Latest news with #ClearAir
The Guardian
22-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Santos wins final approval for Barossa gas project as environment advocates condemn ‘climate bomb'
Santos has received federal approval to commence production from its Barossa offshore gas field off the coast of the Northern Territory. The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (Nopsema) decided to accept the environment plan for the project's production operations. It marks the final approval required for the project, clearing the way for the gas giant to extract and pipe the gas to Darwin. The Barossa field is known for its 18% carbon dioxide content, which is a higher concentration than other Australian gas fields. The development is projected to add more than 270m tonnes of heat-trapping CO2 to the atmosphere over its life once the gas is sold and burnt overseas. 'This is Australia's dirtiest gas project and it should never have been given the green light,' said Gavan McFadzean, the Australian Conservation Foundation's climate change and clean energy program manager. Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as an email 'Barossa is a massive climate bomb that will produce more climate pollution than usable gas.' McFadzean said despite repeated requests by ACF, Santos had not properly explained how the project would comply with Australia's safeguard mechanism or provided a 'proper assessment of how the greenhouse gas emissions from Barossa will affect Australia's environment'. 'Barossa remains on track for first gas in the third quarter of 2025 and within cost guidance,' a Santos spokesperson said in a statement provided to Guardian Australia on Tuesday. Kirsty Howey, executive director of the Environment Centre NT, said: 'It is unfathomable that it has been approved in 2025, when the climate science is clear that we can have no new fossil fuel projects if we are to avoid dangerous global warming'. 'This approval, in the middle of an election campaign, just goes to show the failure of climate policy in Australia to ensure the necessary phase-out of fossil fuels,' she said. 'If Barossa was a litmus test for the reformed Safeguard Mechanism, that policy has failed,' she said. The Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said if Labor was reelected at the forthcoming election, the Greens would be 'essential' in the new parliament to 'ensure real action is taken to address the climate crisis'. 'If the Albanese government wanted to, they could have worked with the Greens in this parliament to stop climate bombs like Barossa by putting a climate trigger in our environment laws,' she said. 'Instead, on the eve of an election, Santos has been given the green-light to produce some of the dirtiest gas in Australia.' Guardian Australia sought comment from Labor. Approval of the production plan follows legal challenges to other components of the Barossa project, including unsuccessful proceedings related to submerged cultural heritage that were launched by the Environmental Defenders Office on behalf of three Tiwi Island claimants, over a proposed export pipeline. The federal court ordered the EDO to pay Santos's full legal costs late last year.
The Guardian
15-04-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
Parched waterways, dead fish and trees ready to give up: historic big dry grips South Australia
Usually hardy trees and shrubs are dying, waterways have turned to dust and ecologists fear local freshwater fish extinctions could be coming as historic dry conditions grip parts of South Australia. Large swathes of the state – including the Adelaide Plains, the Fleurieu, Yorke and Eyre peninsulas and upper south-east – have seen the lowest rainfall on record in the 14 months since February 2024, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. 'The one thing we need more than anything else is rain,' the state premier, Peter Malinauskas, said last week. Off the back of the state's driest summer since 2018-19, this year weather stations across Adelaide, Mount Barker and Mount Lofty have recorded just 20% of their usual rain. Adelaide typically gets 64mm from January to March, but this year only 14mm fell. Mount Barker, 33km to the city's south-east, saw only 15mm compared to its average 83mm. Angus Hines, a senior meteorologist at the BoM, says even though several weather patterns over recent months dragged moisture over the continent from the north-east, 'by the time that airflow reaches South Australia, it's more or less bone dry'. Adelaide's desalination plant has at times been running at capacity, pumping out 300 million litres of drinking water a day to keep the city's residents off water restrictions. Outside Adelaide, deep and usually permanent pools and waterways are parched, leaving freshwater fish stranded and dead. Luke Price, an ecologist for the regional landscape body Landscapes Hills and Fleurieu, says 'we're definitely seeing local extinctions of small populations of fish that usually sought refuge in those pools'. Together with environment organisation Nature Glenelg Trust, the landscape board has bought tens of thousands of litres of water – along with aerators and filtration systems – to replenish one pool, home to an isolated population of river blackfish. Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as a free newsletter Farm dams that acted as refuges for threatened species, like yarra pygmy perch, purple-spotted gudgeon and Murray hardyhead, are also drying out. 'We're looking at having to cart water into those sites just to keep them topped up and keep those fish going,' Price says. 