Aussie Enviro

An interesting tribute article with some thrilling video footage.

it seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living - David Attenborough

💚 🩷 💙

Research shows that eucalyptus bark could be used to clean polluted water, filter dirty air and capture carbon dioxide.

Eucalyptus bark is usually stripped from logs and treated as waste. The new study, published in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy, describes a technique of turning the bark into a porous form of carbon that can trap pollutants which flow through it.

Finding a use for the forestry by-product came as a surprise to the researchers.

https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/9302/Barking-up-the-right-tree-for-cleaner-air-and

Having spent several decades helping audiences around the world understand and appreciate the wonders of the natural world, Sir David Attenborough has been a much-needed voice for conservation, rewilding and climate action.

May 2026, marks Sir Dave’s 100th birthday.

Sir Dave Day is an invitation to come together and celebrate the invaluable efforts of this giant of a man and let him know how appreciative we are of his invaluable work.

https://www.sirdaveday.com/

The Australian primary school children we interviewed were not vague about their fears.

They worried about animals going extinct, about rising sea levels, about whether the planet would be liveable when they grew up.

One 12-year-old described thinking about

what will happen when I’m older, and how I’m gonna have to deal with it.

They also understood that human activity played a large role and were frustrated that more hadn’t been done by governments and past generations. One ten-year-old told us:

(I’m) mad at the people who could have solved the problem before now, but they didn’t. They just thought “It’s fine, this problem doesn’t really matter”. And then look at the world now, it’s such a big problem.

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/32359589

Most winter energy advice focuses on heaters and insulation but energy savings often come from places people rarely check. Small and inexpensive changes can reduce heat loss more than many standard upgrades.

Interestingly, most Australian homes lose heat in simple ways. Warm air escapes through tiny gaps, cold surfaces draw heat from the body and open-plan layouts let warmth drift away.

we must be world no.1 for home battery installs after this

We interviewed 15 Australian primary school children aged between nine and 12-years-old about environmental change, which includes things such as pollution, climate change and deforestation.

Every child knew the environment was changing, and all of them had feelings about it too. Worry was most common. We also heard sadness, anger and hopelessness.

These were thoughtful, complex responses from children paying attention to the world around them.

For their sake as well as for nature we must pull our finger out and get bolshie with our governments to protect the future (do I hear crickets?)

The WA govt is doing a great job but conservation work is challenging.

Dr Barrett said they were seeing some success with the banksia montana populations.

"Although we say we started with 1,000 seedlings of banksia montana, due to drought, due to fire, due to disease, we now have less than 300 young plants, some of which are flowering and starting to set seed," Ms Barrett said.

"But if we were to end up with 100 mature plants in a couple of years' time, we would be very

Often, the cheapest way to make a fabric involves treatment with substances like lead.

But in a fast-changing industry with little regulation, it's hard to tell what's happened to your garments while they were being made.

This is especially concerning when it comes to toddlers and young children.

Glenbog State Forest in the Southern Highlands of NSW is a refuge, one of the last places in southern NSW where greater gliders and yellow-bellied gliders still thrive. A cool, mist-laced “cloud forest” that generates its own climate, it offers sanctuary for many animals already pushed to the brink.

This forest is not empty land waiting to be “harvested.” These trees and the ground they grow from is also home to gang-gang cockatoos, lyrebirds, flame robins, [gliders] and bare-nosed wombats just to name a few.

But despite strong citizen science evidence of critical habitat, Forestry Corporation NSW (FCNSW) plans to destroy this habitat imminently, and reduce this thriving ecosystem to low value woodchips, pallets and firewood to be exported.

Tragically, the native animals living in Glenbog state forest are merely considered ‘collateral damage’ to the forestry industry, and there is no regulatory authority offering them protection.

Please take urgent action for them now by sending a message to the NSW Environment & Agriculture Ministers, the Forestry CEO and your State MP.

