Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has indicated a Coalition government would quickly approve a giant gas project off Western Australia which will release billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases until around 2070.

Woodside Energy is leading the joint venture, which would dramatically expand offshore drilling and extend gas production at the North West Shelf project – already Australia’s largest gas-producing venture.

In a statement on Wednesday, Dutton said a Coalition government would “prioritise Western Australian jobs and the delivery of energy security” by directing environment officials to fast-track assessment of the extension, later saying “we will make sure that this approval is arrived at in 30 days”.

Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is currently considering the proposal. Mining and business interests have been pushing her to make a decision this month.

Dutton’s support for the project is deeply concerning. Evidence suggests extending the project would undermine global efforts to curb carbon emissions and stabilise Earth’s climate. The extension also threatens significant Indigenous sites and pristine coral reef ecosystems. Federal approval of the project puts both natural and heritage assets at risk.

What’s this debate all about?

The North West Shelf project supplies domestic and overseas markets with gas extracted off WA’s north coast.

The project currently comprises offshore extraction facilities and an onshore gas-processing plant at Karratha. Its approval is due to expire in 2030.

Woodside’s proposed extension would allow the project to operate until 2070. It would also permit expanded drilling in new offshore gas fields and construction of a new 900km underwater gas pipeline to Karratha.

In 2022, the WA Environment Protection Authority recommended a 50-year extension for the plant, if Woodside reduced its projected emissions by changing its operations or buying carbon offsets. This paved the way for the state government approval in December last year.

Gas: a major climate culprit

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world is aiming to keep planetary heating to no more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. Greenhouse gas emissions must fall to net zero to achieve the goal. But instead, global emissions are rising.

Greenhouse gases – such as methane, nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide – are emitted throughout the gas/LNG production process. This includes when gas is extracted, piped, processed, liquefied and shipped. Emissions are also created when the gas is burned for energy or used elsewhere in manufacturing.

Australian emissions increased 0.8% in 2022–23 – and coal and gas burning were the top contributors. However, Australia’s greatest contribution to global emissions occurs when our coal and gas is burned overseas.

The North West Shelf project is already a major emitter of greenhouse gases. The proposed extension would significantly increase the project’s climate damage.

Woodside estimates the expansion will create 4.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime. Greenpeace analysis puts the figure much higher, at 6.1 billion tonnes.

Increasing greenhouse gas emissions at this magnitude, when the window to climate stability is fast closing, threatens major damage to Earth’s natural systems, and human health and wellbeing.

Woodside says it will use carbon-capture and storage to reduce emissions from the project. This technology is widely regarded as unproven at scale. Indeed, it has a history of delays and underperformance in similar gas operations in WA.

Woodside proposes to reduce the project’s climate impacts by buying carbon offsets. This involves compensating for a company’s own emissions by paying for cuts to greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere, through activities such as planting trees or generating renewable energy.

However, there are serious doubts over whether carbon offset projects deliver their promised benefits.

Threats to marine life and Indigenous heritage

Damage from the proposal could extend beyond climate harms.

The approval would enable increased drilling in the Browse Basin, including around the pristine Scott Reef. The reef is home to thousands of plant and animal species. Scientists say the project threatens migrating whales and endangered turtles, among other marine life.

Also, the onshore infrastructure is located near the 50,000-year-old Murujuga rock art precinct on the traditional lands of five Aboriginal custodial groups. The site contains more than one million petroglyphs said to depict more than 50,000 years of Australian Indigenous knowledge and spiritual beliefs.

Traditional Owners suffered severe cultural loss in the 1980s when about 5,000 rock art pieces were damaged or removed during construction of Woodside’s gas plant. The Traditional Owners and scientists fear increased acid gas pollution from the proposed expansion will further damage the rock art.

Acting in Australia’s interests

The Albanese government has failed to deliver its promised reform of Australia’s national environment laws. This means nature lacks the strong laws needed to protect it from harmful development.

At federal, state and territory levels, both major parties support expansion of the gas industry. This takes the form of policy inertia, tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

In the current term of government, Plibersek has green-lit numerous polluting projects. This includes approving several coal mine expansions last year.

What’s more, Australian governments support offshore gas developments in the Tiwi Islands, new onshore shale gas extraction in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley and a new coal seam gas pipeline and wells in Queensland.

Approval of the North West Shelf expansion is not in the best interests of Australia and future generations. No federal government should prioritise short-term economic gain over Earth’s climate and human health.

Melissa Haswell, Professor of Practice (Environmental Wellbeing), Indigenous Strategy and Services, Honorary Professor (Geosciences) at University of Sydney & Professor of Health, Safety and Environment, Queensland University of Technology, University of Sydney and David Shearman, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the remnant rainforests of coastal far-north Queensland, bushwalkers may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a diminutive marsupial that’s the last living representative of its family.

The musky rat-kangaroo (Hypsiprymnodon moschatus) weighs only 500 grams and looks a bit like a potoroo. It’s part of a lineage that extends back to before kangaroos evolved their distinctive hopping gait.

Unlike their bigger relatives, muskies can be seen out and about during the day, foraging in the forest litter for fruits, fungi and invertebrates.

As the only living macropodoid (the group that includes kangaroos, wallabies, potoroos and bettongs) that doesn’t hop, they can provide a crucial insight into how and when this iconic form of locomotion evolved in Australia.

Our study, published in Australian Mammalogy today, aimed to observe muskies in their native habitat in order to better understand how they move.

Why kangaroos are special

If we look around the world, hopping animals are quite rare. Hopping evolved once in macropodoids, four times in rodents, and probably once in an extinct group of South American marsupials known as argyrolagids.

In animals heavier than five kilograms, hopping is an incredibly efficient form of locomotion, in large part thanks to energy being stored in the Achilles tendon at the back of the heel.

However, the vast majority of animals that hop are really small. The only hopping animals with body masses over 500 grams are kangaroos. And Australia used to have a lot more kangaroo species, many of them quite large.

Despite the abundance of fossil kangaroos, we still don’t really know why they evolved their hopping gait, especially given it only really becomes more efficient at body masses over five kilograms. Hypotheses range from predator escape, to energy preservation, to the opening of vegetation as Australia shifted to a drier climate.

Researchers looking at limb proportions have suggested that fossil kangaroos also hopped. But it’s likely the ways that extinct roos moved were much more diverse than has previously been suggested.

Why muskies are key in roo evolution

Muskies are the last living member of the Hypsiprymnodontidae, a macropodoid family that branched off early in kangaroo evolution. For this reason, it is thought muskies may move in a similar way to early kangaroo ancestors.

Studies on kangaroo evolution will often mention locomotion in muskies, but only in passing. And only a single, brief, first-hand description of locomotor behaviour in muskies has actually been published, in 1982. The authors observed that muskies moved their hindlimbs together in a bound and that all four limbs were used, even at fast speeds.

So, we set out to answer the question: can H. moschatus hop? And if not, what form of locomotion does it use?

Using high-speed video recordings, we studied the sequence in which muskies place their four feet on the ground, and the relative timing and duration of each footfall.

Through this gait analysis, we determined that muskies predominantly use what is called a “bound” or “half-bound” gait. Bounding gaits are characterised by the hindfeet moving together in synchrony – just like when bipedal kangaroos hop. In the case of muskies, the forefeet (or “hands”) also generally move together in close synchrony.

No other marsupial that moves on all fours is known to use this distinctive style of movement to the same extent as muskies. Rather, other species tend to use a combination of the half-bound and some form of galloping (the gait that horses, cats and dogs use) or hopping.

From all fours to hopping

We were also able to confirm that tantalisingly brief observation from the 1980s: even when travelling at high speeds, muskies always use quadrupedal gaits, never rearing up on just their back legs.

They are, therefore, the only living kangaroo that doesn’t hop.

Combined with further investigation of their anatomy, these observations help us get closer to understanding how and why kangaroos adopted their distinctive bipedal hopping behaviours.

These results also signal a potential pathway to how bipedal hopping evolved in kangaroos. Perhaps it started with an ancestor that moved about on all fours like other marsupials, such as brush-tail possums, then an animal that bounded like the muskies, and finally evolved into the iconic hopping kangaroos we see in Australia today.

However, we are no clearer on how the remarkable energy economy of kangaroo movement evolved, or why hopping kangaroos got so much bigger than hopping rodents.

The next part of the research needs to focus on that and will be informed by key fossil discoveries from early periods in kangaroo evolution.

Aaron Camens, Lecturer in Palaeontology, Flinders University; Amy Tschirn, PhD Candidate in Vertebrate Palaeontology, Flinders University, and Peter Bishop, Postdoctoral research fellow, Harvard Kennedy School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Two windswept beaches 80km south of Adelaide have been closed to the public after locals reported “more than 100” surfers fell ill on the weekend. Their symptoms included “a sore throat, dry cough and irritated eyes” or blurred vision. Dead sea dragons, fish and octopuses have also washed up on the beaches.

Water samples have been taken for testing and health authorities suspect toxins from an algal bloom may be to blame.

But the “mysterious foam” in the water is a health hazard in its own right.

My research shows people should not go in the sea when it is foaming. These bacterial smoothies can contain more harmful pathogens than a sewage treatment plant – and you wouldn’t go swimming in sewage.

Beware of sea foam

Sea foam doesn’t look dangerous. But looks can be deceiving. This foam is likely to contain a mixture of many different types of microbes and pollutants.

On beaches with lots of sea foam, people should avoid all contact with the water – and definitely avoid surfing or breathing in the contaminated water droplets in the air.

I have been studying sea foams since 2003. In 2021, my PhD student Luke Wright and I published research on our discovery of infectious disease-causing microbes in the sea foams of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

Named Nocardiae, these microbes are filamentous bacteria that can cause foaming in wastewater treatment plants, particularly when there’s a high load of fats, oils and greases. We now know the bacteria can cause foaming in the sea too.

We detected 32 strains of Nocardiae in samples of sea foam from beaches at Noosa and south to Caloundra.

Some of these species were new to science. So we named them Nocardia australiensis and Nocardia spumea (“spumea” meaning froth or foam).

Nocardiae bacteria are known to cause skin, lung and central nervous system infections in both humans and animals. But the infection usually only takes hold in people with weakened immune systems. The bacteria can cause abscesses in the brain, lungs and liver.

The incubation time can range between one and six months, depending on the strain of bacteria and the health status of the person involved.

This means it will take some time for people to get infected and show symptoms. Long-term medical monitoring is required to detect the condition, as it can be masked by other disease-causing microbes such as the infectious agent that causes tuberculosis.

Where is the sea foam coming from?

During heavy winds, microbial spores from the soil can end up on the surface of the ocean.

If the water is polluted with floating fats and grease as well as asphaltene, motor oil and hydrocarbons, these spores soon form bacterial colonies or biofilms that go forth and multiply.

That’s because these microbes use pollution as a food source. Seawater is increasingly polluted by runoff from farmland or hard surfaces such as roads. Everything washed into the stormwater drains out to sea. During heavy storms accidental overflow from sewage systems can also occur, as Rockhampton has experienced in the past.

Algae is another food source for these microbes, as they can crack open algae cells to access the nutritious oils inside. Sea foams have been observed in northern France during algal blooms.

Warm water makes matters worse, as the warmth increases the survival rate for Nocardiae. In our laboratory on the Sunshine Coast, we were able to replicate a foaming event. We found foaming started at water temperatures of 24°C and above.

What can be done about it?

Reducing stormwater pollution will reduce the growth of sea foams. Any potential incident of infections of these surfers can raise awareness of the problem.

But sea foam can also be found in pristine environments such as national parks, where it is mostly due to oils leached from trees. We proved this fact at Noosa National Park.

In my experience on the Sunshine Coast, the council and other local authorities have been very receptive to advice on how to fix the problem. They have supported our research and also completed major upgrades at sewage treatment plants over the last 20 years.

Once there’s an outbreak in the environment it is very difficult to control. That’s because ocean is an open system, as opposed to the closed system of a sewage treatment plant, where operators can use special chemicals or mechanical equipment to break the foam down. In open sea it’s impossible. So we just have to wait for it to go away.

In this case, teams of researchers from different disciplines should come together to explore the issue. Microbiologists, marine scientists, meteorologists and chemists should team up to find out what’s going on. Ocean currents should be followed to determine where the pollutants end up.

Sea foam is a global issue

Earlier this month Tropical Cyclone Alfred whipped up sea foam all the way along the coast from South East Queensland to northern New South Wales. I was horrified to see footage of people playing in the thick, sticky sea foam, blissfully unaware of the dangers.

But the problem is not confined to Australia, sea foam can be found at polluted beaches all over the world. Examples include India and Turkey.

I have been telling this story ever since I first observed it on the Sunshine Coast in 2003. Every time there’s a major sea foam event, the media is interested. But research support is also needed in the gaps in between. We scientists need to monitor the shorelines continuously.

As long as humanity continues to produce pollution, the problem will increase. It will also worsen as the world warms, because sea foams like it hot.

Ipek Kurtböke, Associate Professor in Microbiology, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Between 18,000 and 11,000 years ago, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere suddenly shot up. This caused rapid global warming, the mass melting of glaciers, and the end of the last ice age.

Much of this sudden influx of atmospheric CO₂ came from the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, highlighting the key role this body of water plays in regulating the global climate.

However, we have a poor understanding of how and why CO₂ release from this region changed during periods such as the end of the last ice age. But our new study, published in Nature Communications, reveals how much CO₂ was released to the atmosphere from the polar Southern Ocean during this period – and what factors were responsible.

We reached these conclusions by examining the chemistry of sand-sized fossils, called foraminifera, from the seafloor south of Tasmania.

Tiny shells preserved in mud

Foraminifera are tiny single-celled organisms, either floating in the ocean surface or living on the seabed. Most of them build shells made of calcium carbonate to protect themselves. After death, these foraminifera shells are preserved in the mud on the seabed.

Newer generations of foraminifera shells stack over older ones, like adding new pages to a book. Over time, these foraminifera shells form a book on the seabed that can be dated back to millions of years ago.

Even more fascinating, trace amounts of elements in the seawater are incorporated into the calcium carbonate shells of foraminifera. In some foraminifera species, the amount of these elements is sensitive to the environment they live in.

For example, the amount of boron in a species called Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi is sensitive to carbonate ion concentrations, and the amount of cadmium in another species (Hoeglundina elegans) is sensitive to phosphate concentrations.

By looking at trace elements in these foraminifera shells found in the sequence of mud on the seabed, we can decipher mysteries about the past seawater condition in the book left by foraminifera on the seabed.

A giant metal straw

How do scientists do this? First we go out to the ocean to collect mud.

In this process, a giant metal straw is dropped to the seabed and then raised to our research ships, fully filled with mud. We take these mud samples back to our lab. There, we slice them into pieces and examine them separately.

This allows us to extract information from each page of the book in chronological order. Foraminifera shells are washed out of the mud, and specific shells are picked out under a microscope, cleaned, and finally analysed for their chemical composition.

Foraminifera have lived almost everywhere in the ocean for millions of years. Based on their chemical composition, scientists have reconstructed a continuous record of seawater temperature during the past 66 million years in great detail.

Among a few places in the ocean where you cannot find foraminifera is the polar Southern Ocean. Although some foraminifera live there, seawater in this region is often too corrosive for their shells to preserve on the seabed. The lack of foraminifera in the polar Southern Ocean brings a huge challenge for scientists eager to understand past changes in CO₂ exchanges between the ocean and the atmosphere.

From Antarctica to Tasmania

We decided to tackle the problem using mud on the seabed 3,300 metres below the surface just south of Tasmania.

Seawater at that depth near Tasmania is ideal for studying the chemistry of the polar Southern Ocean. That’s because seawater from the polar Southern Ocean sinks to the bottom of the ocean, moves northwards, and eventually occupies the seabed south of Tasmania.

Seawater chemistry – including concentrations of carbon, phosphate and oxygen – does change along its way at the bottom of the ocean.

These changes are, however, generally proportional to each other. So if all these concentrations are known for seawater at depth near Tasmania, we can work out their concentrations in the polar Southern Ocean.

Fortunately, there were plenty of foraminifera shells in the mud for all these reconstructions at the site we examined near Tasmania.

Reconstructing ancient chemical concentrations

Using the chemistry of foraminifera, we reconstructed changes in concentrations of carbonate ion (which is largely related to carbon), phosphate and oxygen at the bottom of the ocean near Tasmania during the end of the last ice age roughly 20,000–10,000 years ago. This period is known as the last deglaciation.

Based on these reconstructions, we calculated the amount of CO₂ released from the polar Southern Ocean during the last deglaciation. Some of this CO₂ came from biological processes – changes in the amount of carbon used by microscopic organisms living near the ocean surface. The rest was from physical processes – CO₂ molecules escaping from seawater directly to the air.

We found that biological processes were more important for CO₂ releases during the earlier stages of the deglaciation, while the physical processes contributed more during the later stages.

So why is this important?

Scientists use climate models to predict future climate and to reproduce past atmospheric CO₂ changes.

Our results provide testing targets for climate models to reproduce.

Better reproduction of past changes will improve climate model design for predicting future changes.

This will help us understand how future changes in the polar Southern Ocean can affect atmospheric CO₂, contributing to making effective plans to mitigate CO₂ emissions.

Yuhao Dai, Research Fellow in Earth Sciences, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Power prices are set to go up again even though renewables now account for 40% of the electricity in Australia’s main grid – close to quadruple the clean power we had just 15 years ago. How can that be, given renewables are the cheapest form of newly built power generation?

This is a fair question. As Australia heads for a federal election campaign likely to focus on the rising cost of living, many of us are wondering when, exactly, cheap renewables will bring cheap power.

The simple answer is – not yet. While solar and wind farms produce power at remarkably low cost, they need to be built where it’s sunny or windy. Our existing transmission lines link gas and coal power stations to cities. Connecting renewables to the grid requires expensive new transmission lines, as well as storage for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Notably, Victoria’s mooted price increase of 0.7% was much lower than other states, which would be as high as 8.9% in parts of New South Wales. This is due to Victoria’s influx of renewables – and good connections to other states. Because Victoria can draw cheap wind from South Australia, hydroelectricity from Tasmania or coal power from New South Wales through a good transmission line network, it has kept wholesale prices the lowest in the national energy market since 2020.

While it was foolish for the Albanese government to promise more renewables would lower power bills by a specific amount, the path we are on is still the right one.

That’s because most of our coal plants are near the end of their life. Breakdowns are more common and reliability is dropping. Building new coal plants would be expensive too. New gas would be pricier still. And the Coalition’s nuclear plan would be both very expensive and arrive sometime in the 2040s, far too late to help.

Renewables are cheap, building a better grid is not

The reason solar is so cheap and wind not too far behind is because there is no fuel. There’s no need to keep pipelines of gas flowing or trainloads of coal arriving to be burned.

But sun and wind are intermittent. During clear sunny days, the National Energy Market can get so much solar that power prices actually turn negative. Similarly, long windy periods can drive down power prices. But when the sun goes down and the wind stops, we still need power.

This is why grid planners want to be able to draw on renewable sources from a wide range of locations. If it’s not windy on land, there will always be wind at sea. To connect these new sources to the grid, though, requires another 10,000 kilometres of high voltage transmission lines to add to our existing 40,000 km. These are expensive and cost blowouts have become common. In some areas, strong objections from rural residents are adding years of delay and extra cost.

So while the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, we have underestimated the cost of getting this power to markets as well as ensuring the power can be “firmed”. Firming is when electricity from variable renewable sources is turned into a commodity able to be turned on or off as needed and is generally done by storing power in pumped hydro schemes or in grid-scale batteries.