'We really just have to keep persevering until we get a decent break to the season.' Brenton Grear, the director of Green Adelaide, says water that remained in waterways across metropolitan Adelaide was providing a valuable refuge for freshwater fish and various aquatic invertebrates. But without significant rainfall, some species may need to be rescued. Wattles and eucalypts, particularly messmate stringybarks, have been dying throughout the Adelaide Hills, while along coastal dunes and clifftops, shrubs like coast daisy bush and coast beard-heath are suffering. Dr Stefan Caddy-Retalic, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide, says many tree species were showing signs of deterioration and stress such as dead limbs, excessive leaf scorching or sprouting new shoots from the base due to the 'ratcheting' effects of lower rainfall, higher temperatures and development that encroached on tree roots. As the city's climate continued to shift from warm mediterranean to semi-arid due to global heating, a lot of the introduced trees people associated with Adelaide – like jacarandas, plane trees and oaks – and some natives, such as grey box, will continue to struggle, he says, with potentially devastating consequences for the animals that rely on them for food and habitat. The ecologist Derek Sandow, of the Northern and Yorke Landscape Board, who manages the Marna Banggara project to rewild southern parts of the peninsula, says even usually hardy native trees looked almost ready to give up. 'You walk through the bush and you see the bigger gum trees are dropping everything, bark, twigs, anything they don't need to keep growing.' Sandow thinks the endangered brush-tailed bettongs reintroduced to the peninsula are surviving but says like many other macropods – the marsupial family that includes wallabies and kangaroos – they have likely put their reproduction on pause. 'I think it's almost unprecedented what people are seeing here. We are seeing kangaroos grazing in people's lawns. They're looking for anything green they can get.' Sign up to Clear Air Australia Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis after newsletter promotion On Kangaroo Island, 110km south-west of the state capital, Dr Jess Marsh, an invertebrate conservation biologist at the University of Adelaide, worries about the island's critically endangered assassin spiders that are only known in one north-west patch where rainfall is also at a record low. The spiders live along creek lines, and need a moist environment for nesting in elevated clumps of leaf litter. The habitat has already been devastated by bushfire that scorched half the island in 2019 and 2020, she says, as well as the dieback of native plants caused by a root fungus. 'I'm really concerned for that whole population,' Marsh says. 'They need complex vegetation and healthy eucalypts. It's getting hotter and drier, and species like the KI assassin spider are on a knife edge. We are going to lose species.' In Mount Gambier towards the Victorian border, Bryan Haywood, a senior ecologist at Nature Glenelg Trust, is seeing dramatically low numbers of some butterflies, and hardy banksia shrubs are dying – scenes reminiscent of the millennium drought. 'To see those banksias dead means it's another resource for insects, birds and small mammals that's being lost,' he says. At one of the trust's properties at Mount Burr Swamp, a 50-hectare wetland which Haywood thought would 'never dry out' can now be walked across 'without getting soggy feet'. Flowering eucalypts were producing scant blossoms, which were dry and without nectar. Dr Katja Hogendoorn, an expert in native and introduced honeybees at the University of Adelaide, says there were about 150 native bee species across greater Adelaide, and all needed nectar to fly. 'If a bee cannot find nectar, it cannot fly, it cannot produce offspring,' Hogendoorn says. Native bees like the blue-banded bee, which hovered and buzzed around cottage gardens, disappeared after the drought in 2019, and she expects a similar crash to come. 'This issue doesn't only affect bees,' Hogendoorn says. 'It affects all flying insects.' 'When you see a reduction in flying insects, you will see a reduction in birds that rely on flying insects,' she said. 'If we want to save our biodiversity, we have to do something about climate change.' As the planet warms in the future, the Mediterranean climate of the state's south is expected to become drier. Time spent in drought is projected to nearly double across the Hills and Fleurieu, Eyre Peninsula, Kangaroo Island and northern and Yorke landscape regions by 2030, according to the state government. Matt Grant is a climate researcher at the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre looking at drought. He says his own research shows parts of South Australia has seen a trend of about one extra month of drought for every five years from 1971 to 2020. Grant says the observed shifts were not clear enough yet to attribute to climate change, and this was down to the complexity of weather systems. 'There seems to be a turning point around 1950 and, from 1970, you see this trend across a lot of the country,' he says. Even with possible showers forecast later this week, it could take months or even years for ecosystems to recover, according to Green Adelaide's Grear. 'These conditions highlight the potential future impacts of climate change. Understanding the issues facing species now can help us better identify which aspects of biodiversity are most at risk for the future.'
