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Anti-logging protesters reject state governments’ claims new laws are necessary to protect workers’ safety

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Governments in two Australian states have been accused of undermining democracy by introducing legislation designed to criminalise environmental protests.

In Victoria, protesters attempting to prevent native forest logging would face 12 months’ jail or more than $21,000 in fines, and bans from protest areas under laws proposed last week by the Andrews Labor government.

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On World Water Day on 22 March, Mina Guli started a challenge to run 200 marathons across 200 countries in a single year to draw attention to the global water crisis. She has run 27 over seven weeks throughout Australia, and aims to complete the remainder – in Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, India, Latin America, South East Asia, Mexico and the US – by March 2023, when the UN Water Conference is held in New York.

‘Australia has some of the driest places on the planet. However, while I completed these marathons, Australians confronted another harsh reality of the water crisis as they dealt with the deluge of heavy periods of rain and flooding throughout News South Wales and Queensland,’ she says

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Laboratory chief blames Brexit for closure as money for corvid brain power research dries up

One of Britain’s most important, and unusual, centres for studying cognition is facing imminent closure as a result of Brexit. Set up 22 years ago to study the minds of crows, rooks and other birds noted for their intelligence, the Cambridge Comparative Cognition Laboratory is set to cease operations in July.

Its director, Professor Nicola Clayton, told the Observer she was devastated by the prospect of ending her research there. Nor was she in any doubt about the prime reason for the centre’s closure.

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Such schemes should be celebrated only when local people and democratic institutions lead the way

Few environmental ventures have captured the popular imagination quite like rewilding. For decades, campaigners have been clamouring for the restoration of natural ecosystems as an urgent response to climate breakdown, and as a good in itself. And now it counts more than just environmentalists among its advocates – big business and the wealthy are getting involved too.

Across the UK, hundreds of thousands of acres are being snapped up for the purpose of rewilding by businesses, billionaires and asset managers. Asos billionaire Anders Povlsen and his wife, Anne, are now Scotland’s largest landowners. In a manifesto of sorts, addressed to the people of Scotland, the couple wrote that their intention was to “restore our parts of the Highlands to their former magnificent natural state and repair the harm that man has inflicted on them”. The investment companies Aviva and Standard Life have also bought land to plant forests and restore peatland. The brewery and pub chain Brewdog is planting “the biggest ever forest” in Scotland; while pop star Ed Sheeran is “trying to rewild as much of the UK as [he] can”.

Eleanor Salter writes about climate, culture and politics

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The world’s longest serving environment correspondent explains the origins of a slow and continuing journey

It all began with Högertrafikomläggningen, Swedish for “the right-hand traffic reorganisation”.

On 3 September 1967, Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. The change mainly took place at night, but in Stockholm and Malmö all traffic stopped for most of the weekend while intersections were reconfigured.

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

The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) has agreed to buy BRL 8.7 million ($1.8 mln) in voluntary carbon credits under its pilot tender process.

An independent watchdog committee along with environment justice group representatives found inconsistencies in California’s 2022 draft Scoping Plan on the role of cap-and-trade in achieving the state’s emissions targets, but differed in their approaches to reforming the programme, a virtual meeting heard Friday. 

Compliance entities saw their California Carbon Allowance (CCA) net length hit a 13-month-high prior to the publication of Q2 WCI auction results this week, while speculators added to their holdings for the first time in four weeks, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday. 

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With empathy and goodwill Anthony Albanese’s Labor government can end the inane climate wars

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This observation is more whimsy than science, but indulge me for a moment. Australians don’t change the stripe of their federal government that often and when they do, they make an emotional investment in the new regime.

The emotional investment often translates as hope. But this time, the prevailing atmosphere feels more like relief. Relief is adjacent to hope, but it’s not quite the same thing.

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California legislators on Thursday turned down a bill that would have added public banking metrics for compliance instruments in the WCI-linked carbon market, while lawmakers plan to further amend an act that would put offset usage underneath the state’s allowance budget in the event of future linkages.

Labor won by offering modest environmental policies. It will have to go further in office to deal with the climate emergency

In his victory speech on election night last Saturday, Labor’s Anthony Albanese promised to turn Australia into a “renewable energy superpower” and end a decade of “climate wars”. This was good news. Under rightwing Coalition governments – an enduring alliance between the Liberal and National parties – Australia was seen as a climate pariah on the world stage. The new prime minister will have to do very little to raise his country’s standing.

From a global perspective, Mr Albanese’s most important policy is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. Mr Albanese’s goal is not as ambitious as the UK’s or the EU’s. But it is a marked improvement on the last government and will be well received in neighbouring Pacific nations tired of seeing existential threats from rising sea levels dismissed in Canberra. The Coalition government led by Scott Morrison promised that Australia would reach net zero by 2050, which at best would have seen a 28% cut in climate-altering emissions by the end of the decade. But significantly there were no new policies under that administration to meet this distant objective.

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Shell has taken a swipe at the UK government’s tax breaks for North Sea fossil fuel investment that accompanied Thursday’s news of a windfall levy on oil and gas profits by pointing out that the sweeteners do not extend to renewable energy.

G7 energy ministers pledged on Friday to ditch coal-fired production but failed to set the 2030 deadline that officials from hosts Germany had crafted in a draft text.

Many of the world’s largest oil and gas companies have committed to mid-century net zero emissions targets, but initiatives looking into the credibility of climate claims are abstaining their support over fears of backing greenwashing.

Division lines have been drawn in the battle to win market share in the voluntary carbon market (VCM) after AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) said Friday that it’s not going to follow the route followed by rival Xpansiv's CBL and introduce a rolling contract for its nature-based standardised spot contract.