In fact, the cost of transmission and firming is broadly offsetting the lower input costs from renewables.

Does this mean the renewable path was wrong?

At both federal and state levels, Labor ministers have made an error in claiming renewables would directly translate to lower power prices.

But consider the counterpoint. Let’s say the Coalition gets in, rips up plans for offshore wind zones and puts the renewable transition on ice. What happens then?

Our coal plants would continue to age, leading to more frequent breakdowns and unreliable power, especially during summer peak demand. Gas is so expensive as to be a last resort. Nuclear would be far in the future. What would be left? Quite likely, expensive retrofits of existing coal plants.

If we stick to the path of the green energy transition, we should expect power price rises to moderate. With more interconnections and transmission lines, we can accommodate more clean power from more sources, reducing the chance of price spikes and adding vital resilience to the grid. If an extreme weather event takes out one transmission line, power can still flow from others.

Storing electricity will be a game-changer

Until now, storing electricity at scale for later use hasn’t been possible. That means grid operators have to constantly match supply and demand. To cope with peak demand, such as a heatwave over summer, we have very expensive gas peaking plants which sit idle nearly all the time.

Solar has only made the challenge harder, as we get floods of solar at peak times and nothing in the evening when we use most of our power. Our coal plants do not deal well with being turned off and on to accommodate solar floods.

The good news is, storage is solving most of these problems. Being able to keep hours or even days of power stored in batteries or in elevated reservoirs at hydroelectric plants gives authorities much more flexibility in how they match supply and demand.

We will never see power “too cheap to meter”, as advocates once said of the nuclear industry. But over time, we should see price rises ease.

For our leaders and energy authorities, this is a tricky time. They must ensure our large-scale transmission line interconnectors actually get built, juggle the flood of renewables, ensure storage comes online, manage the exit of coal plants and try not to affect power prices. Pretty straightforward.

Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For the fourth year running, the condition of Australia’s environment has been relatively good overall. Our national environment scorecard released today gives 2024 a mark of 7.7 out of 10.

You might wonder how this can be. After all, climate change is intensifying and threatened species are still in decline.

The main reason: good rainfall partly offset the impact of global warming. In many parts of Australia, rainfall, soil water and river flows were well above average, there were fewer large bushfires, and vegetation continued to grow. Overall, conditions were above average in the wetter north and east of Australia, although parts of the south and west were very dry.

But this is no cause for complacency. Australia’s environment remains under intense pressure. Favourable conditions have simply offered a welcome but temporary reprieve. As a nation we must grasp the opportunity now to implement lasting solutions before the next cycle of drought and fire comes around.

Preparing the national scorecard

For the tenth year running, we have trawled through a huge amount of data from satellites, weather and water measuring stations, and ecological surveys.

We gathered information about climate change, oceans, people, weather, water, soils, plants, fire and biodiversity.

Then we analysed the data and summarised it all in a report that includes an overall score for the environment. This score (between zero and ten) gives a relative measure of how favourable conditions were for nature, agriculture and our way of life over the past year in comparison to all years since 2000. This is the period we have reliable records for.

While it is a national report, conditions vary enormously between regions and so we also prepare regional scorecards. You can download the scorecard for your region at our website.

Welcome news, but alarming trends continue

Globally, 2024 was the world’s hottest year on record. It was Australia’s second hottest year, with the record warmest sea surface temperatures. As a result, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its fifth mass bleaching event since 2016, while Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia also experienced bleaching.

Yet bushfire activity was low despite high temperatures, thanks to regular rainfall.

National rainfall was 18% above average, improving soil condition and increasing tree canopy cover.

States such as New South Wales saw notable improvements in environmental conditions, while conditions also improved somewhat in Western Australia. Others experienced declines, particularly South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania. These regional contrasts were largely driven by rainfall – good rains can hide some underlying environmental degradation trends.

Favourable weather conditions bumped up the nation’s score this year, rather than sustained environmental improvements.

A temporary respite?

The past four years show Australia’s environment is capable of bouncing back from drought and fire when conditions are right.

But the global climate crisis continues to escalate, and Australia remains highly vulnerable. Rising sea levels, more extreme weather and fire events continue to threaten our environment and livelihoods. The consequences of extreme events can persist for many years, like we have seen for the Black Summer of 2019–20.

To play our part in limiting global warming, Australia needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Progress is stalling: last year, national emissions fell slightly (0.6%) below 2023 levels but were still higher than in 2022. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions per person remain among the highest in the world.

Biodiversity loss remains an urgent issue. The national threatened species list grew by 41 species in 2024. While this figure is much lower than the record of 130 species added in 2023, it remains well above the long-term average of 25 species added per year.

More than half of the newly listed or uplisted species were directly affected by the Black Summer fires. Meanwhile, habitat destruction and invasive species continue to put pressure on native ecosystems and species.

The Threatened Species Index captures data from long-term threatened species monitoring. The index is updated annually but with a three-year lag due largely to delays in data processing and sharing. This means the 2024 index includes data up to 2021.

The index revealed the abundance of threatened birds, mammals, plants, and frogs has fallen an average of 58% since 2000.

But there may be some good news. Between 2020 and 2021, the overall index increased slightly (2%) suggesting the decline has stabilised and some recovery is evident across species groups. We’ll need further monitoring to confirm whether this represents a lasting turnaround or a temporary pause in declines.

What needs to happen?

The 2024 Australia’s Environment Report offers a cautiously optimistic picture of the present. Without intervention, the future will look a lot worse.

Australia must act decisively to secure our nation’s environmental future. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, introducing stronger land management policies and increasing conservation efforts to maintain and restore our ecosystems.

Without redoubling our efforts, the apparent environmental improvements will not be more than a temporary pause in a long-term downward trend.

Albert Van Dijk, Professor, Water and Landscape Dynamics, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University; Shoshana Rapley, Research Assistant, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University, and Tayla Lawrie, Project Manager, Threatened Species Index, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate change is the most pressing problem humanity will face this century. Tracking how the climate is actually changing has never been more critical.

Today, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published its annual State of the Climate report, which found heat records kept being broken in 2024. It’s likely 2024 was the first year to be more than 1.5°C above the Earth’s pre-industrial average temperature. In 2024, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit the highest point in the last 800,000 years.

The combination of heat and unchecked emissions, the organisation points out, had serious consequences. Attribution studies found a link between climate change and disasters such as Hurricane Helene, which left a trail of destruction in the southeastern United States, and the unprecedented flooding in Africa’s arid Sahel region.

Slowing these increasingly dangerous changes to Earth’s climate will require a rapid shift from fossil fuels to clean energy.

The record heat of 2024

From the North Pole to the South Pole, the oceans and our land masses, the report catalogues alarm bells ringing ever louder for Earth’s vital signs.

Steadily rising global average temperatures show us the influence of the extra heat we are trapping by emitting greenhouse gases. The ten warmest years on record have all happened in the past ten years.

The report shows 2024 was the warmest year since comprehensive global records began 175 years ago. The planet was an estimated 1.55°C (plus or minus 0.13°C) warmer than it was between 1850 and 1900.

Together, 2023 and 2024 marked a jump in global mean temperature from previous years. There was a jump of about 0.15°C between the previous record year (2016 or 2020 depending on the dataset) and 2023. Last year was even warmer – about 0.1°C above 2023.

Last year was the first year the planet was likely more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This doesn’t mean we have broken the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of holding warming under 1.5°C – temperatures would need to be sustained over a number of years to formally lose that fight. But it’s not good news.

There are a few extra factors at play in this record-breaking global temperature, including an El Niño event boosting eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures in the first part of 2024, falling pollution from shipping leading to less cloud over the ocean, and a more active sun as well.

Researchers are hard at work unpicking why the Earth’s average temperature jumped in 2023 and 2024. But it is clear the 2024 record-breaking warmth and most other damning statistics in the report would not have occurred if it wasn’t for human-induced climate change.

Carbon dioxide up, glacial melt up, sea ice down

It’s not just global temperatures breaking records.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reached 427 parts per million last year. Sea level rise has accelerated and is now about 11 centimetres above early 1990s levels, and the oceans are at their highest temperatures on record.

Seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic and around Antarctica shrank to low levels (albeit short of record lows) in 2024, while preliminary data shows glacial melt and ocean acidification continued at a rapid pace.

Almost all parts of the world were much warmer in 2024 than even recent averages (1991–2020) and much of the tropics experienced record heat.

From cyclones to heatwaves, another year of extreme events

In the English-speaking media, extreme events affecting North America, Europe and Australia are well covered, such as the devastating Hurricane Helene in the US and the lethal flash flooding in Spain.

By contrast, extreme weather and its fallout in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia get less coverage.

In September 2024, Super Typhoon Yagi killed hundreds and caused widespread damage through the Philippines, China and Vietnam. Later in the year, Cyclone Chido struck Mayotte and Mozambique causing more than 100,000 people to be displaced. Hundreds died in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan due to spring floods following an unusual cold wave.

Unusual flooding hit parts of the arid Sahel and even the Sahara Desert. Meanwhile the worst drought in a century hit southern Africa, devastating small farmers and leading to rising hunger.

Much of South and Central America was hit by significant drought. Huge tributaries to the Amazon River all but dried up for the first time on record. Severe summer heat hit much of the Northern Hemisphere, while more than 1,300 pilgrims died during the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca as heat and humidity pushed past survivable limits.

Globally, extreme weather forced more people from their homes than any other year since 2008, which had widespread floods and fires.

Did climate change play a role in these extreme events? The answer ranges from a resounding yes in some cases to a likely small role in others.

Scientists at World Weather Attribution found the fingerprints of climate change in Hurricane Helene’s large-scale rain and winds as well as the flooding rains in the eastern Sahel.

Paying the price for decades of inaction

This report is a dire score card. The numbers are sobering, scary but sadly, not surprising.

We have known the basic mechanism by which greenhouse gases warm the planet for over 100 years. The science behind climate change has been around a long time.

But our response is still not up to the task.

Currently, our activities are producing ever more greenhouse gas emissions, trapping more heat and causing more and more problems for people and the planet. Every fraction of a degree of global warming matters. The damage done will keep worsening until we end our reliance on fossil fuels and reach net zero.

Andrew King, Associate Professor in Climate Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather, The University of Melbourne and Linden Ashcroft, Lecturer in climate science and science communication, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia’s energy policy would take a sharp turn if the Coalition wins the upcoming federal election. A Dutton government would seek to build seven nuclear power plants at the sites of old coal-fired power stations.

The Coalition says its plan makes smart use of the existing transmission network and other infrastructure. But solar and wind power would need to be curtailed to make room in the grid for nuclear energy. This means polluting coal and gas power stations would remain active for longer, releasing an extra 1 billion to 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

So is there another option? Yes: pumped hydro storage plants. This technology is quicker and cheaper to develop than nuclear power, and can store solar and wind rather than curtail it. It’s better suited to Australia’s electricity grid and would ultimately lead to fewer emissions. Drawing on our recent global analysis, we found the technology could be deployed near all but one of the seven sites the Coalition has earmarked for nuclear power.

The Coalition is likely to spend anywhere from A$116 billion to $600 billion of taxpayers’ money to deliver up to 14 gigawatts of nuclear energy. Experts say the plan will not lower power prices and will take too long to build. Our findings suggest cheap storage of solar and wind, in the form of pumped hydro, is a better way forward.

This way, we can continue to build renewable energy capacity while stabilising the grid. More than 45GW of solar and wind is already up and running, with a further 23GW being supported by the Capacity Investment Scheme until 2027. Only a handful of the pumped hydro sites we found would be needed to decarbonise the energy system, reaching the 1,046 gigawatt-hours of storage CSIRO estimates Australia needs.

Building pumped hydro storage systems near old coal-fired power generators has some advantages, such as access to transmission lines – although more will be needed as electricity demand increases. But plenty of other suitable sites exist, too.

Filling the gaps

Pumped hydro is a cheap, mature technology that currently provides more than 90% of the world’s electrical energy storage.

It involves pumping water uphill from one reservoir to another at a higher elevation for storage. Then, when power is needed, water is released to flow downhill through turbines, generating electricity on its way to the lower reservoir.

Together with battery storage, pumped hydro solves the very real problem of keeping the grid stable and reliable when it is dominated by solar and wind power.

By 2030, 82% of Australia’s electricity supply is expected to come from renewables, up from about 40% today.

But solar panels only work during the day and don’t produce as much power when it’s cloudy. And wind turbines don’t generate power when it’s calm. That’s where storage systems come in. They can charge up when electricity is plentiful and then release electricity when it’s needed.

Grid-connected batteries can fill short-term gaps (from seconds to a few hours). Pumped hydro can store electricity overnight, and longer still. These two technologies can be used together to supply electricity through winter, and other periods of calm or cloudy weather.

Finding pumped hydro near the Coalitions’s proposed nuclear sites

Australia has three operating pumped hydro systems: Tumut 3 in the Snowy Mountains, Wivenhoe in Queensland, and Shoalhaven in the Kangaroo Valley of New South Wales.

Two more are under construction, including Snowy 2.0. Even after all the cost blowouts, Snowy 2.0 comes at a modest construction cost of A$34 per kilowatt-hour of energy storage, which is ten times cheaper than the cost CSIRO estimates for large, new batteries.

We previously developed a “global atlas” to identify potential locations for pumped hydro facilities around the world.

More recently, we created a publicly available tool to filter results based on construction cost, system size, distance from transmission lines or roads, and away from environmentally sensitive locations.

In this new analysis, we used the tool to find pumped hydro options near the sites the Coalition has chosen for nuclear power plants.

Mapping 300 potential pumped hydro sites

The proposed nuclear sites are:

• Liddell Power Station, New South Wales
• Mount Piper Power Station, New South Wales
• Loy Yang Power Stations, Victoria
• Tarong Power Station, Queensland
• Callide Power Station, Queensland
• Northern Power Station, South Australia (small modular reactor only)
• Muja Power Station, Western Australia (small modular reactor only).

We used our tool to identify which of these seven sites would instead be suitable for a pumped hydro project, using the following criteria:

• low construction cost (for a pumped hydro project)

• located within 85km of the proposed nuclear sites.

We included various reservoir types in our search:

• new reservoirs on undeveloped land (“greenfield” sites)

• repurposing existing reservoirs (“bluefield” sites)

• repurposing existing mining pits (“brownfield” sites).

Exactly 300 sites matched our search criteria. No options emerged near the proposed nuclear site in Western Australia, but suitable sites lie further north in the mining region of the Pilbara.

One option east of Melbourne, depicted in the image below, has a storage capacity of 500 gigawatt-hours. Compared with Snowy 2.0, this option has a much shorter tunnel, larger energy capacity, and larger height difference between the two reservoirs (increasing the potential energy stored in the water). And unlike Snowy 2.0, it is not located in a national park.

Of course, shortlisted sites would require detailed assessment to confirm the local geology is suitable for pumped hydro, and to evaluate potential environmental and social impacts.

More where that came from

We restricted our search to sites near the Coalition’s proposed nuclear plants. But there are hundreds of potential pumped hydro sites along Australia’s east coast.

Developers can use our free tool to identify the best sites.

So far, the Australian electricity transition has mainly been driven by private investment in solar and wind power. With all this renewable energy entering the grid, there’s money to be made in storage, too.

Large, centralised, baseload electricity generators, such as coal and nuclear plants, are becoming a thing of the past. A smarter energy policy would balance solar and wind with technologies such as pumped hydro, to secure a reliable electricity supply.

Timothy Weber, Research Officer for School of Engineering, Australian National University and Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We all know microplastics are bad for the environment and our health, but do we really know how bad?

Our new study, published this week in the journal Science Advances, compared changes in 745 proteins found in seabirds with and without plastics in their stomachs.

We focused on young sable shearwaters (seabirds, Ardenna carneipes). They were less than 90 days old and appeared healthy. Despite their young age, the birds with plastic in their stomachs had signs or symptoms of neurodegenerative disease, as well as kidney and liver disease.

We also found evidence of significant damage to the lining of the stomach, likely from microplastics that became embedded in the tissue. It meant proteins that should only be found in the stomach were detected circulating in the blood.

While our findings don’t directly relate to human health, this work paints a distinct picture of the insidious and slow impacts plastic can have on a bird’s health – even if it doesn’t kill them.

Harmful but not deadly?

Some studies have found health impacts of plastics (such as increased exposure to heavy metals), while others have not. Why is that?

An initial study looking at plastic exposure might start out by just looking at what’s known as a single response. This could be the condition of the animal’s body, for example.

While important, such studies don’t account for the diversity of conditions an animal could realistically experience. If you’ve recently been unwell, you might respond to a health test differently than if you were fully healthy. Birds will, too.

Recently, a handful of more in-depth studies have documented a range of plastic impacts on birds; these were harmful, but not severe enough to cause death. For example, birds that consumed plastic had higher cholesterol, were smaller and had shorter wings, and had plasticosis, an inflammatory condition that leads to scar tissue formation.

But consider a loved one with an invisible, chronic health condition. To a stranger they might appear healthy, but their quality of life is actually impacted by their condition. The same is true for birds and other wildlife.

Thankfully, we have more fine-grained tools at our disposal.

Studying proteins

Proteomics is the study of protein composition and regulation, and the role these play in the body. While commonly used in the medical field and other disciplines, omic technologies (including proteomics) are rarely used in wildlife studies.

Certain key proteins are well-known markers of disease. For example, we found low levels of a protein called albumin in the blood of birds with plastic. Having less albumin is a sign of poor liver function.

Birds with plastic also had less of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This protein plays a crucial role in the growth and survival of neurons (nerve cells), including those involved in the development of the birds’ ability to recognise each others’ song.

Our results suggest while not all birds die from plastics exposure, they may have health issues and suffer from reduced cognitive functions, including those needed for courtship (such as song). This may make it more difficult for them to successfully find mates and produce chicks.

Many of the health impacts from plastic exposure have been documented beyond the point of exposure – that is, the stomach. While our findings revealed notable damage to the stomach lining, changes have now been reported in liver, kidneys, spleen and brain of these chicks.

This suggests ingested plastic can have wide-ranging, potentially whole body consequences, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

We must listen closely

It’s important to remember that all the worrying health impacts we found via protein analysis were documented in very young birds that were seemingly healthy.

So what does this mean for other wild species that haven’t yet benefited from proteomics analysis or other in-depth studies? Could these findings change our understanding of how microplastic exposure affects human health? This is a task for future research, but it’s not an easy one.

The reality is, we may never have comparable data for most of the world’s wild species. For our lab alone, it’s taken a decade of laying the groundwork to understand the complexity of this problem in a single bird species, one that’s relatively accessible and easy to work with.

For humans, we may never be able to put a number on the impact of plastics because of the huge array of personal, environmental and social determinants of health.

So, there’s a lot we can learn from these birds. As a society, it’s in our best interest to listen to the story they’re trying to tell us.

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to acknowledge research collaborator Alexander Bond from the Natural History Museum, UK.

Jennifer Lavers (Métis Nation ᓲᐊᐧᐦᑫᔨᐤ), Lecturer in Ornithology, Charles Sturt University; Alix de Jersey, PhD candidate, Tasmanian School of Medicine, University of Tasmania, and Jack Rivers Auty, Lecturer, Medical Sciences, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In Australia’s arid and semi-arid zones lives a highly elusive predator. It’s small but fierce and feisty, with big eyes, long hind legs and a pointy nose. A carnivorous marsupial, it comes out at night to hunt its favourite foods: insects and spiders.

It’s rare for people to see this animal in the wild, owing to a combination of its remote habitat, habit of hiding underground in the daytime, small size, camouflaged coat, and fast speed. For anyone lucky to see one in the wild, they’re very easy to confuse with a mouse.