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Revealed: nearly 2m hectares of koala habitat bulldozed since 2011 – despite political promises to protect species
Nearly 2m hectares of forests suitable for endangered koalas have been destroyed since the iconic species was declared a threatened species in 2011, according to analysis for Guardian Australia. The scale of habitat destruction in Queensland and New South Wales – states in which the koala is formally recognised as being at risk of extinction – has continued despite political promises it would be protected. Analysis by the Australian Conservation Foundation using state and federal government data found 1,964,200 hectares of koala habitat were cleared between 2012 and 2021, the latest year for which there was complete data. The total amount of destroyed forest and bush covered an area larger than greater Sydney, taking in the Blue Mountains, the Illawarra, the southern highlands and the Goulburn and Shoalhaven regions. It is more than 10 times larger than the area the NSW government is assessing for a possible 'great koala national park'. But most of the cleared area – 81% – was in Queensland. About three-quarters of the lost forest is estimated to have been cleared for agriculture, to create cattle pasture and crop fields. The analysis found 13% was removed by the forestry industry and 5% for development of infrastructure, including mining. Just 4% was likely due to natural causes, such as bushfire and drought. Nearly all of the forest destruction occurred on a small scale that did not require consideration under federal environment law. Less than 2% of it was approved by the federal environment minister. Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as an email Campaigners say it shows the national Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – which the Albanese government promised to rewrite in this term before delaying its plans indefinitely – is deeply flawed. Darcie Carruthers, an Australian Conservation Foundation nature campaigner, said: 'It beggars belief that with nearly 2m hectares of potential koala habitat gone in just a decade, the federal government would continue to approve projects that bulldoze koalas' homes. But that's exactly what's happening.' A separate analysis by the foundation found that almost 3,000 hectares of potential koala habitat were approved for clearing in 2024. Carruthers said the outsized contribution of the beef industry towards habitat loss showed 'the food system can do much more for koalas'. 'There are solutions to make sure people, farms, koalas and the forests we all depend on can all thrive,' she said. Gemma Plesman, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the data showed the 'complete failure' of federal environment laws to protect 'Australia's most iconic' endangered species. 'Every year koalas lose more of their home – mostly driven by beef production – and neither of our major parties have been able to stop the destruction,' she said. Koalas in Queensland, NSW and the Australian Capita Territory were formally listed as being vulnerable to extinction in 2012. In 2022 the threat level was raised to endangered after scientists concluded that numbers were likely to have dropped by half over the previous 20 years. Sign up to Clear Air Australia Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis after newsletter promotion A more recent national project to better estimate the number of koalas suggested there are between 95,000 and 238,000 in the states where the species is considered endangered and between 129,000 and 286,000 in Victoria and South Australia. The species faces a host of threats in addition to losing its habitat, including the climate crisis and disease. Dr Christine Hosking, a conservation scientist at the University of Queensland who has researched how the climate emergency will shrink the koala's habitat, said the threat was 'playing out now in real time'. 'Areas of New South Wales and Queensland have seen big reductions [in koala numbers] and that's been down to protracted droughts and heatwaves,' she said. 'Koala's can't thermoregulate above about 37C and we now get successive days above that [as well as] days over 40C in a row. They simply can't survive.' Hosking's research shows that as temperatures rise the koala's habitat in Queensland and NSW contracts eastward, pushing them into already developed areas where they face other risks such as vehicles and dog attacks. A University of Sydney study in February on one of the country's few chlamydia-free koala populations – located in south-western Sydney – found urban development had effectively isolated the population, leading to high levels of in-breeding that made the species more susceptible to disease. 'We're losing koalas for complex reasons,' Hosking said. 'Habitat loss is the No 1 threat because they're so limited in what they can eat, but then you have roads, urbanisation, chlamydia and, of course, climate change.' Prof Mathew Crowther, a conservation biologist and koala ecologist at the University of Sydney, said the marsupial's specialised diet – eucalyptus leaves – put it in conflict with humans. Eucalyptus trees that grow on flatter, more fertile soils generally produce leaves higher in nutrients and lower in toxins. But those flat, fertile soils are where humans like to settle and grow food. 'Koalas and people want the same kind of land,' Crowther said. He said national parks tended to be in more rugged country, which was not the koala's preferred habitat. Many live outside national parks on private land. 'We need to make sure there's enough habitat that is linked together, we need to make sure regrowth and plantings are allowed to happen and we have to give incentives for landholders,' he said.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘Every year matters': Queensland's critically endangered ‘bum-breathing' turtle battles the odds
