The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that 2013 was the hottest year in Australia since records began in 1910. Unusual heat was a persistent feature throughout the year. For the continent as a whole…
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After the early onset of the 2013-14 bushfire season, it is worth reviewing which homes are more likely to be left standing when the fires inevitably return. One of the most important factors to note is…
The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed 2013 as Australia’s hottest year since records began in 1910. Average temperatures over the continent have been 1.2C above the 1961-1990 average, breaking the previous…
Bioenergy is currently the fastest growing source of renewable energy. Cultivating energy crops on arable land can decrease dependency on depleting fossil resources and it can mitigate climate change…
With temperatures starting to climb, it’s time to think about how we will stay cool this summer. The stakes are getting higher when it comes to hot weather. As the Australian Medical Association has warned…
In 1926, just outside of St Petersburg in Russia, botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov set up the Pavlovsk Experimental Station. It was one of the world’s first “seed banks”. The term “seed bank” or…
To mark the beginning of a new year, I have put together a list of some of the major issues and events expected to influence climate change policy-making in 2014. From 1 to 8, these are my top predictions…
The Night Parrot has been called the “world’s most mysterious bird”. First discovered in 1845, it was rarely seen alive for most of the next hundred and seventy years, but it has been rediscovered in 2013…
In a time of diminishing global biodiversity, Bhutan’s conservation achievements read like an environmentalist’s heavenly dream. More than 50% of its land area is designated as protected in national parks…
This summer, many of us are heading overseas. Australians are the world’s largest spenders on international travel on a per capita basis. In 2012, one in three of us headed overseas. After New Zealand…
For the past three years it’s been an occasional pleasure and a frequent privilege to work with the academics who contribute to The Conversation’s Environment & Energy section. It’s not just the soil…
On Christmas Day in Australia, fewer people are at their paid employment and more working premises are closed than on any other day in the year. How does this affect demand for electricity, widely seen…
As Christmas and summer holidays approach, many of us are packing our bags, ready to drive off on holidays to see families and friends. Those long car trips are often to coastal towns, national parks and…
Until 2010, for well over a century, through two world wars and the Great Depression, the quantity of electricity used in Australia each year was greater than the year before. In the three years since…
I have just returned from the jungles of Papua New Guinea, where for two weeks a team of us have set camera traps that will collect vital information about the biodiversity of this remote region. It’s…
Stop press! Actress Julia Roberts has been spotted in a Prius and is reportedly into reusable coffee cups and solar panels. According to media reports, it was the birth of her twins, rather than her Oscar-winning…
As much of inland and eastern Australia sweats through its first heatwave of the summer, a new interactive website has been launched to track where the heat is coming from and to map past heatwaves across…
Australians are set to munch through half a billion prawns this Christmas. But where do all those prawns come from? And can we feel good as we throw another one on the barbie? About half of the prawns…
Island fauna are particularly vulnerable to new threats. Not only do they have a very limited population size and distribution to begin with, they can display extreme naïveté to new predators, due to a…
Images of the typhoon-ravaged Philippines were terribly confronting, vividly conveying what an angry planet can dish up. But amid the destruction and death, an important point was largely missed: the world’s…
The federal government’s recent announcement “reproclaiming” the new Commonwealth Marine Reserves overturns previous plans to protect Australia’s marine biodiversity, and review the management of Australia’s…
Research published last month in the journal Climatic Change may provide an essential building block in proving corporate liability for current and future climate change damage. Researcher Richard Heede…
The latest climate talks in Warsaw may have achieved little in the way of action on climate change, but they were even worse for biodiversity. In fact, since early climate talks in the 1990s, biodiversity…
Australia has a problem with its power system that goes to the core of many issues we’re facing at the moment — increasing coal and gas prices, changing electricity usage, and climate change. That’s the…
China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) has just released some remarkable data on the addition of new electric generating capacity in 2013. China’s electric power system has been growing at a tremendous…