Going beyond zero emissions to net positive sustainability

Excerpt from the Fifth Estate: According to Birkeland sustainability has been corralled by everything that created the problem in the first place: payback periods, costs, a paradigm focused on negatives, and that the best we can do is to minimise these by concepts such as zero carbon. “You can’t.

Ngaire McGaw, has been honoured as a global leader in the field of sustainability. She is listed alongside Tim Flannery, Professor Ian Lowe, Nicholas Stern and David Suzuki. This is the second 100 Global Sustain Ability Leaders list, produced by Ken Hickson, CEO of Sustain Ability Showcase Asia and ABC Carbon. The list identifies and.

Victorian Government radical energy retrofit

Quietly, while hardly anyone was looking, the Victorian government has pushed through one of the most radical energy efficiency programs in Australia’s history. The big question is, why isn’t every government in the country doing the same? Under the Victorian program, taxpayers will save around $1 billion in energy bills for their.

In a recent study, researchers from Green Budget Germany (GBG) took a closer look at these hidden costs, in order to get a better idea of electricity’s true cost. Their new research calculated the health and environmental expenses related to various currently-available energy sources. According to that research, the cheapest energy sources in the world.

Environment minister Tony Burke says the Australian Institute of Marine Science report on the Barrier Reef, which predicts that as little as 6 per cent of the coral could remain by 2020, would send shockwaves through the community and sound a loud and clear warning bell about the future of the reef. The full interview.

Lateline interview

EMMA ALBERICI: Are Australians now, do you think, sufficiently aware of what's coming in terms of this reversal of economic fortunes? ROSS GARNAUT: I don't think the community as a whole is. Certainly the rhetoric from the Government about restraint in government expenditure is consistent with what's required, and in fact in the last couple.

Lester Brown's book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity examines the underlying causes of what is likely the first link in our modern civilization to show that we have pushed beyond the boundaries of the natural systems that support us. As a result, food supplies are tightening and this is moving.

More than half the countries participating in this week’s Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) in New York have, or are introducing, emissions trading to reduce carbon pollution, and all major economies are taking action to reduce pollution. Australia joins 16 other participants at the MEF, including Canada, China, the European Union, France,.

Extract: Conserving Australia's environment as it is today will become increasingly impossible as the world warms, so governments should instead focus on managing environments as they change, the CSIRO says. A new report, says the impact of climate change on plants, animals and ecosystems will be "significant" by 2030 and "extreme" by 2070. "This is.