A rare 'bum-breathing' turtle found in a single river system in Queensland has suffered one of its worst breeding seasons on record due to flooding last December. It has prompted volunteers to question how many more 'bad years' the species can survive. A freshwater species that breathes by absorbing oxygen through gill-like structures in its tail, the Mary River turtle is endemic to south-east Queensland. Its population has fallen by more than 80% since the 1960s and its conservation status was upgraded from endangered to critically endangered last year. Volunteers have worked for more than two decades at Tiaro, about 200km north of Brisbane, to save the species. The Mary River typically flows low at the start of summer – about two metres depth. But when Guardian Australia visited in December it had surged above 10 metres after unusually heavy rain. The result was the number of nests on the riverbanks – and the number of hatchlings that survived – was one of the lowest in the conservation program's 24-year history. Seventeen nests, known as clutches, were laid during the season. Usually 30 to 40 are expected during the turtle's breeding months of October, November and December. Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as an email Eggs in nine clutches hatched successfully but eight were lost to flood waters. The head of the conservation effort and Tiaro Landcare project leader, Marilyn Connell, said the Mary River turtle already had 'lots of things going against it, making it difficult to recover'. 'You sort of can't believe it,' she said. 'We felt despondent.' The volunteers made the difficult decision to intervene and move two nests higher up the riverbanks. One of these survived the flood waters. The river eventually peaked at 11.5 metres at Tiaro in December, one of only six times it has been recorded at that height at that time of year in the past 100 years, according to Connell. The Mary River turtle's formal listing of critically endangered means scientists consider it one rung away from extinction. The remaining wild population is estimated to be about 10,000. They face threats from foxes and other nest predators, invasive species and developments that disturb the flow of the river, including dams and weirs. 'Every year matters, that's how we feel,' Connell said. 'You just have to ask: how many of these bad years can a species that has already declined this much deal with?' Community volunteers protect nests and hatchlings on the riverbanks from predators but even after successful breeding seasons the population has not recovered. The turtle is a long-lived species and can bounce back from a poor breeding season. But too few turtles are reaching maturity, which occurs after about 25 to 30 years. The volunteers are now working with researchers from Charles Darwin University to investigate why many juvenile turtles are not surviving to adulthood and what can be done to address this. Results are expected later this year. Sign up to Clear Air Australia Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis after newsletter promotion Dr Mariana Campbell, a researcher at the university, said 'obviously there is something else happening in the river', and little would be being done to help the turtle were it not for the Tiaro community. Connell said volunteers were concerned that the climate crisis was compounding the threats facing the species. She said sea temperatures off the southern Queensland coast had been at record levels before the floods. Scientists say this leads to more intense rain as the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere increases. 'You think to yourself, is more of this what we've got to look forward to?' Connell said. She said despite the turtle's critically endangered status, volunteers have had to rely on fundraising drives, selling chocolate turtles and chasing financial support from overseas to continue their conservation work. She was shocked in 2010 when the Landcare group received a conservation grant from the United Arab Emirates. The same fund gave them further grants in 2011 and 2018. After a 2022 flood in Queensland and New South Wales, volunteers also received a $300,000 grant through a state government disaster fund. Connell said this was typical of her experience – that 'you have to have a disaster, or the species has to be on its last legs, to get funds'. 'It is ironic but that's the way conservation works in Australia,' she said. She said while community projects like hers could 'chip away' at environmental work they ultimately needed serious government and philanthropic support. 'We can't be doing it all off our own backs,' she said.