For more details and to send your message whether you are in Australia or outside go to: https://animalsaustralia.org/our-work/wildlife/dont-let-forestry-corp-nsw-destroy-glenbog-state-forest/?link_id=6&can_id=a279c95cc7b941436a3e8147acb79fe2&source=email-your-april-update-from-animal-liberation&email_referrer=email_3219531&email_subject=your-april-update-from-animal-liberation

More datacentres and warmer conditions helped push electricity demand to record highs in the first three months of the year, according to Australia’s Energy Market Operator, while growth in batteries kept average wholesale prices down.

Electricity demand – from households, business and industry – reached record levels of 25GW in Q1 2026, an increase of 1.2% compared with the same quarter last year. Across the grid, this growth was offset by record output from rooftop solar.

Emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane from Australian coalmines are more than double official government estimates reported to the UN, according to a new International Energy Agency report.

Climate and energy analysts said the report had again highlighted an “enormous gap” in the country’s reported methane emissions from coalmines and should serve as a wake-up call.

Just a bit of light reading but it is positive!

or a bit of light watching:

The best climate news all year - Simon Clark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1MGJUaxQPk

Electric vehicle purchases in Australia have surged amid the ongoing war in Iran, as drivers worry about rising fuel costs.

The big drawcard: much cheaper running costs. As of 22 April, A$1 of electricity takes an EV 45 kilometres, while $1 of diesel gets you 5.4 km.

Because I've just found out that today Is Wild Koala Day and our koalas are now endangered (critically in some places) I am doing a double on our Aussie species this weekend. The Guardian article will explain why our koalas are so threatened even when there are large populations in some places.

The following video is a bit old but gives a good idea of the features that make the koala so special. Overseas members may find it particularly interesting. Also, share it with children. They should enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI3ADcDH0Uc

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37311675

Australian woman, lived just down the road from where we used to live until we had massive bushfires and we decamped to Tasmania

https://youtu.be/hrMfufkq0Yk

Lismore has serious flooding issues, so I presume the house she lives on is up on the hill near the hospital ?

Collapse ? She talks of her climate grief and her understanding of "we're collapsing", (at about 11:40 and again at 14:00) not sure she's at Tom Murphies level but none the less I find her inspirational and thought others might be interested.

Yes yes we're well aware underpinning it all is someone else paying the bills in exchange for her labour, but I still find her inspirational for lowering her impact significantly and thoughfully.

If mods think its not for here, they can delete it ...

We're back to the cuddly furries!

Long-nosed Potoroos are a smallish marsupial (up to 41cm) related to the kangaroo family. They are distributed in highly-fragmented populations along the east coast of Australia from southern Queensland, through NSW, to western Victoria, and throughout much of Tasmania living in wet and dry sclerophyll forest, coastal heath and coastal woodland, where thick understorey is present.

LNPs are reddish-brown to grey in colour with paler fur below. Their nose is long and tapering with a naked patch of skin on the snout. The tail is sparsely-furred and sometimes has a white tip (this is more common in the southern parts of its range).

Their diet mostly consists of fungi (truffles and mushrooms), but arthropods, seeds, and plant material are also consumed.

They are generally a solitary species, use areas of dense understorey for shelter, and more open areas to forage.

LNPs are continuous breeders, with females sexually mature around 1 year of age. Females raise one young per pregnancy, but can have 3-4 young per year.

Populations have declined since European settlement and are threatened by predation of the red fox and domestic cat, as well as the loss of habitat due to agriculture. Populations tend to be at higher, more natural levels in Tasmania due to the historic absence of foxes.

If you want to see a very cute family of Long-nosed Potoroos and the conservation work being carried out with this species, I hope you enjoy this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFuT2Rvdu0Q

Since July 2025, more than 260,000 households, businesses and organisations have installed home batteries under the federal government’s Cheaper Home Batteries Program.

The program offers a discount of about 30% on the upfront cost of installing eligible small-scale battery systems, which help cut power costs while taking pressure off the main electricity grid.

