Reforms to Australia’s nature laws have passed federal parliament. A longstanding exemption that meant federal environment laws did not apply to native logging has finally been removed from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Native forest logging will now be subject to national environmental standards – legally binding rules supposed to set clear goals for environmental protection. This should be a win for the environment, and some have celebrated it as an end to native forest logging in Australia.

But the reality is such celebrations are premature. We don’t have all the details of the new standards, or know how they will be enforced and monitored.

Business as usual?

Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt has told the forestry industry, including in Tasmania, that native forest operations will continue as usual. In an interview with ABC Radio Hobart, he said the changes keep day-to-day forestry approvals with the state government, but introduce stronger federal oversight.

If that is the case, the logging of habitat for endangered species, such as the swift parrot, will continue, pushing these species closer to extinction. The Tasmanian government has shown no signs of willingness to change its current approach.

And if “business as usual” logging persists, the environment reforms will fall far short of what Australia’s forests – and their plants and animals – need.

Uncertain standards

We don’t yet know what the national forestry standards will contain. But the draft standards for some threatened and endangered forest species aren’t enough to arrest ongoing declines, based on drafts I’ve seen that are yet to be publicly released.

Crucially, we can’t meet the habitat requirements for many forest-dependent species by simply replanting previously cleared land. This is because the trees in replanted forests won’t be mature for several hundred years. Many forest-dwelling species live in holes and hollows that occur only in mature trees.

In other words, allowing loggers to “offset” the forests they damage by replanting other areas is broadly impossible. This reinforces longstanding concerns about the limitations of biodiversity offsets as a way to conserve endangered forests and animals.

Industry pushback

Parts of the forest industry are already seeking to rebrand damaging practices such as mechanical thinning (the removal of large numbers of trees), as forms of so-called “active management” to create healthy forests.

The Australian government’s Timber Fibre Strategy makes extensive reference to the use of “active management”. However, the scientific evidence shows the opposite: such activities can degrade forest structure (by removing key understorey vegetation), facilitate the invasion of weed species, and undermine the ecological integrity of forests.

Different forests

Australia has a vast range of different forest types, and many support a variety of animals and plants threatened by forestry operations.

Effective national standards therefore need to be detailed and sophisticated to deal with such complexity. This will take considerable time to design. And it’s possible each species and forest type will need a different set of standards.

These will need to account not only for the direct impacts of logging – such as the death of animals when their habitat trees are felled – but also indirect impacts. For example, logging can increase fire risk, promote the spread of weeds and feral animals into disturbed areas, and trigger long-term changes in vegetation structure.

Developing national standards is only part of the challenge. Implementing them will demand significant new resources, as well as robust monitoring to ensure governments and logging contractors actually stick to the rules.

Better recovery

Many of Australia’s threatened species don’t have up-to-date recovery plans that will guide the best way to prevent their extinction. And when plans do exist, there is often a lack of resourcing to put them into action.

Without substantial investment, many plants and animals will fall between the cracks, and these new environmental standards will not deliver the change so desperately needed. They must be matched with careful monitoring of species in forests and properly-funded plans for their recovery.

A simple solution

There is a straightforward way to avoid the ecological, administrative, and financial problems created by native forest logging – stop it altogether.

The evidence shows ending native forest logging would deliver significant benefits for biodiversity, forest ecosystems, and reduce fire risks.

It also would benefit government finances because taxpayers would no longer need to subsidise an economically unviable industry that currently loses large amounts of money.

The environment law reforms are to be welcomed. But the devil will be in the detail as to whether hopes for better environmental outcomes and improved forest conservation are realised.

David Lindenmayer, Distinguished Professor of Ecology, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

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

Dozens of bushfires raged over the weekend as far afield as the mid-north coast of New South Wales and Tasmania’s east coast. A NSW firefighter tragically lost his life, 16 homes burned down in the NSW town of Koolewong and four in Bulahdelah, and another 19 burned down in Tasmania’s Dolphin Sands.

Temperatures reached 41°C in Koolewong. Strong winds fanned the fires, making them hard to suppress. The speed and intensity of these fires took many by surprise. Why did they do such damage?

Since the megafires of the 2019–20 summer, Australia has had multiple wet years. Vegetation has regrown strongly. In recent months, below-average rainfall has dried out many landscapes, resulting in dry fuels ready to burn. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has warned these fires point to a “difficult” season ahead.

Do these fires mean Australia is facing another terrible fire season? Not necessarily. The growth of fuel is one thing. But a lot depends on the weather.

Dry fuel, steep terrain and poor access

Big, dangerous bushfires need fuel to burn. Scientists categorise these fuels as either “dead” or “live”. Dead fuels include fallen leaves and twigs on the ground, whereas live fuels include the foliage on living shrubs and trees.

When fuel is wet, it doesn’t burn easily. But when it’s very dry, it burns readily. Drying can happen very quickly on days of high temperatures and low humidity. Fuel dryness can be estimated from weather or satellite data.

Our work has shown fires can spread much more easily when moisture levels drop below 10%.

Over the weekend, we calculated the moisture content of dead fuels fell to critically dry levels, falling below 7% in both Koolewong and Bulahdelah on Saturday December 6. These estimates of dead fuel moisture are derived from our model, which calculates moisture content from gridded maps of temperature and humidity.

Low fuel moisture and strong winds mean higher fire risk. But there are other factors too.

The majority of homes lost in NSW were in Koolewong, just south of Gosford on the Central Coast. Steep terrain and poor access may have contributed to these losses.

