A group dedicated to eradicating cane toads is looking at installing fencing around known hot spots in Darwin.

Rangers have been allowed to return to a reserve which is home to almost a third of the world's remaining mountain gorillas, over a year after fighting forced them out of the area in eastern Democratic Republic Congo, the park's director said on Friday.

At least 200 narwhal whales are trapped by winter ice that is setting in around them in Canada's Arctic, and will have to be culled because they are facing starvation or suffocation, officials said.

Japan's Government says an Australian decision not to send a customs ship to monitor this year's whale hunt in the Southern Ocean appears to be in respect of ongoing diplomatic negotiations.

Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says the campaign to stop whaling will not be harmed by Australia dumping its policy to monitor Japanese ships.

The Federal Opposition says Peter Garrett has become an apologist for Japan on whaling.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett has confirmed the Government will not be sending a vessel to the Southern Ocean to monitor Japanese whaling ships.

A climatologist says the severe storms that hit Queensland's south-east this week could be a sign of things to come.

Studies of NT groundwater are suggesting further northern development should proceed with caution.

Two landholders in southern New South Wales may have helped to save a threatened species of bird from extinction.

Japan and Australia have again agreed to disagree over Japan's whaling program.

The Primary Industries Department says it should know in the next 24 hours what caused of the death of hundreds of bony bream at Lake Bonney in the Riverland.

Indonesia, which has been losing forests at a rapid pace in recent years, plans to plant 100 million trees across the country this year in an effort to limit deforestation, a forestry official said.

Conservationists have lodged an appeal in the New South Wales Land and Environment Court to try to stop the Splendour in the Grass music festival being moved from Byron Bay to a new inland site on the far north coast.

The chairman of the biggest irrigation enterprise in the Murray-Darling Basin says he has not ruled out selling water entitlements to the Federal Government's buyback scheme.

Environmentalists say plans to house almost 500,000 people in two western Sydney growth zones will compromise the last remnants of endangered Cumberland Plain Woodlands.

Australia's petroleum industry is warning gas electricity production could be disadvantaged if a global agreement on carbon emissions reduction cannot be reached.

Tasmania's economic survival is at the centre of a new debate about Gunns' proposed pulp mill, with talk that the project is dead.

Hundreds of fish have been found washed up on the shore of Lake Bonney at Barmera in the South Australian Riverland.

The United Nations climate change agency says countries are failing to meet targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.