But this animal isn’t a rodent – it’s a marsupial known as a kultarr (Antechinomys laniger). And only recently have scientists – including us – started to get a better grasp of their unique behaviour and crucial role in the ecosystem.

A cousin of the Tasmanian devil

The kultarr is a cousin of the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii), as well as dunnarts, antechinuses and phascogales.

Antechinuses and phascogales are known for “suicidal reproduction” or semelparity – dying after reproducing. Even though naturalist John Gould first described kultarrs as a type of phascogale (Phascogale laniger) in 1856, they do not reproduce in this way.

This small marsupial was given its unique genus name by Australian scientist Gerard Krefft in 1867. In 1906, a subspecies was named by British zoologist Oldfield Thomas.

Australian palaeontologist Mike Archer suggested it was a type of dunnart in 1981, but more recent studies have confirmed kultarrs and dunnarts are cousins, and likely originated from a common ancestor.

Nevertheless, some clarity is needed as there are differences between the two subspecies we recognise today (A. l. laniger and A. l. spenceri). These include their geographic range, the length of their tail and body, mammary glands and some cranial features.

Perhaps there is more than one species of kultarr?

A fierce predator

Kultarrs are found across most states and territories except Victoria and Tasmania. They are about the size of a mouse, weighing up to 30 grams. Their fur is brown, fawn or sandy coloured, and their belly fur is white. They also have a long tail with a brush‐like tip, and large elongated hind legs.

Although the long legs of the kultarr make it look like it hops, it is a quadruped. So rather than hopping like a kangaroo, kultarrs walk or run using all four legs at speeds of up to 13.8 kilometres per hour. In comparison, the average human walking speed is roughly 4 km per hour.

Like the Tasmanian devil, the kultarr is a fierce predator, although its prey is smaller – mainly consisting of arthropods. Studies of kultarrs in captivity have shown they have a very simple digestive tract and digest food very quickly, in about an hour.

During the daytime, kultarrs hide in cracks in the soil or burrows made by other animals such as native hopping mice. These cracks and burrows keep the kultarrs safe from predators while they sleep and provide a stable temperature that helps save energy. At night they come out in search of food and mates.

Kultarrs also use torpor, a reduction in metabolic rate and body temperature, to save energy. They can adjust their body temperature to as low as 11°C, and stay in torpor for around 2–16 hours, particularly at times when temperatures are low and food is scarce.

Rarely observed in the field

As kultarrs are so elusive and rarely observed by field researchers, much of what we know about their biology is based on studies of them in captivity.

For example, captive studies have provided information on their reproduction and their behaviour, such as warming up on heat rocks after using torpor to save energy.

Two recent studies analysed historic footage of a captive colony of kultarrs to learn more about their behaviours.

The studies found the most common behaviours displayed in captivity were exploration of their environment and foraging for food. They were also looking out for potential predators by staying alert.

These behaviours are important when breeding animals for conservation actions, such as translocation and reintroduction, which involve relocating animals from one area to another to avoid threats or reintroducing captive bred animals into their former habitat.

The studies highlight the importance of having captive colonies of native marsupials to further understand behaviour and other aspects of their biology that are difficult to study in the wild, particularly in elusive nocturnal species like the kultarr.

A kultarr colony

Very few captive colonies of marsupials exist in research institutions.

In 2007, we established a kultarr colony at Western Sydney University. We learned a huge amount about kultarr biology during the six years the colony was operational. It helped provide new knowledge to aid species conservation and inform translocation or reintroduction programs.

Threats to kultarrs include habitat degradation, natural flooding events, fire and pesticides. Introduced and native predators, such as feral cats, foxes, owls and snakes, also prey on kultarrs.

Whole populations of kultarrs may migrate to new locations seasonally. We think that’s the case because researchers will do extensive surveys, find many, and then survey again, and there are none. Unlike rodents that boom after rainfall in response to better conditions – more food and habitat (plant growth) – kultarrs appear to be more readily seen in drier conditions.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the kultarr as “data deficient” in 2008. Eight years later, it upgraded the species to the status of “least concern”.

But there is still a great deal we don’t know about these elusive little animals, particularly the current population stability – and even if there is more than one species of kultarr out there.

Hayley Stannard, Senior Lecturer in Animal Anatomy and Physiology, Charles Sturt University and Julie Old, Associate Professor in Biology, Zoology and Animal Science, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Compost applied to agricultural soils in Australia each year contains tonnes of microplastics, our research has revealed. These microplastics can harm soil and plant health and eventually enter food crops, potentially posing a risk to humans.

In Australia, more than 51% of organic waste – including garden and food waste from households – is recovered and processed. Much of it is turned into compost.

However, every kilogram of compost we sampled in our study contained thousands of tiny pieces of plastic, invisible to the naked eye. They come from a range of potential sources, including compostable waste bags used by households to store food scraps.

Without swift and effective action, composting may become an environmental crisis, rather than a solution.

The problem with microplastics in compost

As Australia’s landfill sites become exhausted, finding new uses for organics waste has become crucial.

Composting is widely promoted as a solution to managing organic waste. It is comprised of decomposed plant and food waste and other organic materials, which is applied to farms and gardens to enrich the soil and improve plant growth.

Many local councils provide residents with kitchen caddies and “compostable” plastic bags to collect food waste. These bags can also be bought from supermarkets.

These bags usually contain some plant-based substances. However, some contain fossil-fuel based material. Others may contain “bioplastics” such as that made from corn starch or sugarcane, which require very specific conditions to break down into their natural materials.

Research shows some compostable bags are a source of microplastics – plastic particles smaller than 5 millimetres.

Once applied to soil, microplastics can accumulate over time, posing risks to soil health. For example, research shows microplastics can alter soil structure, limit plant growth, hinder the cycling of nutrients and disrupt microbial communities. This in turn may affect farm productivity.

Microplastics can also further degrade into “nanoplastics” small enough to be absorbed by plant roots. From there they can enter stems, leaves, and fruits of agricultural products consumed by humans, posing potential health risks.

Internationally, evidence is growing that compost can introduce significant amounts of microplastics into soil. However, little is known about whether organics applied to farm soils in Australia contain microplastics. This study sought to shed light on this.

What we found

My colleagues and I investigated microplastics in processed organic waste. We took samples from 11 composting facilities in Victoria.

We found every kilogram of compost contains between 1,500 and 16,000 microplastic particles. In weight, this equates to between 7 and 760 milligrams of microplastics per kilogram of compost.

In Australia, about 26% of compost produced at organic waste processing facilities is used in agriculture. So, we estimate that between 2.7 and 206 tonnes of microplastics is being transported to Australian agricultural land from compost each year.

Most microplastic particles we found were “microfibres” and “microfragments”. Microfibres usually derive from synthetic fabrics. Microfragments come from larger plastics, such as packaging material.

We then analysed bin bags marketed as compostable or biodegradable, and found their physical and chemical characteristics were very similar to some microfragments we found in organic waste.

The microfragments may be coming from other sources as well, such as plastic containers and bags, and plant string scooped into the bin when people collect garden waste.

Where to now?

This study provides the first evidence of microplastics in processed organic waste in Australia. It underscores the need to better understand what happens to microplastics during the composting processes, and how microplastics affect soil health.

Policies such as the National Plastic Plan and the National Waste Policy Action Plan promote composting as a key strategy for reducing landfill waste and supporting a circular economy.

But these policies do not adequately address the risks of contaminants such as microplastics. In fact, there are no national standards in Australia regulating microplastics in processed organics.

The absence of clear guidelines leaves composting facilities, waste processors, and end users vulnerable to unintended plastic pollution.

To address this serious environmental issue, urgent action is needed.

Authorities should take steps to limit the flow of microplastics into compost, including developing guidelines for composting facilities, waste management companies and households.

Monitoring should also be used to track microplastic levels in processed organics, identify their sources and assess the impact on soils and food safety.

Shima Ziajahromi, Advance Queensland Research Fellow, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University; Frederic Leusch, Professor of Environmental Science, Griffith University, and Hsuan-Cheng Lu, Senior Research Assistant, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Luxury hiking developments are popping up around Australia – fancy lodges, hot showers and extensive walking infrastructure.

While many opt for these deluxe alternatives to a backpack and tent, they can also stop independent hikers with smaller budgets from accessing national parks if not carefully planned.

National parks are open to all and are arguably some of Australia’s least locked-up lands. They are fundamental to Australia’s tourism offerings with 53 million domestic visits to national parks in New South Wales alone.

National parks are meant to support nature and community. Can remaking sections of them for a select clientele get in the way of these goals?

Why do national parks exist?

The primary purpose of national parks is to conserve nature and cultural heritage. A secondary purpose is for people to engage with and enjoy nature.

Parks agencies use many tools to support conservation and recreation, including building infrastructure or limiting the number of visitors.

Outdoor infrastructure – such as raised boardwalks on hiking trails and cabins for accommodation – can increase visitor comfort and improve physical access. It also helps protect habitat and reduces soil damage and problem behaviours by visitors.

Capping visitor numbers can prevent crowding and lessen physical and social impact. For example, visitor numbers to Lord Howe Island are limited to the number of guest beds.

Society is changing – and so is hiking

The number of Australians accessing national parks is growing. But society is changing and people are engaging with nature differently than they used to.

Today’s national park visitors come from diverse backgrounds. They increasingly use parks as meeting places and have less outdoor survival experience. There is also a growing number of people seeking – and willing to pay for – “hero” experiences. These exciting luxury activities showcase unique aspects of a place.

This means parks agencies must cater to a broad audience. To do this, they are diversifying their offerings from basic experiences to include higher-cost adventures.

An example of the latter includes multi-day hiking routes, such as the Three Capes Track in Tasmania and the Milford Track in New Zealand.

They take place on well-established, high-quality trails maintained by parks agencies and catering to a limited daily number of independent fee-paying walkers. Often, the trips are guided by private operators at extra cost.

While these projects may boost tourism, some fear they may exclude visitors on a budget.

Privatisation by stealth?

One of the main concerns with these developments is that private businesses profit from public assets with little benefit to conservation, the primary purpose of national parks.

Private operators are building luxury lodges and being granted concessions to operate guided hiking experiences in national parks.

Independent hikers can still visit the Three Capes Track in Tasmania, though the experience is no longer as accessible, affordable or spontaneous as it once was.

The Falls to Hotham Alpine Crossing master plan

People are raising similar concerns about the Falls to Hotham Alpine Crossing master plan. It proposes a multi-day walking experience across the Victorian Alps.

The plan is a clear example of the potential tension between tourism development and accessibility.

A 2022 community consultation by the Victorian government noted “high levels of concern” for the plan. It centred on increased visitor numbers, the prospect of unprepared and inexperienced walkers, environmental damage, and the costs to stay in huts.

The proposal includes a longer walk, environmentally sensitive track upgrades, and new campsites.

The inclusion of commercially operated huts “tailored for those who desire an added level of comfort” is a concern for those opposed to the development.

Are there pros to development?

Advocates argue private investments in protected areas can support well-managed, sustainable tourism opportunities while generating revenue for conservation.

License fees from luxury lodges and guided tours may help fund park maintenance. Visitor caps and track upgrades protect against environmental degradation and offer controlled access that minimises visitor impact and reduces seasonality of visitation.

But opponents worry these projects prioritise profit over public access.

If national parks become exclusive spaces for wealthier visitors, they risk losing their purpose as places for all Australians to enjoy.

Sustainable tourism

The primary and overriding purpose of national parks is nature conservation. Recreation and tourism are secondary and should not undermine the park’s environmental and cultural integrity.

Visitor caps and serviced experiences are part of the toolkit to cater to an increasingly diverse population while protecting the very attraction visitors come to see.

Tourism development in protected areas, however, needs a social license and local community engagement is an important sustainability principle.

For national parks to operate as they are intended, free or low-cost options and access must be available alongside premium experiences.

National parks belong to everyone and their management must reflect this. While tourism developments can offer benefits, they must not come at the cost of accessibility, affordability, or most importantly, environmental integrity.

Pascal Scherrer, Associate Professor, Southern Cross University; Isabelle Wolf, Vice Chancellor Senior Research Fellow, University of Wollongong, and Jen Smart, PhD student, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

About 90% of flowering plants rely on animals to transfer their pollen and optimise reproduction, making pollination one of nature’s most important processes.

Bees are usually the first insects to come to mind when people think of pollinators. But many other insects – including beetles, flies, moths and butterflies – also visit flowers to feed on nectar and pollen.

In doing so, they can play an essential role in pollinating plants.

Let’s take a closer look at some of nature’s unsung insect pollinators.

Fabulous flies

An estimated 30,000 species of fly (Diptera) call Australia home, making them the second largest group of insects after the beetles.

Flies have a huge variety of feeding habits including flower-visiting groups such as:

• blow flies (Calliphoridae)
• bee flies (Bombyliidae)
• hover flies (Syrphidae)
• noseflies (Rhinidae) and
  
• march flies (Tabanidae).

Blow flies often get a bad rap for their tendency to cluster on faeces and dead animals. But these amazing (and often beautiful!) animals can be important pollinators, especially in alpine regions such as the Australian Alps.

Named for their distinctive hovering flight, stripey yellow-and-black hover flies (Syrphidae) are often mistaken for bees. Hover flies are potential pollinators of several native plants.

The larvae of many common hover fly species prey on pest insects such as aphids, and so play an important role in controlling pest populations.

Another group in the hover fly family, known as drone flies, have larvae that live in stagnant water.

These larvae have a long, slender breathing tube, or “snorkel” that allows them to access air from the surface, earning them the rather unflattering name “rat-tailed maggots”.

Then there are the bee flies. As the name suggests, many species of bee fly (Bombyliidae) have fuzzy, bee-like bodies. Australia boasts around 400 species of bee fly.

Bee flies feed on the nectar or pollen of many native flowering plants and so may act as pollinators.

The larvae of most bee fly species lay their eggs in or on other insects, particularly wasps and solitary bees. The larvae then feed on the insect host, usually killing it.

Being both pollinators and natural regulators of insect populations, bee flies play an important yet often overlooked role in Australia’s ecosystems.

Don’t forget frit flies and march flies

Despite being relatively common, you’ve probably never noticed tiny frit flies (Chloropidae). No, that’s not a typo; frit flies are different to fruit flies (although they are often around the same size).

There are 322 described species of frit fly in Australia, although the actual number is probably much higher as these diminutive flies are understudied.

Frit flies and their relatives, the jackal flies (Milichiidae), are believed to be the pollinators of midge orchids (Genoplesium spp), many of which are rare or threatened in Australia.

Exactly how midge orchids are attracting these tiny flies is not clear, but at least some Genoplesium species may be mimicking the smell of wounded insects.

Biting flies can be annoying, but some are also pollinators. March flies, also known as horse flies (Tabanidae), are often disliked for their painful bites, but these large flies can act as pollinators when they visit flowers to feed on nectar and pollen. In fact, it’s only the females that eat blood to support egg development.

One species, the flower-feeding march fly (Scaptia auriflua), has abandoned blood meals altogether, feeding exclusively on nectar and pollen.

March fly larvae, which develop underground, are formidable predators. Equipped with venomous fangs, they actively hunt and subdue prey.

Friendly flower chafer beetles

Many beetle species visit flowers to feed on nectar and pollen, including the flower chafers (subfamily Cetoniinae). The flower chafer group includes beautiful beetles such as:

• green (and occasionally yellow) and black fiddler beetles (Eupoecila australasiae)
• big buzzy cowboy beetles (Chondropyga dorsalis), and
• the delightfully spotty punctuate flower chafers (Neorrhina punctatum).

Adult flower chafers feed on the nectar and pollen of many flowering plants, especially natives such as eucalyptus and angophoras.

Their larvae live underground, feeding on decaying organic matter. So don’t panic if you find curl grubs in your garden – they might be baby flower chafers.

Nectar scarabs (Phyllotocus spp) are another beetle frequently seen foraging on native flowers. There are about 28 species in Australia.

Most are smaller and less conspicuous than flower chafers, although some species form large swarms on flowering trees such as Angophora, Eucalyptus and Leptospermum.

The larvae of nectar scarabs feed on decaying organic matter and grass roots in soils.

Even wasps help pollinate

Unlike bees, which mostly get their protein from pollen, wasps are primarily predators, although they may act as pollinators when they visit flowers for a sip of sugary nectar.

Some Australian orchids have evolved a remarkable strategy for attracting their wasp pollinators: they deceive unsuspecting males by mimicking the scent (and sometimes shape) of female wasps. Male wasps attempt to mate with the flower, unwittingly transferring pollen in the process.

Next time you’re outside, say a silent thanks for the many unsung insect pollinators helping to keep our ecosystems healthy.

Tanya Latty, Associate Professor, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With the world on the threshold of 1.5°C of warming, one pressing question is: how bad can it get? The answer may lie beneath our feet.

Buried underground are rocks, many rocks, and they are old. For palaeontologists like us, they are a vast archive of past life on Earth. In particular, they can tell us how life on land fared during times when the climate warmed suddenly. Our new study showed that plants were severely affected and forests took millions of years to recover.

About 252 million years ago more than 80% of marine species became extinct. This is known as the end-Permian mass extinction, arguably the most significant climatic crisis since the earliest appearance of animals, more than 555 million years ago. It seems that the prime culprit was the massive amount of warming-inducing greenhouse gas released by volcanoes in a region known as the Siberian Traps in Russia.

Evidence suggests that plants may not have suffered a mass extinction, but their communities were heavily affected, if not destroyed outright. While the extreme heat would have pushed plants and animals past their tolerance limits, they probably also faced deadly droughts, ozone depletion, widespread wildfires and toxic heavy metal contamination.

Data on how plants fared following the end-Permian extinction are plentiful, but little is known about those located at higher latitudes, where it was cooler. Thriving ecosystems existed at polar latitudes back then, aided by a mostly ice-free polar region. At the end-Permian event, however, this ecosystem was entirely wiped out.

Our work examined the rocks and fossils of the Sydney region of Australia, which was located near the south pole for at least 8 million years following the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history. These well-preserved, long-term records provide a window into the recovery of plant communities furthest away from the source of trouble.

The long, unsteady path to recovery

The plant fossils from these Australian rocks showed that conifers, like modern pines or cypresses, were some of the earliest to colonise the land immediately following the calamity. The recovery to flourishing forests, however, was not smooth sailing.

We discovered that even higher temperatures 2 million years after the end-Permian event caused the collapse of these conifer survivors. In turn, they were replaced by tough, shrubby plants resembling modern clubmosses (like Isoetes). How hot it got in Sydney is not known, but this scorching period lasted for about 700,000 years and made life challenging for trees and other large plants.

When cooling conditions finally manifested, large but unusual plants that looked like ferns but bore seeds like conifers flourished and established more stable forests in Sydney. This recovery took less than 100,000 years to happen. These plants eventually dominated the landscape for millions of years, paving the way for the lush forests during the Mesozoic age of the dinosaurs.

So, after million of years, the forest ecosystems of the Mesozoic came to look like those from before the end-Permian event. But crucially, the plant species that made up the new forests were completely different.

The term “recovery” can be misleading. Forests recover eventually, but extinction of individual species is forever.

By understanding how ancient plant ecosystems weathered extreme climate swings, we, as researchers, hope to learn valuable lessons about how modern plants and ecosystems might cope (or not) with today’s climate crisis. With this knowledge, we can inform policymakers of what is yet to come, and help steer a course that will avoid the worst climate outcomes over the longest possible timeframes.

So, fossil records add a data-driven long-term perspective to the climate choices we make today. Ecosystems depend on a fragile balance, with plants as the backbone of food webs on land and climate regulators.

