Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Pollution aside, the problem with expanding Heathrow lies in the disruption and delay inevitable in such a complex project Get ready for another season of that interminable saga, Heathrow’s third runway. There was a lull during the Covid pandemic when the airport’s owners, despite winning permission from the supreme court in 2020 to submit a planning application, cooled their jets while they waited for passenger numbers to recover. Now the whole thing is back, courtesy of Rachel Reeves. The chancellor is reported to be preparing to use a speech next week to declare support for a third runway at Heathrow alongside wider airport expansion in the south-east. The best form of airport expansion is none at all, environmentalists (some of them in the cabinet) will argue, but it looks as if Reeves has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. A £1.1bn investment in Stansted, to enable it to grow its annual capacity from 29 million passengers to 43 million, was welcomed by the government last year. Continue reading...

Cost of fixing ‘forever chemical’ pollution should be borne by manufacturers and polluters, not governments and consumers, expert tells Senate inquiry Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A water quality expert says the Australian government should expand a planned ban of PFAS as a New South Wales Indigenous community called for funding for blood tests for people living on “poisoned” land. PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a group of several thousand synthetic compounds, are found in a wide variety of products including waterproof fabrics, food packaging, hygiene products and firefighting foam. They are sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals” because they are slow to break down and persist in the environment for extended periods. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Critical CO2 stores held in permafrost are being released as the landscape changes with global heating, report shows A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north. For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded. Continue reading...

Move is part of £300m investment that includes deepwater quay and building of hundreds of homes near city centre Belfast harbour is to invest £90m to upgrade its port to serve a wave of wind energy projects and cruise ships as part of a £300m investment plan. A new deepwater quay capable of supporting wind projects will be the largest part of an investment plan that also includes the construction of hundreds of homes at a site near the city centre. Continue reading...