energy solutions to enter the market;

• increasing access to markets for decentralised energy; and

• increasing the alignment between energy and environmental considerations.

Dispatchable energy

Besides “traditional” renewables such as wind and solar farms, renewable energy schemes could specifically tender for “dispatchable” solutions such as demand management, concentrated solar thermal, sustainable bioenergy or storage. The SA government last week announced plans to do just this, by targeting these solutions for 25% of the government’s energy use.

If this is to happen more broadly, it should be done in alignment with the outcomes of the reviews that the Australian Energy Market Commission and the Australian Market Operator are undertaking on the security of the market.

Decentralised energy

One of the most exciting areas of investment in the NEM over the past decade has been the hundreds of thousands of homes installing their own solar systems. Technologies such as batteries, smart homes and improved load management mean that individual consumers are increasingly willing and able to get involved with the energy market, rather than just being consumers.

Yet the link to wholesale electricity markets is currently just as tenuous for a small generator as it is for a small consumer. Any market reform must therefore ensure that groupings of such small-scale producers can supply the market’s needs in a meaningful way.

For inspiration we can look to New York state, which is designing an energy market geared towards decentralised options such as solar panels. To encourage decentralised systems, New York is embarking on the Reforming Energy Vision plan to lower the financial and environmental costs of power and make the market more resilient.

Environment and energy

Energy and environment policies have been too separate for too long, which is why the appointment of a single federal environment and energy minister is a welcome move.

However, the National Electricity Objective, which forms the basis of energy policy decisions, does not include an environmental component. It emphasises “price, quality, safety, reliability and security”, but not emissions. This means that regulators cannot consider the climate or environmental implications of their decisions.

Unless the objective is amended, we are likely to see perverse outcomes of energy decisions. One previous example was the four-year delay in introducing the Demand Management Incentive Scheme, despite the fact that it is likely to save money and cut carbon emissions.

With Australia’s electricity at a technological crossroads, it is important that we make sure we are going in the right direction.

Alex Fattal is affiliated with the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures which undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO, community and corporate clients.

The UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO, community and corporate clients. Nicky Ison is also a Founding Director of the Community Power Agency, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to growing the community energy sector in Australia.

The Ord River was targeted for agricultural expansion in the 20th century. isthatdaves/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

In May, the Northern Territory government granted a major water licence for a cattle station near Pine Creek, west of Kakadu National Park, to use almost 14 million litres of water a year to irrigate crops.

In response, the Northern Land Council, which represents Aboriginal landholders, called for a moratorium on all further water allocations in the Territory, claiming the government had not fully consulted the community about the licence.

As we document in a new paper, this kind of debate has been happening ever since the colonisation of northern Australia, often on the premise that the north’s water resources are “wasted” without more economic development and subsequent increases in settler populations.

Since the early 20th century, huge amounts of public money have been invested in large-scale water infrastructure projects in northern Australia, such as the Ord River Scheme.

But the viability of this program has been widely critiqued on economic grounds since the mid-1950s. Prominent agricultural economist Bruce Davidson coined the phrase “the Northern Myth” to describe the widely held, but misplaced, belief in the north’s capacity to accommodate vastly expanded agriculture and irrigation because of its abundant water and land.

These developments also largely occurred without consulting Aboriginal people. Water was allocated to other users without taking account of traditional owners' longstanding cultural and economic practices with regard to land and water, stretching back thousands of years.

A colonial history of exclusion

After Britain acquired sovereignty of Australia, water use was regulated according to English riparian rights. Under this law, legal rights to use water, for example for farming, were given to whoever owned the land where rivers flowed. The link between water use and landholding remained in place, in one form or another, until the late 20th century.

This meant that Indigenous Australians, whose traditional ownership of land (native title) was only recognised by the Australian High Court in 1992, were largely denied legal rights to water.

Around the same time that native title was recognised, reforms (known as the National Water Initiative) were being pursued to increase the environmental sustainability of the Murray Darling Basin.

Unfortunately, however, these reforms largely failed to make substantive change in Indigenous water rights or to engage Indigenous people effectively. Today, Indigenous Australians have land rights and/or native title rights and interests over some 30% of the Australian continent, but own only 0.01% of water entitlements.

Problems continuing

In June last year the Commonwealth government released the latest version of its plans, the White Paper on Developing Northern Australia, which calls for yet more significant expansion of irrigation. Strong concerns have been expressed about the plan’s failure to incorporate environmental water reserves.

Aboriginal rights and interests still do not seem to be adequately catered for. In a speech at the Garma Festival, Northern Land Council chief executive Joe Morrison claimed Aboriginal people had again been largely absent from the process, saying:

Aboriginal people have an essential stake in the future of northern Australia … Aboriginal people must be front and centre in planning processes for the north. This is a fundamental gap in the national discourse about northern development … I’m not one to despair, but I do wonder when the day will come that we have a seat at the planning table.

Aboriginal people are a significant demographic group in northern Australia, with extensive landholdings. In the Northern Territory, for example, Aboriginal people represent more than 25% of the population and own more than 50% of the land. Any major reform proposal that does not adequately include Aboriginal people risks its own legitimacy.

To give Aboriginal people fair representation in northern water development, they must be accorded a fair share of the water. At the turn of the century, the Northern Territory government developed promising proposals to include “strategic indigenous reserves” in northern water resource plans. However, the policy was discontinued after a change of government in 2013.

Experience recovering environmental water in the Murray-Darling Basin has taught us that it is much easier to set aside a share of water while resources are still plentiful than embark on a process of buyback.

By and large, Aboriginal people recognise the case for economic development, not least because of the employment opportunities it creates for their own communities. But they also know the importance of protecting country, particularly sacred sites.

This is not to say that Indigenous water rights must be purely for cultural purposes. On the contrary, Indigenous people deserve commercial water rights too, especially given that they have been sidelined from agricultural expansion for so long.

Righting that historical wrong will mean giving Aboriginal people the same water rights that have been given to non-Indigenous users ever since colonisation.

Liz Macpherson has received funding from the University of Melbourne (including the Human Rights Scholarship) and International Bar Association Section on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law. All views expressed in this article, alongside those of her coauthors, are her own.

Lee Godden was the Australian Law Reform Commissioner in charge of the Inquiry into the Native Title Act 1993 between 2013 and 2015. She was also recently a Chief Investigator on the Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements (ATNS) Project, which was partnered by the Australian Research Council, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Australian National University, Griffith University and the University of Melbourne. It received funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Rio Tinto, Santos and Woodside.

Lily O'Neill was previously a PhD student with the Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements (ATNS) Project. The ATNS Project is a project partnered by the Australian Research Council, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Australian National University, Griffith University and the University of Melbourne. It receives funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Rio Tinto, Santos and Woodside.

Erin O'Donnell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Lichen is made up of two types of fungus and an algae, that's one more species than previously thought. wikimedia

There is big news in the world of lichens. These slow growing organisms have long been known to be a collaboration between a fungus and a photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria. A recent publication in Science may have changed all that.

Researchers have discovered another fungus living in the tissues of lichens. Unlike the dominant fungal type, also known as Ascomycetes, the new fungus is a Basidiomycete that exists as single cells, more closely related to yeast. A survey has found these new fungal cells in 52 genera of lichens, raising the prospect of a previously undetected third partner in the ancient symbiosis.

Interestingly, despite many attempts, it has never been possible to synthesise lichen in the laboratory by combining the two known partners, and now we might know why. Lichenologists have always recognised a mycobiont (fungal partner) and a photobiont (the photosynthetic organism that makes food) and now we may have to find a word for the new fungal component.

Toby Spribille of the University of Graz in Austria and his colleagues were trying to understand why two species of lichen that were made up of the same species of mycobiont and photobiont were differently coloured and contained varying levels of a toxin known as vulpinic acid.

Using an approach that examined the messenger RNAs produced by the organism, they tried to find the genes that produced the toxin, but neither the mycobiont or the photobiont had genes that matched the transcript. By broadening their search to include other types of fungi, they found genes belonging to a rare fungus called a Cystobasidiomycete.

Unable to see the cells responsible for this unusual finding, they used fluorescent in situ hybridisation (FISH) to light up cells containing genes for the algae, the ascomycete and the cystobasidiomycete. By linking different colours to each organism, they produced videos showing the distribution of each cell type. The new fungus existed as single cells inside the cortex, where it may play a structural role as well as providing chemical defence.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this discovery. Spribille was quoted in the New York Times as saying that lichens are as diverse as vertebrates. And yet we did not know until now that the symbiosis that allows lichens to exist has more than two partners.

The authors have described a new order of fungi called the Cyphobasidiales. It is not everyday that scientists are able to add new taxa at such a high level. It is like discovering the Primates. By creating a phylogenomic tree and applying a molecular clock, they found that this group has been around for 200 million years, probably since the beginning of lichens.

The 52 genera that have been examined thus far are widespread (on six continents) but are still a small portion of lichens, so there may be more to discover. Interestingly, the continent that is not included is Australia. Perhaps we do not have enough lichenologists to provide samples to the international community. It is possible that some lichens do not contain this new order of fungi. What is not in doubt is that now scientists will be looking at lichens more closely.

Lichens grow very slowly. Individuals can be hundreds or even thousands of years old. Now it seems that our knowledge of this ancient symbiosis has also grown slowly, as it has taken 150 years to find the third partner.

