This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Australia — covering advances in conservation, public health, Indigenous rights, clean energy, and more. Each entry highlights progress worth knowing about.
The landmark plan includes funds for improving water quality by reducing pollution from farm fertilizer runoff, and encourage reef restoration by experimenting with laboratory-grown coral that is more durable at higher temperatures.
“The Superhub will enable Neoen to produce renewable hydrogen for overseas export markets, and create 300 construction and ongoing jobs for South Australia”
Rooftop solar in Australia hit a stunning new high in 2017, with homeowners, schools, and small businesses installing roughly 9,500 panels every single day. The country added 1,057 megawatts of small-scale solar capacity in a single year — enough to rival a medium-sized coal plant, but spread across millions of ordinary rooftops. Average system sizes doubled compared to five years earlier, as falling prices turned solar from a niche eco-choice into a practical way for households to take charge of their power bills. It’s a hopeful reminder that the energy transition isn’t only happening in distant policy rooms or massive infrastructure projects — sometimes it’s being built one sunny rooftop at a time.
The solar energy boom has been spurred by solar projects large and small, with multiple industrial projects paired with the appearance of solar panels on buildings all over the country.
In a move that will make the Sydney institution the world’s first university to be energy carbon neutral, the University of New South Wales has inked a deal to meet all its electricity needs with solar energy from next year onwards.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced the government will ban single use plastic bags “as quickly as we can”.
A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia created the biggest perovskite solar cell so far, also setting a new efficiency record with it.
Australian Greens party Sen. Larissa Waters breast-fed her baby, Alia Joy, during a session in the Senate Chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia.
South Australia is not just likely to have already met its target of 50 per cent renewables some eight years ahead of time, it is now heading for an extraordinary penetration rate of 80 per cent wind and solar by 2021.
MSC-certified fishing began in 2000, when Western Australia’s Western Rock Lobster fishery became the first in the world to earn the Marine Stewardship Council’s blue label. Auditors scrutinized its pot-based methods, stock health, and management rules — and it has since been recertified four times, offering early proof that commercial fishing and ocean stewardship can hold together.
