The deadly bushfires in Australia have released millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equivalent to more than a third of the country’s CO2 emissions for a whole year. The blazes in Victoria have so far claimed more than 180 lives and destroyed more than 750 homes. To make matters worse, the climate costs will also be dire because of the type of forest that burned.

Mark Adams, scientist at University of Sydney, said, “Once you burn millions of hectares of eucalypt forest, then you are putting into the atmosphere very large amount of carbon.”

Australia’s total emissions per year are around 330m tonnes of CO2. Adams’s previous research has shown that the bushfires in 2003 and 2006-07 had put up to 105m tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because they burned up land carrying 50 to 80 tonnes of carbon per hectare.

This time, however, the forests being destroyed are even more carbon-rich, with more than 100 tonnes of above-ground carbon per hectare, so the CO2 emissions from this year’s disaster could be far larger than previous fires.

Under Kyoto Protocol, the carbon dioxide emissions from forest fires is not counted under the agreement, though it is being considered for inclusion in the successor treaty that will be debated later this year in Copenhagen.

Denmark Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that the G20 economic summit in coming April can help pave the way to a climate change deal by sending a signal that the financial crisis and global warming can be tackled simultaneously.

He urged leading advanced and emerging countries to keep the environment in mind when they meet in London on April 2 for the G20 summit, whose main goal is to seek solutions to the global economic downturn.

“It might facilitate the process towards Copenhagen in December if ‘green’ aspects could be an element at the G20 meeting,” Rasmussen told reporters after talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “I think it would be beneficial if the G20 could send a clear signal that there is no contradiction between addressing the financial crisis and addressing climate change,” he said.

Rasmussen expressed concern that economic stimulus packages that had been presented so far to counter recession were not very pro-environment. “I would encourage countries to make sure that future stimulus packages have a strong ‘green’ element,” he said.

Denmark unveiled a 100-billion crown ($17.79 billion) bank aid package in January, offering to inject public credit into banks to jump-start their corporate and private lending and stimulate a slumping economy.

A draft proposal for a pilot carbon capture and storage plant is likely to be passed by German Parliament before the next general elections in September.

The plant will be built by German utility E.ON and industrial group Siemens.

It will be built at E.ON’s Staudinger power station near Hanau east of Frankfurt, and will be tested in a hard-coal fired unit, Staudinger’s block 5.

The move is in line with efforts around the globe to produce almost carbon-free power to help fight climate change caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels.

Like sector peers, E.ON plans on using industrial-scale CCS starting in 2020, when the European Union requires coal plants to use the process if they want to continue to generate power. E.ON’s generation unit, E.ON Kraftwerke, operates 50 blocks of a total capacity of 14,000 megawatts. Under long-term investment programs, it currently aims for 20 new plants with a capacity totaling 15,000 MW.

An international moratorium on whaling has been in force since 1986. However, Iceland ended a 20-year ban on commercial whaling in August 2006, issuing quotas that ran through August 2007. After a temporary halt, the country resumed whaling in May last year, despite protests by environmentalists.

The new government in Iceland had promised to review the whaling decision made by the previous regime and it was expected that whaling will be stopped again.

However, Iceland’s interim government said that it would allow whale hunting to go ahead this year but left in doubt whether the practice would be allowed to continue beyond 2009.

Fisheries Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson said that hunters should not take it for granted that whaling would be permitted over the following four years, as proposed by the previous government.

The United States, Germany, Britain, France, Finland and Sweden have called on the Iceland Prime Minister to drop the whaling plans.

Uganda’s Parliament’s committee on ICT has finalized a new policy that will regulate the importation and disposal of electronic gadgets in the country.

Edward Baliddawa, chairman of the Parliament committee said, “Policy is contained in the draft National Information Technology Bill that is now before the committee for scrutiny.” According to him the bill seeks to minimize the impact of second hand electrical gadgets whose impact on health and the environment cannot be underestimated.

He explained that there is no effective e-waste management system, and this has caused Uganda to remain a dumping ground for all kinds of computer scrap that comes into the country from the developed economies.

The UK government plans to have at least six nuclear power stations built in the UK by 2020 as part of a major “renaissance” of the industry designed to plug a looming energy gap. It is currently evaluating various sites’ applications for new reactors, but recent developments are likely to dent public faith in nuclear power. It has emerged that the Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee (NuSAC) was quietly scraped last year and nuclear power station operator Magnox was fined £250,000 and ordered to pay £150,000 costs as a result of more than 14 years of radioactive leaks at the former Bradwell Nuclear Power Station in Essex.

Phil Heaton, team leader of the Environment Agency’s Nuclear Regulation Group, said that the fine was a clear message to the nuclear industry that we require the highest standards of operation at all such sites and will take firm action even if the environment beyond a site’s boundaries is not affected.