Many homes in this region have been built close to eucalypt forests. We know houses are more likely to be destroyed by fire if situated in areas where forests make up more than 60% of the surrounding neighbourhood, compared with houses with a low percentage of surrounding forest.

Many homes here would have been built before current building codes that require bushfire-resistant construction came into effect.

Because performing hazard-reduction burns around homes in forest landscapes is challenging, there’s a greater onus on homeowners in forested areas to ensure their homes are prepared for fire as best as possible. Sometimes, even this won’t be enough.

Primed for fire once again

The fires at Koolewong and Bulahdelah burned through forests that narrowly escaped the 2019–20 Black Summer fires. These megafires burned more than 7.2 million hectares of southern Australia, an area larger than European nations such as Ireland and Denmark. NSW was hardest hit.

Since that devastating summer, NSW has had a reprieve. Years of wetter-than-average conditions followed, with the exception of 2023.

Bushfires burn through the built-up fuel on the ground, making fires in following years less likely. This protective effect is usually strongest in the first five years after fire.

This summer marks six years since the Black Summer. Wet conditions have meant fuel loads are fast recovering – especially in the tracts of land where severe fires raged, burning up into the canopy. After the fires, the blackened landscape was left with high light levels. This, coupled with several very wet years, has led to ideal conditions for vegetation growth.

Our recent research shows there are now very high levels of midstorey fuels in many areas – flammable shrubs and regenerating eucalypts. These elevated fuels can make a fire much more intense. That’s because they act as a ladder for flames burning along the forest floor to reach up into the trees and potentially start a canopy fire.

What lies ahead?

Drought conditions have now eased for much of southern Australia – with the exception of eastern NSW.

The Bureau of Meteorology has declared a weak La Niña event is in progress. These events typically bring wetter, cooler conditions to much of Australia. But this one seems weak, and climate change is making it harder to predict them based on the historic record. Long-range forecasts predict rainfall is actually likely to be lower than average over December.

These intense fires and dry conditions mean we should be careful this fire season – especially in drought-affected eastern NSW.

Rachael Helene Nolan, Associate Professor, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University; Chris Gordon, Research Fellow in Landscape Ecology, Western Sydney University, and Rachael Gallagher, Professor and ARC Future Fellow, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

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

During the last global coral bleaching event in 2023 and 2024 , the Great Barrier Reef experienced the highest temperatures for centuries and widespread bleaching. With bleaching events becoming more frequent, the very existence of coral reefs is under threat.

This, in case it’s not clear, is a major problem. Coral reef ecosystems are essential for many species of plants and animals to survive. They provide humans with essential food security (many fish can’t survive without them), prosperity (via tourism and fisheries) and shoreline protection.

But heat stress can weaken corals, making them vulnerable to disease. At the same time, warm conditions can make the pathogens that cause disease stronger and more virulent.

For our research, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we tracked hundreds of coral colonies on One Tree Reef in the southern Great Barrier Reef in Australia during a 2024 heatwave. Weakened by heat stress, one particular type of boulder coral, Goniopora, developed a disease called black band disease.

These corals are old – probably at least 100 years old – and are like the old growth forest of the reef.

Six months later, 75% of these coral colonies in the reef community we monitored were dead.

This is especially worrying because these massive corals are normally quite resilient to heat stress. Even the strong are now struggling to survive.

And their huge, dead bodies can detach from the reef and hurtle around, crushing and destroying other corals in their path.

What we found on the Great Barrier Reef

We were originally tracking multiple sites on One Tree Reef in response to an extreme heatwave. We wanted to understand which coral species were more resistant and which were more sensitive to heat stress.

It was a surprise to see the bleached boulder corals quickly get infected by black band disease.

Black band disease is caused by a group of pathogenic microbes that kill coral tissue. These pathogens naturally occur in the environment but this is the first time such a disease epidemic has been observed on the Great Barrier Reef.

The disease appears as a black band, leaving behind bare skeleton as it destroys the coral tissue and spreads throughout the colony. Around the world, black band disease has been recorded on many different coral species. This disease has wiped out reefs in the Caribbean and fundamentally altered reef structure and function.

A review of coral diseases on the Great Barrier Reef shows that black band disease is mostly found on branching corals. Branching corals are more delicate and tree-like in comparison to sturdy, boulder corals.

Our findings are curious because on One Tree Reef only one particular species, a normally resilient boulder-like coral, was affected.

Black band disease virtually wiped out these corals at the site we were monitoring.

In other words, ordinarily strong and resilient corals are now succumbing to this disease. This is extremely troubling.

Why is this worrying?

This boulder-like coral, specifically from the genus Goniopora, has long, flower-like tentacles that sway with the currents.

A key reef-building coral on the Great Barrier Reef, it is very slow-growing compared to branching corals. Goniopora tends to be more resistant to disturbance and is often found in areas of lower water quality.

Living for hundreds of years, it can form extensively large coral patches supporting a wide range of organisms. These long-lived corals form the backbone structure of reefs providing refuge for a range of invertebrates and fish. Because of their size, they help buffer coastlines from waves.

We found that six months after the 2024 heatwave, the colonies we were tracking had been all but wiped out. At least 75% were dead.

Of the surviving colonies, 64% had experienced partial coral tissue death due to black band disease. While other species of corals showed signs of recovery after the heatwave, we didn’t see any recovery at all for the boulder corals.

Killer bowling balls

One Tree Reef is one of the most protected coral reefs on the Great Barrier Reef.

