The Australian Financial Review

ASX chief executive Dominic Stevens perfectly captures what Australia’s top corporate leaders are hoping from the administration of US President-elect Joe Biden.

B & T

Every minute around the world, one million single-use plastic bottles are purchased. If this statistic isn’t confronting enough, you may find it alarming that this number will jump a further 20 per cent by 2021, creating an environmental crisis that some predict will be as serious as climate change.

Money Management

As the world is experiencing a global transition from reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy, investors should see an acceleration in green energy investments next year, according to research firm Evergreen Ratings.

The Guardian

Plastic bags and flexible packaging are the deadliest plastic items in the ocean, killing wildlife including whales, dolphins, turtles and seabirds around the globe, according to a review of hundreds of scientific articles.

Australian Geographic

Quokkas may take more than a decade to recover from a 2015 bushfire in Western Australia, according to new research.

The Sydney Morning Herald

An overnight reprieve from wild, wet weather in northern NSW is not expected to last as heavy rainfall is forecast to return on Monday morning when a low-pressure trough sitting off southern Queensland moves onshore.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Every morning, Heidi Wintermeyer dons a bright pink cap and swims with fellow cancer survivors with Manly Beach's Bold and Beautiful swimming club. But after a big downpour, she’s wary of the risk of untreated sewage overflowing into the ocean. “Most of the people I swim with know better than to go in after heavy rain,” she said. “They’ll miss swim club rather than get sick.”

The Guardian

There have been more than 50 calls for help overnight to the New South Wales State Emergency Service as wild weather pummels the north of the state and parts of south-east Queensland.

9 News

The United Nations wants countries to declare a "climate emergency" to lift the sense of urgency in combating global warming.

The Australian Financial Review

The Morrison government's approach to climate change has brought together two Labor foes with Mark Butler and Joel Fitzgibbon uniting to condemn a failure to commit to net zero emissions by 2050.

The Sydney Morning Herald

London: Britain's opposition is demanding Prime Minister Boris Johnson boycott Australia's campaign to have Mathias Cormann installed as the next head of the OECD saying the former cabinet minister's denialist climate change record makes him unfit for the job.

ABC News

World leaders should declare states of "climate emergency" in their countries to spur action to avoid catastrophic global warming, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has told a climate summit.

The Australian Financial Review

In 2008 the UK Climate Change Committee, which I then chaired, estimated that reducing Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050 would cost 1-2 per cent of gross domestic product in that year. In its latest report, it reckons a 100 per cent cut will cost just 0.5 per cent of 2050’s GDP.

The Australian Financial Review

Social licence ratings are highly prized as corporate PR, but the destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves shows these metrics fail to measure the impact of companies on the ground.

The Guardian

At the world’s biggest coal export port in Newcastle, no China-bound ships are waiting or scheduled to load before Christmas

ABC News

The regional town of Colac, in south-west Victoria, is only home to about 13,000 people.

Yahoo News

The noise from wind farms can have subtle effects on sleep, including changes to the amount of time spent in a deep sleep.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Some of Sydney's hottest schools have no trees and barely any shade to provide refuge for students and teachers in soaring temperatures, prompting a mass tree-planting campaign across the city to stop playgrounds from becoming unbearable in summer.

NT News

DARWIN could become a world leader in heat mitigation for cities of its climate, according to a pair of new reports

The Daily Telegraph

With a death toll in the billions a massive surveillance operation using cutting edge technology will be rolled out to discover which endangered animals survived last summer’s bushfires.

ABC News

Bigger boats, better equipment, accurate weather forecasts, social media and climate change are threatening fish populations. But there's hope.

The Guardian

Labor says it will “take 146 years” to reach net-zero emissions under the Coalition’s current climate projections.

The Sydney Morning Herald

London: British taxpayers will stop subsidising overseas fossil fuel projects under a pledge by Prime Minister Boris Johnson which opens a new front in the push for more urgent international action on climate change.

The Guardian

The story is, genuinely, intriguing. Scott Morrison clearly thought Boris Johnson had invited him to speak at a climate ambition summit this weekend, because he told parliament last Thursday that was the plan.

The New Daily

While Stephen Smith was Australia’s foreign minister during the Rudd government from 2007 to 2010 he instructed his department to banish the phrase “punching above our weight” from speech notes and official correspondence.

The Australian

This week it seems Australia lost the support of its partner, Britain, in winning a speaking slot at this weekend’s UN global summit it is hosting on climate. The reason is our stubborn failure to commit to net-zero emissions by 2050.