The fossils have spoken: the disruption of these systems can have consequences that last hundreds of thousands of years, so protecting today’s ecosystems is more important than ever.

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Marcos Amores, PhD Candidate in Palaeoclimatology, University College Cork and Chris Mays, Senior Curator, Palaeobotany, Natural History Museum Vienna

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

An oil tanker carrying jet fuel was recently hit by a cargo ship while at anchor 13 miles (21km) off the east coast of England. This set off a series of large explosions and a huge plume of black smoke, while a still unknown quantity of jet fuel has spilled into the sea.

We’re marine ecologists at the University of Hull, the city nearest the incident. We know this coast and these seas very well. While it’s too early to say exactly what the consequences will be, we do know that this spill puts at risk one of Britain’s most important stretches of coastline – both for conservation and for commercial fishing.

The collision occurred in the Holderness offshore marine protected area, a region of coarse sandy seabed that supports lots of different species. These include the ocean quahog, an edible clam known to live for over 500 years. The area also acts as a nursery for fish like lemon sole, plaice and European sprat.

This area overlaps with those designated to protect harbour porpoises and the nearby Humber Estuary and its mud flats, sand dunes and marshes where thousands of birds spend the winters alongside other important species, such as lampreys and grey seals.

The UK’s largest mainland breeding seabird colony is found just north of the collision site, along the Flamborough and Filey coast. More than 250,000 birds nest there every year, including impressive numbers of guillemots and razorbills. It also hosts species of conservation concern like gannets, kittiwakes and puffins.

To the south are other protected coastlines and an important breeding site for grey seals. The Wash, where four rivers empty into the same large square-shaped estuary, is found 70km to the south, in the general direction of drift from the tanker collision. The area has large salt marshes and is another important site for over-wintering birds.

The spill has taken place in a productive fishing area that supports the largest crustacean fishery in Europe, with about £15 million of live lobster landed annually. The mix of coarse sand and cobbles on the seabed provides ideal nursery ground for lobsters as they can create burrows under perfectly-sized stones.

How this may affect life in and around the sea

Given the ecological and commercial importance of the region, people are right to be worried by the possible effects of spilled aviation fuel, air pollution and deposition of contaminated soot from the smoke plume. While it is too early to comment on the potential severity of the fuel spill, the nature of the contaminant and the environmental conditions allow us to make some assumptions.

Jet fuel is thinner than crude oil and spreads rapidly to form a film on the surface of the water. It is unlikely that the fuel spilled would lead to heavy oiling of birds or the formation of tar balls and smothering of the sea bed by oily material, as can happen after crude oil spills.

Conditions at the spill site are highly dynamic. There is therefore a good chance the fuel will mix into the seawater below, breaking up the surface slick, potentially exposing the seabed to contaminants. Strong currents, wave action and relatively coarse sediment help oxygen to mix into the water and sediments which helps the fuel to degrade more quickly.

In calmer areas areas, particularly where there is lots of sediment suspended in the water (such as within the Humber estuary and parts of the Wash), there may be potential for contaminants to adhere to fine particles in suspension and subsequently sink to the seabed. Fuel will likely take longer to degrade in organic rich, fine-grained and poorly oxygenated sediment within the estuary than in offshore areas.

While the conditions at sea favour degradation, jet fuel is highly toxic and will likely impact species in the water ranging from tiny plankton at the base of the food chain, up to the predatory birds, seals, porpoise and dolphins at its top.

Animals at the surface and those which regularly break through it to feed or breathe will be especially affected by direct contact with the surface slick. Though seals breed between late October and December, there are still seals at the nearby breeding sites, potentially including young seals.

Even if we do not see high levels of mortality, the incident could not have come at a much worse time for birds as they prepare for breeding season. Adults birds challenged by toxic fuel over the short term may suffer reduced reproductive fitness, although it’s difficult to say for sure at the moment.

It will be some time before we really get the full picture. We still don’t know how much fuel was spilled, its chemical composition and toxicity, how it behaved once it hit the sea, where it will end up and how long it will last. All these factors will be important if we are to understand how this incident will affect the environment.

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Krysia Mazik, Senior Lecturer, Marine Biology, University of Hull; Magnus Johnson, Senior Lecturer Environmental Marine Science, University of Hull; Rodney Forster, Professor and Lead, Hull Marine Laboratory, University of Hull, and Sue Hull, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology and Ecology, University of Hull

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A “calling” in the context of work might be characterised by a strong sense of purpose and a motivation beyond just being paid at the end of the month. It’s mostly associated with occupations like healthcare workers, teachers or nonprofit staff, for example. We might not immediately think of sustainability managers – employed by companies to reduce their environmental impact – as following a calling in the same sense.

As researchers, however, we have found that sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) managers are also drawn to their work by a calling to serve as agents for social change – even though their roles are corporate ones.

The social aspirations of sustainability managers are key to the success of corporations’ CSR and sustainability work. However, these aspirations often clash with the corporate reality within the organisation.

Our research is based on 57 sustainability managers in international companies in Sweden across various industries and career levels. We found that sustainability managers chose their careers in order to live out their strong socio-environmental ambitions.

Yet keeping that motivation is far from easy. According to sustainability managers themselves, their employers fail to live up to their social aspirations. They are pushed to prioritise corporate goals over social good, and their visions are reduced to compliance only. Their innovative ideas can fade in the struggle to be heard and gain support within the organisation.

We found that as sustainability managers gain more seniority within the corporation, they lose their socio-environmental purpose and instead start to focus on the bottom-line results of sustainability initiatives. This means they become less ambitious with regard to sustainability initiatives – and more concerned with the profit-driven benefits of sustainability.

For example, a senior sustainability manager among our cohort who was employed at a company facing accusations of human rights violations focused more on improving the sustainability report and how she could communicate the idea that “CSR makes sense for business”.

Though sustainability managers in the early stages of their careers are committed to radical change, their voices are seldom heard by the management or their colleagues. They struggle with feelings of social exclusion and meaninglessness, as their aspirations crumble.

This can be emotionally draining and challenging to their identity, ultimately leading them to adopt more commercial aspirations instead. The sustainability managers find they can do little to mobilise the organisation to support their case for doing good.

Shifting to the corporate mindset

During their mid-careers, sustainability managers seemed more able to sell their social aspirations within the corporation. But their calling for social and environmental change becomes “corporatised” and a scaled-back version of their original vision. The shift to a business mindset seems important to get others in the organisation to take them seriously. It’s also important for the sustainability managers themselves, as it increases their sense of belonging within the organisation.

But the initial drive towards societal change begins to dissipate. One sustainability manager explained that they had been “moulded” to think with more of a business mindset. “The first thing is that everything has to have business value,” they said.

As sustainability managers in the later stages of their careers gain more power within their organisation, they also express more pride when they talk about their achievements. These are often linked to increased ranking or branding value – for example featuring on sustainability indices or securing media coverage of the company’s sustainability credentials.

The social motivation for sustainability work, however, is sidelined. Sustainability managers say their work is meaningful and in line with their purpose. But the purpose is now almost exclusively driven more by corporate benefits.

Are sustainability managers useless, then? Far from it. But our research shows how the very system that hires them to drive change often stifles their social and environmental aspirations.

As such, companies should value and respond to sustainability managers’ social aspirations to ensure that they maintain the spirit, motivation, and passion for change. This, after all, is what lies at the heart of sustainability and CSR work.

Our research underscores a critical point. If corporations want sustainability managers to drive meaningful and lasting change, they must support their calling for social impact. This includes giving them a voice and authority, for example, by including them in the executive team.

Sustainability managers should not be relegated to work only on compliance tasks, but actively encouraged to contribute to the corporate strategy. A culture of openness that welcomes critical perspectives should embrace sustainability managers challenging the status quo. Without this, the drive for greener and more equitable corporate practices risks fading away.

Sanne Frandsen, Associate Professor in Organization, Lund University; Enrico Fontana, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Business, Cranfield University, and Mette Morsing, Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Beware of hyperbolic headlines. But in this case, I’m afraid, as Ulrike Herrmann’s very readable book The End of Capitalism makes clear, the choice between capitalism and civilisation really does seem to be either/or – and the end will probably come a lot sooner that we thought.

Review: The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection are Incompatible – Ulrike Herrmann, translated by David Shaw (Scribe)

Anyone who isn’t alarmed about the rapid and well-documented decline in the global environment, upon which we and our atypically comfortable lifestyles depend, really hasn’t been paying attention. You may not enjoy reading a book like this, but you really should read it – if only for your children’s sake.

The End of Capitalism appeared in Germany a couple of years ago, but it has lost none of its relevance or urgency. On the contrary, with Donald Trump in the White House promising to “drill, baby drill”, it could hardly be more timely.

Could capitalism end?

The majority of potential readers are likely to disagree with Herrmann’s central claim that “climate protection will only be possible if we abolish capitalism”.

This is unsurprising. We have known nothing other than capitalism in the West for several hundred years. Attempts to do things differently in other parts of the world, such as the Soviet Union, generally did not go well socially or, more importantly, environmentally.

One of the reasons it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as philosopher Fredric Jameson famously claimed, is that people everywhere like the abundance of stuff that capitalism has been instrumental in producing. Living standards, especially in the West, but also in China, India and elsewhere, have risen unimaginably in a remarkably short space of time. It is not surprising that the beneficiaries have generally been pleased about this unprecedented change in their material circumstances.

True, contemporary capitalism is characterised by a growing gulf between the richest and the poorest, both within and between countries. This is an awkward problem for “communist” China, but one that Australians and especially Americans seem relatively unconcerned about. Herrmann, too, is surprisingly relaxed about it. She argues that “capitalism made democracy possible – and it can be democratically controlled”.

This idea is currently being subjected to a searching real-time examination, as the Trump administration systematically eviscerates and transforms America’s system of governance to a point where sober and serious analysts consider it to be headed toward authoritarianism. Herrmann does not consider such a possibility, but she does provide a clear explanation of the rise of capitalism and the social and technological forces that have made it the most transformative force in human history.

More hyperbole? Lots of people have given up on organised religion, but not many have renounced consumerism. Unlikely as such a renunciation might seem, Herrmann argues that endless consumption is something we will have to give up if the environment is to remain habitable. The argument is simple and has been around since the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, half a century ago: a system that is predicated on ever expanding growth is incompatible with a world of finite resources, especially if one of those resources is a functioning natural environment.

Lots of people have spent the intervening 50 years pointing out why the authors of that book were wrong. It is likely they will be queuing up to tell Herrmann she is wrong, too – especially when she argues that “‘green growth’ does not exist”.

The unpalatable options

We have been repeatedly assured that technology will come to the rescue. But Herrmann contends that “we no longer have the time to wait for possible technological breakthroughs. We must act immediately if we are to avert climate collapse.”

The seemingly irreconcilable problems, she argues, are highlighted in the cost of removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it somewhere. Despite all the hype, such technology has yet to be viably demonstrated at scale. This means “humanity will be forced to move away from fossil fuels and towards green energy”.

Unfortunately for the likes of Peter Dutton, Herrmann is scathing about the prospects for nuclear power. There is some debate about precise figures, but the German experience, which is central to the book’s main arguments, suggests that even when Germany had 19 commercially run reactors, they could only provide around 13% of total energy consumed. Herrmann points out that “the nuclear energy sector is the only branch of industry in which costs consistently rise”. Reactors are, consequently, not viable without government subsidies.

Before admirers of green energy and especially “green growth” start feeling smug, it is important to note that Herrmann is equally sceptical about wind and solar. She claims that, between them, they provide less than 10% of Germany’s energy needs and won’t be of much use in periods of dunkelflaute: the “dark doldrums” when the sun doesn’t shine (much) and the wind doesn’t blow.

In 2024, however, after the publication of the German edition of Herrmann’s book, Germany generated 59% of its electricity from renewables, including 31.9% from wind and 14.7% from solar.

Nevertheless, energy storage is expensive and difficult, and the transition to green solutions is fraught. One example: it takes 35 kilograms of scarce minerals to make a traditional petrol driven car and 210 kilograms to make an electric one. Manufacturing the batteries for them generates a further 15–20 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

As a result, “our planet is being ransacked […] Around one-third of all raw material consumption since 1900 took place in the short time between 2002 and 2015.”

This is why Herrmann argues that simply moving to green energy sources will not be sufficient, either to guarantee current needs or to adequately reduce our collective impact on the environment.

It is not only the automotive sector that will have to shrink. One of the industries that will be difficult to reform, much less shrink, is aviation. Over a single year, 90% of the world’s population will not fly at all and 1% will account for half of the global aviation emissions. This mirrors the grotesque levels of inequality in global wealth distribution. It means the rich will have to join the poor in “saying goodbye to flying”.

Other examples of politically unpalatable sacrifices are given throughout the book. And the message is clear:

The challenges will grow, and the funds [to address them] will shrink. Consumption must fall, which immediately begs the question of who should cut back and by how much. Distribution conflicts will be inevitable.

Given that “technology will not enable us to produce enough green energy sufficiently cheaply to fuel ‘green growth’ […] the only remaining option is green shrinkage: fewer new buildings, fewer cars, fewer chemical products”.

This is a message that no policymaker anywhere in the world, democrat or autocrat, will want to hear. It is not just the rich industrialised countries that are wedded to the idea of economic expansion. Many developing countries would like nothing better than to join their wealthy counterparts. So would the people of the global south, which is why so many of them risk their lives to flee hopeless poverty.

Improbable precedents

Unlikely as the necessary reforms are to be realised, Herrmann suggests that wartime Britain offers a model of what can be achieved if the dangers are sufficiently immediate and existential. She points out that “rationing was so popular in Britain because everyone had exactly the same entitlement” – though no doubt the legendary “spirit of the Blitz” also had something to do with spending nights cowering in underground stations with hundreds of strangers while people dropped bombs on you.

This is not a flippant point. Without a dramatic change of consciousness on the part of “ordinary” people generally, and policymakers in particular, it is impossible to imagine the sorts of sacrifices that seem necessary to achieve the “shrinkage” being considered, much less enacted as “necessary prohibitions”.

Given that any actions would also need to have a global, rather than just a national rationale, a radical change of collective direction also seems improbable, to put it delicately, especially if it involves something resembling central planning.

And yet Herrmann argues that there is no choice other than radical and seemingly unimaginable change if we are to survive in anything like a civilised condition:

There is no alternative for the industrialised countries. Either they end growth voluntarily, or the era of growth will end violently, when everything that forms the basis of our way of life has been destroyed.

For what it’s worth, I agree. I am not a climate scientist, but I recognise that there is an intellectual division of labour that is a central component of modernity. None of us is capable of knowing everything about the increasingly complex world in which we live. But if something like 99% of climate scientists agree on the causes and likely consequences of climate change, I am happy to take their word for it. What possible basis could I have to disagree?

Herrmann may not be right about everything, but she is right about enough to cause any open-minded reader to think seriously about what the future looks like, especially for younger generations who will have to deal with the decisions we make – or don’t make – today.

This is hardly a novel insight. But it is striking that, for all our real understanding about the nature of the unprecedented challenge we collectively face, there is still an equally remarkable unwillingness or inability to act.

Like many before her, Herrmann thinks that salvation could come from “below”, because “parties do not lead their voters, they follow them”. But given what is currently happening in the United States and elsewhere, the durability of democracy itself is uncertain. In a world where democracy is already in retreat, the environmental emergencies that will inevitably increase without meaningful action could make authoritarian responses even more likely.

Still, what do I care? I’m a baby boomer with no kids. I live in one of the wealthiest, safest places on Earth. In Western Australia, we don’t even care about the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world. Local politicians are planning to make an even bigger contribution to destroying the planet than we already do, because Woodside Energy wants to speed up the approval process for the controversial North West Shelf project. Good to know who’s running the state, at least.

It might have been useful if Herrmann had given a bit more attention to the politics of self-absorption or the slightly optimism-inducing literature on “degrowth”.

These are minor criticisms of what is a significant contribution to the literature on the climate crisis, though I fear The End of Capitalism may only be read by an already sympathetic audience. This remains a seemingly insurmountable obstacle faced by would-be reformers. I know it is considered de rigueur to strike an optimistic note when concluding discussions of this sort, but it is not easy, and may be dishonest.

There is no doubt that unmitigated climate change and environmental degradation will transform our lives and the political systems that circumscribe them. By the time they do, it may be too late to do anything useful, other than keep a lid on social breakdown. It won’t necessarily be the end of the world, but it may be the end of any human civilisation worthy of the name.

Mark Beeson, Adjunct professor, Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cod sold in some European supermarkets is being mislabelled and is actually fished far from its claimed origin, according to our new study. We sampled cod sold in Germany, Spain, France and the UK and found that about 30% of it originated in a different location.

Seafood mislabelling, in which one species is sold as another, is a common problem. It may happen by mistake or by deliberate fraud, in which case, there is at least hope for improvement, as various DNA methods are now available for testing species.

But our new research highlights another problem: the mislabelling of geographical origin. As with species mislabelling, this issue can affect the sustainable management of fisheries, the conservation of fish in the wild and consumer trust.

Within a single species, some fish stocks can be severely depleted while others are sustainably harvested. Our findings suggest that mislabelling of geographical origin is commonplace. This means consumers could be unknowingly buying seafood from overfished stocks, or from regions where illegal, unreported or unregulated fishing is common, along with human rights abuses.

Atlantic cod is a useful subject for an investigation into the origins of fish people buy. This species is widely distributed and organised into several regional populations across the north Atlantic that all vary in their conservation status.

The north-east Arctic cod stock is large, relatively stable and well managed. The North Sea cod stock, meanwhile, is depleted and overfished. This discrepancy between two commercially important fish stocks in Europe highlights the importance of accurate labelling. Yet, until now, there had been no investigation into the extent of geographical mislabelling among European retailers.

We sampled 108 Atlantic cod products and compared the reported catch location for 31 of them with their geographical origin, which we determined using DNA analysis.

Less than 2% of our samples belonged to haddock instead of cod, which suggests species mislabelling is on a downward trend in Europe thanks to robust traceability and labelling regulations.

But the geographic origins of nearly a third of the samples was incorrectly reported in written or verbal communication. We might have expected fish from the over exploited North Sea stock to have been passed off as fish from the remote and less heavily fished northeast Arctic, but the opposite was observed. Somewhat surprisingly, errors were more prevalent among samples that were labelled as originating in the overexploited North Sea stock.

Why misreport fishing locations?

Whether deliberate or not, the reasons behind the mislabelling of any seafood product are not straightforward, but range from economic incentives to supply chain complications.

Mislabelling a product’s fishing location can hide serious infringements – by passing off fish from a depleted stock as sustainably caught, for example. It can also be motivated by consumer preferences. People tend to prefer local products, and in the case of cod, may prefer fish from regional waters, especially if they are unaware that it is a depleted stock.

Despite a relatively strong framework for tracing and labelling seafood in the EU and in the UK, enforcement is inconsistent. Issues persist with paper-based methods for tracing fish origins, though a fully digital system could replace this in the EU in the near future.

Atlantic cod is a staple fish and one of the most comprehensively studied. The prevalence of mislabelled origins for this species – and in a market with relatively stringent regulation – should raise concerns about the misrepresentation of other species elsewhere.

Methods for investigating species mislabelling have been refined, while those designed to evaluate the fishing location of marketed seafood are underused. This must change. The routine application of DNA testing could aid the monitoring of wild fish and the sustainable consumption of seafood.

When buying fish from a fishmonger, ask where it was caught, instead of asking if it is local. This can help you select fish that was caught in the region rather than fish caught by local fishers in a distant sea. When buying from a supermarket, check that the fishing location is indicated on the label. Some regions are associated with higher risks of human rights abuse or illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Inform yourself on which regions are affected by these problems, and if possible, try and avoid seafood from there.