Previously, outbreaks of black band disease have been linked to coastal stressors such as pollution and high nutrients. Given One Tree Reef is 80 km offshore in open ocean, its isolation protects it from land-based pressures.

This makes the disease prevalence and rapid spread at One Tree Reef particularly concerning.

Once the coral tissue is killed by the disease, the skeleton is quickly covered by algae (and other organisms) that eat away at the skeleton. We noticed the breakdown of the boulder coral skeleton began surprisingly fast after the colony died.

This process usually takes many months to years. By six months, though, we found these boulder corals were unstable and began to detach from the reef.

This is dangerous as they can act like bowling balls if moved by waves and tropical cyclones, destroying surrounding reef.

These large structural corals that have survived for hundreds of years are now lost from this reef, resulting in a potentially permanent change to the ecosystem.

Black band disease is one of the earliest recorded coral diseases, first identified in the Caribbean. There, it has driven high mortality in corals and reshaped entire coral communities. Our results are beginning to echo these devastating disease outbreaks seen in the Caribbean.

With coral disease expected to rise with climate change, our findings reinforce the need for urgent global action and for ambitious climate and reduced emissions targets.

Shawna Foo, Senior Research Fellow, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney and Maria Byrne, Professor of Marine Biology, University of Sydney

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

Australia’s electricity grids are undergoing a profound transformation. Solar and wind have provided 99% of new generating capacity since 2015. Last month, renewables hit parity with fossil fuels for the first time.

But there’s a lesser-known part to the story. Renewable output varies, which means they need to be backed up. For years, authorities have predicted gas power stations would remain necessary to back up or “firm” renewables. But increasingly, this work is being done instead by large-scale batteries.

Grid batteries have rapidly moved from a supporting role to prime time by firming renewables, ramping up output very rapidly and boosting system security by ensuring a stable voltage. Battery capacity in the pipeline has soared from 3 gigawatts in 2022 to 26GW in 2025 in Australia’s main power grid, the National Electricity Market.

Batteries can soak up a glut of solar and release it back to the grid during evenings. It’s nowhere more visible than in isolated Western Australia, which has its own separate power grids.

In recent months, renewables (largely solar) have begun supplying more than half (55%) of the electricity to WA’s Wholesale Electricity Market. Batteries are increasingly overtaking large-scale solar and gas generation in meeting peak demand.

As grid operators grow more comfortable with the capabilities of grid batteries, it will become less necessary to burn gas for power. One of the world’s top gas exporters is now demonstrating how to avoid using this fossil fuel.

Batteries coming of age

The latest plans from the Australian Energy Market Operator show battery storage is anticipated to keep growing sharply.

The market operator anticipates Australia will need 14GW of gas power capacity by 2050. Gas will shift from firing up at times of peak demand to act largely as a backup for renewables and storage.

But even this role isn’t certain. The plunging cost of grid-scale batteries means gas and even hydropower will struggle to compete over the next ten years. Other analysts have come to similar conclusions.

Western Australia, global testbed

WA has taken up batteries at remarkable speed. Major new systems have been deployed in Kwinana, an industrial area of Perth, and the coal town of Collie. Collectively, these grid batteries have more than 5 gigawatt-hours of storage.

These batteries supplied more than 20% of evening peak demand and surpassing gas generation sources in a recent week.

Throughout November, renewables provided 55% of power to WA’s main grid, well above the National Energy Market’s 50%. What’s impressive is this was achieved without using hydropower or drawing power from other states. The system relied on rooftop solar, solar farms, wind and batteries.

Overseas, states such as California have been using batteries with significant success. And, WA is showing how it can be done without interconnections.

Records tumbled throughout November, including periods where wind and solar met 100% of demand in WA’s main grid. Batteries meant some coal and gas generators kept running to provide grid services but not power. As grid batteries expand, this won’t be necessary.

Coal is already on life support in Australia. And, in this fastest energy transformation in human history, WA is showing that gas, too, will pass and be replaced.

Batteries bypassing gas in the main grid

In November, the National Electricity Market also passed a major milestone when large batteries put more power into the grid than gas peaker plants for the first time.

Industry analysts now expect batteries to become the primary tool to firm renewables on Australia’s main grid within a few years. The Eraring, Mortlake and Melbourne Renewable Energy Hub grid batteries will soon come online. Investment in grid batteries has surged from A$100 million to billions a year.

The federal government’s new home battery subsidy scheme has been wildly popular. Around 146,000 have now been installed, though there are questions about cost blowout and the size of batteries installed.

Distributed energy storage such as home batteries and electric vehicle batteries could supply more overall storage than grid-scale batteries before 2030.

The facts on the ground are changing quicker than many policymakers anticipated.

The heartbeat of the grid

One challenge for clean grids is how to replace the spinning turbines of coal and gas plants, which have stabilised electricity voltage for decades. Solar and wind can’t easily provide the vital inertia these spinning machines provide.

It turns out big batteries can provide this service without spinning turbines. In recent months, there’s been debate over whether big batteries will be allowed to stabilise the grid – essentially, giving the grid its heartbeat.

Australia’s energy market operator anticipates an increasing role for batteries to do this work too by pairing batteries with grid-forming inverters and “virtual synchronous machines” to ensure electricity is delivered at the grid requirements for frequency and voltage.

Real-world applications in Australia and elsewhere show batteries can do the job more precisely and efficiently than fossil fuel plants.

