Latest news with #environmentalImpact
News.com.au
5 days ago
- General
- News.com.au
Fire ant outbreak hits BHP's Broadmeadow mine in Central Queensland
An outbreak of fire ants has hit mining giant BHP's Broadmeadow mine in central Queensland, sparking alarm and fury in environmentalists. The Invasive Species Council flagged the outbreak on Friday, warning it marked the first time the ants, which can cause devastating economic and environmental impacts, had been detected in the region. 'In the last week, we've had another detection in NSW, an interception in WA and now the first outbreak in Central Queensland,' advocacy manager Reece Pianta said. 'I am incredibly angry about this. This is not bad luck. It's a spectacular failure because of known gaps in funding, enforcement and surveillance.' The ants infect painful stings on people and animals and pose a threat to agricultural businesses. They can fly up to 5km and travel over and underground, the government's animal and plant pests and diseases website states, and can also move with shipping containers and cargo and hide in soil, mulch, fertiliser and plant material. The government has spent $690m to contain and eradicate the species since 2001 following an outbreak in South East Queensland. The 2021 Scott-Orr Review concluded an extra $200m to $300m in yearly funding for 10 years was needed to contain and eradicate the threat. 'Australia's last chance to eradicate deadly fire ants is being destroyed because Australia's governments are dithering and delaying critical funding increases,' Mr Pianta said. 'We have warned for two years that there is a major gap in funding for suppression, with nest densities off the charts south of Brisbane. 'The Senate inquiry found this. The independent program review found this. The Queensland government has raised this. The federal biosecurity department knows this. 'But every time it has been raised, the message we get back is that new funding is just around the corner if only we will be patient.' Broadmeadow is a metallurgical coalmine located near Moranbah in Queensland's Bowen Basin, about 1050km north of Brisbane. National Fire Ant Eradication Program officers visited the mine site on Wednesday to clear out the ant nests. A BHP spokesman said the company was working closely with the program to support the 'rapid containment, treatment and eradication' of the detection. Mr Pianta said the Broadmeadow detection demonstrated the country's control system was 'breaking down'. 'This outbreak at Broadmeadow is almost 800km from the known infestation zone,' he said. 'That's simply unacceptable. Every mine site and construction project across the country should be checking for fire ants. 'Any business or resident that has received materials from South East Queensland needs to check them. 'This outbreak is a national wake-up call.' In 2024, The Australia Institute warned that fire ants could cost the country up to $22bn in losses by the 2040s. It is estimated the ants will produce $2.5bn in damages each year beyond 2035.
South China Morning Post
6 days ago
- South China Morning Post
Retired Hong Kong social worker admits defrauding authorities out of HK$16,780
A retired Hong Kong social worker behind a dropped legal challenge against the approval of the San Tin Technopole project's environmental study has admitted to concealing his financial assets to defraud authorities out of HK$16,780 (US$2,137) in welfare benefits. Eddie Tse Sai-kit on Thursday pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud for obtaining monthly aid of HK$4,195 on four occasions without notifying the Social Welfare Department that his income exceeded the limit for receiving an old age living allowance. The 68-year-old defendant was arrested early this year while he was challenging an environmental impact assessment report that endorsed the development of a technology hub near the mainland Chinese border. Despite securing permission from the High Court to commence judicial review proceedings, Tse later dropped the case , citing 'widespread harassment and intimidation'. The court heard that Tse had applied for an old age living allowance in June 2023 and claimed his monthly income was HK$5,000, which was below the then limit of HK$10,710. He received a total of HK$80,460 from the department between July 2023 and December 2024. But the social worker failed to declare his earnings from Polytechnic University, where he had worked as a part-time supervisor from January 2021 to May this year.
