Environment

Environment

Fears that 'significant' coral mortality is still to come

Eyes are on us: Coral bleaching has returned to the Great Barrier Reef - and other reefs - in 2017.

The world is 33 months into its biggest recorded coral bleaching event with little sign of it ending, raising the prospect that coral mortality on the Great Barrier Reef will increase "significantly" from the quarter already lost in the past year, scientists say.

Lost and found

Thought to be extinct for almost 200 years, the newly-named Hibbertia Fumana makes a comeback.

Claims of a cover-up as a plant lost for two centuries turns up on a development site.

Shark!

There has been a spate of shark attacks off the north coast of NSW this year.

Have a spate of bites and sightings up and down the NSW coast raised the odds that an attack awaits beachgoers this summer? Peter Hannam investigates.

Westpac branded as 'wimps' over coal pledge

Westpac announced its new investment policy last week.

Westpac's decision to effectively rule out lending to the proposed giant Adani coal mine in Queensland has drawn praise from environmentalists but derision from the government and industry.

As rising seas erode shorelines, Tasmania shows what can be lost

Gravestones mark the 19th-century burial sites mostly of convicts from the historic Port Arthur prison.

Maybe the hardened convicts who carved the 19th-century gravestones dotting this tiny Tasmanian island were barely literate, or perhaps one of them just had a wicked sense of humour. Schoolmaster Benjamin Horne went to his repose in 1843 with this sentence chiselled above his head: "Sincerely regretted by all who knew him."

Britain goes a day without burning coal for electricity

The closed Tower Colliery near the village of Hirwaun in Glamorgan, South Wales in a file picture

Friday was the first full day since the height of the Industrial Revolution that Britain did not burn coal to generate electricity, a development that officials and climate change activists celebrated as a watershed moment.