Staying informed can help you avoid falling hook, line and sinker for mislabelled fish next time you shop.

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Marine Cusa, Pew Marine Fellow; Marine Policy Advisor, Oceana Europe & Research Scientist, Technical University of Denmark and Stefano Mariani, Professor of Marine Biodiversity, Liverpool John Moores University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Microplastics – the tiny particles of plastic shed when litter breaks down – are everywhere, from the deep sea to Mount Everest, and many researchers worry that they could harm human health.

I am a machine learning researcher. With a team of scientists, I have developed a tool to make identification of microplastics using their unique chemical fingerprint more reliable. We hope that this work will help us learn about the types of microplastics floating through the air in our study area, Michigan.

Microplastics – a global problem

The term plastic refers to a wide variety of artificially created polymers. Polyethylene, or PET, is used for making bottles; polypropylene, or PP, is used in food containers; and polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, is used in pipes and tubes.

Microplastics are small plastic particles that range in size from 1 micrometer to 5 millimeters. The width of a human hair, for comparison, ranges from 20 to 200 micrometers.

Most scientific studies focus on microplastics in water. However, microplastics are also found in the air. Scientists know much less about microplastics in the atmosphere.

When scientists collect samples from the environment to study microplastics, they usually want to know more about the chemical identities of the microplastic particles found in the samples.

Fingerprinting microplastics

Just as fingerprinting uniquely identifies a person, scientists use spectroscopy to determine the chemical identity of microplastics. In spectroscopy, a substance either absorbs or scatters light, depending on how its molecules vibrate. The absorbed or scattered light creates a unique pattern called the spectrum, which is effectively the substance’s fingerprint.

Just like a forensic analyst can match an unknown fingerprint against a fingerprint database to identify the person, researchers can match the spectrum of an unknown microplastic particle against a database of known spectra.

However, forensic analysts can get false matches in fingerprint matching. Similarly, spectral matching against a database isn’t foolproof. Many plastic polymers have similar structures, so two different polymers can have similar spectra. This overlap can lead to ambiguity in the identification process.

So, an identification method for polymers should provide a measure of uncertainty in its output. That way, the user can know how much to trust the polymer fingerprint match. Unfortunately, current methods don’t usually provide an uncertainty measure.

Data from microplastic analyses can inform health recommendations and policy decisions, so it’s important for the people making those calls to know how reliable the analysis is.

Conformal prediction

Machine learning is one tool researchers have started using for microplastic identification.

First, researchers collect a large dataset of spectra whose identities are known. Then, they use this dataset to train a machine learning algorithm that learns to predict a substance’s chemical identity from its spectrum.

Sophisticated algorithms whose inner workings can be opaque make these predictions, so the lack of an uncertainty measure becomes an even greater problem when machine learning is involved.

Our recent work addresses this issue by creating a tool with an uncertainty quantification for microplastic identification. We use a machine learning technique called conformal prediction.

Conformal prediction is like a wrapper around an existing, already trained machine learning algorithm that adds an uncertainty quantification. It does not require the user of the machine learning algorithm to have any detailed knowledge of the algorithm or its training data. The user just needs to be able to run the prediction algorithm on a new set of spectra.

To set up conformal prediction, researchers collect a calibration set containing spectra and their true identities. The calibration set is often much smaller than the training data required for training machine learning algorithms. Usually just a few hundred spectra are enough for calibration.

Then, conformal prediction analyzes the discrepancies between the predictions and correct answers in the calibration set. Using this analysis, it adds other plausible identities to the algorithm’s single output on a particular particle’s spectrum. Instead of outputting one, possibly incorrect, prediction like “this particle is polyethylene,” it now outputs a set of predictions – for example, “this particle could be polyethylene or polypropylene.”

The prediction sets contain the true identity with a level of confidence that users can set themselves – say, 90%. Users can then rerun the conformal prediction with a higher confidence – say, 95%. But the higher the confidence level, the more polymer predictions given by the model in the output.

It might seem that a method that outputs a set rather than a single identity isn’t as useful. But the size of the set serves as a way to assess uncertainty – a small set indicates less uncertainty.

On the other hand, if the algorithm predicts that the sample could be many different polymers, there’s substantial uncertainty. In this case, you could bring in a human expert to examine the polymer closely.

Testing the tool

To run our conformal prediction, my team used libraries of microplastic spectra from the Rochman Lab at the University of Toronto as the calibration set.

Once calibrated, we collected samples from a parking lot in Brighton, Michigan, obtained their spectra, and ran them through the algorithm. We also asked an expert to manually label the spectra with the correct polymer identities. We found that conformal prediction did produce sets that included the label the human expert gave it.

Microplastics are an emerging concern worldwide. Some places such as California have begun to gather evidence for future legislation to help curb microplastic pollution.

Evidence-based science can help researchers and policymakers fully understand the extent of microplastic pollution and the threats it poses to human welfare. Building and openly sharing machine learning-based tools is one way to help make that happen.

Ambuj Tewari, Professor of Statistics, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For many people, the most visible impact of Cyclone Alfred was the damage big waves and storm surge did to their local beaches.

Beaches in southeast Queensland and northeast New South Wales are now scarred by dramatic sand cliffs, including the tourist drawcard of Surfers Paradise.

Sand islands off Brisbane – Bribie, Moreton and North Stradbroke – protected the city from the worst of the storm surge. But they took a hammering doing so, reducing their ability to protect the coastline.

The good news is, the sand isn’t gone forever. Most of it is now sitting on sandbars offshore. Over time, many beaches will naturally replenish. But sand dunes will take longer. And there are areas where the damage will linger.

Why did it do so much damage?

Cyclone Alfred travelled up and down the coast for a fortnight before crossing the mainland as a tropical low. On February 27, it reached Category 4 offshore from Mackay. From here on, the cyclone’s intense winds whipped up very large swells.

By the time the cyclone started heading towards the coast, many beaches had already been hit by erosion-causing waves. This meant they were more vulnerable to storm surge and further erosion.

As Alfred moved west to make landfall, it coincided with one of the the year’s highest tides. As a result, many beaches have been denuded of sand and coastal infrastructure weakened in some places.

Which beaches were hit hardest?

Areas south of the cyclone’s track have been hit hardest, from the Gold Coast to the Northern Rivers.

Some beaches and dunes have significantly eroded. Peregian Beach south of Noosa has lost up to 30 metres of width.

Erosion cliffs, or “scarps”, up to 3 metres high have appeared on the Gold Coast. It exposed sections of the last line of coastal defence – a buried seawall known as the A-line, constructed following large storms in the 1970s.

Up and down the Gold Coast, most dunes directly behind beaches (foredunes) have been affected by storm surge of up to 0.5 metres above the high tide mark and eroded. Even established dunes further inland have been eroded.

Where did the sand go?

In just a week, millions of tonnes of sand on our beaches seemingly disappeared. Where did it go?

Beaches change constantly and are very resilient. As these landforms constantly interact with waves and currents, they adapt by changing their shape.

When there’s a lot of energy in waves and currents, beaches become flatter and narrower. Sand is pulled off the beaches and dunes and washed off offshore, where it forms sandbars. These sandbars actually protect the remaining beach, as they make waves break further offshore.

Dunes form when sand is blown off the beach on very windy days and lands further inland. Over time, plants settle the dune. Their roots act to stabilise the sand.

Healthy dunes covered in vegetation are normally harder to erode. But as beaches are washed away during large storms and the water level rises, larger waves can directly attack dunes.

The tall erosion scarps have formed because dunes have been eaten away. In some areas, seawater has flooded inland, which may damage dune plants.

Most sand will return

As coastal conditions return to normal, much of this sand will naturally be transported back ashore. Our beaches will become steeper and wider again.

It won’t be immediate. It can take months for this to occur, and it’s not guaranteed – it depends on what wave conditions are like.

Some sand will have been washed into very deep water, or swept by currents away from the beaches. In these cases, sand will take longer to return or won’t return at all. Dunes recover more slowly than beaches. It may take years for them to recover.

Australia’s east coast has one of the longest longshore drift systems in the world, where sand is carried northward by currents to eventually join K'Gari/Fraser Island.

Can humans help?

Sand will naturally come back to most beaches. It’s usually best to let this natural process take place.

But if extreme erosion is threatening buildings or roads, beach nourishment might be necessary. Here, sand is added to eroded beaches to speed up the replenishment process.

Other options include building vertical seawalls or sloping revetment walls. These expensive methods of protection work very well to protect roads or buildings behind them. But these engineered structures often accelerate erosion of beaches and dunes.

We can help dunes by staying off them as much as possible. Plants colonising early dunes are very fragile and can be easily damaged. Temporary fencing can be used cheaply to trap sand and help dunes recover. Re-vegetating dunes is an efficient way of reducing future erosion.

How can we prepare for next time?

The uncertainty on Cyclone Alfred’s track, intensity and landfall location kept many people on edge, including at-risk communities and disaster responders. This uncertainty puts many scientists under enormous pressure. Decision-makers want fast and clear information, but it’s simply not possible.

In Australia, almost 90% of people live within 50km of the coast. In coming decades, the global coastal population will grow rapidly – even as sea level rise and more intense natural disasters put more people at risk.

As the climate crisis deepens, rebuilding in high-risk areas can create worse, more expensive problems.

Communities must begin talking seriously about managed retreat from some areas of the coast. This means not building on erosion-prone areas, choosing not to defend against sea incursion in some places and beginning to relocate houses and infrastructure to safer heights inland.

Decision-makers should also consider deploying nature-based solutions such as dunes, mangroves and oyster reefs to reduce the threat from the seas.

Technology has advanced rapidly since Cyclone Zoe made landfall in this region in 1974. We can track weather systems from satellites, get up-to-date weather and wave forecasts on our phones and use drones to see change on beaches and dunes.

But these technologies only work if we use them. The Gold Coast has the world’s largest coastal imaging program. But most other coastal regions don’t conduct long-term monitoring of dunes and beaches. Without it, we don’t have access to data vital to protecting our beaches and communities.

Javier Leon, Associate Professor in Physical Geography, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In wet forests of southeastern Australia, superb lyrebirds engage in extraordinary behaviour – tilling the soil to create habitats for their prey to flourish.

The superb lyreird scratches through the leaf litter and topsoil while foraging, using its powerful claws to search for invertebrates such as worms, centipedes, spiders, crustaceans and insects.

This loosens the soil, allowing more air and water to infiltrate, and speeding up the decomposition of organic material. Our new study shows this creates an ideal habitat for the invertebrates on which it feeds – ensuring they grow large and ensuring the lyrebirds’ future buffet.

So, lyrebirds essentially “farm” their food resource by cultivating the forest floor. This behaviour is rarely seen in the non-human world. It extends across millions of hectares, potentially delivering far-reaching benefits to forest ecosystems.

A remarkable species

The superb lyrebird is mainly found in moist eucalypt forests in southeastern Australia. It is known for its mimicking song and, in the case of the males, ornate, lyre-shaped tail feathers.

Lyrebirds are considered “ecosystem engineers”. This means their foraging changes the environment in ways that affect other species.

Our previous research has shown superb lyrebirds can move an astounding 155 tonnes of litter and soil per hectare of forest floor each year.

The scale of this disturbance suggests it must affect the invertebrates that live in the soil, including those on which lyrebirds rely for their food. Did this in turn benefit the lyrebirds themselves? Our research set out to test this.

What our research involved

Our two-year project involved three sites in the tall forests of Victoria’s Central Highlands.

At each site, we established three experimental plots (3m × 3m), each involving a different “treatment”.

The first treatment involved fencing off the plot to create a lyrebird-free environment. We left these areas alone for two years.

The second treatment also fenced out lyrebirds. But at these, we visited monthly to rake the litter and soil, mimicking lyrebird foraging and scratching. We used a three-pronged, claw-like rake the same width as a lyrebird’s foot. But unlike the lyrebird, we didn’t eat the bugs we encountered!

In the third treatment, we marked the plots with metal stakes, but no fence. This allowed lyrebirds to forage as they pleased.

We collected a sample of soil and leaf litter from each plot at the start of the study, and then again in each spring season.

Then, with help from a specialist insect scientist, known as an entomologist, we counted and classified the invertebrates in the samples – a whopping 197,880 creatures in all.

What we found

We compared samples from the fenced plots – both those that excluded lyrebirds and prevented them feeding, and those where we raked to mimic lyrebird foraging.

We found the raked plots had more types and a larger amount of invertebrates than the undisturbed plots. This suggests turning over the litter and soil creates conditions for invertebrates to thrive and grow bigger.

Then we compared samples from the raked plots and plots where lyrebirds had been free to forage. Again, invertebrates in the raked areas were bigger and more diverse. This was because in both treatments invertebrates had increased, but some had been eaten by lyrebirds in the unfenced plots.

These results provide evidence – albeit unsurprising – that lyrebird feeding affects the invertebrate community on the forest floor. But it also shows that lyrebird cultivation of the litter and soil allow invertebrates to rapidly increase in number and type, replacing what lyrebirds harvest.

Big benefits for forests

Our research shows lyrebirds scratch and modify the forest floor in ways that promote bigger and more diverse food sources. This makes it one of only a few non-human animals known to farm their prey.

Other well-known examples include leaf cutter ants in South America, which grow elaborate fungus “farms” in their nest chambers. The ants weed out unpalatable fungi and select premium leaf matter to feed their crop.

And in West Africa, foraging by both the greater flamingo and the fiddler crab changes mudflats in ways that increase algal biofilms, their shared food resource.

The interaction between lyrebirds and invertebrates has wide benefits for forests. Invertebrates help cycle nutrients and disperse seeds. They also provide food for many birds, small mammals and reptiles.

In this way, the superb lyrebirds’ farming-type behaviour plays an important role in maintaining forest biodiversity. This fascinating behaviour also provides yet another reason to celebrate the complexity of nature.

Alex Maisey, Postdoctoral research fellow, Research Centre for Future Landscapes, La Trobe University; Andrew Bennett, Emeritus Professor in Ecology, La Trobe University, and Angie Haslem, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, landscape and fire ecology, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Trump administration announced on March 12, 2025, that it is “reconsidering” more than 30 air pollution regulations in a series of moves that could impact air quality across the United States.

“Reconsideration” is a term used to review or modify a government regulation. While Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin provided few details, the breadth of the regulations being reconsidered affects all Americans. They include rules that set limits for pollutants that can harm human health, such as ozone, particulate matter and volatile organic carbon.

Zeldin wrote that his deregulation moves would “roll back trillions in regulatory costs and hidden ‘taxes’ on U.S. families.” But that’s only part of the story.

What Zeldin didn’t say is that the economic and health benefits from decades of federal clean air regulations have far outweighed their costs. Some estimates suggest every $1 spent meeting clean air rules has returned $10 in health and economic benefits.

How far America has come, because of regulations

In the early 1970s, thick smog blanketed American cities and acid rain stripped forests bare from the Northeast to the Midwest.

Air pollution wasn’t just a nuisance – it was a public health emergency. But in the decades since, the United States has engineered one of the most successful environmental turnarounds in history.

Thanks to stronger air quality regulations, pollution levels have plummeted, preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths annually. And despite early predictions that these regulations would cripple the economy, the opposite has proven true: The U.S. economy more than doubled in size while pollution fell, showing that clean air and economic growth can – and do – go hand in hand.

The numbers are eye-popping.

An Environmental Protection Agency analysis of the first 20 years of the Clean Air Act, from 1970 to 1990, found the economic benefits of the regulations were about 42 times greater than the costs.

The EPA later estimated that the cost of air quality regulations in the U.S. would be about US$65 billion in 2020, and the benefits, primarily in improved health and increased worker productivity, would be around $2 trillion. Other studies have found similar benefits.

That’s a return of more than 30 to 1, making clean air one of the best investments the country has ever made.

Science-based regulations even the playing field

The turning point came with the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which put in place strict rules on pollutants from industry, vehicles and power plants.

These rules targeted key culprits: lead, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter – substances that contribute to asthma, heart disease and premature deaths. An example was the removal of lead, which can harm the brain and other organs, from gasoline. That single change resulted in far lower levels of lead in people’s blood, including a 70% drop in U.S. children’s blood-lead levels.

The results have been extraordinary. Since 1980, emissions of six major air pollutants have dropped by 78%, even as the U.S. economy has more than doubled in size. Cities that were once notorious for their thick, choking smog – such as Los Angeles, Houston and Pittsburgh – now see far cleaner air, while lakes and forests devastated by acid rain in the Northeast have rebounded.

And most importantly, lives have been saved. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to periodically estimate the costs and benefits of air quality regulations. In the most recent estimate, released in 2011, the EPA projected that air quality improvements would prevent over 230,000 premature deaths in 2020. That means fewer heart attacks, fewer emergency room visits for asthma, and more years of healthy life for millions of Americans.

The economic payoff

Critics of air quality regulations have long argued that the regulations are too expensive for businesses and consumers. But the data tells a very different story.

EPA studies have confirmed that clean air regulations improve air quality over time. Other studies have shown that the health benefits greatly outweigh the costs. That pays off for the economy. Fewer illnesses mean lower health care costs, and healthier workers mean higher productivity and fewer missed workdays.

The EPA estimated that for every $1 spent on meeting air quality regulations, the United States received $9 in benefits. A separate study by the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research in 2024 estimated that each $1 spent on air pollution regulation brought the U.S. economy at least $10 in benefits. And when considering the long-term impact on human health and climate stability, the return is even greater.

The next chapter in clean air

The air Americans breathe today is cleaner, much healthier and safer than it was just a few decades ago.

Yet, despite this remarkable progress, air pollution remains a challenge in some parts of the country. Some urban neighborhoods remain stubbornly polluted because of vehicle emissions and industrial pollution. While urban pollution has declined, wildfire smoke has become a larger influence on poor air quality across the nation.

That means the EPA still has work to do.

If the agency works with environmental scientists, public health experts and industry, and fosters honest scientific consensus, it can continue to protect public health while supporting economic growth. At the same time, it can ensure that future generations enjoy the same clean air and prosperity that regulations have made possible.

By instead considering retracting clean air rules, the EPA is calling into question the expertise of countless scientists who have provided their objective advice over decades to set standards designed to protect human lives. In many cases, industries won’t want to go back to past polluting ways, but lifting clean air rules means future investment might not be as protective. And it increases future regulatory uncertainty for industries.

The past offers a clear lesson: Investing in clean air is not just good for public health – it’s good for the economy. With a track record of saving lives and delivering trillion-dollar benefits, air quality regulations remain one of the greatest policy success stories in American history.

Richard E. Peltier, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If the joy of seeing butterflies seems increasingly rare these days, it isn’t your imagination.

From 2000 to 2020, the number of butterflies fell by 22% across the continental United States. That’s 1 in 5 butterflies lost. The findings are from an analysis just published in the journal Science by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Powell Center Status of Butterflies of the United States Working Group, which I am involved in.

We found declines in just about every region of the continental U.S. and across almost all butterfly species.

Overall, nearly one-third of the 342 butterfly species we were able to study declined by more than half. Twenty-two species fell by more than 90%. Only nine actually increased in numbers.

Some species’ numbers are dropping faster than others. The West Coast lady, a fairly widespread species across the western U.S., dropped by 80% in 20 years. Given everything we know about its biology, it should be doing fine – it has a wide range and feeds on a variety of plants. Yet, its numbers are absolutely tanking across its range.

Why care about butterflies?

Butterflies are beautiful. They inspire people, from art to literature and poetry. They deserve to exist simply for the sake of existing. They are also important for ecosystem function.