Given the sophisticated techniques required to untangle this conundrum, I suppose it was not possible to know about the silent partner, the yeast in the mix, until now. But it certainly gives rise to some exciting science.

Australians are often taken aback to discover that we import about 75% of the seafood we consume. Yes, that’s right – in a nation girt by sea that vaunts its love of a shrimp on the barbie, three-quarters of our fish and shellfish comes from overseas.

Wander over to your local supermarket and look at the seafood on offer. Barramundi, the iconic Australian fish, is usually there but it is typically from Vietnam, having been farmed and frozen. The processed products – crumbed prawns or garlic prawns – are also usually from Asia, and bright yellow-dyed smoked cod is seemingly always from South Africa.

Then there are the truly “glocal” (local-global) items, such as crumbed products made using Australian fish that has been sent to Thailand for processing and then shipped back again. This type of practice is set to become more common, as the family-owned Australian seafood company Kailis Bros this year sold 90% of its seafood processing, wholesale and export business to a Chinese conglomerate.

Eating ‘glocal’?

As anyone who has a passing acquaintance with contemporary food politics knows, it’s all about eating local, seasonal, and sustainable produce. As previous writers on The Conversation have pointed out, food choices have become loaded with moralism, which can make choosing the “right” food somewhat daunting.

Our research – including Elspeth’s forthcoming book, Eating the Ocean, and Kate’s soon-to-be-submitted PhD thesis on sustainable tuna – shows these problems become even trickier when it comes to fish.

Beyond the obvious problem of trying to eat local when talking about food that comes from a vast ocean, there is the added problem of the way in which fishing has developed as a globalised industry.

Over the past 20 years the ownership of fishing boats in the Global North (including Australia) has shrunk to a fraction of what it was. This has been part of a necessary move to regulate international fishing practices and ensure all countries have access to a fair share.

But the quotas introduced in Iceland, Canada, and Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s have also had the effect of concentrating ownership of the fishing industry in relatively few hands. In South Australia, for example, the number of licensed bluefin tuna fishers went from several hundred to fewer than 30.

Meanwhile, the downturn in inshore fishing because of overfishing, and the need to cover the costs of increasingly sophisticated technology to track fish, has led to ever-larger boats that can work farther from shore.

Simply put, this means you can no longer go down to the dock and “look the fisherman in the eye” as the US writer Michael Pollan has urged us to do for land-based farming. Long fishing trips means that fish have to be caught in vast numbers, flash-frozen while still at sea, then landed and immediately transferred to huge logistical operations covering hundreds or thousands of kilometres.

There are other reasons why Australia, despite having the world’s third-largest Exclusive Economic Zone, consumes so much imported fish. Our seas evidently suffer from low productivity and scarce nutrients. But no matter: the government reassures us that high seafood imports are common in wealthy nations.

One answer might be to catch your own, but be careful where you try, especially in urban areas. UNSW Australia’s Emma Johnston has described how Sydney’s stormwater overflows, combined with a history of industrial dumping, have rendered its harbour a toxic slurry – so it’s better not to eat any fish caught under the bridge.

Fish going in all directions

The flow of fish goes both ways, or rather multiple ways. Australia exports high-value fish and seafood around the world. Our lobsters and abalone are loved in China, while nearly all of South Australia’s bluefin tuna goes to Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market.

The tuna barons in Port Lincoln, SA, a town that used to boast Australia’s highest number of millionaires per capita, have become experts in international currency. Their fish, fattened in pens and inspected by visiting connoisseur Japanese investors, are priced in yen – and the farmers listen carefully to the visitors' advice, knowing that a good product is worth even more yen.

Back in the supermarket, there’s evidence that consumers are willing to spend time thinking about tuna too – at least, if Kate’s collection of dozens of eco-labelled tuna cans is any guide. Unlike the Japanese market, where the quality of the flesh is paramount, the supermarket labels suggest ecological sustainability is the key consideration. But sustainability goes deeper than just the fish itself; we rarely think about how sustainable the can is, nor about how the metal was mined, nor about the transport costs for the fish or packaging.

Does it matter that we eat so much of other nations' fish, while sending our most prized delicacies to foreign buyers? The answers vary: some people worry about reports of illegal fishing practices and pollution in Southeast Asia, where some fish are still caught using cyanide.

Equally chilling are the reports of “sea-slaves” – indentured labourers from Cambodia and Myanmar who are forced to work in the Thai shrimp trade.

On the other hand, would we want to stop our fishers, who by and large work in a highly regulated, sustainable enterprise, from getting top dollar for their produce? It is a tough call, and an even tougher set of complex relations.

What’s certain is that guilt-tripping consumers into buying local doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the ethics of eating the ocean.

Prof Elspeth Probyn receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Kate Johnston does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

A living coucal from South Africa, whose huge prehistoric relatives lived on the Nullarbor. Pascal Bernadin, CC BY-NC-ND

Western Australia’s Nullarbor Plain may be a vast treeless expanse today, but hundreds of thousands of years ago it was home to an array of weird and wonderful species, including two newly discovered extinct “giant cuckoos”.

The two species belonged to a group of birds called coucals, which are part of the cuckoo family. The larger of the extinct species would have stood more than half a metre tall and, judging by its bones, probably couldn’t fly.

The discovery, which we made during a 2014 dig at the Thylacoleo Caves, is not the first bizarre species found beneath the Nullarbor. Over the past decade, excavations of these caves have revealed thousands of exceptionally well-preserved fossils. Some are the remains of living species, others are of extinct species already known to science, while others have been totally new discoveries.

One surprise was finding two new species of tree-kangaroo. It takes a leap of imagination to envision today’s flat, treeless Nullarbor Plain covered in trees with large marsupials clambering about overhead. Clearly the region’s climate and conditions have undergone huge shifts – a fact underlined by the latest fossil finds.

The Nullarbor Plain today: not a tree or giant cuckoo in sight. Elen Shute Fossils found, species lost

Of the two new bird species we discovered, the smaller, Centropus bairdi, was similar in size to the largest living coucals from Melanesia, which weigh 700g or more. However, its exceptionally weak wing muscles imply that Centropus bairdi was flightless. We excavated its bones from cave sediments that are more than than 780,000 years old.

The larger species, Centropus maximus, is the largest cuckoo known anywhere in the world. It had long, powerful legs, and probably weighed well over 1kg, perhaps even topping 2kg.

Cavers first found one femur shallowly buried in a rock pile. Returning for more bones the following day, they uncovered two coucal skeletons side by side, where they presumably had lain undisturbed since the birds fell into the cave together hundreds of thousands of years before.

Thunder thighs: The femur of a modern Pheasant Coucal (left) looks puny next to the bones of the extinct Nullarbor species Centropus bairdi (middle) and Centropus maximus (right). Elen Shute

The two new species join another known extinct coucal, Centropus colossus, which was discovered in a South Australian cave 30 years ago, and was just a little smaller than Centropus maximus.

In their day, these two largest coucals would have been among Australia’s heaviest land-hunting birds. Today, the only living bird predators that can match them are the Wedge-tailed Eagle, Black-breasted Buzzard, White-bellied Sea-eagle and Powerful Owl.

All three coucals lived during the Pleistocene epoch, 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago. This was a time of ecological upheaval around the world. Successive ice ages caused sea levels to rise and fall, and temperatures and rainfall to fluctuate.

Many Pleistocene animals worldwide, particularly the large ones, went extinct as a result of climatic fluctuations, human impacts, or a combination of both.

We don’t know when these coucals went extinct, or what killed them, but this is one group where we can probably discount human hunting, as today’s coucals are reported to taste and smell appalling. It seems more likely that they died out when their habitat changed.

Birds of paradox

Living coucals are predatory, primarily ground-dwelling, and are known for their weak and graceless flight. They eat large invertebrates and small vertebrates, especially frogs. Perhaps the extinct ones tucked into the frogs that we now know lived on the Nullarbor too.

Coucals aren’t what we think of as typical cuckoos, which are best known for sneaking their eggs into the nests of other birds. Coucals (and many other members of the cuckoo family) build nests and raise their own young.

Even more unusually, female coucals are larger than males, and males do most or all of the work to raise the brood, a trait they share with only 5% of the world’s bird species.

The 26 living species of coucal span Africa, Madagascar, Asia, New Guinea, and northern Australia. For birds that have trouble staying airborne, they have managed to get around remarkably well.

Australia’s only living species, the Pheasant Coucal, is found only in the continent’s north and east. Without the fossil discoveries, we would never have guessed that their relatives once lived thousands of kilometres further south.

The Pheasant Coucal, Australia’s only living coucal species. Geoff Whalan Rare as hen’s teeth

Few extinct birds are known from Australia, and only ten Pleistocene species have previously been described.

This is meagre compared to the 80 Pleistocene mammal species known to have been lost from Australia. This could mean one of two things: either birds cruised through the Pleistocene largely unscathed, or we have underestimated their rates of extinction.

The best-known extinct Pleistocene bird from Australia is the “thunderbird”, Genyornis newtoni, which stood 2m tall and weighed more than 200kg. The other nine Pleistocene species include flamingos from Lake Eyre, large megapodes related to the malleefowl from eastern and southern Australia, logrunners and a pardalote from Victoria, dwarf emus from King Island and Kangaroo Island, and the previously discovered giant coucal from South Australia.

Given such modest numbers, the two new Nullarbor coucals increase the number of known Pleistocene bird extinctions in Australia by 20%. Their disappearance is another piece in a complex ecological puzzle that covers just one corner of a vast continent.