The question now is how quickly market rules and grid standards can be updated to allow batteries and inverters to do this at scale.

Of course, batteries aren’t a silver bullet. As the market operator’s plan for the electricity system makes clear, the optimal future grid will combine grid-scale batteries, pumped hydro, management of electricity demand, and widespread rooftop solar, home batteries and EV batteries.

Finding ways to coordinate use of Australia’s rapidly growing household energy storage capacity and tapping into EV batteries through V2G technology could avoid overspending on grid-scale storage.

A farewell to gas?

As battery storage grows, the need for a gas backup for the grid will shrink.

Expensive gas peaking plants are already being outcompeted in Australia’s main grid, while WA’s enthusiastic battery takeup is showing how isolated grids can rely more and more on solar, wind and storage.

Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University and Ray Wills, Adjunct Professor, The University of Western Australia

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

Glacial earthquakes are a special type of earthquake generated in cold, icy regions. First discovered in the northern hemisphere more than 20 years ago, these quakes occur when huge chunks of ice fall from glaciers into the sea.

Until now, only a very few have been found in the Antarctic. In a new study soon to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence for hundreds of these quakes in Antarctica between 2010 and 2023, mostly at the ocean end of the Thwaites Glacier – the so-called Doomsday Glacier that could send sea levels rising rapidly if it were to collapse.

A recent discovery

A glacial earthquake is created when tall, thin icebergs fall off the end of a glacier into the ocean.

When these icebergs capsize, they clash violently with the “mother” glacier. The clash generates strong mechanical ground vibrations, or seismic waves, that propagate thousands of kilometres from the origin.

What makes glacial earthquakes unique is that they do not generate any high-frequency seismic waves. These waves play a vital role in the detection and location of typical seismic sources, such as earthquakes, volcanoes and nuclear explosions.

Due to this difference, glacial earthquakes were only discovered relatively recently, despite other seismic sources having been documented routinely for several decades.

Varying with the seasons

Most glacial earthquakes detected so far have been located near the ends of glaciers in Greenland, the largest ice cap in the northern hemisphere.

The Greenland glacial earthquakes are relatively large in magnitude. The largest ones are similar in size to those caused by nuclear tests conducted by North Korea in the past two decades. As such, they have been detected by a high-quality, continuously operating seismic monitoring network worldwide.

The Greenland events vary with the seasons, occurring more often in late summer. They have also become more common in recent decades. The signs may be associated with a faster rate of global warming in the polar regions.

Elusive evidence

Although Antarctica is the largest ice sheet on Earth, direct evidence of glacial earthquakes caused by capsizing icebergs there has been elusive. Most previous attempts to detect Antarctic glacial earthquakes used the worldwide network of seismic detectors.

However, if Antarctic glacial earthquakes are of much lower magnitude than those in Greenland, the global network may not detect them.

In my new study, I used seismic stations in Antarctica itself to look for signs of these quakes. My search turned up more than 360 glacier seismic events, most of which are not yet included in any earthquake catalogue.

The events I detected were in two clusters, near Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers. These glaciers have been the largest sources of sea-level rise from Antarctica.

Earthquakes at the Doomsday Glacier

Thwaites Glacier is sometimes known as the Doomsday Glacier. If it were to collapse completely it would raise global sea levels by 3 metres, and it also has the potential to fall apart rapidly.

About two-thirds of the events I detected – 245 out of 362 – were located near the marine end of Thwaites. Most of these events are likely glacial earthquakes due to capsizing icebergs.

The strongest driver of such events does not appear to be the annual oscillation of warm air temperatures that drives the seasonal behaviour of Greenland glacier earthquakes.

Instead, the most prolific period of glacial earthquakes at Thwaites, between 2018 and 2020, coincides with a period of accelerated flow of the glacier’s ice tongue towards the sea. The ice-tongue speed-up period was independently confirmed by satellite observations.

This speed-up could have been caused by ocean conditions, the effect of which is not yet well understood.

The findings suggest the short-term scale impact of ocean states on the stability of marine-terminating glaciers. This is worth further exploration to assess the potential contribution of the glacier to future sea-level rise.

The second largest cluster of detections occurred near the Pine Island Glacier. However, these were consistently located 60–80 kilometres from the waterfront, so they are not likely to have been caused by capsizing icebergs.

These events remain puzzling and require follow-up research.

What’s next for Antarctic glacial earthquake research

The detection of glacial earthquakes associated with iceberg calving at Thwaites Glacier could help answer several important research questions. These include a fundamental question about the potential instability of the Thwaites Glacier due to the interaction of the ocean, ice and solid ground near where it meets the sea.

Better understanding may hold the key to resolving the current large uncertainty in the projected sea-level rise over the next couple of centuries.

Thanh-Son Pham, ARC DECRA Fellow in Geophysics, Australian National University

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

Ahead of the United Nations climate summit in Belém last month, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva urged world leaders to agree to roadmaps away from fossil fuels and deforestation and pledge the resources to meet these goals.

After failing to secure consensus, COP president Andre Corrêa do Lago announced these roadmaps as a voluntary initiative. Brazil will report back on progress at next year’s UN climate summit, COP31, when it hands the presidency to Turkey and Australia chairs the negotiations.

Why now?

These goals originate in the outcomes of the first global stocktake of the world’s progress towards the Paris Agreement goals, undertaken in 2023.

At the COP28 talks in Dubai in that year, there was an agreement to transition away from fossil fuels and to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.