Butterflies are pollinators, picking up pollen on their legs and bodies as they feed on nectar from one flower and carrying it to the next. In their caterpillar stage, they also play an important role as herbivores, keeping plant growth in check.

Butterflies can also serve as an indicator species that can warn of threats and trends in other insects. Because humans are fond of butterflies, it’s easy to get volunteers to participate in surveys to count them.

The annual North American Butterfly Association Fourth of July Count is an example and one we used in the analysis. The same kind of nationwide monitoring by amateur naturalists doesn’t exist for less charismatic insects such as walking sticks.

What’s causing butterflies to decline?

Butterfly populations can decline for a number of reasons. Habitat loss, insecticides, rising temperatures and drying landscapes can all harm these fragile insects.

A study published in 2024 found that a change in insecticide use was a major factor in driving butterfly declines in the Midwest over 17 years. The authors, many of whom were also part of the current study, noted that the drop coincided with a shift to using seeds with prophylactic insecticides, rather than only spraying crops after an infestation.

The Southwest saw the greatest drops in butterfly abundance of any region. As that region heats up and dries out, the changing climate may be driving some of the butterfly decline there. Butterflies have a high surface-to-volume ratio – they don’t hold much moisture – so they can easily become desiccated in dry conditions. Drought can also harm the plants that butterflies rely on.

Only the Pacific Northwest didn’t lose butterfly population on average. This trend was largely driven by an irruptive species, meaning one with extremely high abundance in some years – the California tortoiseshell. When this species was excluded from the analyses, trends in the Pacific Northwest were similar to other regions.

When we looked at each species by its historical range, we found something else interesting.

Many species suffered their highest losses at the southern ends of their ranges, while the northern losses generally weren’t as severe. While we could not link drivers to trends directly, the reason for this pattern might involve climate change, or greater exposure to agriculture with insecticides in southern areas, or it may be a combination of many stressors.

There is hope for populations to recover

Some butterfly species can have multiple generations per year, and depending on the environmental conditions, the number of generations can vary between years.

This gives me a bit of hope when it comes to butterfly conservation. Because they have such short generation times, even small conservation steps can make a big difference and we can see populations bounce back.

The Karner blue is an example. It’s a small, endangered butterfly that depends on oak savannas and pine barren ecosystems. These habitats are uncommon and require management, especially prescribed burning, to maintain. With restoration efforts, one Karner blue population in the Albany Pine Bush Preserve in New York rebounded from a few hundred individuals in the early 1990s to thousands of butterflies.

Similar management and restoration efforts could help other rare and declining butterflies to recover.

What you can do to help butterflies recover

The magnitude and rate of biodiversity loss in the world right now can make one feel helpless. But while national and international efforts are needed to address the crisis, you can also take small actions that can have quick benefits, starting in your own backyard.

Butterflies love wildflowers, and planting native wildflowers can benefit many butterfly species. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has guides recommending which native species are best to plant in which parts of the country. Letting grass grow can help, even if it’s just a strip of grass and wildflowers a couple of feet wide at the back of the yard.

Supporting policies that benefit conservation can also help. In some states, insects aren’t considered wildlife, so state wildlife agencies have their hands tied when it comes to working on butterfly conservation. But those laws could be changed.

The federal Endangered Species Act can also help. The law mandates that the government maintain habitat for listed species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in December 2024 recommended listing the monarch butterfly as a threatened species. With the new study, we now have population trends for more than half of all U.S. butterfly species, including many that likely should be considered for listing.

With so many species needing help, it can be difficult to know where to start. But the new data can help concentrate conservation efforts on those species at the highest risk.

I believe this study should be a wake-up call about the need to better protect butterflies and other insects – “the little things that run the world.”

Eliza Grames, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What do the Australian lungfish, ghost bat, sandhill dunnart and southern and central greater gliders have in common? They’re all threatened species that need a formal “recovery plan” – but do not have one.

Today, environmental group the Wilderness Society launched a case in the Federal Court against Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, arguing she and successive environment ministers have failed to meet their legal obligations to create threatened species recovery plans.

Other species forming the basis of the case are Baudin’s cockatoo, the Australian grayling, Carnaby’s black cockatoo, red goshawk, forest red-tailed black cockatoo and the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle.

Many other species and ecological communities also don’t have recovery plans. If successful, the case would set a precedent compelling future environment ministers to meet their legal obligations and improve Australia’s dire conservation record. This is a significant moment for conservation in Australia – testing how accountable environment ministers are in preventing species extinctions.

Why do recovery plans matter?

Threatened species recovery plans lay out very clearly why species or ecological communities are in trouble and the actions necessary to save them. Once a plan is in place, it can directly benefit the species by tackling threats and safeguarding habitat.

Proposals such as a new farm, suburb or mining project can be assessed by the environment minister and rejected if they are inconsistent with recovery plans and place threatened species at increased risk of extinction. Recovery plans have helped dozens of species come back from the brink.

Under Australia’s national environmental laws, the environment minister must decide whether a recovery plan is required for a species or ecological community listed as threatened.

If a plan is ordered, it must typically be created within three years. But a 2022 Auditor-General’s report found just 2% of plans met this timeframe.

Recovery is possible, but plans are vital

Successive governments have failed to keep up with creating and implementing recovery plans in a timely manner. The perennial and chronic lack of funding for conservation means there’s little capacity to do the vital but time-consuming work of planning and recovery.

As a result, the federal government has increasingly shifted to offering conservation advices in place of recovery plans. Conservation advices can be produced and updated faster than recovery plans. This is useful if, say, a new threat emerges and needs a rapid response.

But there’s a key legal difference. When the environment minister is considering a project such as land clearing for new farmland or a mine, they need only consider any conservation advice in place. When a recovery plan is in place, the minister is legally obliged not to approve actions which are contrary to its objectives and would make the plight of a species or ecological community worse.

A conservation advice can be thought of more like a fact sheet without the same legal weight or accountability that recovery plans have.

In March 2022, the Morrison government scrapped recovery plans for 176 threatened species and habitats, despite thousands of submissions arguing against this.

After the Albanese government took power in May 2022, it pledged to end “wilful neglect” of the environment and to introduce stronger environmental laws. Sadly, this commitment has not been honoured.

Why do we need recovery plans?

Australia’s species protection record is unenviable. Since European colonisation, more than 100 species have been driven to extinction and more than 2,000 species and ecological communities are listed at risk of suffering the same fate.

For a species to be considered threatened, its population has to have shrunk or meet other criteria putting it at risk of extinction. The severity of the decline and hence its extinction risk will determine how it’s categorised, from vulnerable through to critically endangered. Recovery plans lay out the research required to actually recover these species, meaning helping their populations to grow out of the danger zone.

A key role for these plans is to coordinate planning and action between relevant interest groups and agencies. This is especially important for species found across state and territory borders, such as the southern greater glider and the migratory swift parrot. The greater glider should have had a recovery plan in place since 2016, but does not.

Are individual plans still worthwhile?

Faced with so many species in need of protection and limited funding, prominent figures including former Environment Minister Peter Garrett have argued we should focus our efforts on protecting ecosystems rather than single species to make the best use of scarce funds.

But there is a deeper issue. Australia is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. It has the capacity to greatly increase conservation spending without impoverishing humans, and should do so for the benefit of the economy, culture and our health and wellbeing.

That’s not to say ecosystem protection isn’t worthwhile. After all, ecosystems are made up of species and their interactions with each other and their environment. You cannot have healthy species without healthy ecosystems and vice versa.

But if we focus only on protecting large expanses of wetland, forest and grasslands, we risk overlooking a key issue. Two species in the same ecosystem can be very differently affected by a specific threat (predation by foxes, for instance). Some species can even have conflicting management needs. For some species, invasive species are the biggest threat, while climate change and intensified fire regimes threaten others the most.

Extinction is a choice

As Australia’s natural world continues to deteriorate, climate change deepens and worsening wildlife woes abound, these issues will no doubt be front of mind for many in the upcoming federal election.

It can be easy to see these trends as inevitable. But they are not – the collapse of nature is a choice. We have what we need for success, including traditional, ecological and conservation knowledge. What’s sorely needed is political will.

There were once fewer than 50 northern hairy-nosed wombats alive. Today, that number exceeds 400. When supported, conservation can succeed.

Almost all Australians want their government to do more to save our species. Let us hope whoever forms the next government takes up that challenge – even if it takes court cases to prompt action.

Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Frogs and other amphibians rely on the surrounding environment to regulate their body temperature. On hot days they might seek shade, water or cool spaces underground. But what if everywhere is too hot?

There is a limit to how much heat amphibians can tolerate. My colleagues and I wanted to work out how close amphibians are to reaching these limits, globally.

Our new research, published today in Nature, shows 2% of the world’s amphibians are already overheating. Even when they have access to shade and moisture, more than 100 species are struggling to maintain a viable body temperature.

If global temperatures rise by 4°C, nearly 400 species (or 1 in 13 amphibians) could be pushed to their limits. However, this assumes access to shade and water, so it’s probably an underestimate. Habitat loss, drought and disease will likely make even more amphibians vulnerable to heat stress.

Here is why that matters — and what we can do about it.

Finding the missing pieces of the puzzle

The critical thermal maximum is the temperature beyond which an ectothermic (“cold-blooded”) species simply cannot function.

In laboratory experiments, it is defined as the temperature that renders the frog or salamander unable to right themselves when flipped on their back, or when they start having muscular spasms.

At this temperature, they are incapacitated and unable to escape. If amphibians stay under those conditions for extended periods, they will eventually die.

First, we searched the scientific literature for data on heat tolerance in amphibians and compiled a database. This database covers more than 600 species, but that’s only 7.5% of amphibians on Earth. Knowledge of the heat tolerance of amphibians from tropical regions and the Global South is especially sparse.

To build a global picture, we needed to fill those gaps. We used statistical models to predict the heat tolerance of species missing from the database.

Think of it like solving a puzzle: if a piece is missing, we can make an educated guess of what it looks like, based on the pieces around it.

By using what we know about a species’ biology and how its relatives cope with heat, we can predict how much heat it is likely to tolerate. With this approach, we estimated heat tolerance limits for more than 5,000 amphibian species — around 60% of all known species.

We then compared each species’ tolerance limits to temperatures experienced over the past decade, as well as future conditions under different climate scenarios. That allowed us to see which species could be pushed over the edge by extreme heat events.

Intensifying threats

We found 2% of amphibians (about 100 species) are probably already overheating. This is an optimistic scenario, assuming they always have access to shaded and humid conditions. In reality, many amphibians live in disturbed habitats, where shade and water are in short supply.

If global temperatures rise by 4°C, the number of vulnerable species jumps from 2% to about 7.5%. That’s nearly a fourfold increase, meaning almost 400 species — 1 in 13 amphibians — could be pushed to their heat tolerance limits.

We also found some interesting regional patterns. In the southern hemisphere, tropical species are most exposed to overheating. However, in the northern hemisphere, species outside the tropics often face higher risk. This underscores how local temperatures and species-specific tolerance limits matter more than just the distance from the equator, challenging common assumptions about the greater vulnerability of tropical species.

Local extinctions — where a species can no longer survive in a particular area — may occur if extreme heat events become too frequent. Amphibians often cannot just hop to cooler places. Many cannot relocate to different areas because they depend on specific wetlands, steams and ponds to breed and feed. If these habitats disappear or become too hot, some amphibians may have nowhere else to go.

Thermal refuges

Dense vegetation and reliable water sources act like natural air conditioners for amphibians. Our results show that if amphibians can stay hydrated and cool, many can survive heatwaves. Yet climate change is rapidly making these moist refuges more scarce.

With increasing deforestation, habitat disturbance, and droughts, amphibians are losing their ability to cope with the heat. Active efforts to protect, restore, and connect forested areas and wetlands are increasingly needed to boost their chances of survival.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is also crucial. It’s clear every fraction of a degree counts. Keeping climate warming as low as possible will reduce the risk of sudden, widespread overheating events, not only for amphibians but also for countless other species.

Time to act

More than 40% of all amphibians are already threatened with extinction, making them especially vulnerable to climate change.

But if we protect and restore forests, wetlands, ponds, and streams — and reduce carbon emissions — many species may stand a chance.

More research on amphibians is needed. Our statistical models help us predict which species are most at risk, but these predictions cannot replace on-the-ground research.

By studying these species directly, we can better understand the threats they face and optimise conservation efforts. This is particularly needed in the lesser-studied areas of South America, Africa and Asia.

Amphibians have been around for millions of years. They are part of our cultural heritage and play vital roles in balancing ecosystems. Let’s not lose them to a climate crisis we hopefully still have time to fix.

Patrice Pottier, Postdoctoral researcher in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Europe is warmed by heat from ocean currents, which move water from the warm tropics to the colder North Atlantic. Once the warm, salty water from the tropics reach the polar region, they cool enough to sink to the depths and flow back towards the Southern Ocean.

This enormous system of currents is known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Climate scientists are increasingly worried about the AMOC, which appears to be slowing down.

While there’s still debate over whether the AMOC has weakened over the last decades, climate models consistently show the AMOC will significantly weaken over the coming century due to the increase in heat-trapping atmospheric greenhouse gases. As more heat stays in the system, the ocean heats up and ice melts, adding fresh water to polar oceans. The overall effect is to slow these currents. The AMOC could weaken 30% by 2060.

A weaker AMOC would mean big changes in Europe, which benefits directly from the warmer waters it brings. But it would also change the climate in the Southern Hemisphere. Our new research shows a weakening of the AMOC would lead to a large change in rainfall patterns, leading to wetter summers in northern Australia and a drier New Zealand year-round. Indonesia and northern Papua New Guinea would also become drier.

Running AMOC?

In the Earth’s long history, the AMOC has gone through many periods of weakening. These were most common during ice ages, when glaciers expanded, but they also occurred during periods as warm as today.

To reconstruct past climates, researchers use data from ice cores, marine sediment cores and speleothems (mineral deposits in caves such as flowstone and stalagmites), as well as simulations performed with climate models. These data show a weaker AMOC strongly affected the climate in the Northern Hemisphere. When flows of warmer water faltered, sea ice expanded in the North Atlantic, while Europe endured colder, drier conditions and the northern tropics became drier.

If the AMOC weakens significantly, it will mean major change for Northern Hemisphere nations. Average temperatures could actually drop 3°C in Western Europe.

At present, the AMOC’s flows of warmer water give European nations more pleasant climates and keeps ports ice free, while the Canadian side of the North Atlantic has a much more severe climate.

What does it mean for the Southern Hemisphere?

Data from ice cores and marine sediment cores also showed Antarctica and the Southern Ocean became warmer during these past AMOC weakening events. Until now, we haven’t understood what an AMOC weakening would mean for rainfall in the Australasian region.

To find out, we ran climate model simulations with the Australian Earth system model, ACCESS-ESM1.5. Our modelling reveals a complex and regionally varied response, primarily shaped by large-scale atmospheric changes.

As the AMOC weakens, it sets off a chain reaction in the oceans and atmosphere which alter rainfall and temperatures across Australasia.

A weaker AMOC would affect ocean temperatures, cooling surface waters in the northern hemisphere and warming waters in the southern hemisphere. This would push the Intertropical Convergence Zone – a belt of heavy rain near the equator – further south.

This means areas such as northern Papua New Guinea and Indonesia will get less rain, while northern Australia will cop wetter summers.

Next, a warmer south equatorial Atlantic triggers atmospheric waves – large-scale movements of air that travel across the globe. These waves lower air pressure over northern Australia, pulling in more moisture and making summer rainfall even heavier.

At the same time, a weaker AMOC disrupts the usual tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean dynamics, altering wind patterns and pressure systems in the Southern Hemisphere. High pressure systems shift southward, affecting storm tracks. The overall effect is fewer storms reaching southern Australia and New Zealand, leading to drier winters.

Last, as the Atlantic currents peter out, heat builds up in Southern Hemisphere oceans rather than being carried to the poles. This results in hotter summers, particularly in southern Australia and New Zealand.

Deluges and droughts

It’s likely we will see these important currents weaken this century, bringing major change to both hemispheres.

Those in Australia and New Zealand are likely to see a magnification of some existing climate shifts, such as a drier south and wetter north.

Policymakers and resource managers need to prepare for a future where water becomes an increasingly uncertain resource.

In the north, more rain over summer could mean a greater reliance on water storage and flood mitigation. In the south, drier conditions may force increased water use efficiency and drought planning.

In New Zealand, a year-round drying trend could challenge farm productivity and hydropower generation. Long-term water management will be critical.

What happens in the North Atlantic doesn’t stay there. It ripples through the atmosphere and oceans, with far-reaching consequences.

Himadri Saini, Research Associate at Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney and Laurie Menviel, Associate Professor, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Studies of ancient DNA have tended to focus on frozen land in the northern hemisphere, where woolly mammoths and bison roamed. Meanwhile, Antarctica has received relatively little attention. We set out to change that.

The most suitable sediments are exposed near the coast of the icy continent, where penguins like to breed. Their poo is a rich source of DNA, providing information about the health of the population as well as what penguins have been eating.

Our new research opens a window on the past of Adélie penguins in Antarctica, going back 6,000 years. It also offers a surprise glimpse into the shrinking world of southern elephant seals over the past 1,000 years.

Understanding how these species coped with climate change in the past can help us prepare for the future. Wildlife in Antarctica faces multiple emerging threats and will likely need support to cope with the many challenges ahead.

A unique marine ecosystem

Adélie penguins are particularly sensitive to changes in their environment. This makes them what we call a “sentinel species”, providing an early warning of imbalance or dysfunction in the coastal ecosystem. Their poo also provides a record of how they responded to changes in the past.

In our new research, we excavated pits up to 80cm deep at ten Adélie penguin colonies along the 700km Ross Sea coastline. We then collected 156 sediment samples from different depths in each excavation.

Six of these colonies were still active, meaning birds return annually to breed. The other four had been abandoned at various times over the past 6,000 years.

From these sediments we generated 94 billion DNA sequences, which provided us with an unparalleled window into the past lives of Adélie penguins and their ecosystem.

We detected the DNA of several animal species besides Adélie penguins. These animals included two other birds, three seals and two soil invertebrates.

Not all of this DNA came from penguin poo. Our samples also contained DNA from feathers, hairs or skin cells of other species in the environment at the time.

Penguin population size and diet

When we took a closer look at the DNA from penguins of the present day, we found more genetic diversity in samples from larger colonies.

Recognising this relationship between genetic diversity and colony size enabled us to estimate the size of former colonies. We could also reconstruct population trends through time.

For example, in samples from active colonies, we found penguin genetic diversity increased as we sampled closer and closer to the surface. This may reflect population growth over the past century.

The DNA also revealed changes in penguin diets over time. Over the past 4,000 years, the penguins in the southern Ross Sea switched from mainly eating one type of fish – the bald notothen – to another, Antarctic silverfish.

The bald notothen lives beneath the sea ice, so this prey-switching was likely driven by a change in sea ice extent compared with the past.

Surprise! Elephant seals

We made an unexpected discovery at Cape Hallett, in the northern Ross Sea. This is the site of an active penguin colony.

Samples of sediment from close to the surface contained lots of penguin DNA and eggshell. But samples from further down, where penguin DNA and eggshell were scarce, contained DNA from southern elephant seals.

Today, elephant seals are uncommon visitors to the Antarctic continent, and breed on subantarctic islands including Macquarie, Campbell and Antipodes Islands. Yet, bones of elephant seal pups found along the Ross Sea coast indicate the species used to breed in the area.