Time will tell if these birds were local oddities, or the tip of an extinction iceberg that affected birds Australia-wide and has so far slipped under the radar.

elen.shute@gmail.com received funding from BirdLife Australia for this project

gavin.prideaux@flinders.edu.au receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Trevor Worthy receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Catch them all - and maybe spare a thought for the trees. Matthew Corley/Shutterstock.com

Anyone who has been outdoors in a populated area in the past month will be aware of the massive success of Pokémon GO, which has rocketed to the top of the gaming charts.

People have been avidly collecting Pokémon creatures in various media formats for two decades, so it was a logical move to use smartphone technology to turn the franchise into a “mobile augmented reality” (MAR) gaming app.

It has proved to be an economic as well as a social phenomenon, sending the market value of its owner Nintendo soaring to US$39.9 billion. But the game was not actually developed by Nintendo; it was created by Google spin-off Niantic, which also built Pokémon GO’s popular MAR predecessor, Ingress.

Similar to Pokémon GO, Ingress is a reality-embedded sci-fi game in which players interact with real-world objects that are overlaid (using smartphone cameras) by a veneer of simulated characteristics.

In a new paper published in the journal Restoration Ecology, we argue that MAR games such as these can be a force for good in ecology and conservation, rather than being a cause for concern, as others have argued.

The key is not to lament or rail against the popularity of gaming or augmented reality, but rather to embrace what makes them a success. They tap into people’s sense of fun and competitiveness, and they get people into the great outdoors – and this is all stuff that can encourage people to embrace nature.

The problem

The growth of our modern civilisation, spurred on by technological innovations, has been underpinned by the exploitation of the natural environment. Today, a large fraction of the Earth, once swathed in wilderness, is now monopolised by humans. Populations of plants and animals have declined, leading to local losses and global extinctions, as a result of habitat destruction, harvesting, invasive species, and pollution.

Yet although the direct causes of wildlife loss are clear enough, what’s less obvious is why many people seemingly don’t care. The environmental writer George Monbiot has ascribed society’s ongoing destruction of the environment to the fact that not enough people value nature and wilderness any more.

This “eco-detachment” has been described as a symptom of our modernised, urbanised world, in which new technology both dominates peoples’ interests and simultaneously increases society’s ability to damage the environment.

But what if augmented reality – from MAR apps on smartphones to HoloLenses – could be harnessed in a positive and proactive way, to reconnect the wider public to nature and so unlock their inherent biophilia?

What if a smartphone game was created that focused not on features of the cityscape, but rather on “gamifying” nature, wildlife, and human interactions with the natural environment?

Such a game would lead its players to actively choose to experience nature. They would connect to it, and protect it (as an in-game reward), and thus understand its value.

Ingress enthusiasts. Hey, at least they’re outdoors, right? R4ph4ell-pl/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Getting more of society to connect with nature has long been an elusive dream of environmentalists. More than a decade ago, a group of leading conservation biologists famously found children were far more expert at recognising Pokémon characters than they were at identifying common wildlife groups. The problem isn’t with spotting “species” per se – it’s that they were mainly exposed to the electronic ones and not the real ones.

This issue of where people invest their attention is crucial. Ingress now has more than 7 million active players, and has been downloaded by 12 million people since its release in 2012. The fact that the game requires you to get out and about means it encourages players to locate, recognise, and identify with an array of cultural icons they might otherwise ignore.

Egress!

So here’s the challenge: to create a new version of Ingress (let’s call it “Egress”), that is educational and positive, as well as popular. It might also use augmented reality to visualise environmental changes, either good (restoration) or bad (damage), in people’s local landscapes. To be a hit, it would need to both capture an audience and to foster a community. And it could even generate data for citizen science projects.

There are lots of possibilities for how an app such as this could work. Perhaps it might involve using smartphones to photograph, locate, and automatically “tag” species within a landscape; or to identify rare plants or insects; or detect signs of animal activity (diggings, droppings, and so on). The crucial point is that although its focus would be on ecology and nature, it needs to also incorporate a fun gaming element – sort of like a high-tech version of those old birdwatching handbooks, but one that offers more kudos for spotting rarer species.

A recent editorial in Nature highlighted some of the potential uses of Pokémon GO, Ingress and others, suggesting that MAR games might even be used to discover and describe new species.

Who doesn’t want a new animal or plant to be named after them? Such citizen science activities would strengthen links between research, conservation, and the community.

What Ingress and Pokémon GO have shown is that it is possible to get millions of tech-savvy people out of their living rooms and basements and actively engaging with the wider world. While it’s impossible to guarantee that any project will go viral, this recent experience with MAR shows that people really can be persuaded, in large numbers, to get outside and explore.

That’s surely the first and most necessary step towards getting people to reconnect with, and care about, nature in the digital age.

Barry W. Brook receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jessie C. Buettel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

If you live in southern Australia, you may have noticed it’s been a rather wet couple of months. What you might not realise is the role that the tropical Indian Ocean has played in helping to create this weather.

Since late May, the ocean has been in what we call a “negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) phase” – and it seems set to be one of the strongest such events in at least 15 years.

Compared to its Pacific cousins, El Niño and La Niña, the IOD is something of a mystery to many people. So what is it, and what does it mean for our climate, and does it explain why this winter has been such a wet one for many Australians?

What is the Indian Ocean Dipole?

The Indian Ocean Dipole is similar to the more famous El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific. That system seesaws between El Niño conditions – characterised by a “warm blob” of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific – and La Niña, where the warm patch is in the western Pacific.

Similarly, the IOD is defined by the relative distribution of warmer-than-usual water across the tropical Indian Ocean. The system can flip between positive, neutral and negative phases, depending on the presence and position of these “temperature anomalies”.

When the temperatures in the west (off Africa) and the east (off Indonesia and Australia) are roughly normal, we call this a neutral IOD phase.

Explaining the Indian Ocean Dipole

The IOD enters a negative phase (as it did two months ago) when waters in the eastern Indian Ocean become significantly warmer than normal, while waters off Africa are cooler. This happens largely because of prevailing wind patterns.

The Earth’s rotation causes trade winds to blow from east to west, which push warmer surface waters across the Pacific and into the relatively shallow waters north of Australia. This warm water (often the warmest open ocean water in the world) causes a drop in atmospheric pressure over the western Pacific and eastern Indian oceans. In turn, this low pressure induces prevailing winds to blow across the tropical Indian Ocean from west to east.

When these westerly winds strengthen, they push surface waters (which are warmer than deeper water) towards Australia, while at the same time cooler waters are drawn up to the surface off Africa.

The resulting pattern – a blob of warmer-than-normal water in the east and a cooler-than-normal patch in the west – is termed a negative IOD phase. As you can see from the map below for the week ending July 17, we’re in a negative phase now – cooler waters can be seen near the Horn of Africa, and warmer waters near Sumatra.

These conditions increase tropical moisture and cloudiness near Australia. This typically leads to increased rainfall across the southern half of the continent (see below). Conversely, eastern Africa gets less rainfall than normal, which can lead to intense droughts and, at times, quite serious humanitarian impacts.

A negative IOD affects Australia’s temperatures as well as its rainfall. Across the southern mainland, cooler-than-average days are more likely from June to November, although overnight temperatures are generally normal. The snow season typically finishes later and with deeper peak snow, although these impacts are being modulated by climate change.

Meanwhile, Australia’s tropical north tends to get warmer-than-usual days and warmer nights too.

When will it end?

IOD events typically develop during late autumn or early winter, and peak in spring. They then decay rapidly as the monsoon trough arrives in the Southern Hemisphere around the end of spring, bringing a change in wind patterns that rapidly breaks down the IOD pattern. This means that the IOD typically has little influence during the Australian summer.

Are El Niño, La Niña and the IOD linked?

While it’s not always the case, a negative IOD is more likely to form during a La Niña year, while a positive IOD is more likely to form during El Niño.

Indeed, we experienced a combined positive IOD/El Niño event in 2015, which goes a long way to explaining the particularly poor rainfall in many parts of Australia last spring. Typically when the two events occur together, their effects on rainfall are reinforced.

The current state of play

The IOD has been in a negative phase for the past two months, and is likely to stay like that until the end of spring. Recent observations suggest it’s the strongest negative event in at least the past 15 years. What’s more, as of mid-July 2016, about half of international models suggest that La Niña may form later in the year.

So why should we care? The negative phase of the IOD has already influenced recent rainfall – last month was Australia’s second-wettest June in 117 years of national records. This is good news for some of the areas in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia which were hit hard by the dry conditions associated with the 2015-16 El Niño.

It’s also likely that the negative IOD has contributed to the very warm conditions across northern Australia, which has seen several records set and even had an impact upon tropical crops such as mangoes, which require cool periods to set flower. And if La Niña does become established in the Pacific Ocean, we may have only seen the start of the wet weather.

Australia’s current climate outlook reflects the typical conditions expected during a negative IOD event. However, other factors are at play too, including the overall warming trend of Australia’s climate, the record warm Indian Ocean more generally, the tendency for our weather systems to be located more to the south, and even the occurrence of East Coast Lows which may be more likely this year due to a record warm Tasman Sea.

To stay up-to-date with the latest on the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), please read our fortnightly ENSO Wrap-Up. We’ve also recently updated all of our Indian Ocean Dipole information, including a new list of historical IOD years, video and infographic.