BBC News
7 days ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Warning bill will 'tragically' damage Surrey countryside
A government bill could cause "tragic, irretrievable and avoidable" damage to Surrey's countryside, a councillor has warned. Jonathan Essex, Green Party councillor for Redhill East, said the Planning and Infrastructure Bill could "dismantle decades of progress in nature protection" if passed. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government told the BBC: "The government has inherited a failing system that has delayed new homes and infrastructure while doing nothing for nature's recovery."We are determined to fix this," they added. "Our Planning and Infrastructure Bill will deliver a win-win for the economy and nature by unblocking building and economic growth and delivering meaningful environmental improvements."There is a shortage of affordable homes in Surrey, with more than 10,000 households on a local authority housing waiting list, according to a Surrey County Council (SCC) document. Listen: The Surrey towns where 1 in 5 homes cost over £1m SCC unanimously agreed on a motion by Mr Essex to urge the government to change "deeply damaging" parts of the Planning and Infrastructure bill will "water down" habitat protections to sites of specific scientific interest and other protected areas, the East Surrey Green Party said in a statement. Protection granted to individual species, such as bats, newts, wild birds and water voles, could also be weakened, it added.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Starfish killer found in Palm Beach County's Lake Worth Lagoon by University of Florida
Ecologist Alex Romer tugged his snorkel on and slipped into the stillness of Palm Beach County's Lake Worth Lagoon, an estuary of mud and sand, turtles and tidal whims, manatee and mutton snapper, and on that day in July 2024, devastation. Sea stars, also known as starfish, lay in pieces in the murk, arms twisted, white with sores, bodies deflating, disintegrating, vaporizing into the substrate with a shadow of powdery black imprints left behind. At first, the University of Florida researcher thought it was only a few sickened nine-armed sea stars in an area dubbed Lake Worth Cove at John D. MacArthur Beach State Park. But there were dozens, up to 75, with varying degrees of symptoms from what would be determined to be sea star wasting disease, or sea star wasting syndrome. More: Boat restrictions possible near Peanut Island as dredging begins in Lake Worth Lagoon It's believed to be the first documented case of the sea star killer in Florida's coastal waters according to researchers at UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, which published a study this year in the journal Southeastern Naturalist. Romer, who is a quantitative ecologist with UF's Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center, was the lead author. 'I had a pretty good idea it was sea star wasting disease,' Romer said. 'They live in the substrate, but they were all out because they were suffering.' Millions of sea star deaths between 2013 and 2015 along the Pacific coast from the Gulf of Alaska to Mexico are blamed on the disease. First thought to be a virus, new evidence points to a syndrome, or group of symptoms that occur together, including a bacterial growth that may be caused by environmental factors such as warmer water temperatures, changes in salinity levels and pollutants. Romer, who said he recognized the disease from learning about it in an advanced placement environmental science class, went back the day after his initial snorkel trip to take photos and collect samples. He gave those to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which then returned them to UF for study. Sea surface temperatures in the Lake Worth Lagoon where the sick sea stars were found were more than 1.8 degrees above average at the time of the event, according to UF. Unusually low tides and stormwater runoff were also observed. 'When nine-armed sea stars forage, they churn the sand for worms and shellfish,' Romer said. 'If their numbers drop, that sediment-mixing slows, giving algae a chance to overgrow meadows. Thinner seagrass means fewer nursery spots for young sportfish.' More: Seagrass is making an epic comeback in the Lake Worth Lagoon - why that's so critical Deborah Drum, director of Palm Beach County's Environmental Resources Management Department, or ERM, said none of her marine scientists have seen signs of sea star wasting disease in the Lake Worth Lagoon and believes what Romer stumbled on was a very localized event. In the past few months, Drum said environmental resource employees have found healthy nine-armed sea stars throughout the northern reaches of the lagoon and in the Munyon Cove area near where Romer was snorkeling. 'As to what can be done (about the disease), it's what ERM strives to do through habitat enhancement and restoration within the Lake Worth Lagoon with the creation of oyster reefs and seagrass and mangrove habitat,' Drum said. The lagoon, once a freshwater lake, became a brackish estuary with the dredging of the Boynton Beach and Lake Worth inlets. Hardening of its sandy coastline with sea walls, as well as regular deluges of stormwater runoff and occasional dumps of Lake Okeechobee water has coated areas of the lagoon in life-choking muck. Palm Beach County has spent millions of dollars to restore the lagoon, including by building islands for mangrove habitats, shorebirds, oyster reefs and sea grass. Romer said he hopes people will report seeing anything unusual in the wild to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at 888-404-FWCC (3922) or record what they see on community science platforms such as iNaturalist. 'This isn't my area of expertise, it's not something that I was researching or looking for, but any member of the public can be involved in conservation in the same way I was here,' he said. Kimberly Miller is a journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network of Florida. She covers real estate, weather, and the environment. Subscribe to The Dirt for a weekly real estate roundup. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@ Help support our local journalism, subscribe today. This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: University of Florida finds starfish disease in Palm Beach County
BBC News
7 days ago
