The 700 projects include wind and solar farms, battery storage, gas and hydro plans
More than half the renewable energy projects needed to meet the government’s clean power targets by 2030 are now able to plug into the electricity grid after years of delay, according to the system operator.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) has offered more than 700 clean energy projects in Great Britain a grid connection date since the start of the year, after a two-year process to unblock a bottleneck that threatened to delay projects into the 2030s.
Government plan to de-link gas and electricity prices aims to reduce bills for consumers after global surge in prices
Households in England, Scotland and Wales could save nearly £200 a year on their energy bills if the government stepped into the market to act as the sole buyer of electricity, according to a thinktank.
The research found that public procurement of electricity, meaning the government would become the “single buyer” of power before it is resold to consumers, could shave billions of pounds from electricity prices.
Following the devastating Northern Rivers floods in New South Wales in 2022, roughly 14,000 truckloads of water-damaged materials were sent to landfill.
The flood exposed many things, including our unimaginative approach to managing waste. As immediate recovery moved into reconstruction, we saw an opportunity to manage this flood-damaged material differently.
We proposed an alternative to traditional house demolition. It was piloted on two flood-damaged houses in Lismore, using a “circular” model that could reuse materials and eliminate waste.
As well offering potential economic benefits for the local community, our report found it had considerable social and environmental value.
Why did homes get demolished?
In the aftermath of the floods, many NSW homes were significantly damaged and still lay in the path of future floods. In response, the NSW government introduced a buy-back scheme for eligible homes in flood-prone areas.
Part of this program involved demolishing homes, with the materials discarded in landfill or used for low-value recycling, such as woodchipping and burning. Yet the homes contained valuable materials, such as hardwood timbers.
Losing these homes was traumatic for the local community and an unnecessary loss of valuable resources. So the NSW Reconstruction Authority, Living Lab Northern Rivers, and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) explored how to recover a material that is extremely difficult to source today – old growth timber.
A flood-damaged home in North Lismore, before it was dismantled as part of the Circular Timber project.Kurt Petersen/LLNR
The colonial hunger for hardwood
The first wave of European colonisation of the Northern Rivers included groups known as “cedar getters”. These timber cutters arrived in search of highly-prized rainforest hardwoods.
Much of this timber was transported to Australian cities or as far away as Europe. It was also used to construct buildings and homes for local communities.
Premium old growth timbers extracted from the area included red cedar (Toona ciliata), spotted gum (Corymbia maculata), tallowwood (Eucalyptus microcorys), rosewood (Didymocheton fraserianus) and blackbutt (Eucalyptus pilularis).
This is not your ordinary hardware-variety timber. Prized hardwood rainforest timber is dense, strong, durable and resistant to rot and insects.
Berto Pandolfo (project lead) and Kris Gardner identifying timber species during the selective deconstruction process.Kurt Petersen
The circular timber project
In early 2024, the Circular Timber project developed an alternative to traditional demolition, which offers very little opportunity for recovering materials.
The current system for demolishing homes is this: large-scale machines level structures and excavators scoop materials into dump trucks, which transport them to distant landfill. Sometimes, materials are recovered, but the vast majority are broken into small pieces, trucked away and buried.
We wanted to establish a “circular” system that reused materials and eliminated waste. This cannot be achieved by a single entity – multiple partners needed to collaborate. In this case, the local community, educators, businesses and government agencies collaborated to establish a pilot where timber from uninhabitable homes could be recovered and reused.
The local community was invited to make prototypes as proof that these premium timbers could be salvaged into new objects. Buy-in from the community was immediate – the materials in these homes represented a link to the region’s history and culture.
Two homes acquired by the government authority were deconstructed, with their recovered materials made available to local timber makers, builders, artists, architects and designers. The salvaged timber was transformed into a dining table, a community shed, and other designed objects.
An aerial photo of the two properties that were used for the project.Living Lab Northern Rivers
How it happened
Moving from home demolition to deconstruction represented a significant challenge. There are Australian standards for demolishing a building, but no guidelines for deconstructing exist (yet).
This project developed a considered approach to dismantling the homes. Care was taken in site preparation, materials identification and disassembly to ensure as much of the timber was recovered as possible.
Although deconstructing, recovering and reusing house materials requires more time, there were significant local and global benefits. For example, salvaging timber reduces carbon emissions, significantly reduces waste sent to landfill, and has a smaller carbon footprint than using virgin timber.
There are also economic and social benefits. This was a Northern Rivers community with a long history of seeing lives turned upside down by catastrophic floods. They responded positively to retaining the physical, cultural, and historical value of the past built into these homes.