Yet achieving these goals relies on a “just transition”, where no country is left behind in the transition to a low-carbon future, including a “core package” of public finance to address climate adaptation, and loss and damage. The Belém outcome fell short.

Forests need urgent protection

Forest loss and degradation is continuing, at an average rate of 25 million hectares a year over the last decade, according to the Global Forest Watch. This is 63% higher than the rate needed to meet existing targets to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. Yet the climate pledges submitted for the Belém COP remain far off track from this goal.

In the 2025 Land Gap Report, my colleagues and I calculated the scale of this “forest gap” – the gap between 2030 targets and the plans countries are putting forward in their climate pledges.

We show the pledges submitted up until this year’s climate summit would cut deforestation by less than 50% by 2030, meaning forests spanning almost 4 million hectares would still be cut down. The pledges would lead to forest degradation – where the ecological integrity of a forest area is diminished – of almost 16 million hectares. This is only a 10% reduction on current rates.

Together, this equates to an anticipated “forest gap” of around 20 million hectares expected to be lost or degraded each year by 2030. That’s about twice the size of South Korea.

While this underscores the inadequacy of commitments, the analysis is based on pledges submitted up to the start of November 2025, at which point only 40% of countries had submitted an updated plan. Major pledges submitted during COP31, such as from the European Union and China, don’t change this analysis.

Forest wins in Belém

A new fund for forest conservation called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility was launched in Brazil, attracting $US6.7 billion in pledges ($A9.9 billion).

The forest fund focuses on tropical deforestation, the leading cause of emissions from forest loss. But it has a key weakness: the limited monitoring of forest degradation, which could allow countries to receive payments while still logging primary forests.

The fund will establish a science committee and plans to revise monitoring indicators over the next three years, creating an opportunity to strengthen its ability to protect tropical forests.

The COP30 leaders’ summit also saw the launch of a historic pledge of $US1.8 billion ($A2.7 billion) to support conservation and recognition of 160 million hectares of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ territories in tropical forest countries.

But global action on forests needs to extend beyond the tropics. Across both deforestation and forest degradation, countries in the global north are responsible for over half of global tree cover loss over the past decade.

Beyond tropical forests

A global accountability framework on forests is needed to increase ambition on climate action, including in countries and regions with extensive forests outside of the tropics, such as Australia, Canada and Europe.

In these regions, industrial logging is a major driver of tree-cover loss but receives far less political attention than tropical deforestation. Wide gaps in reporting – between deforestation and degradation – mean logging-related degradation often goes unreported.

In a recent report, only 59 countries said they monitor forest degradation. Of these, almost three-quarters are tropical forest countries.

The IUCN World Conservation Congress which convened in Abu Dhabi this year prior to the climate talks, passed a motion on delivering equitable accountability and means of implementation for international forest protection goals. This arose from a recognised need to promote greater equity between forest protection standards across countries.

All of this points to an urgent need to tackle accountability in global forest governance. The forest roadmap to be developed for COP31 in Turkey could help drive stronger alignment and transparency across UN processes – from the UN Forum on Forests’ 2017–2030 plan to the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 2030 target to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

Australia could lead on forests

Australia could help shape global forest ambition in the year ahead. It is currently the only country whose emissions pledge promises to halt and reverse deforestation and degradation by 2030 – a clear signal that developed countries must lead.

As President of Negotiations at COP31, Australia can also work to bring Brazil’s fossil-fuel and forest roadmaps into formal negotiations. But this depends on two things: credible leadership from developed countries and long-overdue climate finance. As a deforestation hotspot with ongoing native forest logging, Australia has considerable work to do to meet this responsibility.

Kate Dooley, Senior Research Fellow, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

Sydney, like many other Australian cities, has a long history of urban farming. Market gardens, oyster fisheries and wineries on urban fringe once supplied fresh food to city markets.

As suburbs expanded, many farms in and around cities were converted to houses, roads and parks. The process is continuing.

But this isn’t the whole story. Urban farming is making a comeback in a different guise.

Underneath the Barangaroo towers in Sydney’s CBD, a basement carpark has been transformed into a farm. Trays of more than 40 different varieties of sprouts and microgreens grow under LED lights, often maturing within two weeks. Within hours of harvest, they’re in the kitchens of nearby restaurants.

The urban farmers use sensors, ventilation systems and smartphone apps to ensure growing conditions are ideal. From around 150 square metres, farmers produce about 5,000 punnets a week. Farms such as this one at Urban Green Sydney are part of a broader shift towards high-tech urban farming.

In my research, we asked what these new forms of urban farming mean for cities. Do they make cities and their far-flung food supply chains more resilient to climate change – or do they consume energy without enough to show for it?

Greenhouse – or laboratory?

Greenhouses are a way of controlling the growing conditions for plants. The technology has deep historical roots, from early greenhouse experiments during the Roman Empire to progress in 15th century Korea and advances during the Victorian era such as the Wardian Case, which allowed live plants to survive long sea voyages.

Traditional greenhouses act as climate-controlled enclosures for plants. These days, smart greenhouses use sensors and digital monitoring to optimise, and often automate, plant growth.

Large-scale rural farms such as South Australia’s Sundrop Farms already demonstrate how smart greenhouses, renewable energy and desalination can power food production in harsh climates. Overseas, countries including Spain and China have rolled out smart greenhouses at scale in rural areas.

But these technologies are being urbanised, appearing in commercial buildings, rooftops and even domestic kitchens.

