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Generating and storing sustainable energy is the holy grail
Transmission lines have fallout. Battery farms are expensive. Repeating Snowy II is out of the question. But there is a simple solution to generating and storing sustainable energy for overnight...
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How can we respond to cow farts and farm emissions?
Early in the climate change journey, two villains were publicly identified – fossil fuels and farting farm animals, in particular, cows and sheep. The most recent statistics from Australia’s...
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Quolls fly in to save the species
Air travel isn’t what it used to be. But a recent journey from New South Wales to Western Australia definitely quoll-ified as unusual. Join Cosmos Country reporters Jamie Seidel and Glenn Morrison as...
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Innovative recyclables replace dangerous silica benchtops
As Australia realises the dangers of working with engineered stone to manufacture benchtops and tiles, one company is bucking the trend to make high-end products largely from recyclables. At a...
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Town finding new solutions to the problem of instability in a renewables’ grid
The central Australian town of Alice Springs – bathed in fierce desert sunlight – is on track to achieve 50% renewable power generation by 2030. But the good news is tempered by – of all things – the...
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Early warning system for water quality passes first test
A milestone first run of a proposed national ‘weather service’ for Australian regional water quality has received a confident thumbs up from the national science agency, CSIRO. The system is being...
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Rescue quolls begin to breed at wildlife park
Animal conservationists in Western Australia are watching with growing excitement a new quoll recovery project – and a mum with multiple babies. Robin Sinclair, a field ecologist with the Australian...
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Sovereignty lost when low lying reefs disappear
Low lying coral Islands form on top of living reefs. Varying in size, the islands arise from sediments of the reef, skeletons and shells of living biota. Sometimes barely a couple of meters above sea...
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Podcast: coral reef islands are at risk
When a low lying coral reef disappears under the ocean forever, there is more at risk than the animals which inhabit it. Low lying reefs in this respect are cays and tiny sand atolls scattered along...
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The road ahead as our weather gets wilder
Even the tough surface of our roads is not immune to the challenges of climate change. The House of Representatives Inquiry into the implications of severe weather events on the national regional,...
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Big Australian Cooperative Research Centre to help lead agriculture to a...
A new agriculture research hub – with the highest level of funding ever for this type of model – has been launched in Queensland to assist farmers with the transition to reducing greenhouse gas...
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Mathematics to help understand flows on unique mound springs
The Great Artesian Basin’s unique mound springs are in danger. A new mathematical model might help by looking at the effects of reduced water extraction on the mounds. Mound springs are unique, an...
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Better groundwater knowledge needed as climate changes
One-third of Australian taps deliver groundwater for our daily use. On the world’s driest inhabited continent, 70% of land is either arid or semi-arid, so it should come as no surprise that 17% of...
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Cosmos Country: A deep dive into our oceans
Australians love the ocean – and we love shipwrecks – so will our love affair help save the seas? Cosmos Country dives into the ocean – or specifically the Ocean Lovers Festival – as Glenn Morrison...
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From refinery to biofuel reactor
A disused Western Australia oil refinery is one step closer to being given a new lease on life as a biofuel reactor and it could help power Australia’s aviation industry towards its 2050 carbon...
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Wagga Wagga’s cool new strategy to tackle climate change
The New South Wales regional city of Wagga Wagga has used innovative technology to find a cooler way forward as global temperatures climb. Wagga Wagga City Council recently won the Local Government...
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Cosmos Country: Shipwrecks and love for the ocean
Regional communities looking for ways to diversify income and employment under climate change often turn to tourism. Recently, the Australian Tourism Commission created a data hub to help. It shows...
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Energy infrastructure causes quite a stir
A massive transformer is causing quite a stir on the roads of Victoria and New South Wales. Unlike the mega-popular toys, real transformers can’t adapt themselves neatly into a handy form of...
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Cosmos Country: Managing Australia’s coastal bays and estuaries
Water quality is a growing problem. And it’s not just about your local dam or the River Murray. Australia’s coastal bays and estuaries are important on many levels. They’re great places to live....
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Solving the ammonia dilemma
Fertiliser is crucial for Australia’s agriculture industries. But only a few places produce it. So when fighting broke out in the Gulf of Aden and the Black Sea (not to mention the COVID pandemic),...
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How does climate change affect coral reef islands?