The salvaged timber from deconstructed homes was used to make new objects.Living Lab Northern Rivers
Homes hold many values
Between 2019 and 2025, there were 214,483 approvals granted nationwide for knock-down-and-rebuild applications in Australia, with the management of waste material left to the discretion of the owner and demolition contractor.
A standard Australian house can include salvageable materials such as hardwood timber, premium timbers, pressed metal ceilings or Federation red bricks.
Shifting our approach from demolition to deconstruction could open up new opportunities. Not only could it create jobs, but it could reduce the need for virgin materials and protect our environment.
This project reminds us that value should not only be assessed in economic terms but also in relation to our environment and communities. This program showed deconstructing homes can be embraced as a way to transform waste into a valuable resource.
Berto Pandolfo receives funding from Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation (NRCC).
Angelique Milojevic receives funding from Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation (NRCC).
Dan Etheridge receives funding from the NSW Reconstruction Authority. The NSWRA funded the project described in this article.
The world’s hottest years over the past decade have coincided with stagnant economic productivity, rising prices and geopolitical instability.
Is this just coincidence or has the current level of climate change been one of the drivers? Climate change is often framed as a problem for the future. But how much economic damage has today’s current level of ~1.35°C of warming already caused?
To answer that question, we analysed the effects of climate change to date on the New South Wales economy. The results were released today as part of a Net Zero Commission report.
We estimate climate change has already caused median losses of around 18% (probability range 4–33%) to the NSW economy, the biggest economic jurisdiction in the country. At a median 18% loss, that translates to about A$21,300 per person on average in yearly income.
We show that it’s not local bushfires or flooding that are driving the majority of damage, but changing global weather that in turn affects our cost of living.
Imagine a world without climate change
Studies typically project the global economic damage that climate change will do by 2050 or 2100.
Some influential estimates have suggested climate damage would be fairly small. But our recent research and work by others shows the economic damage coming down the pipeline could be more than four times larger than previously thought.
Our research question for this report was different: “What would the NSW economy look like today if historical emissions of greenhouse gases had not caused climate change?”
This requires a thought experiment: imagining a past where we burn fossil fuels at the historical rate, but the additional carbon dioxide and other atmospheric gases do not cause changes to temperature or rainfall patterns.
Answering this question will allow us to understand the economic losses we have already endured from historical climate change.
How we did it
First, we collected data on historical economic growth and weather across the world over the past 70 years. We then modelled how weather changes (or shocks) impacted economic growth over this period. There is significant debate on how to do this, so we adopted a variety of approaches.
Then we had to plausibly guess at how the weather would have evolved in the past four decades without climate change. To create this hypothetical weather series, we simply removed any trend found in the weather data which we ascribe to human-caused climate change. This works because there is no evidence natural causes have contributed to the upward trend in temperatures.
Finally, we compared economic growth rates predicted by the models under the observed and under the hypothetical weather conditions. The contrast between the total economic production of the NSW economy in the two scenarios is the economic cost of historical climate change for a given year.
What we found
We estimate the median economic loss for NSW in 2024 was 18%. There is significant uncertainty in this figure, with the lower estimates around 4% and the higher around 33%.
The median loss figure of 18% translates into an average of $21,288 in losses per person in yearly income (in 2023–2024 dollar values). In other words, the model finds that if historical warming had not occurred then people living in NSW would each have $21,288 more dollars, on average, in their pockets every year. This amount is large enough to meaningfully improve the quality of life of the state’s average household.
The models suggest the primary mechanism through which this loss has occurred is the rise in the global average temperature. When people think about losses associated with climate change in NSW, they might consider how climate change exacerbated the bushfires of 2019–20, or the floods that followed. The damages they caused are, of course, real and significant.
However, the economic models suggest the majority of the damage has come from shifts in weather globally. Given the interconnectedness of modern economies through trade and global supply chains, it is reasonable to assume that climate shocks to supply chains affect the whole globe.
The interconnectedness of the global economy can be seen in the downturn following the US-Israel war with Iran and the halt to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.Eric Seddon/Pexels, CC BY
How we think about climate change
When pollsters ask Australian voters what issues they care about, “climate change” is often listed as one issue among many. Voters are asked to assess how important climate change is to them relative to the cost of living, public health, interest rates, secure employment, and other important things.
Presenting issues in this way reinforces a common misconception that they are independent, and that one can be prioritised over the other.
To the contrary, there is now good evidence that climate change is strongly related to economic outcomes, which in turn drive the cost of living, interest rates, investment in in health and education and the labour market.
It’s time to stop thinking of climate change as “merely” an environmental issue, which can be discarded when economic times are tough. Instead, we should recognise what it really is: a current and ongoing threat to our standard of living.
Timothy Neal receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Ben Newell receives funding from the Australian Research Council