Carbon dating of these bones indicate elephant seal colonies began disappearing from the southern Ross Sea around 1,000 years ago. Over the following 200 years, colonies in the northern Ross Sea began vanishing too.

As the climate cooled and the extent of sea ice increased, elephant seals could no longer access suitable breeding sites. These sites were then taken over by Adélie penguins who expanded into areas once occupied by seals.

Our DNA evidence suggests Cape Hallett was one of the last strongholds of southern elephant seals on the icy continent. But we may yet again see elephant seals breeding on the Antarctic mainland as the world warms and sea ice melts.

Even more ancient DNA in Antarctica

Our study spans the past 6,000 years, but our research suggests it would be possible to go even further back.

The DNA fragments we found were very well preserved, showing little of the damage expected in warmer climates.

So it should be possible to obtain much older DNA from sediments on land in Antarctica – maybe even 1 million-year-old DNA, as recently reported from Antarctic sediments beneath the ocean floor.

Worthy of lasting protection

In December 2017, 2.09 million square kilometres of the Ross Sea and adjoining Southern Ocean became the world’s largest marine protected area. Establishing the protection was a major achievement, yet it was only afforded for 35 years.

After 2052, continuation of the region’s protected status will require international agreement. Knowledge of the vulnerability of local species and their risk in the face of change will play a key role in informing the decision. Our research provides a case study for how ancient environmental DNA can contribute towards this understanding.

Jamie Wood, Senior Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution, University of Adelaide and Theresa Cole, Postdoctoral technician in environmental DNA, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For centuries, fire was one of the major fears for city-dwellers. Dense cities built largely of wood could – and did – burn. In 1666, a fire in a bakery went on to destroy two-thirds of the city of London, leaving 85% of residents homeless. In 1871, fire burned out huge areas of Chicago. In World War II, bombing raids by Allied forces largely destroyed cities such as Dresden in Germany and Tokyo in Japan.

The threat of large-scale urban fires drove authorities to spend more on urban firefighting and require buildings to use less flammable material. Fire alarms, fire engines and automatic sprinklers have done much to reduce the chance of uncontrolled spread.

But will our sense of safety endure in the age of climate change? In January, we saw swathes of Los Angeles burn – even in the northern winter. Driven by low humidity and high winds, numerous large fires encroached on the city, destroying outlying suburbs. Climate change made the fires worse, according to climate scientists.

Now we have new research on the question of whether climate change will make large city fires more likely. A research team from China, Singapore and Australia have gathered a decade’s worth of data on fires from almost 3,000 cities in 20 nations, home to one-fifth of the world’s population.

The researchers found for every 1°C increase in air temperature, outdoor fires (rubbish and landfill) increase 4.7% and vehicle fires 2.5%. If the world accelerates its burning of fossil fuels under a high emissions scenario compatible with a 4.3°C temperature rise by century’s end, outdoor fires in cities would soar 22% and vehicle fires 11%. But building fires are projected to actually fall 5%. Thankfully, this emissions scenario is now less likely.

What did this research find?

To make these findings, the researchers aggregated the fire incident data from 2,847 cities located in 20 countries over the 2011–20 decade and analysed them to see how air temperature influences the frequency of three types of fires: outdoor, structural and vehicle. They found a strong correlation.

Of the 20 nations, New Zealand looks likely to have the highest increase in fires, soaring 140% over 2020 figures by 2100.

When we think of fires in a city, we usually think of structural fires – a building going up in flames.

The research suggests building fires would actually decrease 5% by 2100. This is unexpected, and might suggest uncertainty about this finding.

Interestingly, this research found the fewest structural fires occurred at air temperatures of 24°C, a temperature which humans find optimal. When it’s hotter or cooler than that, more buildings catch fire.

Why? It’s likely due to our behaviour. We spend more time indoors when it’s very cold or very hot outside, which the authors suggest could make us more likely to accidentally cause fires by using electrical appliances and fireplaces which have a fire risk.

By contrast, outdoor and vehicle fires do increase linearly as temperatures rise. Most vehicle fires come from an equipment or heat source failure, which are both likely to increase as temperatures rise. We are also more likely to have a car crash when it’s hotter, and vehicle fires often come after a crash.

Outdoor fires become more likely because heat dries out fuels and favours fire spread. Rubbish dumps can spontaneously catch fire when temperatures are too high – even underground. This happens because chemical reactions are accelerated in warmer temperatures, causing waste materials to heat up faster. If the extra heat isn’t dissipated, waste can become so hot that it catches fire on its own.

We should take these estimates with a grain of salt. This is because they project recent statistical patterns into an uncertain future, and draw on a data set not perfectly suited to the task. The data set stops in 2020, before the electric vehicle transition gathered speed. EVs have a different risk profile for accidental fires.

As the authors note, there are large barriers to getting a coherent understanding of fire risk. “Despite multiple efforts, we have been unsuccessful in obtaining fire data from Africa and South America,” they write.

Their estimates also relate to a high-emissions future which is hopefully becoming less likely, though the general pattern of the results are similar under less severe climate projections.

Most importantly, it’s not yet clear why temperature influences urban fires. This uncertainty raises questions over whether simple projections of current patterns into the future are realistic or appropriate.

Cities aflame?

Arguably the most important contribution of this new research is to show us that our cities are not inherently protected from fire.

For city authorities, this research points to the need to manage combustible materials, from piles of mulch to dry urban parks and even home gardens. Storage yards, rubbish dumps and recycling centres will also need to be managed.

Fire used to be a major concern for cities, and it could be again. Cities and fire are uneasy bedfellows, and climate change will worsen the situation.

David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania and Calum Cunningham, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Pyrogeography, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tossing and turning on sweltering summer nights? You’re not alone.

As temperatures rise due to climate change, our sleep is becoming shorter and more disrupted.

But it’s not just the heat keeping us awake – climate change creates multiple challenges to our nightly slumber, which may be affecting our health.

What happens when we don’t get enough sleep?

Sleep isn’t just rest – it’s vital for our health.

Adults need at least seven hours per night to maintain cognitive function, memory and emotional balance. Poor sleep immediately impacts mood and attention, while chronic sleep issues increase risk of diabetes, obesity, depression, heart disease and even premature death.

So, how is climate change impacting our sleep?

1. Overnight temperatures are rising

Our circadian rhythm – that internal biological clock – requires our internal body temperature to drop at night for quality sleep. The ideal room temperature for sleep is 15°C to 19°C.

Rising outdoor temperatures make this body temperature increasingly difficult to maintain, especially for those without air conditioning. Paradoxically, widespread air conditioning use further contributes to climate change by using fossil-energy, which creates emissions.**

Research shows the impact on our sleep is already measurable. Our 2023 study of 375 Australian adults found people lost 12 minutes per night on the hottest nights compared with the coldest (31°C vs 0.4°C overnight temperatures across the year).

Globally, scientists predict we could lose 50–58 hours of sleep annually per person by the end of the century if warming continues unchecked. This is one way climate change will make geographic inequalities worse.

2. Climate change is worsening air pollution

Hot and dry conditions typically tend to make air pollution worse. As climate change increases the number of hot days and frequency of heatwaves, the rate of wildfires will increase. This adds another source of air pollution, increasing emissions of harmful greenhouse gases and airborne particles.

Air pollution is linked with poorer health, increased risk of chronic illness and early death.

Air pollution also impacts our sleep through breathing issues, inflammation and potentially disrupting our nervous system’s ability to regulate sleep.

And in winter, households burn wood for residential heating, adding another source of climate-impacting emissions. Air pollution from wood fires worsens respiratory conditions such as asthma, bronchitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, further compromising sleep.

3. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe

Whether it’s wildfires, heatwaves, flooding or cyclones, extreme weather is becoming more common and more intense.

With these extreme events comes widespread upheaval in affected communities. From mass population displacement to loss of shelter, security and essential resources, sleep is likely way down the list of priorities when dealing with natural disasters.

However, sleep disturbances are common after these extreme events. A review of global research on wildfire survivors found two-thirds experienced insomnia and more than a third reported nightmares. These effects persisted up to 10 months after the disaster.

4. Climate anxiety is on the rise

Even if you haven’t directly experienced an extreme weather event, the constant stream of climate catastrophes in our media can trigger what psychologists call “climate anxiety” – an existential dread that is keeping people awake.

Research confirms these climate concerns are linked with sleep disturbances including difficulty falling asleep, insomnia and wakefulness. They occur across the age spectrum, affecting both younger and older adults.

If climate-related concerns or ongoing poor sleep are significantly impacting your life consider consulting a doctor or psychologist.

Tips for getting a good night’s sleep during hot nights

Fortunately, there are a few simple things you can do to improve your chances of getting a good night’s sleep. They cost nothing or very little and require just a small bit of pre-bedtime planning.

Here are some tips for getting a good night sleep despite the temperature:

For your environment:

· sleep in the coolest room in the house (this may not be the bedroom)

· keep curtains closed during the day to limit heating from sunlight

· put on a fan – air flow can lower your perception of the temperature (by helping sweat evaporate faster) without actually cooling your room

· select light, breathable bedding (natural fibres work best)

· if outside temperatures drop at night, open the windows to encourage air circulation.

For your body:

· take a cool shower before bed to help lower body temperature

· timing your exercise is important: aim to exercise early in the day

· wear light natural-fibre clothing

· keep a damp towel or spray bottle by your bed to dampen your skin

· stay hydrated but avoid heavy meals before sleeping.

As we adapt to a changing climate, getting a good night’s sleep should be a top priority for our health.

With some practical adjustments to our environments and habits, we can adapt to these changes while advocating for the broader climate solutions that will ultimately help us all rest easier.

Ty Ferguson, Research Fellow, University of South Australia and Carol Maher, Professor, research professor in exercise, nutrition and activity, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Imagine for a moment the atmosphere is a kitchen sink. Wildfires, industry emissions, plants and microbes dump their grimy dishes into it in the form of noxious and planet-heating gases.

The only reason why these gases are not continuously accumulating in the atmosphere and we are not choking in a giant smog cloud is that the atmosphere makes its own detergent: hydroxyl.

The hydroxyl radical (OH) is generated in complex chemical cycles and removes organic gases by reacting with them. This includes the potent greenhouse gas methane – OH removes about 90% of it from the atmosphere.

An important question for climate scientists is whether our ongoing emissions could use up the OH detergent and leave the atmosphere less able to cleanse itself.

While that may seem likely, we also emit compounds like nitrogen oxides (from engines and power plants) that increase OH production. Which of the two processes dominates and whether OH levels are going up or down has been hotly debated.

But as we show in our new study, OH has been increasing and the atmosphere’s self-cleaning ability has been strengthening since 1997.

This finding gets us a step closer to understanding what happens to methane once it enters the atmosphere. While it is good news that the atmosphere’s scrubbing capacity has been increasing, it also suggests that methane emissions are rising faster than scientists and policy makers assumed.

Complex measurements

OH is very challenging to measure directly. It only exists for a second before it reacts again.

Instead, we used the radiocarbon content of carbon monoxide (14CO) as a footprint of OH activity. Only reaction with OH removes 14CO, which makes it a robust tracer and indicates how much OH is in the air.

The 14CO radioactive isotope (which is chemically the same as carbon monoxide but heavier) forms when cosmic rays start a chain of reactions in the atmosphere. We can calculate this production rate accurately and therefore know how much 14CO enters the atmosphere.

For each of the hundreds of data points used in our study, we used air samples collected at two remote stations in New Zealand and Antarctica, respectively, over the past 33 years.

From these samples, we isolated only the carbon monoxide, which we then turned into carbon dioxide and eventually into graphite (pure carbon) to measure how many of the graphite atoms represent the carbon isotope 14C.

Confirmation by modelling

We found a statistically significant decrease in 14CO over the past 25 years. This can only be caused by an increase in OH.

Our computer model that calculates climate and atmospheric chemistry confirms this. The combination of measurements and simulations shows that OH is increasing, but proves it only for the Southern Hemisphere where we have collected samples.

This is interesting because this part of the world is affected by the “grime” gases, including methane, that react with OH but is far from more industrialised regions that emit compounds that generate OH (especially nitrogen oxides).

If we can detect an OH rise in the more pristine southern hemisphere, chances are the increase is global. Indeed, our model shows that OH is likely rising faster in the northern hemisphere.

The simulations also suggest the main factors at play. Higher methane fluxes suppress OH, as expected, and by themselves would cause a downward trend. In contrast, nitrogen oxide emissions, ozone depletion in the stratosphere and global warming favour the formation of new OH, turning the balance to an overall increase.

These findings are a big step in the understanding of atmospheric chemistry. They show that rising OH levels have so far saved us from even faster rising atmospheric methane levels and the associated warming.

Currently, urban and industrial pollution of nitrogen oxides maintains this state. But the danger is that the very necessary efforts to clean up these pollutants could cut the OH supply to the atmospheric kitchen sink. With less detergent and the same input of grime, the dishwater will turn dirty.

Hinrich Schaefer, Research Scientist Trace Gases, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For New Zealand, a country with an underwater territory 14 times its landmass, marine ecosystems present a significant opportunity to investigate carbon storage options.

Prompted by a 2023 report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, the government recognised the need to focus on the oceans in addressing climate change.

In its emissions reduction plan for 2026-2030, it highlights the potential to harness marine habitats as carbon sinks and to count this towards the country’s efforts to slow climate change.

Several blue-carbon studies report on stocks of carbon in sediments and mangrove, saltmarshes and kelp forests. This tells us how much carbon is stored in these ecosystems – but very little about how carbon flows through them and the factors that influence whether it is stored or emitted.

This is important. Marine ecosystems can be both sinks or sources of carbon. If we don’t understand how organic material is transformed or how carbon dioxide (CO₂) is either taken up by plants or emitted into the atmosphere, we will likely make poor decisions about nature-based solutions.

To address this, we have invited researchers from the Scandinavian research partnership CoastClim – an innovative project linking seafloor biodiversity and climate – to bring their unique set of instrumentation to New Zealand to explore patterns in greenhouse gas emissions from the seafloor.

The measurements we made this summer are tracking emissions of methane and CO₂ from seafloor sediments in the upper reaches of several harbours (Waitemata, Mahurangi and Whangateau) in the Auckland region.

We found CO₂ concentrations were up to eight times higher than atmospheric levels in more disturbed and polluted parts of these harbours. Methane concentrations were up to 30 times higher. This shows that degraded habitats are indeed transformed into net emitters of greenhouse gases.

Paying attention to land-coast connections

There has been concern about the health of the Firth of Thames, at the back of the Hauraki Gulf, because the area drains a large catchment with intensive agriculture.

We found this region is a significant source of greenhouse gases.

Our sampling on the open coast revealed high draw-down of CO₂ in healthy patches of kelp. But this effect was reversed in areas where New Zealand’s endemic sea urchin, kina, has grazed off the kelp. These regions are known as kina barrens and they dominate many non-protected reefs.

Our data highlight an important finding relevant to how we manage marine ecosystems and address both the biodiversity and climate crises. As we stress and degrade these ecosystems, they have less capacity to process carbon in ways that store it or move it into food webs. The system fails in its self-regulation and transforms into a net source of greenhouse gases.

We argue that we have to manage these ecosystems in an integrative fashion, considering the long-term stores of carbon and the time it takes to build them up, along with the many processes that move carbon from one part of the ecosystem to another.

Considering the dynamics of marine carbon and restoring or protecting coastal ecosystems are good options for addressing multiple challenges. We shouldn’t just be looking for good places to bank carbon but also those where good management can reduce seafloor disturbance and therefore limit the release of greenhouse gases.

Considering climate and biodiversity

This project highlights the importance of considering both biodiversity and climate together. If we manage one ignorant of the other, we risk failure because biodiversity matters to how we address climate change.

This holistic understanding of the stock and flows of carbon (long-term sequestration and carbon in living organisms) is necessary if we are to identify viable long-term carbon stores. It is also crucial to assessing how the stresses we put on the marine environment can turn an ecosystem from a carbon sink to a source.

Working with our Scandinavian colleagues also confirmed our earlier research. For a number of years, we have been studying how different stressors – including sediment disturbance, nutrient flows from land and microplastic pollution affect the way nitrogen, carbon and oxygen are processed in coastal sediments.

These processes have implications for the release of greenhouse gases. But until now, we have not been able to test some connections and close the loop on some of our ideas.

As with most interventions to natural ecosystems, we are better off accepting they are complex, and that any supposed “silver bullet” solutions can have unintended consequences.

Simon Francis Thrush, Director of the Institute of Marine Science, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Netflix’s new drama Toxic Town tells the true story of a group of women from Corby in Northamptonshire, UK, who gave birth to children with limb differences in the 1980s and 90s. The children were born with shortened arms or legs or missing fingers. The drama follows their battle to uncover the cause and their subsequent fight for justice.

This skilful portrayal of a real-life tragedy isn’t just compelling drama, it’s a stark warning about the dangers of weak environmental protections. With the UK no longer following EU environmental standards and the US rolling back key pollution regulations and scaling down environmental enforcement, the issues at the heart of Toxic Town feel more urgent than ever.

As two atmospheric scientists, we were pleased to see Netflix taking on this recent event in UK history.

Corby’s industrial heritage mirrors that of many English towns: for decades, the town’s steelworks provided jobs. Then in the 1980s they were decommissioned, leaving behind high unemployment and thousands of tonnes of hazardous waste. While many areas have decommissioned steelworks, the difference here is that environmental procedures for decommissioning hazardous waste appear not to have been followed.

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Waste from the steelworks was transported through town in lorries to sites for long-term storage. Despite government advice to ensure their lorries were cleaned and their loads covered to prevent contamination, dirty, uncovered lorries carrying hazardous waste were repeatedly driven through the area, allowing toxic sludge to spill out on to the roads.

Drivers were also paid bonuses for extra loads, which encouraged them to ignore regulations and cut corners. And, as the sludge spilled from their lorries dried, it turned into dust that was carried through the air and inhaled by residents, including pregnant mothers.

Crucially, this dust was not typical air pollution which, while harmful, doesn’t usually come from contaminated land so doesn’t contain high concentrations of heavy metals and industrial chemicals. Yet, to the naked eye, Corby’s toxic dust would have been pretty indistinguishable from everyday grime.

What is clear, however, is that there was a lot of it. During the 2009 court case against what was then Corby Borough Council, which was responsible for the steelworks’ decommissioning, residents recalled the orange dust coating surfaces and filling the air. Many stressed the need to wash their cars frequently as they quickly became coated in dust.

As the show depicts, in 1999 concerns were raised about the impact of the pollution by mothers in the area who had given birth to children with upper limb differences. Northamptonshire Health Authority conducted an initial investigation and concluded the problem was no worse than elsewhere in England and Wales.

Acting on behalf of the mothers, the solicitor Des Collins launched his own investigation. Ultimately birth differences in Corby were, in fact, found to be three times higher than in surrounding areas

Inexplicably, even among environmental researchers, the Corby toxic waste case remains relatively unknown despite being a landmark legal case. It was the first time a link between airborne pollution and limb differences in children was officially established.

The council lost the case and was found liable for public nuisance, negligence and breach of statutory duty. It disputed the verdict but reached a confidential private settlement with the families.

Corby’s story has been dubbed the “British Erin Brockovich”. This is due to its parallels with the famous US environmental lawsuit in which Erin Brockovich, a legal clerk, helped build a case against Pacific Gas and Electric who were fined US$330 million (£415 million) for contaminating the water supply in Hinkley, California.

Why environmental regulation matters

It’s tempting to watch Toxic Town with the reassurance that such a disaster couldn’t happen again. Surely, with modern environmental monitoring and stronger regulations, we are now better protected?