Nothing to disclose.

Andrew B. Watkins, Catherine Ganter, David Jones, and Paul Gregory do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Forests and other land-based carbon stores held onto more carbon during colder historical climates. Miguel.v/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the Little Ice Age wasn’t caused by New World pioneers cutting a swathe through native American agriculture, as had been previously thought.

Instead, our new analysis of the climate record contained within Antarctic ice cores suggests that the fall in atmospheric CO₂ levels during the cold period from 1500 to 1750 was driven by increased net uptake of carbon by plants.

This in turn suggests that if plants reacted to falling temperatures by taking up more carbon, they are likely to react to the current rising CO₂ levels by releasing yet more of it into the atmosphere.

Historical atmospheres

Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were fairly stable from around 2000 years ago until the start of the Industrial Revolution, since when they have begun to climb dramatically. However, along the way were relatively small shifts, such as that seen during the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Carbon dioxide naturally cycles between the atmosphere, the land and the ocean. On land, it is removed from the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis and returned when plant material decomposes. Normally these processes balance out, but a change in the rate of one of these processes can shift atmospheric CO₂ levels to a new equilibrium.

If decomposition increases as it warms, this will slow or reverse the rebalancing uptake, leaving more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warming the climate still further and so on, in a positive feedback.

The LIA corresponded with the start of European colonisation of the New World. European diseases devastated populations in the Americas, and one theory held that this led to a decrease in indigenous agriculture, which in turn let forests grow back and took up significant amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere. This had been suggested as the first geologically recognisable signature of human impact on the globe, and thus the start of the Anthropocene epoch.

But was this actually the case? Our study suggests not, because while we can be relatively certain the LIA change in CO₂ levels was due to differences in the behaviour of land plants, our results suggest that the change was a response to the changing climate, and not to human-driven changes in vegetation cover.

Looking for clues

How can we tell? We know that the process involved terrestrial plants, because the atmosphere during the LIA was even lower in CO₂ containing the isotope carbon-12, which is preferred by photosynthesising plants.

But how do we know if the changes were due to changes in vegetation cover, or to climate feedbacks. To answer that we looked at another gas, carbonyl sulfide (COS), which is also trapped in air bubbles along with the carbon dioxide. This molecule has almost the same structure as CO₂, except one of the oxygen atoms is replaced with sulfur.

This is close enough to trick the plants, which take it up during photosynthesis. But unlike CO₂, COS it is not released when plant material decomposes so an increase in photosynthesis leads to a decrease in atmospheric COS.

This means that the “early Anthropocene” hypothesis has a testable consequence: it should have led to an observable reduction in COS concentrations within the ice cores. However, when we looked at the ice core record we found that there was an increase. This suggests that photosynthesis actually decreased during the LIA, rather than increasing as we would expect if the difference was due to forest regrowth.

This means that the drop in atmospheric CO₂ during the LIA was more likely to have been a direct response to the dipping temperatures. The cool climate of the LIA reduced photosynthesis but also slowed down plant respiration and decomposition, with the net effect that more CO₂ was taken up by the land biosphere during cool periods.

What about the future?

The flipside of this is that the reverse may happen when temperatures rise, as they are now. Rising temperatures are likely to mean even more CO₂ being released from the terrestrial biosphere. While plants continue to increase their photosynthesis as Earth warms, our findings suggest that plant decomposition will increase even more, meaning that less carbon stays in the soil.

This is concerning, because as we know, humans have opened the tap on a new source of carbon: fossil fuels that were previously locked away underground. We are rapidly returning lots of this stored carbon to the atmosphere, and the land and ocean are only removing about half of what we add.

Our discovery suggests that every degree increase in temperature will result in about 20 parts per million extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is about the middle of the expectation from climate models. It means that, if we want to keep global warming to within 2℃ of average pre-industrial temperatures, in line with the Paris climate agreement, we need to factor in this positive feedback loop, which means that the more temperatures climb, the more extra CO₂ will be released from the world’s landscapes.

Peter Rayner receives funding from Australian Research Council linkage grant.

Cathy Trudinger has received funding from the Australian Climate Change Science Program (a partnership between the Department of the Environment, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO).

David Etheridge has received funding from the Australian Climate Change Science Program (a partnership between the Department of the Environment, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO), from the University of Copenhagen, from the CO2CRC and from the Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance.

Mauro Rubino does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Under a cloud: South Australia's wind farms have been blamed for price spikes, but without them the volatility would be even worse. Tim Phillips Photos/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The past few weeks have seen extraordinarily high wholesale electricity prices in South Australia, averaging (as of 23 July) A$321 per megawatt hour, compared with A$80 per MWh for July 2015.

The prices have attracted an even more extraordinary deluge of news coverage – much of it asserting, with little or no evidence, that the high prices have been caused by an excessive reliance on wind generation.

This graph shows the wholesale prices in the National Electricity Market (NEM) since the beginning of July.

Looking at the graph, several things are apparent:

• until the middle of May, SA prices were in line with those in other mainland NEM states, and almost never the highest

• price spikes also happened in other states, most notably in Queensland, which doesn’t have wind power

• prices in all four NEM states began to increase gradually from the middle of May.

In SA there is no long-term relationship between wholesale prices and the share of electricity supplied by wind, as shown below (comprehensive data on wind generation only date back to 2007). If anything, wind generation tends to drive down the wholesale price.

What does dictate electricity prices?

In the NEM, just as in any complex market, prices are determined by a combination of many different factors. The factors that may have affected SA’s prices this month include:

• the level of demand for electricity

• the amount of wind generation

• gas prices (for power generation)

• the capacity of available non-wind generation

• the capacity of the interconnectors linking SA and Victorian networks

• the level of competition between generators and their resulting price-setting behaviour.

Let’s briefly consider each in turn.

Demand

Winter heating requirements mean than July in SA is almost always one of the top two months for overall electricity demand (though not for peak monthly demand, which happens during summer heatwaves). However, average daily demand so far this month is slightly lower than the same time last year, while average wholesale prices are nearly four times higher. So something else must be pushing up the price.

Wind power

July is normally a windy month in SA. But it seems likely that this month’s total wind generation, while roughly the same as last July, will be much lower than in July 2014. The average price so far this month is about A$320, compared with about A$70 in May this year (when it was windier) and A$50 in July 2014.

Wholesale gas prices

Wholesale gas prices increased rapidly during May and June. It is generally agreed that this is due to increased demand for gas for the three export LNG plants in Queensland, which are now running at two thirds of full capacity.

Gas prices affect wholesale electricity prices mainly though their effect on the operating cost of open-cycle gas turbine (OCGT) generators. These smaller, fast-start generators are ideal for meeting demand spikes, but they are relatively expensive to run. As we have already seen, wholesale prices climbed in all NEM states during May and June, and there is little doubt that higher gas prices were the main driver.

Non-wind generation

For most of its 18-year existence, the NEM has had a large excess of generation capacity relative to demand. This ensured tough competition between rival generators, which drove prices down. But now, in SA, this competition is weakening.

Early last year, Adelaide’s 478-megawatt gas-fired Pelican Point power station was taken offline, despite being one of the most efficient and lowest-emission thermal power stations in Australia. Its owner, Engie, said it was unable to trade profitably based on expected prices of gas and electricity. (In mid-July it was brought partially back online at the state government’s request, and has been operating at about one-third capacity for much of the time since then.) Then in May this year, the ageing 530MW coal-fired Northern power station was permanently shut down.

SA’s remaining thermal generating capacity consists of modern and old gas-fired plants, including several of the OCGT plants described above. Combined, their total is less than the annual summer and winter maximum demand in the state. So if periods of high demand coincide with periods of low wind generation, owners of these power stations can charge more because these days there is less competition.

Interconnector capacity

The Heywood interconnector, the main grid connection between SA and Victoria, has a maximum capacity of 460MW and at times of low wind generation it effectively functions as a direct replacement for Northern, by supplying electricity from the Latrobe Valley. It is being upgraded to 650MW and, as part of this work, it was effectively taken offline for about a week, beginning on July 5 – the period that has seen the highest prices.

Compare the period July 5-14, 2016, with July last year when demand was almost identical. The reductions in coal and interconnector supply are plainly evident, as are the increases in expensive gas generation from Torrens Island (Austrlia’s oldest operating thermal power station) and the OCGT plants.

Market competitiveness

Periods of low wind have thus left SA depending on a mixture of gas generators, many of them old and inefficient, whose already high costs have been driven still higher by the rapid rise in gas prices.

This has given the three businesses that own these power stations – AGL, Engie and Origin – increased market power. The rapid price spikes during the period July 5-15, and for several days thereafter, suggest that this market power was being exercised.

So what’s the real cause?

As we have seen, if you want a satisfactory explanation, you have to start with the very high wholesale gas prices right across the country. These have made SA’s gas-fired electricity options much more expensive, in turn raising the floor price for all of its power in times of low wind generation.

In addition to this higher floor price, the tightening of supply and lack of competition have allowed generators to drive prices to even higher levels in the form of short-lived spikes, which have raised the monthly average price still further.

The closure of Northern power station has significantly reduced competition in the SA wholesale electricity market. Additional competition, which normally comes from the transmission links with Victoria, was almost absent for an extended period during the month, because of upgrading work on the Heywood interconnector.

