Climate calling

Some say modern air travel is rubbish, with cramped seats, delays and cancellations and high prices. But rubbish may have a significant role to play in the airline industry of the future. Australian researchers have come up with a way to turn rubbish into jet fuel.

The deaths of 28 pilot whales in a mass stranding event on a Western Australian beach is the second such event in under a year. There was a similar stranding at Cheynes Beach in Albany in July 2023, where at least 90 of the mammals died. Several theories have been put forward as to why this might be happening, but the true cause remains a mystery.

'Planet versus the plastics' is the new call to arms for Earth Day 2024, which is calling for a 60 per cent reduction in plastic use by 2040. The United Nations Environment Program has found humans produce 400 million tonnes of plastic waste each year.

It's been just over a year since South Australia's River Murray burst its banks in the biggest flood since 1956. For months flooding from high rainfall interstate put thousands of hectares of agricultural land under water and inundated 3500 houses. But it also pumped much needed water through the ailing southern end of the Murray Darling basin. South Australian correspondent Peta Doherty toured the Pike Floodplains in the Riverland with Indigenous rangers from River Murray and Mallee Country.

Coral reefs around the world are experiencing global bleaching for the fourth time - a result of warming ocean waters - driven in part, by climate change. The event is expected to be the most extensive on record. For Australia's Great Barrier Reef, it's the fifth mass bleaching event in eight years.

In a landmark ruling...Europe’s top human rights court has found the Swiss government is not doing enough to combat climate change. Experts say it could unleash a new wave of climate litigation. The verdict suggests governments are legally obligated to meet their climate targets under human rights law.

The Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland is raising the alarm about disappearing Pacific Islands, and the potential for larger Commonwealth nations to become the new homes for climate refugees. She’s upped the ante on the need for developed Commonwealth countries to cut emissions and spend more on climate adaption in an interview from Samoa with SBS. Baroness Scotland has made an appeal for developed nations like Australia to speed up the clean energy transition, as federal budget deliberations here reach their final stages. Ahead of a Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Samoa later this year, Baroness Patricia Scotland has also warned some Commonwealth countries in the Pacific could soon cease to exist... and it would be inconscionable not to act. She's speaking to SBS Chief Political Correspondent Anna Henderson from the Samoan capital Apia.

Farmers in India say using biofertilisers instead of artificial chemicals helps the plants to survive storms, flooding and dry weather.

Australia could soon see megadroughts that last for more than 20 years, new modelling suggests. The bleak research from the Australian National University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes has found these droughts could be worse than anything else in recent historical experience.

Weeks of above-average temperatures have taken a toll on the Great Barrier Reef, as scientists confirm at least two-thirds of the reef is experiencing another mass bleaching. With coral bleaching events affecting more and more reefs worldwide, some are fearing the Great Barrier Reef won't recover as it has in the past.