The coast alongside the Great Barrier Reef is home to ports, farms, holiday resorts, and more than a million people. It all puts pressure on the Reef, and it’s time for some firms plans to manage it.
Built-up urban environments transform the resource of rainwater into wasted runoff. Low Impact Development mimics nature to help get stormwater into the natural water system.
The Australian Constitution says residents have the right to water from the rivers for irrigation and conservation purposes but governments have brought in laws that are restricting this – One Nation’s…
Most of us have littered at one time or another, and in the process we probably contributed to the enormous of amounts of plastic that enter the ocean every year, eventually ending up in one of the five…
Hormone-disrupting pollutants in the urban rivers of South Wales are having adverse effects on the health and development of wild birds such as dippers. Research we’ve undertaken in collaboration with…
I was in the middle of giving a talk on the marine debris problem at a notable Californian marine research institute, when I drank the last of my water bottle, threw it onto the hall floor from the podium…
Frustratingly, the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has turned up many floating objects, but none of them are from the plane. That’s largely because the latest search area is likely to…
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…
Each square kilometre of Australian sea surface water is contaminated by around 4,000 pieces of tiny plastics, according to our study published today in journal PLOS ONE and data repository Figshare. These…
How do you get to know one of Earth’s most mysterious creatures? By looking at its earwax, according to a group of US researchers. Analysing the contents of blue whales’ ears, through a process similar…
Contaminated during the surrounding area’s history of mining, the River Hayle in Cornwall contains metals including copper, zinc, nickel and cadmium at levels that can kill brown trout, a particularly…
Anyone flushing a toilet in urban Australia today does so confident that they’ll never again see the thing they’ve flushed. They probably also think they are causing minimal environmental harm, thanks…
Each year more than 1 million tonnes of mineral nitrogen fertiliser is applied to arable and grass crops in the UK. This pollutes waterways through nitrate run-off and the atmosphere from the release of…