Competition from wind generators protects consumers from high wholesale prices for much of the time. But when the wind is not blowing, consumers are exposed to the full effects of an uncompetitive market. That is what has happened to customers in SA this month.

It is absurd to say that SA electricity prices would be lower if there were less wind generation. On the contrary, consumers would be exposed to high prices in an uncompetitive market for more of the time, and thus face higher average prices, not lower ones.

What has happened to SA electricity prices during this month is a stark demonstration of the need for a fundamental rethink of the the design of the National Electricity Market, which was designed at a time when Australia had very little gas generation and no wind. Demands to limit the growth of wind (and also solar) generation are in effect demands to renege on national emissions reduction commitments, for the sake of preserving a set of outdated and dysfunctional institutions.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Insitute

Australia still rates poorly on clean energy and climate action. CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Australia may be home to some of the world’s most liveable cities, but we have a long way to go to meet the world’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Australia ranks 20th in the world – well behind Canada and many European countries but ahead of the United States – according to a new index that compares different nations' performance on the SDGs, which were adopted last September.

Launched at this week’s United Nations SDG talks in New York, the index marks each country’s performance towards the 17 goals. These aim to put the world on a more sustainable economic, social and environmental path, and feature 169 targets to be met over the next 15 years in areas such as health, economic growth and climate action.

The ranking, called the SDG Index and Dashboard and prepared by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the German think tank Bertelsmann Stiftung, ranks countries' performance using a set of 77 indicators.

Australia: good water, bad energy

Australia, with some of the world’s highest carbon emissions per person, rates poorly on the clean energy and climate change goals. It also falls down on the environmental goals, with high levels of solid waste and land clearing as well as loss of biodiversity.

Despite the long life expectancy and general good health of Australians, the index highlights that Australia has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world.

As shown in the performance chart below, Australia rates relatively highly on lack of poverty, education and water quality. Inequality, while increasing, is not as bad as it is in the United States or the United Kingdom.

Australia’s performance on each of the Sustainable Development Goals. SDG Index and Dashboards report

The best-performing countries on the list are mainly the northern European countries. Sweden, Denmark and Norway are at the top of the pile. Yet even these nations have significant challenges to achieve the climate change and environmental goals.

The top of the rankings… SDG Index and Dashboards report …and the lowest-ranked nations. SDG Index and Dashboards report

At the bottom of the rankings are sub-Saharan African countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and the Central African Republic, which face extreme poverty, hunger and major health problems.

In Asia, Japan and Singapore both rate above Australia, in 18th and 19th places respectively. Thailand (61st), Malaysia (63rd) and China (76th) are in the middle of the pack.

Priorities for action

The purpose of the report is to help countries identify the gaps that must be closed in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and to identify priorities for early action.

The SDG Index notes that Australia performs much better in the UN’s Human Development Index (on which it ranks second), which focuses on social and economic development but not environmental sustainability. This clearly demonstrates that Australia needs to act urgently to address the climate and environmental goals. It is in Australia’s interest to do so as we are more vulnerable to climate change than most comparable countries.

The report also highlights some other specific challenges for Australia, including fisheries management and sustainable use of nitrogen-based fertiliser. While Australia is not the worst performer on gender equality, many countries have a higher proportion of women in national parliaments than our 26.7% and we have a significantly larger gender wage gap than New Zealand.

The SDG Index will be updated regularly to improve its quality and coverage and allow people around the world to measure progress against the goals. Australia’s plan for implementing the SDGs within Australia is not yet clear and this will be an important item on the agenda for the re-elected Turnbull government.

John Thwaites receives funding from the Harold Mitchell Foundation. He is chair of Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University.

Despite substantial conservation efforts, human impacts are harming coral reefs all over the world. That in turn affects the millions of people who depend on reefs for their livelihoods. It’s a gloomy picture, but there are some bright spots.

In a study that appears on the cover of this week’s Nature, I and 38 international colleagues identify 15 places around the world where the outlook is not so bleak. Many of them are in surprising places like Pacific island states, which may not have lots of money for conservation but do have a close social connection to the health of their oceans.

Unlike scientific studies that look at averages or trends, we took a slightly different approach and focused on the outliers – the places bucking the trend. This type of “bright spot” approach has been used in a range of fields, including business, health and human development, to search for hope against backgrounds of widespread failure.

One example is in Vietnam, where the charity Save the Children looked at poor children who bucked the trend of widespread malnutrition. They discovered that poor families with healthier kids were collecting small crabs and shrimp from their rice paddies and grinding them into their kids' food, and feeding them smaller, more frequent meals. These practices have now spread to more than 2.2 million families, cutting childhood malnutrition by 65%.

This is a great example of local habits that, once identified and spread more widely, have had a hugely beneficial impact. My colleagues and I wanted to see if we could do the same for the world’s coral reefs.

Searching for bright spots

We carried out more than 6,500 reef surveys across 46 countries, states and territories around the world and looked for places where reef fisheries should have been degraded, but weren’t.

We defined these bright spots as reefs with more fish than expected, based on their exposure to pressures like human population, poverty and unfavourable environmental conditions. To be clear, bright spots are not necessarily “pristine” reefs, but rather reefs that are doing better than they should be given the circumstances. They are reefs that are “punching above their weight”.

We identified 15 bright spots and 35 dark spots (places that were doing much worse than expected) in our global survey. The bright spots were mainly in the Pacific Ocean, and two-thirds of them were in populated places like the Solomon Islands, parts of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Kiribati.

Dark spots were more globally distributed; we found them in every major ocean, sometimes in places that are generally considered to be pristine, such as in the northwestern Hawaiian islands. Again, this doesn’t mean the reefs were necessarily in terrible shape – just worse than we would expect, given that in cases such as Hawaii they are remote, well protected and in a wealthy country with a strong capacity to govern their reefs.

The Great Barrier Reef, which is often considered the best-managed reef in the world, performed largely as we would expect it to, given that it is in a wealthy country with low population density, and many of its individual reefs are offshore and mostly remote from people.

What makes bright spots special?

We wanted to learn what these bright spots were doing differently. Why were they able to withstand pressures that caused other reef systems to suffer? And could lessons from these places inform reef conservation in other areas?

Our preliminary investigation showed that bright spots (and their nearby human communities) generally had four crucial characteristics:

• strong local sea traditions, which include ownership rights and/or customary practices such as periodically closing a reef to fishing

• high levels of participation in management by local people

• high levels of dependence on fishing (this seems counter-intuitive, but research shows that where people’s livelihoods depend on a resource, they are more committed to managing it responsibly)

• deep-water refuges for fish and corals.

Importantly, the first two are malleable (for instance, governments can invite local people to become more involved with reef management), whereas the latter two are less so (it is hard to change people’s livelihoods, and impossible to change the undersea landscape in a way that wouldn’t devastate reefs in the process).

We also found some common characteristics of dark spots

• use of particular types of fishing nets that can damage habitat

• widespread access to freezers, allowing fish catches to be stockpiled

• a recent history (within the past five years) of environmental disturbance such as coral bleaching or cyclone.

Where next?

We believe that the bright spots offer some hope and some solutions that can be applied more broadly across the world’s coral reefs.

Specifically, investments that foster local involvement and provide people with ownership rights to their marine resources can help people develop creative solutions and defy expectations that reefs will just continue to get more degraded.

Conversely, dark spots can highlight the development or management pathways to avoid. In particular, it is important to avoid investing in technology that allows for more intensive fishing, particularly in places with weak governance or where there have already been environmental shocks like cyclones or bleaching.

The next step is to dig deeper into the social, institutional and ecological dynamics in the bright spots. By looking to the places that are getting it right – whether by accident or design – we can hopefully make the future a bit brighter for reefs the world over.

Joshua Cinner receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Pew Charitable Trust, and over the past five years has also received funding from the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The world is using its natural resources at an ever-increasing rate. Worldwide, annual extraction of primary materials – biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and minerals – tripled between 1970 and 2010. People in the richest countries now consume up to ten times more resources than those in the poorest nations.

Clearly, if the developing world is to enjoy a similar standard of living to those in the developed world, this cannot continue. We need to break the link between global economic development and primary resource consumption.

Over the past few days, nations have been meeting in New York to discuss the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to “promote prosperity while protecting the planet”.

Today the meeting sees the launch of an international report coordinated by CSIRO and the UN Environment Program. The report lists several ways in which the world can maintain economic growth while reducing its primary material use – ending the pattern that has driven world economic growth over the past four-and-a-half decades.

The importance of decoupling

Decoupling economic growth from resource use is crucially important – especially when we consider our finding that not even the wealthiest countries have managed to stabilise or reduce their overall material consumption footprint. The only time this footprint was reduced was during the global financial crisis of 2008-09. It has since begun to grow again.

This suggests that there is no level of human well-being at which the demand for primary materials will level off – unless we make some fundamental changes to our economy.

Since the turn of the century, as emerging economies like China have begun to industrialise and urbanise, they have used massive amounts of iron, steel, cement, energy and construction materials. While this has helped millions of people move out of poverty, huge infrastructure investments have also ratcheted up the demand for primary materials to unprecedented levels.

Surprisingly, this boom in global growth has not led to improvements in efficiency, despite the many technological advances along the way. The global economy uses more material per unit of GDP than it did in 2000. This is because production has shifted from material-efficient economies such as Japan, South Korea and Europe to less efficient ones like China, India and Southeast Asia.

Decoupling will create the space for developing countries to raise their standards of living while also achieving the SDG objectives. This won’t occur spontaneously; it requires well-designed policies, not to mention large public investments in research and development.

