It sounds weird, but releasing small cane toads ahead of the main invasion front can help predators learn to avoid the biggest, most toxic ones. Here’s exactly how it works.
Storm season in the Australian tropical savanna.
Euan Ritchie
Australia’s Great Northern Savannas are the largest and most intact ecosystem of their kind on Earth. But they still face pressure from grazing, mining and agricultural expansion.
The Ord River was targeted for agricultural expansion in the 20th century.
isthatdaves/Wikimedia Commons
Ever since British settlement, water rights in Australia’s north have favoured landowners over traditional owners, effectively locking Aboriginal people out of agricultural development.
Clean water can help to break the link between poor hygiene and eye diseases such as trachoma.
Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA)
As Australia joins a New York summit to discuss the UN Sustainable Development Goals, it still faces questions over whether it is meeting water standards at home.
Coping with floods is just one of the issues dams need to deal with.
Tatters ❀/Flickr
Cape York’s ecosystems are worth as much as the Queensland economy.
The new assistant minister for cities, Angus Taylor, has expressed a ‘deep belief that consultation and proper public debate gets to wise outcomes’.
flickr/Crawford Forum
Effective development planning must anticipate where growth might occur and its wider impacts. So, if the federal government is serious about cities policy, it needs a proper settlements plan.
Northern rivers could increase Australia’s irrigated land by 50%. But we need to think about the environmental impacts.
Robin Hutton/Flickr
It’s full steam ahead for bringing vast increases in farming to northern Australia. In fact, probably too fast to adequately consider the environmental impacts.
The remote rivers of northern Australia could be home to untold numbers of new and threatened fish.
Matthew Le Feuvre
More land is burned in northern Australia during August and October than any other time of the year, and it’s not just a natural disaster.
An historian reading the government White Paper on developing northern Australia will realise we’re actually heading all the way back to the 1890s.
andrew matthews/Flickr
The federal government’s recent White Paper on developing northern Australia has disturbing echoes of the 1890s, a time when unbridled capitalism and indentured labour developed the North.
The north may be pleasant now, but climate change may make it less so.
rjcox/Flickr
The recently released white paper on developing northern Australia ignores an elephant in the room: climate change. While the paper sees a bright future for the north (roads, rail, dams and food), without considering climate change we can’t be sure the north will even be liveable.
The white paper on developing northern Australia outlines a solid vision - now for action.
Andrew Campbell
The White Paper on Developing Northern Australia represents the most comprehensive attempt yet to think through the development possibilities of the north.
Tony Abbott: ‘We can encourage jobs and tackle the costs of living far away from major cities’.
AAP/Lukas Coch
A 20-year roadmap to boost northern Australia’s development and investment will be unveiled by Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
Looking over Palmerston and the East Arm of Darwin Harbour to the new $35B Inpex LNG plant. Many resources projects in the north are in beautiful, environmentally important places.
Andrew Campbell
This year’s federal budget outlined plans for infrastructure in northern Australia, but it will need to do more than build roads and rail to sustainably develop the north.
More mines, more roads, as the government puts its drive towards economic development ahead of all else.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
Amid talk of paths to surplus and investing in infrastructure, both sides of politics seem to have forgotten Australia’s longstanding responsibility to govern sustainably, and not just for the economy.
Not at loggerheads: jobs and the environment can coexist in Queensland’s north.
Willem van Aken/CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons
Do politicians really have to choose between being pro-development or pro-environment? No, says Allan Dale, and Queensland’s new government has the chance to prove it.
Cane toads are still spreading across northern Australia.
UNSW
Cane toads, introduced in 1935 to control cane beetles, have now spread across a huge swathe of Australia, from the Kimberley in northern Western Australia to northern New South Wales. They’re still spreading…
King tides are just one of the threats faced by the people of Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, as a result of climate change.
Brad Marsellos
While you may have heard about the increasing threat that climate change and rising seas pose to Pacific islands — already forcing some communities to move — Australia has its own group of islands that…
Managing Director, Triple Helix Consulting; Chief Executive Officer, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research; Professorial Fellow, ANU Fenner School for the Environment and Society, Australian National University