Environmental protections are only as strong as the political will to enforce them. History has repeatedly shown that weak or poorly enforced regulations can lead to catastrophic consequences. For example, the Bhopal gas disaster in India in 1984 saw a toxic gas leak that killed thousands.

The Love Canal incident in the US in the 1970s exposed residents to hazardous waste, causing birth defects and illness. And the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the US in 2010, which became one of the largest marine oil spills in history.

Despite such repeated events, environmental regulation is increasingly dismissed by some politicians and industry leaders as red tape –a bureaucratic burden that hampers industrial and economic growth.

The UK’s exit from the EU means that it no longer needs to adhere to EU environmental regulations, including the Reach law which mandates the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals, It’s the main EU law that governs chemicals to protect both the environment and human health. While not flawless, Reach is considered to be the most robust chemicals regulation in the world and because of global supply chains, it often encourages manufacturers beyond Europe to comply.

Campaigners worry that the UK’s departure from the EU environmental regulations will weaken its environmental benchmarks. Water quality in the UK has worsened in the past decade and is now worse than that of most EU countries. Yet, evidence shows that the chemicals industry lobby is powerful.

The attitude of the new administration in the US to environmental protection laws has caused considerable concern across the global scientific community. There has been a rollback of more than 100 environmental regulations, including 39 relevant to air and water pollution. Most of these rule reversals have already been enacted, just over a month into the new administration.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has had 168 staff placed on leave and environmental groups have warned “that these cuts put minority and lower income families living close to polluting sites at risk”. In parallel, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), another federal agency which monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditions, is facing drastic cuts to it’s staff and budget. These cuts harm the capacity of the US to monitor and enforce environmental regulations.

What happens in the US often sets a precedent for other countries. It is worrying that reducing environmental protection in the US may encourage other countries, including the UK, to follow suit.

So, far from being a thing of the past, we could be witnessing a return to the toxic times seen in Corby if we fail to prioritise stringent environmental safeguards. As solictor Des Collins starkly reminds us at the end of the drama: “A town that is made by burning up red tape and using it as fuel does so much damage.”

Kirsty Pringle, Atmospheric Scientist and Project Manager, Software Sustainability Institute, University of Edinburgh and Jim McQuaid, Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science, University of Leeds

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Flowing clockwise around Antarctica, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest ocean current on the planet. It’s five times stronger than the Gulf Stream and more than 100 times stronger than the Amazon River.

It forms part of the global ocean “conveyor belt” connecting the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. The system regulates Earth’s climate and pumps water, heat and nutrients around the globe.

But fresh, cool water from melting Antarctic ice is diluting the salty water of the ocean, potentially disrupting the vital ocean current.

Our new research suggests the Antarctic Circumpolar Current will be 20% slower by 2050 as the world warms, with far-reaching consequences for life on Earth.

Why should we care?

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is like a moat around the icy continent.

The current helps to keep warm water at bay, protecting vulnerable ice sheets. It also acts as a barrier to invasive species such as southern bull kelp and any animals hitching a ride on these rafts, spreading them out as they drift towards the continent. It also plays a big part in regulating Earth’s climate.

Unlike better known ocean currents – such as the Gulf Stream along the United States East Coast, the Kuroshio Current near Japan, and the Agulhas Current off the coast of South Africa – the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is not as well understood. This is partly due to its remote location, which makes obtaining direct measurements especially difficult.

Understanding the influence of climate change

Ocean currents respond to changes in temperature, salt levels, wind patterns and sea-ice extent. So the global ocean conveyor belt is vulnerable to climate change on multiple fronts.

Previous research suggested one vital part of this conveyor belt could be headed for a catastrophic collapse.

Theoretically, warming water around Antarctica should speed up the current. This is because density changes and winds around Antarctica dictate the strength of the current. Warm water is less dense (or heavy) and this should be enough to speed up the current. But observations to date indicate the strength of the current has remained relatively stable over recent decades.

This stability persists despite melting of surrounding ice, a phenomenon that had not been fully explored in scientific discussions in the past.

What we did

Advances in ocean modelling allow a more thorough investigation of the potential future changes.

We used Australia’s fastest supercomputer and climate simulator in Canberra to study the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The underlying model, ACCESS-OM2-01, has been developed by Australian researchers from various universities as part of the Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia.

The model captures features others often miss, such as eddies. So it’s a far more accurate way to assess how the current’s strength and behaviour will change as the world warms. It picks up the intricate interactions between ice melting and ocean circulation.

In this future projection, cold, fresh melt water from Antarctica migrates north, filling the deep ocean as it goes. This causes major changes to the density structure of the ocean. It counteracts the influence of ocean warming, leading to an overall slowdown in the current of as much as 20% by 2050.

Far-reaching consequences

The consequences of a weaker Antarctic Circumpolar Current are profound and far-reaching.

As the main current that circulates nutrient-rich waters around Antarctica, it plays a crucial role in the Antarctic ecosystem.

Weakening of the current could reduce biodiversity and decrease the productivity of fisheries that many coastal communities rely on. It could also aid the entry of invasive species such as southern bull kelp to Antarctica, disrupting local ecosystems and food webs.

A weaker current may also allow more warm water to penetrate southwards, exacerbating the melting of Antarctic ice shelves and contributing to global sea-level rise. Faster ice melting could then lead to further weakening of the current, commencing a vicious spiral of current slowdown.

This disruption could extend to global climate patterns, reducing the ocean’s ability to regulate climate change by absorbing excess heat and carbon in the atmosphere.

Need to reduce emissions

While our findings present a bleak prognosis for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the future is not predetermined. Concerted efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could still limit melting around Antarctica.

Establishing long-term studies in the Southern Ocean will be crucial for monitoring these changes accurately.

With proactive and coordinated international actions, we have a chance to address and potentially avert the effects of climate change on our oceans.

The authors thank Polar Climate Senior Researcher Dr Andreas Klocker, from the NORCE Norwegian Research Centre and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, for his contribution to this research, and Professor Matthew England from the University of New South Wales, who provided the outputs from the model simulation for this analysis.

Taimoor Sohail, Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne and Bishakhdatta Gayen, ARC Future Fellow & Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last month tech giant Meta announced plans to build the world’s longest submarine communication cable.

Known as Project Waterworth, the 50,000-kilometre cable would link five continents. Meta says it would improve connectivity and technological development in countries including the United States, India and Brazil.

Improving global connectivity has been the main purpose of submarine cables since the first one was laid across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.

Globally, there are currently around 1.4 million kilometres of these garden hose-sized, plastic-wrapped cables. The optical fibres inside can transmit data at speeds of up to 300 terabits per second.

But submarine cables can do far more than just enhance telecommunications. In fact, a recent conference I attended in London highlighted how a relatively new generation of cables can also be used to keep us safe from threats such as climate change and natural disasters.

Multipurpose cables

SMART – short for Scientific Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications – cables are designed for environmental monitoring. They are a joint initiative by the International Telecommunications Union, the World Meteorological Organization and UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

These cables are equipped with sensors that measure vital environmental data in the ocean. This data includes seismic activity, temperature fluctuations and pressure changes. It can be used to improve early-warning systems for tsunamis and earthquakes as well as tracking changes in the climate.

OFS – short for optical fibre sensing – cables are aimed at protecting critical infrastructure. They use the fibre within to detect vibrations surrounding the cable. This allows cable operators to identify potential disruptions from fishing activity, ship anchors and other physical disturbances.

A handful of countries, including France and Portugal, are actively investing in these cables. The European Commission is also supporting SMART cable projects within broader infrastructure strategies.

A slow uptake

The topic of sensing cables comes up at conferences, thanks to industry professionals who work on it pro bono. But the technology isn’t widely adopted by the broader industry and governments. For example, SMART cables have been around since 2010, but there are only two projects in development.

The reasons for this slow uptake boil down to three major concerns, as discussed at the conference.

1. Outdated regulation

The legal framework governing undersea cables is outdated.

While the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea regulates international waters, it doesn’t address cables equipped with environmental sensors.

This legal ambiguity introduces additional complexities to already lengthy and complex processes for obtaining permits when sensing technologies are integrated into cables.

2. No clear business model

Industry executives question the financial feasibility of sensing cables. For example, during the conference in London, several industry executives suggested adding sensors raises costs by approximately 15%, with no clear revenue return.

Unlike data traffic, environmental data doesn’t directly generate income. Unless governments intervene with funding, tax incentives or expedited permits, cable operators have little incentive to absorb these added costs and complexities.

3. Security risks

At the subsea cable conference in London, several industry insiders also warned embedding sensors in cables could create new security risks.

Some governments might view sensing-equipped cables as surveillance tools rather than neutral scientific infrastructure.

There is also concern such cables could become attractive targets for malicious actors.

A need for more ocean data

But there are good reasons for more countries and industry to invest in SMART cables.

For example, information on ocean depth, seabed composition and temperature fluctuations is valuable. A wide array of industries, from shipping and offshore energy to fisheries and insurance, could leverage this data to enhance their operations and mitigate risks.

Scientists have also pointed out that in order to better understand climate change, we need more and better data about what’s happening in the ocean.

Current subsea cable regulatory hurdles make investing in sensing technology challenging. But if regulation is updated, projects such as Meta’s Waterworth Project could more easily integrate sensors.

With experts suggesting the Waterworth Project be viewed as multiple cables instead of one, sensors could just be deployed on less geopolitically sensitive cable branches.

They could facilitate the creation of an open-access, publicly funded database for ocean observation data. Such a platform could consolidate real-time data from sensing cables, satellites and marine sensors. This would provide a transparent, shared resource for scientists, policymakers and industries alike.

Of course, deploying sensing technology may not be feasible in volatile regions such as the Baltic or South China seas.

But there is potential in areas especially vulnerable to climate change, such as the Pacific. Here, scientific data could be harnessed to model oceanic changes and explore solutions to rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns.

A path forward

Portugal demonstrates a path forward for SMART cables. Despite the regulatory challenges, it is actively investing in SMART cables in order to improve climate data.

Other governments can learn from this if they wish to fulfil their moral duty to invest in infrastructure that serves as a public good.

The idea of embedding sensors in cables may not be the perfect climate change fix. But it’s a step toward understanding the ocean’s invisible rhythms – a small but necessary gesture to stop pretending our planet’s breakdown will fix itself.

Cynthia Mehboob, PhD Scholar in Department of International Relations, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Delhi is perhaps the most polluted of the world’s megacities. Every winter, the city’s 30 million residents breathe air so toxic that visibility drops to mere metres. If you stand on top of one of Delhi’s monuments you can barely make out buildings across the street as the thick, acrid smog burns your eyes and scratches your throat.

But conditions can and do change rapidly. January 2025 offered a dramatic demonstration of how weather patterns can rapidly transform the city’s air quality.

On January 5, favourable winds improved air quality enough to lift some restrictions. Yet by January 15, as winds calmed and temperatures dropped, pollution levels soared dramatically, forcing the city to implement its maximum “severe +” interventions. These include banning trucks from entering the city, restricting private vehicles and moving schools to online classes.

Delhi didn’t suddenly have more cars, factories, power plants or construction sites from one week to the next. Those things are consistent sources of pollution. There are some events that add to air pollution in the shorter term, such as fireworks during Diwali, or the mass burning of unwanted crop debris (known as stubble), both of which take place in October or November.

But that wasn’t what happened in January. Instead, the sudden reversal revealed how weather, not just emissions, dictates Delhi’s ability to breathe. Understanding this will be crucial if the city is to clean up its air.

A meteorological prison

Delhi is one of many large cities found in a flat and hugely fertile region spanning the Indian subcontinent to the south of the Himalayas. It’s known as the Indo-Gangetic plains, as it contains the floodplains of the Indus and Ganges-Brahmaputra rivers and their tributaries. More than a billion people live in this part of the world.

Delhi specifically is also bordered by another mountain range to its south, the Aravallis. While modest compared to the Himalayas, these mountains contribute to the city sitting in a natural bowl-like area, which makes it harder for pollution to disperse.

This geographical positioning means its location naturally collects airborne pollutants from surrounding agricultural areas. Even if Delhi somehow produced zero emissions, the region would still be likely to experience air quality problems during winter.

In winter, Delhi experiences “temperature inversions” where warmer air sits above colder air like a lid on a pot. This phenomenon occurs naturally in the region but is intensified by the city’s heat-trapping urban landscape. Normally, temperature decreases with height, allowing air to mix vertically, since warm air rises. Under inversion conditions, this pattern reverses and pollutants are trapped near the ground.

The height up to which pollutants can disperse, known as the “mixing height”, also dramatically reduces in winter. While summer allows mixing up to an altitude of about one kilometre, winter can compress this to just a few hundred meters, concentrating pollutants in a much smaller volume of air.

Meanwhile the Himalayas block air from flowing northward, forcing pollution to travel the entire stretch of northern India before finding an exit over the Bay of Bengal. In cities, urban structures further complicate this by creating “surface roughness”, a frictional effect that slows pollution dispersion.

Seasonal factors

There are also seasonal factors that make pollution accumulate or disperse more at certain times of year.

Delhi’s summer monsoon season runs from July to September, providing natural cleansing through rainfall. During post-monsoon months (October-November), rainfall is minimal. At the same time, wind speeds decrease, limiting ventilation. These conditions compress the atmospheric boundary layer — the lowest part of atmosphere influenced by Earth’s surface — trapping pollutants near ground level.

Throughout winter (December-February), cooler surface temperatures intensify temperature inversions. This creates lots of fog, which combines with pollutants in the atmosphere to form Delhi’s characteristic smog. The reduced mixing height during this period severely restricts vertical dispersal of pollutants.

In pre-monsoon months (March-May), strong westerly winds can blow additional dust from the Thar Desert and agricultural regions toward Delhi. However, higher temperatures increase vertical mixing, improving overall dispersion despite this additional dust.

Season-specific approach

India’s technological interventions, including smog towers and anti-smog guns,have shown limited effectiveness in addressing the causes of pollution. Even more ambitious proposals such as using cloud seeding to induce precipitation aren’t very practical. Cloud seeding is expensive, can only cover a limited area, and needs very specific meteorological conditions.

To manage its air quality, Delhi needs a season-specific approach that anticipates weather patterns and pulses in emissions. Getting ahead of the smog could involve a few different things.

Preventive planning would mean implementing stricter emission controls before the cold, still winter days when fog is likely, rather than reacting after pollution has already accumulated.

It would involve solutions that span the whole of the Indo-Gangetic plains, rather than focusing just on Delhi (or indeed any other individual urban centre). After all, many of India’s most polluted cities share the same weather conditions, and the long-range transport of pollution can play a huge role.

A season-specific approach would mean some fixed seasonal policies would instead adapt to forecast meteorological conditions. For instance, construction restrictions (building dust is a big source of air pollution) might be tightened when inversions are predicted, even on seemingly clear days.

Finally, by combining meteorological and air quality monitoring, authorities could provide targeted warnings and interventions days before visible pollution accumulates.

Understanding these natural constraints isn’t just an academic exercise – it’s essential for developing effective policies that can protect millions of residents year-round. As climate change potentially alters these meteorological patterns, the need for scientifically informed policy becomes even more critical.

Ankit Bhandekar, Research Student — Atmosphere, Oceans and Climate, University of Reading and Laura Wilcox, Associate Professor, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate regulation through carbon storage was worth A$43.2 billion to Australia in 2020-21, according to a report released today which seeks to put a monetary value on the benefits flowing from our natural assets.

Australia’s first national ecosystem accounts were released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics today. Together, they reveal the key ways our environment contributes to Australia’s economic and social wellbeing in dollar terms.

Ecosystems covered by the accounts include desert, grasslands, native forests, rivers, streams, coastal areas and oceans.

The accounts provide a holistic view of Australia’s land, freshwater and marine environments. They intend to help policymakers look beyond GDP to a broader measurement of how ecosystems contribute to society and the economy.

Valuing our ecosystems

The accounts cover services provided by Australia’s ecosystems in 2020–21.

Australian ecosystems stored more than 34.5 billion tonnes of carbon – the most valuable service by ecosystems examined in the accounts, according to the ABS.

It brought a $43.2 billion benefit to Australia in the form of climate regulation. Plants and other organisms reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by removing and storing them. This helps stabilise the climate, avoiding damage caused by climate change.

Grasslands made the biggest contribution to carbon storage, followed by native forests and savannas.

The accounts show grazed biomass, or grasslands, provide $40.4 billion in benefits, through the forage provided to cattle and sheep. The dollar figure represents what farmers would otherwise have spent on feeding their livestock.

The accounts also examined the provision of surface water taken from ecosystems, and used for drinking, energy production, cooling, irrigation and manufacturing. This was valued at $1.4 billion.

The provision of wild fish, sold to consumers to eat, was put at $39.2 million.

The accounts also reveal how coral reefs, sandbanks, dunes and mangroves protect our coastlines against tides and storm surges.

The ABS estimates mangroves protected 4,006 dwellings around Australian coastlines. This prevented more than $57 million worth of building damage.

The accounts also track changes in Australia’s ecosystems.

Some 281,000 hectares of mostly farmland were converted to urban and industrial uses between 2015–16 and 2020–21. And 169,000 hectares of “steppe” land – flat, unforested grassland – was converted to sown pastures and fields.

Feral animal and weed species continue to spread. Meanwhile, the number of threatened native species is increasing.

Why do we need ecosystem accounting?

Think of a logged forest. The value of the timber produced counts towards Australia’s gross domestic product. But cutting trees down also produces a loss. For example, the forest is no longer there for the community to enjoy. And it no longer provides “services” such as filtering water and preventing soil erosion.

There are many reasons to measure the value of those services. For example, governments might then be able to charge a logging company a licence fee which reflects the community value of the forest. A government may decide the forest is too valuable to allow logging at all, or the fee may just be set too high for any company to find it profitable to log it.

To date, the value lost when trees are cut down, or other ecosystems are damaged, has not been included in the national accounts. The new environmental accounts seek to change this.

Obviously, ecosystems are complex and difficult to measure. The ABS has been guided by an international framework developed by the United Nations.

The ecosystem accounts are a collaboration between several federal agencies: the ABS, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and the CSIRO.

Boundless plains and golden soil, girt by sea

The accounts distinguish between environmental “realms”.

About half of Australia’s terrestrial (dry land) realm is desert. About a quarter is savanna and grassland. Intensively used land, such as pastures, is a smaller proportion.

There are contrasts between the states. Western Australia has 158 million hectares of desert while Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory have none. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory host 97% of Australia’s mangroves.

About half of Australia is the marine realm, covering 681 million hectares. Some 30% of this is the marine shelf and 70% deep sea. About 14 million hectares comprise coral reefs. The darker areas in the map below show where most fish are caught.

The coastal realm comprises mangroves and saltmarsh. In 2021, mangroves covered an estimated 1.1 million hectares of Australia’s coastal areas.

A small but important proportion of Australia is our freshwater realm, comprising rivers and streams. The accounts show between 2015–16 and 2020–21, 4% of natural environments along perennial rivers were converted to higher intensity land uses.

Where to now?

These accounts are just the first step in estimating the value of Australia’s natural assets.

The ABS will update Australia’s ecosystem accounts annually. It describes the inaugural accounts as “experimental” and says the government agencies involved will run a consultation process to improve them.

We can expect the accounts to become more useful over time as data accrues and trends can be identified.

According to the ABS, policy uses for the accounts include managing healthy and resilient ecosystems, and integrating biodiversity into planning.

Poet and playwright Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. In today’s society we often underrate things that do not have a dollar value attached.

So this compilation of Australia’s ecosystems, and their value to us, is a welcome development. It should lead to more informed, holistic decisions about whether natural assets should be protected, or damaged for economic benefit.

John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.