New measures needed

Past policy decisions that determine economic development, human well-being and environmental outcomes have often been informed by a small set of economic indicators.

In contrast, policies designed to achieve progress towards the SDGs will require new information about natural resource use and environmental impacts. The new report, compiled with help from my colleagues in Austria, Germany and Japan, aims to provide data on current resource use, and on how these primary materials might be used more efficiently to produce goods and services.

We have found that while dramatic increases in the consumption of fossil fuels, metals and other materials threaten to intensify the effects of climate change, increase pollution and harm wildlife, there are also large opportunities to embrace more sustainable practices. This in turn would also lead to economic benefits and improved well-being.

Here are some of the report’s recommendations for maintaining economic growth while streamlining resource use, split across the major sectors of the economy:

• Construction and housing. Improved building materials, insulation and orientation of new buildings – together these can cut energy use in buildings by 80%. Meanwhile, using higher-strength steel in the construction of medium-density and high-rise buildings can save on the amount of construction material used.

• Transport and mobility. Improved urban design, walkable cities, public transport, electric and hybrid vehicles, improved fuel efficiency in aviation, freight and private transport – all of these measures will deliver massive savings in materials, energy and greenhouse emissions.

• Agriculture and food. Improved irrigation techniques; reduced fertiliser and pesticide use; reduced average consumption of meat and dairy; and reducing food loss and waste from its current level of more than 30%.

• Heavy industry and energy. Besides embracing recycling and renewable energy, heavy industries such as steel, cement and paper can each draw on a range of new technologies, such as electric arc furnace improvements in the iron and steel industry.

• Technology. Nano- and biotechnology will play increasingly important roles in sustainable production and consumption – for instance, through the creation of more durable products or the development of enzymes as industrial catalysts.

The report also recommends placing a price on primary materials at the point of extraction, as well as putting a price on carbon emissions. The proceeds of these levies should be invested in research and development in resource-intensive sectors of the economy, to find yet more ways to reduce overall consumption of materials.

Of course, increasing material efficiency can bring its own problems. The report recommends various policy initiatives to address these issues. Among these is shorter working hours to compensate for productivity gains, instead of salary increases alone, to avoid the rebound effect of higher overall consumption.

Lower-income countries will doubtless require more primary materials than they currently use, if they are to reach the same level of development as today’s wealthy countries. Expanding global demand for materials may contribute to local conflicts like those seen in areas where mining competes with agriculture and urban development. But the more we can curb the world’s resource growth, the more room there will be for people’s standards of living to grow too without surpassing planetary limits.

This article was written with the help of Karin Hosking from CSIRO’s Land and Water Flagship. More information on the data in the report is available from UNEP Live.

Heinz Schandl receives funding from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

When Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews reshuffled his cabinet in May, most of the headlines were about Wade Noonan’s return after suffering mental health issues, and Lisa Neville who became the state’s first female police minister.

But from an environmental perspective there was another significant change. Energy and resources, long regarded as twin portfolios, were split. Instead, the energy brief was partnered with climate change and environment under a single minister, Lily D’Ambrosio.

On Monday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull followed suit, creating a new super-portfolio of environment and energy, with Josh Frydenberg as the minister.

Linking policy development and decision-making for the energy and climate change portfolios makes sense. As a result of the historic Paris Agreement struck last year, the world – including Australia – is committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

This calls for a major transformation, shifting the world’s energy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources like solar and wind, newer technologies such as wave and geothermal energy, and innovations like battery storage and energy demand management.

In that sense, energy and climate (and therefore the environment) go hand in hand. Decisions about energy sources have direct implications for our ability to deal with climate change. Conversely, decisions taken to reduce emissions will invariably impact on the energy portfolio. The two sectors have been crying out for better integration.

Many of the technologies needed to decarbonise our electricity system are already available. But we need to move faster. Our research at ClimateWorks Australia shows we will need at least 50% renewable electricity by 2030 if we are to decarbonise the electricity sector in time to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

This means we need policies that will push harder to help large-scale clean energy technologies reach the necessary level of commercialisation and integration.

Renewables and efficiency

Within these broad portfolios, there are particular policy areas that also need to be linked more closely with one another. In particular, renewable energy policy needs to be combined with measures to promote energy efficiency.

There is a natural synergy between renewable energy and energy efficiency, yet the two have never been systematically linked at either a national or state level. The better our energy efficiency performance, the less investment we need in new renewable energy sources to replace carbon-intensive ones. This in turn helps to lower the overall network costs and can protect households against rising power bills.

While unit prices of electricity are expected to rise as we modernise and decarbonise the energy system, household bills need not. If governments promote energy efficiency at the same time, households can reduce their energy use to offset the rising energy costs, keeping bills flat or even reducing them.

The lack of joined-up thinking between these two areas has led to missed opportunities. Some 1.5 million Australian homes have solar panels, thanks in part to the federal incentive scheme. Meanwhile, there are separate state-based incentive schemes for household energy efficiency. Why have these two never been linked? If solar panel installers could also provide household energy efficiency audits, householders could kill two birds with one stone and further reduce their demands on the electricity grid.

Household battery storage technology provides the next key opportunity to link installation incentives with renewable energy and energy efficiency. But this opportunity will again be missed if policies are not better integrated within the portfolio.

The National Energy Productivity Plan is a new policy with 34 measures aimed at improving energy efficiency. Frydenberg led this process when he chaired the COAG Energy Council last year. He has retained these responsibilities within his expanded portfolio, giving him a golden opportunity to take a truly integrated approach.

In the meantime, D’Ambrosio has taken the opportunity to review Victoria’s upcoming action plans on renewable energy and energy efficiency, to take advantage of the opportunity in her joint portfolio to ensure energy and climate policies have the close integration they need.

Whole-of-government support

Of course, integrating the energy and climate portfolios is not the whole solution. Cabinet support will still be needed to introduce integrated policies in other areas that are critical to hitting Australia’s emissions reduction targets. Examples include: putting specific regulations on emissions-intensive industries; creating market enablers for low-carbon technologies; ratcheting up green standards for buildings, vehicles and infrastructure; and ensuring planning approval systems are designed to take account of these targets.

The real work will need to happen in the federal government’s 2017 review of policies to achieve Australia’s Paris emissions target of 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. A recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers report found that “Australia will need to nearly double its historic rate of decarbonisation, to 4.4% annually”, if it is to meet even the lower end of this goal.

Ministers often talk about taking a “whole-of-government approach” to major issues. Yet plenty of silos still need breaking down if we are to achieve meaningful action on climate change.

The moves in both Canberra and Spring Street to bring environment, climate and energy under a single umbrella are a positive step towards better policy and real action. But, as ever, there is still plenty of hard work ahead.

Anna Skarbek is CEO of ClimateWorks which receives funding from philanthropy and project-based income from federal, state and local government and private sector organisations.

Next month, the cruise ship Crystal Serenity will embark on a controversial voyage, becoming the first cruise liner ever to sail Canada’s Northwest Passage – a formerly icebound route that only became navigable in 2007. It’s a dramatic symbol of the change that is currently taking place in the Arctic, which is warming more rapidly than anywhere else on Earth.

This warming is already affecting polar bears, greening the tundra, and physically shrinking red knots. Now, in a new study, we show that it could contract the breeding habitat of millions of migratory birds that travel to the High Arctic.

Countries worldwide could see declines in the numbers of migratory birds reaching their shores, and the Canadian and Russian Arctic islands may be the last refuges these species have.

We studied migratory shorebirds, superstars of global migration that cover tens of thousands of kilometres a year, and sometimes travel more than 10,000km in a single flight. These amazing birds breed in the Arctic and then fly south, stopping at known refuelling points en route to their non-breeding grounds, some of them in the Southern Hemisphere. Protecting these ultra-mobile species that cross international borders is a particularly difficult conservation challenge.

Shorebirds are embattled by habitat loss and hunting along their migratory routes. Nowhere is this more apparent than the route used by species that migrate to Australia: the East Asian/Australasian Flyway. Most species that travel between Australia and the Arctic stop off at mudflats in the Yellow Sea off China. But coastal habitat there is being rapidly destroyed and population numbers are already crashing. The question is, how will climate change amplify the stress that these populations, and shorebirds globally, are already experiencing?

Researchers have investigated the possible effects of sea-level rise on shorebirds (answer: not ideal, because most species rely on coastal habitats) and how changing seasons could affect migratory timing (how do birds time their migration if snowmelt in the Arctic occurs earlier and earlier?).

But what about species distributions? To answer this question, we worked out the range of climatic conditions currently tolerated by 24 shorebird species that breed in the High Arctic tundra, and then used climate models to see whether these conditions are likely to still exist in 2070.

Our overall expectation was obvious: as the climate warms up, species globally are starting to track cooler climates towards the poles. But the issue for Arctic species is that they are already at the top of the world, with nowhere left to go. This means their habitat must necessarily contract, instead of shifting poleward.

This is exactly what our models predicted: climatically suitable conditions for breeding could shrink by more than half for 80% of species by 2070, and five species – Pacific golden plover, stilt sandpiper, curlew sandpiper, white-rumped sandpiper, and red phalarope – may have essentially no suitable conditions left at all.

In a double whammy for Australian shorebirds already struggling with Yellow Sea habitat loss, our results predict that their breeding regions in western Alaska and eastern Siberia are going to be hit the hardest by climate change too, with little or no habitat left for many species.

