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South Australia reaches 104.1 per cent wind and solar over state demand for the last seven days.

The post South Australia’s incredible week: 104.1 per cent wind and solar over seven days appeared first on RenewEconomy.

A handful of thorny issues remain unresolved as delegates at COP15 prepare for the final two days of negotiations in Montreal, even as a steady drip of new funding announcements over the past couple of days have intended to brighten the mood of the talks.

Biden poised to sign measure into law as US faces criticism at Cop15 biodiversity conference over failing to sign 30-year-old pact to protect nature

As the UN meets in Montreal to discuss saving biodiversity without the US, whose representatives are joining only as observers, conservationists are hailing one American step in the right direction: a likely ban on the trade of shark fins.

Although shark finning – the practice of cutting off shark fins and dumping the rest of the body back into the ocean – is illegal in the US, much of the trade in fins happens in US territory. As many as 73 million sharks are finned around the world each year.

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Scientists say a rare reef habitat near the mouth of the Amazon is at risk from oil exploration.

Last week’s experiment in the US is promising, but it’s not a magic bullet for our energy needs

The revelation that researchers had succeeded in creating a nuclear fusion reaction that generated more energy than it consumed made reassuring reading last week. For almost half a century, I have reported on scientific issues and no decade has been complete without two or three announcements by scientists claiming their work would soon allow science to recreate the processes that drive the sun. The end result would be the generation of clean, cheap nuclear fusion that would transform our lives.

Such announcements have been rare recently, so it gave me a warm glow to realise that standards may be returning to normal. By deploying a set of 192 lasers to bombard pellets of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, researchers at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California, were able to generate temperatures only found in stars and thermonuclear bombs. The isotopes then fused into helium, releasing excess energy, they reported.

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This year’s best photography from Guardian Australia’s photographic team and freelance photographers across Australia and New Zealand

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Despite backing calls to protect 30% of world’s land and sea by 2030, UK has no such target in its own plans

The UK’s environment targets are a missed opportunity to protect Britain’s rainforests, cold water coral reefs, chalk streams and peat bogs, environmentalists have said, amid accusations of hypocrisy over the government’s position at Cop15.

On Friday, the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, announced the government’s legally binding targets at the UN summit in Montreal, where the world is negotiating this decade’s agreement to protect biodiversity on Earth, with talks expected to conclude on Monday.

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New research finds nearly 30% of land animals could disappear form their local area by 2100 due to climate change and habitat destruction. This is more than double previous predictions. Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University Giovanni Strona, Doctoral program supervisor, University of Helsinki Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

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

An Indian agritech startup has raised over $6 million in its latest funding round, bringing its cumulative investor haul to $13 mln.

A Polish district heating plant has joined the EU ETS exodus, leaving the scheme due to the high cost of carbon allowances.

Compliance entities reduced their California Carbon Allowance (CCA) holdings across the board, while financials continued to scoop up V23 CCA and RGGI Allowances (RGAs) this week at the tail end of annual rebalancing activity, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday.

California and Quebec will decrease the number of current and advance vintage allowances offered in the jurisdictions’ February cap-and-trade sale as emissions budgets tighten in the linked carbon market, according to an official notice published Friday.

Airlines need to stop their continued underestimation of flight emissions and policies need to be put in place to ensure high quality carbon credits are used, writes Niklas Kaskeala of Compensate.

Dominion Energy will purchase tens of millions of RGGI Allowances (RGAs) before Virginia leaves the cap-and-trade programme at the end of 2023, the company said this week as it petitioned the State Corporation Commission (SCC) to pass these costs along to ratepayers.

Offset project developers are asking California regulator ARB to make several changes to its forest offset protocol to incorporate remote sensing and updated risk reversal ratings, as researchers continued to argue the scheme does not yield credits additional to business-as-usual practice, according to public comments.

The ministers of energy of Western Balkan countries, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia announced a new collective pledge to reduce emissions, at the 20th Ministerial Council of the Energy Community on Thursday.

Long-awaited targets to protect the environment will fail to fix water pollution, say nature groups.

A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Vandenberg space force base, California, carrying the Swot satellite – short for surface water and ocean topography – into orbit. The international mission, jointly developed and operated by Nasa and the French space agency CNES, in partnership with the British and Canadian space agencies, aims to give scientists an unprecedented view of the bodies of water that cover about 70% of the Earth, and help researchers better understand climate breakdown

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Modelling shows that if we continue on current trajectory, global heating will drive a cascade of extinctions in plants and animals

Earth could lose more than a tenth of its plant and animal species by the end of the century on current trends, according to new research which comes as nearly 3,000 scientists call for action from governments to stop the destruction of nature in the final days of negotiations at Cop15.

The climate crisis will drive an accelerating cascade of extinctions in the coming decades, as predators lose their prey, parasites lose their hosts, and temperature rises fracture Earth’s web of life, according to the researchers, who warn of the risk of co-extinctions in a paper published on Friday in Science Advances.

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