- BBC News
'I can't drink the water' - life next to a US data centre
When Beverly Morris retired in 2016, she thought she had found her dream home - a peaceful stretch of rural Georgia, surrounded by trees and it's anything 400 yards (366m) from her front porch in Fayette County sits a large, windowless building filled with servers, cables, and blinking a data centre - one of many popping up across small-town America, and around the globe, to power everything from online banking to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT."I can't live in my home with half of my home functioning and no water," Ms Morris says. "I can't drink the water."She believes the construction of the centre, which is owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), disrupted her private well, causing an excessive build-up of sediment. Ms Morris now hauls water in buckets to flush her says she had to fix the plumbing in her kitchen to restore water pressure. But the water that comes of the tap still has residue in it."I'm afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it, and brush my teeth with it," says Morris. "Am I worried about it? Yes."Meta, however, says the two aren't connected. In a statement to the BBC, Meta said that "being a good neighbour is a priority".The company commissioned an independent groundwater study to investigate Morris's concerns. According to the report, its data center operation did "not adversely affect groundwater conditions in the area".While Meta disputes that it has caused the problems with Ms Morris' water, there's no doubt, in her estimation, that the company has worn out its welcome as her neighbour."This was my perfect spot," she says. "But it isn't anymore." We tend to think of the cloud as something invisible - floating above us in the digital ether. But the reality is very cloud lives in over 10,000 data centres around the world, most of them located in the US, followed by the UK and AI now driving a surge in online activity, that number is growing fast. And with them, more complaints from nearby US boom is being challenged by a rise in local activism - with $64bn (£47bn) in projects delayed or blocked nationwide, according to a report from pressure group Data Center the concerns aren't just about construction. It's also about water usage. Keeping those servers cool requires a lot of water."These are very hot processors," Mark Mills of the National Center for Energy Analytics testified before Congress back in April. "The surface of each chip is hotter than the surface of the sun. It takes a lot of water to cool them down."Many centres use evaporative cooling systems, where water absorbs heat and evaporates - similar to how sweat wicks away heat from our bodies. On hot days, a single facility can use millions of study estimates that AI-driven data centres could consume 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027. Few places illustrate this tension more clearly than Georgia - one of the fastest-growing data centre markets in the humid climate provides a natural and more cost-effective source of water for cooling data centres, making it attractive to developers. But that abundance may come at a Rogers is the executive director of Flint Riverkeeper, a non-profit advocacy group that monitors the health of Georgia's Flint River. He takes us to a creek downhill from a new construction site for a data centre being built by US firm Quality Technology Services (QTS).George Diets, a local volunteer, scoops up a sample of the water into a clear plastic bag. It's cloudy and brown."It shouldn't be that colour," he says. To him, this suggests sediment runoff - and possibly flocculants. These are chemicals used in construction to bind soil and prevent erosion, but if they escape into the water system, they can create says its data centres meet high environmental standards and bring millions in local tax construction is often carried out by third-party contractors, local residents are the ones left to deal with the consequences."They shouldn't be doing it," Mr Rogers says. "A larger wealthier property owner does not have more property rights than a smaller, less wealthy property owner." Tech giants say they are aware of the issues and are taking action."Our goal is that by 2030, we'll be putting more water back into the watersheds and communities where we're operating data centres, than we're taking out," says Will Hewes, global water stewardship lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which runs more data centres than any other company says AWS is investing in projects like leak repairs, rainwater harvesting, and using treated wastewater for cooling. In Virginia, the company is working with farmers to reduce nutrient pollution in Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the South Africa and India - where AWS doesn't use water for cooling - the company is still investing in water access and quality the Americas, Mr Hewes says, water is only used on about 10% of the hottest days each the numbers add up. A single AI query - for example, a request to ChatGPT - can use about as much water as a small bottle you'd buy from the corner shop. Multiply that by billions of queries a day, and the scale becomes clear. Prof Rajiv Garg teaches cloud computing at Emory University in Atlanta. He says these data centres aren't going away - if anything, they're becoming the backbone of modern life."There's no turning back," Prof Garg there is a path forward. The key, he argues, is long-term thinking: smarter cooling systems, rainwater harvesting, and more efficient the short term, data centres will create "a huge strain", he admits. But the industry is starting to shift toward yet, that's little consolation to homeowners like Beverly Morris - stuck between yesterday's dream and tomorrow's infrastructure. Data centres have become more than just an industry trend - they're now part of national policy. President Donald Trump recently vowed to build the largest AI infrastructure project in history, calling it "a future powered by American data".Back in Georgia, the sun beats down through thick humidity - a reminder of why the state is so attractive to data centre locals, the future of tech is already here. And it's loud, thirsty, and sometimes hard to live next AI grows, the challenge is clear: how to power tomorrow's digital world without draining the most basic resource of all - water.