But from May 1, the government is changing how it calculates this discount. This is to keep the rebate sustainable as battery costs fall, while also discouraging people from installing oversized systems.

For a typical household battery with a storage capacity of about 10–13 kilowatt-hours (kWh), the May 1 rebate change will likely reduce upfront costs by between A$600 and $800.

That’s not a major saving. So it’s not worth rushing to buy a battery, especially if it doesn’t suit your needs.

A new AI tool will help Parks Victoria to respond in a mere fraction of the time to native and endangered species affected by natural disasters... The species recognition model uses high-speed AI to process 20 images per second and can identify more than 200 native and feral species.

And what puts the cherry on top is that the AI tool has been set up on a **free, open source platform **.

Pre-existing AI systems were operated by large tech companies so they owned the data. Researchers and land managers generally want to keep control of their data."

The Parks Victoria model is not only open source, but it also runs on your computer rather than in the cloud, which increases data security. That is particularly relevant for our threatened species or species that are at risk of poaching. It is also free of charge.

No cuddly, furry or bright feathered friends. Today we’re going to dive into NSW coasts and look at two endangered species: a habitat and one of the species that needs it for survival.

Scientists are rebuilding endangered native underwater pastures of Posidonia Australis seagrass and helping White’s Seahorse come back from the brink. Posidonia used to grow extensively from southern Qld all the way down to the NSW south coast but the usual culprits, development and physical disturbances have wiped out most of these underwater meadows.

Seagrasses are true flowering plants with root systems that stabilise sediment and prevent erosion. Their meadows trap carbon much faster than terrestrial forests. They also provide essential nurseries for fish and invertebrates.

Seahorses swim vertically and use their tails to remain within their habitats by grasping & wrapping around seagrass leaves and other plants to camouflage, anchor & feed. If there is no posidonia habitat the seahorses cannot survive.

‘Seahorse hotels’ have been developed to help both habitat and seahorses. These are 1m x 1m steel mesh cages to which marine life can attach, mimicking the tangled complexity of the original habitat. On the seafloor the hotels become encrusted with corals, sponges and algae, attract tiny crustaceans and so provide an ideal ecosystem for seahorses.

The hotels also benefit the posidonia by acting as buffers from wave action and mitigating sand inundation. And, as posidonia is replanted and thrives, fish like snapper, flathead, bream and pyjama squid return and thrive too. If you want to learn more go to: https://www.unsw.edu.au/research/cmsi/research-projects/Marine-Environmental-Sustainability/seagrass

More about seahorses: Seahorses have remarkable adaptations including hard bony armour on the body, the prehensile tail, binocular vision, excellent camouflage and a really interesting mode of reproduction.

Colouration Seahorses in general are known for their ability to change colour depending upon their habitat, what they have eaten, and also as part of courtship and 'greeting rituals'. White's Seahorses change from their usual sombre colouration into far brighter shades of cream and yellow.

Breeding behaviours are remarkable The male seahorse has a pouch into which the female seahorse lays her eggs. In White's Seahorse, the male fertilises the eggs and cares for them for about three weeks (depending upon several factors including the temperature). During this time, he aerates the pouch, and most remarkably of all, nourishes the eggs through a capillary network in the pouch with his own 'placental fluids'. At the end of the 'pregnancy', the male gives birth to 100-250 fully formed young seahorses of about 1 cm in length which swim away to care for themselves. The male then 'becomes pregnant' again almost straight away. White's Seahorse is monogamous (females and males form permanent pairs) and breed from October to April.

Here's some more on seahorse hotels and LOTS of little seahorses! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC-lTTP0Hig

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/32053141

In short:

A retired Sea Shepherd vessel used in anti-whaling campaigns has been restored and primed for a conservation comeback.

The flagship vessel was rescued from the scrap heap in 2019, with skipper Kerrie Goodall spending more than 4,000 hours to bring it back to life.

What's next?

The ship has left Newcastle Harbour, bound for Melbourne, where it will participate in marine conservation campaigns.