This is not the first time scientists have warned about the impacts of climate change on species diversity. Such warnings are often seen as vague premonitions of distant future threat, yet this year saw the first climate change-driven extinction of a species; suddenly it’s starting to feel very real.

Of course, species have dealt with changes in climate before; the last major warming period in the Arctic occurred 6,000-8,000 years ago. But that warming was gradual and happened in different regions of the Arctic at different times. In contrast, the current wave of warming is much faster and is happening throughout the Arctic, leaving species little time to adapt and nowhere to go.

Arctic Canada and the islands off northern Russia are predicted by our models to fare better than many other regions. Encouragingly, there are many protected areas in most places around the Arctic, with the exception of a clear gap in the Canadian Arctic, where resource exploitation is a growing threat.

Continued efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions are crucial, and we must protect strategic locations to secure the future of Arctic biodiversity in a changing climate. With the right action hopefully we can see shorebirds continuing their incredible journeys for many years to come.

Hannah Wauchope receives funding from the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP150101059 and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions..

Richard Fuller receives funding from the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP150101059 and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions.

Double time: Josh Frydenberg has added environment to his energy portfolio. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

One of the most notable moves in yesterday’s cabinet reshuffle was Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to merge the environment and energy portfolios, and hand them both to current energy minister Josh Frydenberg.

The immediate reaction was mixed. The Australian Petroleum and Exploration Association described it as “the holy grail”, whereas others branded the move a nightmare scenario.

Often when two agencies are combined, the culture of one dominates. In this case, it will hinge on the agenda chosen by Frydenberg, Turnbull, and the government as a whole.

If the resource-oriented, centralised, growth-focused energy industry culture dominates, we could see emerging industries blocked, the climate response crippled, and environmental destruction.

On the other hand, if the various interest groups are forced to engage with the climate issue, and the abuse of market power, fossil fuel subsidies and other longstanding conflicts are worked through, it could be the circuit-breaker that’s so sorely needed.

Tricky issues

One thing that’s clear is that Frydenberg has been given a remarkably complicated brief. Energy and environment are both great examples of “wicked problems” – issues so complex that we struggle to define the problems, let alone agree on how to deal with them.

For instance, one crucial aspect of Frydenberg’s existing energy portfolio relates to energy exports, which traditionally have represented a significant proportion of Australia’s overall exports. But a recent Productivity Commission report points out that services (which are typically low-energy) now make up more than 40% of exports from a “value-added” perspective.

Factor in environmental considerations and the prospect becomes more complex still (although a good energy minister will already be across these trends). Australia’s profits from fossil fuel exports create deficits for consumer countries as well as contributing to their carbon emissions. The global shift away from fossil fuels is a necessary and understandable response, which calls into question the long-term future of Australia’s energy exports.

But energy policy has other dimensions that are often more important to voters and the broader economy. Fair energy prices and reliable power supply are crucial for the community and business. The sector creates many environmental problems but can also help to improve environmental quality. It has traditionally underpinned economic development but employs few people and is capital-intensive – and our economy is decoupling its progress from dependence on energy growth.

The energy sector is also in deep crisis, with volatile and increasing electricity and gas prices, conflict over mining, and a war between proponents of emerging clean energy solutions and powerful energy companies.

Need for vision

It all sounds daunting, but this is also a perfect time for someone with a broader perspective and wider experience to engage the many stakeholders, resolve tensions, and guide Australia towards a sustainable, 21st-century energy sector.

What can we surmise about the various figures who will influence this process? Turnbull is famously keen on innovation, and is comfortable with disruptive energy sources, being one of the 1.5 million householders with rooftop solar. And he was very excited after his ride in a Tesla electric car.

His chief of staff Drew Clarke has a strong background in industry development, energy efficiency and (the new buzz-phrase) energy productivity. Martin Parkinson, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, is a former head of the environment department.

Frydenberg himself is one of the few recent Australian energy ministers not enmeshed in the traditional energy industry – a marked contrast to his predecessors Ian Macfarlane, Greg Combet and Martin Ferguson. His career has encompassed a broad range of interests, including finance, international affairs, back-room politics, sport, and even helping the print handicapped. Soon after his appointment as energy minister, he attended several international energy meetings, including an APEC energy ministers’ conference at which I spoke on the future role of clean energy. He seemed pretty interested.

After returning, he commented at a meeting of COAG’s Energy Council that energy efficiency seemed to be the big international agenda item. He has also presided over development of Australia’s National Energy Productivity Plan, and he has been an advocate for innovation.

So he seems to be ambitious, forward-looking and broad in perspective. However, as energy minister he has been reported as supporting a range of controversial energy development options, including new coal mines.

It remains to be seen whether this stance was part of Turnbull’s “calm the conservatives” strategy, or perhaps informed by a lack of exposure to up-to-date economic and scientific analysis. What does Josh Frydenberg really think? And if independent policy research contradicts his views, will he be prepared to change his mind?

Another important issue is who will be appointed to the department’s senior positions. This could have a crucial bearing on the outcome. Choosing the right people could guide a positive transformation that supports progress towards a truly sustainable energy and environmental future.

Alan Pears has worked for government, business, industry associations public interest groups and at universities on energy efficiency, climate response and sustainability issues since the late 1970s. He is now an honorary Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT University and a consultant, as well as an adviser to a range of industry associations and public interest groups. His investments in managed funds include firms that benefit from growth in clean energy.

The transition to a clean energy future is upon us, as shown by the huge uptake of solar panels and by the Turnbull government’s decision to set up a A$1 billion Clean Energy Innovation Fund. But what about those people who are at risk of being left behind?

Our survey of lower-income households shows that information about low-carbon living is often difficult to access, and that assistance is sometimes misdirected.

As a result, transitioning to low-carbon living is much harder for these households than it should be.

Listening to the people

Between December 2015 and June 2016, we held 23 focus group discussions with 164 lower-income households across eight metropolitan and regional centres in New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Our aim was to try to understand the challenges these households face in transitioning to low-carbon living. This was part of a wider study, funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, on finding ways to help poorer households reduce their carbon impact.

Almost everyone we spoke with supported the idea of low-carbon living. However, the ability to afford whiz-bang green technology – from expensive solar panels and battery systems right down to LED lightbulbs – is a big issue for these households.

Significant increases in energy costs since the late 2000s have added to this problem. In some states, bills have more than doubled in just the past six years.

While money is a key problem, it’s not the whole story, and there are ways to help. We have found a range of factors, besides affordability, that limit lower-income households’ ability to transition to low-carbon living.

Finding reliable information

Not everyone is looking for a hand-out; many just want to know how they can help themselves become more energy-efficient.

A major barrier that cropped up time and again in our survey is accessing the “right” information. Many people get good tips about assistance programs through friends and family, or via charities like the Salvation Army (one of our in-kind project partners).

But outside these avenues, information is often only available online, and many of our participants said that they either can’t afford internet access at home or, more importantly, don’t know what to search for.

What little information trickles through is often hard to understand. The Tasmanian government, for instance, offers a range of concessions on power and heating bills for older people or those who need to run medical equipment at home. But the benefits are expressed in cents per day (the current electricity concession, for instance, is 132.557¢ per day), which can make them unnecessarily hard for customers to calculate. Eligibility criteria are also often complicated.

With access to government services increasingly being moved online, the process can become a confusing rigmarole for many people, while others may miss out entirely.

Misdirected assistance

Most of the assistance programs available to lower-income households, such as Centrelink Utilities Allowances, are aimed squarely at providing financial relief.

States and territories also have their own rebate schemes to offer relief from rising energy costs. In NSW, for example, EAPA vouchers are designed to provide emergency and crisis relief.

But with lower-income households less likely to own their homes, they are often precluded from accessing programs to encourage green energy, such as solar panel rebates. This is a classic split incentive – the owner buys the panels (and gets the rebate) but the tenant gets the benefit (lower bills), making the owner less likely to invest.

This leads to the question of why rebates are not offered for using green energy, as well as for installing it.

“Green” criteria already exist in some other assistance programs. For example, the No Interest Loan Scheme, which helps lower-income households buy products such as whitegoods, now requires appliance to meet certain energy-efficiency standards.

The same principle could easily be used to help lower-income renters access electricity from cleaner energy sources.

Giving poorer households free home energy assessments is a good start, but they are focused purely on cutting energy consumption.

Removing hurdles

The compounding impacts of energy bill increases mean that many lower-income households are doing it pretty tough. Forgoing comfort in not turning on the heater or air-conditioner is one thing, but skipping meals or medication (as many of our survey respondents do) can have significant impacts on health and well-being.

Unfortunately, lower-income households have been going without life’s essentials for far too long. Setting up assistance programs is a good start, but we need to make sure that those who need help are getting it.

Here are our five suggestions for making it happen:

1. Get the info out there. It’s important that people get the right information when they need it. Putting information online is great but it cannot be the only way – consideration must be given to those without internet access or who are less computer-literate.

2. Keep it simple. Information needs to be straightforward and clear. If it’s stuffed with jargon and confusing numbers, it can become self-defeating.

3. Support the support organisations. Charities like the Salvation Army and the St Vincent de Paul Society serve important roles within our community, but they too need our continued help, especially when funding is not keeping up with needs.