One of the best places to see what smart greenhouses look like is the Agritech Precinct at Western Sydney University. Here, researchers experiment with the “unprecedented control” of temperature, humidity and light the technologies permit on crops such as eggplants and lettuce.

The greenhouses use drones to water crops, robotic arms to harvest them and smart lighting systems to manage growth. Visiting these facilities doesn’t give you the sense you’re in a farm. It feels more like a laboratory.

Technologies like these are promoted in official plans for Greater Sydney, which call for “new opportunities for growing fresh food close to a growing population and freight export infrastructure associated with the Western Sydney Airport”, particularly in Sydney’s peri-urban areas.

Australia is funding research on improving these technologies as a way to future-proof food production.

Researchers are conducting similar experiments with smart greenhouses around the world, from the United States to the Netherlands.

Which crops work best in cities?

Smart greenhouses can’t do everything.

Grain crops need much more space. Fruit trees don’t work well with space constraints. Some vegetable crops don’t lend themselves well to intense high-tech production.

The cost of running LED lights and smart systems mean farmers have to focus on what’s profitable. Many hyped urban farming ventures have failed.

These challenges don’t mean the approach is worthless. But it does mean farmers have to be selective about what they grow. To date, crops such as tomatoes, leafy greens, and herbs have proven the best performers. These crops can be grown relatively quickly in space-restricted, repurposed urban areas mostly hidden from public view and sold to restaurants or individual buyers.

Smart greenhouses producing these type of crops have emerged in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide.

Urban farmers often draw on the promise of sustainability and low food miles in their branding. But the technologies raise questions around equity. Do these farms share environmental and social benefits fairly across the city or are they concentrated in a few rich areas?

Smart greenhouse technology – at home?

The humble veggie patch is an Australian staple. But the shift to apartment living and larger building sizes risks crowding it out.

At household scale, smart greenhouses and apps are making it possible for some people to begin producing larger volumes of food in kitchens, balconies and backyards as a DIY method of boosting food security and self-sufficiency.

Compact growing appliances promise to automate production of fresh herbs and baby vegetables. Hydroponic grow tents can grow almost anything indoors (though they are commonly used for illicit crops). Maker communities are using open-source tools such as Hackster to automate watering, lighting and data collection.

Using these technologies at home seems positive, acting to boost home-grown food supplies and increase resilience in the face of food supply chain issues. In fact, it’s perhaps the most uneven frontier. Rather than working to spread smart agriculture across a cityscape, these approaches resemble prepping – efforts to boost individual household resilience.

Making best use of smart greenhouses in cities

At their best, smart greenhouses dotted around cities work to create controlled environments where food can be produced close to where it is eaten. These high-tech, climate controlled environments are often hidden from view.

They promise resilience against the disruption climate change is bringing to agriculture and shorter supply chains. But these food production technologies also risk deepening inequality if they’re mainly taken up by wealthy consumers.

Whether these technologies ultimately benefit cities will depend on how they are integrated and positioned within our urban systems.

For urban authorities, the challenge is to ensure these emerging methods of producing food in the heart of cities boosts resilience collectively rather than fragment it. It will take policy guidance to ensure the benefits of these smart farms are shared equally.

Vera Xia, Lecturer in Design and Urban Technology, University of Sydney

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

It seemed inevitable – politically at least – that the federal government would step in to save Tomago Aluminium in New South Wales, Australia’s largest aluminium smelter.

Rio Tinto, the owners of Tomago, has enjoyed attractively priced electricity for a long time, most recently with AGL. But this contract ends in 2028. Unable to find a replacement at a price it could accept, Rio Tinto warned that Tomago was facing closure. Tomago produces more than one-third of Australia’s aluminium and accounts for 12% of NSW’s energy consumption.

On Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a Commonwealth-led deal for electricity supply beyond 2028. This deal will provide the smelter with billions of dollars in subsidised power from the Commonwealth-owned Snowy Hydro through a portfolio of renewables, backed by storage and gas. This follows months of negotiation to avoid the smelter closing and sacking its roughly 1,000 workers.

The government has provided funding to support other struggling manufacturers such as the Whyalla steelworks and the Mount Isa copper smelter, and wants to see aluminium production continue in Australia. About 30–40% of the cost of making aluminium is the energy, so it’s a huge input. Electricity from the market would have been considerably more expensive, so the government is subsidising the commercial price.

The deal may have been a necessary and immediate solution to a political problem with local economic and social impacts. However, it raises several important questions about the risks involved and the longevity of the plant.

Risks and benefits

First, to what risk is the federal government exposed? Commodity markets such as aluminium are prone to difficult cycles, and there’s a chance Tomago might not survive at all, in which case the government is off the hook.

Not only are we looking to subsidise Tomago’s electricity, but we are looking for Snowy Hydro to invest in renewable energy projects and build more renewable energy in NSW. The history of building renewable energy and its support transmission infrastructure suggests that both cost and time constraints become problematic. The NSW government may have a role in supporting this side of the deal.

The Commonwealth’s case for making this deal is presumably underpinned by its Future made in Australia policy. This says we should be supporting industries where there’s a national interest in a low-emissions world. So if, for example, we can see a future where subsidising Tomago’s electricity for five or ten years would mean it can produce low-emission aluminium the world wants to buy, that would be a success.

But what happens if, after five or ten years, the world hasn’t sufficiently changed to provide enough renewable energy to make our electricity cost less? What if the rest of the world wants green, low-emissions aluminium, but that’s not what Australia produces? If the risks the government is underwriting crystallise in a bad way, does the government have an exit strategy?