Low lying coral Islands might be a good place to relax, but did you know they form on top of living reefs? That they are nature’s mix of sediments, skeletons and the shells of living biota? Or that...
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Cosmos Country: Transitioning agriculture to net zero emissions
Australia’s farmers and agricultural industries are at the front line when it comes to dealing with the impacts of climate change. Agriculture also contributes 14% of the country’s emissions. The...
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The Australian water industry is undergoing profound change
Australians have worried about running out of water since before colonisation. Back then, coastal Aboriginal people turned to rivers, streams and lakes for drinking water; those inland, perhaps a...
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Staying ahead of the wave
A beautiful, sandy beach. Crystal clear waters. Fish. Thriving sand dunes. Coastal communities often depend on these tourism drawcards. So, how can councils anticipate the damage done by increasingly...
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Good and bad – the news on climate change and shipwrecks
Around the 39,000km coastline of Australia, about 7500 ships lie beneath the water. These sunken pieces of history can take visitors back hundreds of years to tragedies that saw lives and cargo lost....
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Cosmos Country: How solar thermal storage can help regional industry
What we do with our excess sunlight is the pressing question of the green energy transition. Sunlight can be pumped into batteries, but batteries are expensive and they degrade. Sunlight can push...
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Pigeonpea in the mix as search begins for more heat tolerant crops
The weather might be warming, but the world still needs to eat. Australians are among those searching for answers to crops that can beat the heat and still produce food that is both palatable and...
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Forget the partisan hype, Aust farmers are preparing for the extremes of...
Australia’s farmers are “doing amazing things” and rising to the climate challenge by adopting a deep level of strategic thinking to almost everything they do, according to a new survey on resilience...
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CSIRO moves to protect world heritage sites
Australia’s World Heritage areas are under threat from climate change. From the Great Barrier Reef to the Tasmanian Wilderness, the Blue Mountains and K’gari (Fraser Island), the CSIRO says...
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Cosmos Country: Satellite mapping helps sustainable agriculture
Eyes in the skies are already looking at fields near you. Now a cooperative research program is investigating ways to collect, extract, refine – and deliver – a wealth of data about the health of...
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We need to put the guesswork back into agriculture
Australian agriculture is in for a good year ahead, with a 47 per cent increase in income leading to $85 billion in national revenue. And the Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation...
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Managing aquifers to deal with groundwater loss
Australians have worried about running out of water since before colonisation. Back then, coastal Aboriginal people turned to rivers, streams and lakes for drinking water; those inland, perhaps a...
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Geologists and First Nations eye ancient water in SA’s arid north
Getting a glass of water on a hot day in the dry northwest of South Australia can be a tough call. And it won’t get any easier under climate change, given the frequency of droughts in Australia’s...
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Cosmos Country: saving the short nosed sea snake
As a mass coral bleaching event takes place on the Great Barrier Reef, species in other parts of the country are also facing reef challenges. Cosmos Country‘s Jamie Seidel and Marie Low talk to...
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Paradise revisited: how to fire manage our most pristine places?
In the late 1970s, few travellers of New South Wales’ south coast might have taken the Mt Agony Road turnoff from the Princess Highway into Murramarang National Park, 4 hours south of Sydney. For a...
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Farmers urged to become involved in “urgent“ discussions about the future
Farmers have been urged to get involved in discussions about their industry to “safeguard their futures.” The CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has published the Ag2050 Scenarios Report, to...
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Experts weigh in on MDB plans
One of Australia’s leading science academies is calling for an overhaul of the Murray Darling Basin’s governance system as part of a 50-year vision for Australia’s largest water region. The basin,...
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Pathway to resistance in blight-devastated wheat found
The role that a specific gene plays in developing resistance to the fungal pathogen has been demonstrated by a Chinese-Australian research team. As climate change causes more humid conditions, the...
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Wheat gene discovery might lead to higher yields and climate change resilience
Scientists have shed new light on the role of well-known wheat gene that influences the yield of wheat, providing knowledge that will help improve farm productivity and build adaptation as the climate...
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Soil’s carbon power relies on topsoil retention (and maybe a little bacterial...
Topsoil critical for carbon trappings An almost 2-decade experiment in New South Wales has revealed the vital role of agricultural topsoil in carbon storage. Published today in the journal Crop &...
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