The Sydney Morning Herald

It seems unfair. We Australians have only had a minute or two to congratulate ourselves on the incredible exceptionalism of our pandemic response. And here we are being internationally shamed for our exceptionalism over our response to another lethal and immediate threat – climate change.

The Canberra Times

It's 2020, and there has been a shift in the balance of power. Not in the Senate, but between the federal government and the states.

Independent Australia

'Like a pandemic, climate change is an inevitable threat that we must address before it is too late,' reads a June 2020 statement.

The Australian

Financial firms could be hauled before a federal inquiry over their climate change policies and the black-listing of lending and investment to resources-based businesses.

ABC News

Queensland is perfectly poised to cash in when the cruise industry resumes business, but with a Federal ban on leisure ships entering Australian waters now extended, the state will have to wait.

The Brisbane Times

University of Queensland researchers have identified for the first time which genes are "in charge" of decision making in cells, with implications for everything from stopping disease in its tracks to helping animals deal with climate change.

The Guardian

The spread of a facial cancer that ravaged the Tasmanian devil population has slowed due to the animal’s “amazing evolutionary response”, increasing its chance of survival, new research suggests.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Mexico City: An enormous iceberg is heading toward South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic, where scientists say a collision could devastate wildlife by threatening the food chain.

The Guardian

Campaigners who helped end logging and mining in the spectacular paradise of lakes, rainforests and beaches now fear global heating

News.com.au

The unusual nature of Australia’s Black Summer bushfires may have marked the beginning of a new fire-fuelled “ice age” and the world seems to have “crossed a threshold” to a more dangerous future, a global fire historian says.

ABC News

If you take a walk around any established Australian neighbourhood, chances are you will come across barbed wire fences marked with signs warning people to KEEP OUT.

9 News

As a child in the 1970s, Gerrard Albert played on the mud flats at the mouth of New Zealand's Whanganui River where raw sewage from the nearby town spilled into the estuary and out to the ocean.

The New Daily

Protesters calling for the declaration of a “climate emergency” have clashed with police in Melbourne amid news the federal government is unlikely to rely on “carry-over credits” to reach its 2030 Paris emissions reduction target.

ABC News

Former Australian rugby great David Pocock says the Wallabies Indigenous anthem rendition was a great gesture, but the issue with Advance Australia Fair is not the language it is sung in, but the lyrics themselves.

ABC News

Longer and more frequent heatwaves will inevitably change the way Australians work in the future, a public health specialist says.

ABC News

Scott Morrison has continued to step back from his controversial use of "carry-over credits" to help meet Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets but has not committed to abandoning them.

The Sydney Morning Herald

The Fijian Prime Minsiter has warned Australia's climate targets must increase to net zero emissions by 2050 or risk sacrificing Pacific nations, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted he was not frustrated about missing a speaking spot at a global climate summit.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Early on Thursday morning it became clear Australia had been unable to use its diplomatic heft to shoulder aside such powers as Belize and Saint Lucia to secure one of the 70-odd speaking slots at a virtual UN climate summit to be held in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Yahoo News

Pacific island nations on the frontline of climate change demanded Friday the world "get serious" about saving the planet ahead of UN-brokered talks on global warming.

Yahoo News

European Union countries have struck a deal on the bloc's new climate target after haggling through the night at a summit in Brussels.

The Australian Financial Review

Australia's biggest oil and gas producers are not following their European peers into renewable energy to help meet net zero emissions targets because they doubt they can make money out of it.

Insurance Business

Liberty Mutual Insurance has announced that it has become a signatory of the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), as part of its commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) progress. Liberty Mutual is the first US property and casualty insurer to join the international network of institutional investors that have committed to including ESG factors in their investment decisions.

The Age

Australian investors are finding it tough weighing up how their companies are performing on key social and ethical issues because of a lack of consistency on Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) reporting standards among the nation's biggest companies.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Some years ago, as I was shopping the aisles of the human supermarket called online dating, I found myself puzzling over those excruciating profile questions. You know the ones. They’re designed to give prospective dates a special insight into your personality and are conjured by people who believe life is a series of constrictive, binary options: beach or mountain? Nightclub or Netflix? (Why not hit the sand, drive up the mountain, stream a movie and go clubbing?)

The Conversation

Global emissions are expected to decline by about 7% in 2020 (or 2.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide) compared to 2019 — an unprecedented drop due to the slowdown in economic activity associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.