4. Get value for the public’s money. A billion-dollar public fund may sound like a big deal, but this is small fry compared to Australia’s A$878 billion annual domestic consumption expenditure. Nonetheless, it is a good start in heading towards the right direction. We just need to make sure it helps those who need it most.

5. Overcome personal pride. Asking for help is never easy, and that’s why so many lower-income families go without. Making sure that incentive programs reach the right people, in the right way, can dramatically improve their willingness to use them. Hopefully, in the long run, fewer families will need to go without.

Edgar Liu receives funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, New South Wales' Department of Family and Community Services, PAYCE Communities, SGCH Ltd, South Australia's Department for Communities and Social Inclusion, and Strata Community Australia (NSW chapter).

Bruce Judd receives funding from the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, the Australian Research Council, and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

There are few frontiers in the world that can still be said to be unexplored. One of these terra incognita is the land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheets. Buried under kilometres of ice is a fascinating realm of canyons, waterways and lakes, which is only now being mapped in detail.

There are more than 400 known lakes in this harsh environment, and more are being discovered as technology advances. This water beneath the ice lubricates the interface between the ice sheet and its rocky bed, and thus controls the flow and behaviour of the ice itself.

Under such a large volume of ice, how is it possible for water to exist at all without freezing? The answer is pressure: when a large weight of ice is pushed onto water, it can stay liquid at temperatures well below the normal freezing point. What’s more, the large body of ice actually insulates the bed and protects it from the very cold air temperatures above.

The liquid water is created by heat from the Earth’s interior and from the friction generated as ice flows over the bedrock, which can melt the underside of the ice sheet. It is this water that flows into the subglacial lake basins and eventually into the ocean.

The network of lakes beneath Antarctica’s ice. Zina Deretsky/US NSF/Wikimedia Commons Huge water features

A tour around this subglacial landscape would take you first to the largest lake under the ice: Lake Vostok. At 12,500 square kilometres and with an average depth of 430 metres, Lake Vostok is the world’s sixth-largest lake by volume, but as it lies beneath some 3.5km of ice, it’s not easy to visit.

You can’t see it, but it’s there: Lake Vostok’s location in East Antarctica. NASA

Using ice-penetrating radar and seismic techniques, scientists have mapped Lake Vostok to understand its origins. They have found that it may be up to 15 million years old. The lake has circulation patterns driven by freezing and thawing of the overlying ice, and even has small lunar tides.

Lake Vostok was discovered decades ago, but what is thought to be the second-largest lake under the ice sheet was first observed only this year. It is in Princess Elizabeth Land, East Antarctica, known as the “last pole of ignorance” because until recently it was virtually unmapped.

This region is also home to a huge canyon system, which extends all the way from the ice sheet interior to the coast. The system is as deep as the Grand Canyon but 100km longer.

Map of subglacial lake locations and ice thickness. NSIDC (Blakenship et al., 2009; Smith et al., 2012) Dynamic environments

So far our tour has focused on the central regions of Antarctica, where ice and water are relatively stable. In contrast, at the ice sheet’s dynamic edges near the coast we find fast-flowing regions called ice streams. Many of these have subglacial lakes in their catchments.

Tens to hundreds of kilometres in length, these lakes are short-lived, growing and draining over a period of just a few years. Evidence of this drainage process comes from satellite measurements of the height of the ice sheet. The surface can be seen to rise and fall, as the lake swells and then ebbs away again.

So far, at least 130 of these “active” lakes have been discovered. More are being found every year.

One example is Lake Whillans, in West Antarctica. Covering about 60 square km, it’s small in comparison with the gigantic Lake Vostok, but is by no means insignificant. In January 2013, a US research expedition drilled into the lake, extracting clean samples that were later found to contain microbial life.

Such life thrives in this harsh environment without sunlight for photosynthesis. Instead, the microbes depend on the oxidation of methane and ammonia, derived from sediments that are hundreds of thousands of years old. This momentous discovery of life in such a harsh and unforgiving environment may provide scientists with critical information on the development of marine life cycles.

First view of the bottom of Antarctica’s subglacial Lake Whillans. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Wikimedia Commons Loose underpinnings

The water beneath the ice creates a mysterious and fascinating subglacial world, but it is also important because it lubricates the bed of the ice sheet and controls how fast the ice can flow. Where there is sediment under the ice, liquid water can make the ground unstable, while in other areas high pressure allows the ice to float on a pillow of liquid water. In both cases this reduces the friction at the base, allowing the ice to flow faster.

As scientists, we want to predict how the ice sheet will react to a warming climate. To do that, it is essential to pin down the role of water in the current flow rates of Antarctic ice. These fascinating lake and canyon features are therefore not only intriguing, but also play a crucial part in the future of the icy continent.

Christine Dow receives funding from the University of Waterloo and from a Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) fellowship.

Felicity Graham is funded by the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative for Antarctic Gateway Partnership.

Sue Cook works for the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, which is funded through the Australian Government Department of Industry and Science.

Fleas get a free ride - and there's not much in it for the dog. Kristian Niemi/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

To call someone a “parasite” is an insult. But the word has rather a different meaning in biology.

Etymologically speaking, the earliest known record of the word parasite in the English language was in 1539, when it was defined as “a hanger-on, a toady, a person who lives on others”. The word itself was derived from the Greek parasitos, meaning “a person who eats at the table of another”.

The social use appears to precede the scientific use, which was first recorded in 1646 as “an animal or plant that lives on others”.

Parasite might trigger distant memories of school lessons about fleas and tapeworms. But is this view accurate? As with most things in life, the answer is not as straightforward as it first appears.

It’s complicated

Parasites are a group of often unrelated organisms that share a way of life. Parasitism is only one example in the spectrum of ways organisms relate to each other.

Today, ecologists use “symbiosis” to refer to any relationship between two organisms. Anton de Bary, the pioneering mycologist (a fungi specialist), defined symbiosis when he wrote in his 1879 monograph Die Erscheinung der Symbiose that “any two organisms living in close association, commonly one living in or on the body of the other, are symbiotic, as contrasted with free living”.

Symbiosis can be subdivided into four broad categories, with clear examples in each, but the boundaries between them are sometimes blurred.

Parasitism

Parasitism is a relationship in which one partner (the parasite) benefits at the expense of the other (the host). Parasites hurt their hosts in many ways, ranging from general or specialised pathology and impairment of sexual characteristics, to the modification of host behaviour. Parasites increase their own fitness by exploiting hosts for food, habitat and/or dispersal.

Less obvious but familiar examples include the cuckoo, which is a brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of other bird species. This relieves the parasitic parent from the investment of rearing young or building nests, enabling them to spend more time foraging and producing more offspring.

The risk of losing an egg to raiders such as small mammals is reduced by distributing the eggs among different nests – literally not putting all their eggs in one basket.

Another interesting example, a parasite for life and not just at Christmas, is mistletoe. This plant grows on a wide range of host trees and commonly stunts their growth, but can kill them with heavy infestation.

Mistletoe is not completely dependent on its host and has its own leaves that do some photosynthesis. It uses the host mainly for water and mineral nutrients.

A lion eating a wildebeest or zebra is certainly benefiting from the other organism’s loss, but lions are predators, not parasites. Well-adapted parasites have typically evolved not to kill their hosts.

What about mosquitoes, which drink human blood? Parasites usually live in a very intimate relationship with their host, depending on it for more than nutritional requirements. The host is a source of food and at the same time provides a more-or-less permanent habitat. So, a mosquito is more properly a tiny predator.

But mosquitoes also transmit disease-causing micro-organisms such as the malaria protozoan or dengue virus. These are true parasites.

Mutualism

Mutualism is a relationship in which both partners benefit from the interaction.

The classic example of mutualism is lichen, a long-term association between a fungus and a green alga (or blue-green cyanobacterium). It is this that the German mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary described as “the living together of unlike organisms”.

The fungus benefits from the relationship because algae or cyanobacteria produce food by photosynthesis. The algae or cyanobacteria benefit by being protected from the environment by the filaments of the fungus, which also gather moisture and nutrients from the environment and (usually) provide an anchor to it.

A further example may be observed in a tropical aquarium. Well known to fans of the Disney film Finding Nemo, the clownfish is protected by a sea anemone, which stings the fish’s predators; in turn, the clownfish removes ectoparasites from the anemone.

Commensalism

Commensalism is a similar concept, but only one partner benefits, while the other is unaffected. The cattle egret is a classic example of a commensal.

This bird forages in fields among cows and horses, feeding on insects stirred up when the animals graze. The egret benefits from this relationship because the livestock inadvertently help it find a meal, while they are seemingly unaffected by its presence.

Another, more recently appreciated example is the colonisation of the human gut by so-called “good bacteria”, also known as probiotics, which multiply in the mammalian gut and apparently aid digestion. Whether this relationship is in fact commensal or mutual may depend on the species of bacteria involved.

Some biologists argue that any close relationship between two organisms is unlikely to be completely neutral for either party, and that relationships identified as commensal are more likely mutualistic or even parasitic in a subtle way that has not been identified.

Competition

Competition is an interaction between organisms in which the fitness of one, or potentially both, is lowered by the presence of the other. In some cases, both partners may be harmed by the relationship.

The behaviour of male red deer during the rutting season is an example of competition within a species, while trees of different species compete for light in a rainforest.

So, the next time you are tempted to call someone a parasite, think again. Your relationship with them may in fact be an example of competition, commensalism or perhaps even mutualism: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

Andrew Taylor-Robinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.