We’ve been here before

In 1984, under the leadership of John Cain, the Labor government signed a joint venture agreement with Alcoa to build an aluminium smelter at Portland, including a deal to subsidise electricity until 2016. Forty years later, we’re still pay for it.

With Tomago, we don’t want Australian taxpayers exposed to something over which we have no control – the global price of aluminium. If the price of aluminium collapses, or Snowy Hydro is permanently uncompetitive or China dominates the world market, the hypothesis that Tomago can be competitive in the long term collapses.

Interestingly, this deal is very different to the one the Commonwealth and Queensland governments have done to support Rio Tinto’ Boyne smelter in Gladstone.

In October, Rio Tinto announced plans to possibly bring forward the closure of Gladstone Power Station to 2029, six years ahead of the current schedule, and supply the smelter with predominantly renewable electricity. The move was welcomed by environmental groups, as Gladstone is Queensland’s oldest and largest coal-fired station.

But some commentators have said closing the plant in four years’ time is unrealistic, and a staged phase-out would be better.

The announcement this week, welcomed by the business and its workers, is probably unsurprising. But we haven’t seen the detail. The government may very well have a case for this deal, but the future of the plant and its power supply remain unknowable. The risks with taxpayer funds may have been worth taking, but they should be clearly explained and justified.

Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute

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

It’s common for Australians to use social media to find their next hike or swimming spot. And there’s a huge array of travel influencers willing to supply the #inspo for their next trip.

Many of these influencers create their content in a way that respects the environment and their followers. But unfortunately, not all #travelspo is made with such consideration.

My new research reveals how Australian travel and adventure influencers think about risk, responsibility and their role in shaping how their followers behave in natural environments.

Collectively, their accounts reach tens of thousands of people and prompt them to visit these parks in real life. Yet most influencers in my study saw themselves as entertainers, not educators.

And that distinction can have consequences, such as falls and drownings. People are risking their lives at cliff edges, mountain overhangs and around water. In fact, 379 people died taking selfies between 2008 and 2021.

‘Here to inspire, not teach’

I interviewed 19 Australian influencers aged 23–41 who specialise in travel and outdoor content.

Despite their large followings (up to 80,000), many rejected the idea they have a responsibility to overtly warn people about hazards.

As one put it:

“We’re not an education page. If you want [to know?] what you should and shouldn’t be doing, follow a National Parks page.”

Another explained that influencers are :

“just there to entertain.”

Influencers consistently distanced themselves from the expectation they should communicate safety information. Many argued it was up to followers to “do their own research” or take “personal responsibility” when attempting the difficult hikes, cliff-edge photos or waterhole jumps they had seen online.

A few admitted they would “feel guilty” if someone was injured imitating their content, but quickly neutralised that responsibility by noting there was no way to know whether their post had caused the behaviour.

Why downplay hazards?

Social media platforms reward spectacular content. Posts showing people on cliff edges, waterfalls, remote rock formations or narrow ledges outperform more banal imagery.

One influencer was blunt:

“People want to watch people do crazy things… not talk about risk.”

Others acknowledged they sometimes entered closed areas or assessed hazards themselves, dismissing signage unless they believed it related to environmental or cultural protection.

A national survey we conducted found that social norms – the sense that “everyone does this” or will admire it – strongly predicted risky behaviour outdoors. People were far more likely to climb out onto ledges or jump into waterfalls if they believed others would approve. How risky they thought the activity was barely seemed to matter.

Influencers also curate a platform-specific aesthetic: Instagram is “perfect”, TikTok more “raw”, but neither encourages long, careful explanations of risk. Detailed safety advice was described as “ruining the vibe” or diminishing the illusion that inspires engagement.

This creates a perverse incentive: the more dangerous the content looks, the better it performs, meaning influencers may unintentionally promote behaviours unsafe for many followers.

Online posts are trusted

Australians treat influencer content as a trusted source of outdoor inspiration.

Followers may assume a location is safe because an influencer went there and filmed it. This impression is strengthened by the influencers’ perceived authenticity — a form of experiential credibility that substitutes for formal expertise.

Influencers in my study acknowledged their posts can send large numbers of unprepared visitors to fragile or hazardous environments. Some refused to share exact locations for this reason. Others posted the image but omitted details to avoid encouraging inexperienced users to attempt risky spots.

But most still avoided overt safety messaging because it felt mismatched to their brand — or simply because posts that highlighted difficulty or danger “don’t perform well”.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, our increasingly curated experience of the outdoors – from manicured trails to social media-driven expectations – has weakened the sense of personal responsibility that once came with venturing into nature.

Influencer content amplifies this shift by presenting the outdoors as effortless, aesthetic and risk-free, even when the reality is very different.

Why this matters

This dynamic creates challenges for Australia’s national parks and land managers. My earlier research showed rangers are dealing with increased injuries, rescues and environmental strain linked to social media-driven visitation.

In my work with the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, I saw first-hand how social media funnels huge numbers of people into the same photogenic spots.

About a third of visitors said Instagram had influenced their decision to visit, and many described going “for the photo” rather than for the walk or the landscape itself. That behaviour often puts pressure on rangers and increases the likelihood of slips, falls and rescues.

Influencers hold enormous reach with audiences that official agencies often struggle to connect with. Many are open to collaborating – but only when safety messages can be delivered in ways that fit their storytelling style and personal brand.

As one influencer summed up:

“If it’s culturally sensitive or damaging to the environment, that’s where I draw the line. But safety – I’m happy to push the boundaries.”