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
‘Endearing and fascinating' yellow-bellied glider faces ‘inexorable slide' into extinction
Australia's most skilled aerial mammal, the yellow-bellied glider, is on an 'inexorable slide' to extinction as global heating creates more extreme bushfires that are robbing the species of the food and tree hollows it relies on to survive. Thanks to large parachutes of skin stretching from their wrists to their ankles, yellow-bellied gliders can travel up to 140 metres in a single jump, the furthest of any Australian mammal, including the larger and better known endangered greater glider. Scientists studying the species said its characteristics – including a diet of tree sap, nectar and insects, reliance on old trees with hollows for shelter and nesting, and a tendency to live across a large 'home range' – make it especially vulnerable to the climate crisis. They said fragmentation of the glider's forest habitat, logged and cleared for development, had already put pressure on 'yellow-bellies' before the black summer bushfires of 2019-20 scorched 41% of their habitat and pushed them on to the national threatened species list in 2022. Prof John Woinarski, an ecologist at Charles Darwin University and a leading threatened species expert, said the glider was 'sliding inexorably towards extinction'. 'They need hollows to rest in during the day, but across Australia the number of these old trees is declining rapidly through logging and fire,' he said. 'Many hollow-bearing species are in trouble – and the yellow-bellied gliders' [decline is] more pronounced than the others.' Yellow-bellied gliders live for about six years, are about the size of a small cat and live in family groups of up to six animals in a home range of between 25 and 85 hectares (62 and 210 acres) – a much larger area than is typically relied on by greater gliders. They are nocturnal, notoriously hard to spot and one of the loudest marsupials in Australia. Their distinctive shrieking and gurgling calls can be heard from as much as 500 metres away. One researcher said the sound was 'like a satanic pig going through an exorcism'. The glider has two sub-species. One is restricted to the wet tropics of north Queensland and is considered endangered. Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as an email The other sub-species lives between south-east Queensland and south-east South Australia. It is listed as vulnerable in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, and endangered in South Australia. It is feared it could already be extinct in the latter. There is no reliable estimate of how many yellow-bellied gliders are left. The national threatened species scientific committee said it was likely there were more than 10,000 but fewer than 100,000. It estimated the population across the south-east had fallen by at least 30% over 12 to 15 years. Sign up to Clear Air Australia Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis after newsletter promotion Research in three areas of NSW after the black summer fires found between 13% and 66% fewer gliders in burnt areas. 'Climate change is going to make conservation of any forest-dwelling species much harder,' Woinarski said. 'It's the loss of hollow-bearing trees that is exacerbated by repeated fires. Recurrent fires are a recipe for doom.' Dr Rod Kavanagh, a forest ecologist and adjunct professor at Southern Cross University, began researching the gliders in the late 1970s. He said the species was 'under-studied' and more research and data were needed to understand how it was affected by the climate crisis. He said he had visited known glider habitat in northern coastal NSW after the black summer and had found no gliders in severely burnt areas. Gliders were also absent from unburnt areas, he said, but there were no notable declines on the south coast. Woinarski said land clearing and native forest logging in NSW and Queensland continued to put pressure on the gliders but the biggest issue was that 'we need to get serious about climate change and reducing emissions'. 'In 20 years, it is going to be far harder to help them,' he said. 'We need greater public awareness … It is such an endearing and fascinating creature and we all need to appreciate what a wonderful animal it is.' Desley Whisson, an associate professor and ecologist at Deakin University who coordinates glider research, called for greater support for projects that planted vegetation in cleared areas and connected fragmented forest areas that the species relied on. She said greater public awareness of where gliders live and their plight would also help them survive. 'I think fire is one of the biggest risks,' she said. 'I try to stay optimistic and I think we can all do something positive. 'I would hate to think of a world that doesn't have yellow-bellied gliders in it.'