Risk-taking gets rewarded

Influencers are not acting maliciously. They operate within a commercial and algorithmic system that rewards spectacle over nuance.

But understanding how they see their role helps explain why risky content thrives — and why followers may misjudge the real-world hazards behind the perfect shot.

If organisations want to reduce injuries and environmental pressures, engaging influencers through co-designed communication strategies may be essential. Because for many Australians, the journey outdoors now begins on a screen.

Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate in Public Health & Community Medicine, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney

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

Humans have moved plants and animals well beyond their native ranges, across barriers that normally prevent dispersal. As a result, people have increased the rates of hybridisation between populations that were once isolated for thousands, or even millions, of years.

Animal hybrids are a controversial issue among scientists, as they often suffer from health issues.

But our new study of Australian dingoes, published in the journal PNAS, found that hybridisation with introduced European dogs might have had evolutionary benefits.

New species can evolve when a subset of the population becomes separated, often by physical barriers like mountains or oceans. Over time, these isolated populations accumulate unique genetic mutations, some of which become fixed. If these populations spend long enough apart, they become so different they can no longer interbreed.

Although they were once domestic, dingoes became isolated from other dogs around 3,500 years ago and evolved into free-living apex predators. Some scientists argue that the dingoes’ distinct appearance and behaviour warrant their recognition as a new species. Others claim that hybridisation with domestic dogs, which were brought to the continent by Europeans from the late-18th century onwards, has blurred this boundary.

Humans have been moving animals around for millennia. When farmers spread from the Near East into Europe around 8,500 years ago, for example, the domestic pigs that accompanied them came into contact and mated with European wild boar. In some cases where there were no closely related native populations, however, such as the import of exotic animals during the Roman period, escapees formed feral populations. Dingoes fit into this second category.

Species translocations and hybridisation accelerated during the colonial period, which reshaped local ecosystems. Hybrid offspring can lose the unique traits that allowed their parent populations to thrive in their specific habitats. Other effects are invisible, and can only be teased out of genetic studies.

For instance, across Asia, diversity in wild red jungle fowl populations is being lost through interbreeding with domestic chickens. In the Americas, almost all traces of Indigenous dog diversity was wiped out through hybridisation with introduced European dogs.

Hybridisation can also be beneficial. The acquisition of alleles (a different version of a gene) from another population may improve an animal’s survival in new environments, or make them resistant to new diseases.

The ancestors of modern human populations on the Tibetan Plateau, for example, inherited an allele of the EPAS1 gene from Denisovans (a closely related human species) that improved their ability to live at high altitudes.

The dingo debate

Since dingoes were only isolated from other dog populations for a few thousand years, it is not a surprise that they can readily interbreed. The “purity” of dingoes is therefore a great source of conflict between conservationists, farmers and policy makers, and is used by both sides to justify policies to either protect or persecute dingoes.

Some genetic studies have suggested that dingo-dog hybridisation has not taken place, while others indicate most dingo populations have some level of European dog ancestry. A fundamental issue with these studies is that they require comparison against a “pure” reference population. Given centuries of overlap between dingoes and dogs, it is almost impossible to be sure that modern populations do not have mixed ancestry.

To circumvent this issue, our study sequenced genomes from ancient dingo bones recovered from caves on the Nullarbor Plain in southern Australia. Crucially, this included dingoes that lived and died prior to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. Establishing a precolonial baseline of ancestry for dingoes allowed us to to pinpoint the degree of European dog ancestry in dingo populations across Australia today.

Our genetic analysis showed that most dingoes living in the northwest of Australia did not have any detectable European dog ancestry. The opposite was true in the southeast, where almost a quarter of the genome of some dingoes came from European dogs.

Further investigation found that the European ancestry was in fact broken up into small chunks throughout the genome of dingoes, indicating that interbreeding took place at least ten generations (or 30 years) ago.

In fact, most of the hybrid mating coincided with the outset of aerial baiting programs in the mid-20th century, when poisoned meat was dropped from helicopters to kill dingoes en masse. This reinforces similar findings in Scottish wildcats, which shows local populations were resistant to interbreeding with invasive (domestic cat) populations until their own numbers declined to the point where finding a suitable mate (another wildcat) became too difficult.

Diversity is the key to success

Superficially, gene flow between dingoes and European dogs sounds like a negative outcome. Our research, however, suggests that dingoes have actually benefited. Hybridisation has led to an increase in genetic diversity in dingoes across southeast Australia, potentially offsetting the negative effects of inbreeding.

We also found evidence that a few alleles, which were transmitted from dogs to dingoes via interbreeding, may provide better protection against infectious diseases brought to the continent by European dogs.

Despite being an introduced species, dingoes are now adapted to Australia’s varied ecosystems. Based on our results, we suggest that instead of prioritising “purity”, future conservation efforts should focus on maintaining large enough populations for natural selection to operate effectively, so that dingoes can maintain their position as Australia’s apex predator.

Hybrids are becoming increasingly common as humans and their domesticates continue to encroach into wild habitats, from Scottish salmon to Andean alpacas. In order to understand the impacts, both positive and negative, of this hybridisation, our results suggest we must first look to the past.

Lachie Scarsbrook, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Genetics, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford; Greger Larson, Professor of Palaeogenomics, University of Oxford, and Laurent Frantz, Professor of Palaeogenomics, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

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

People typically think about evolution as a linear process where, within a species, the classic adage of “survival of the fittest” is constantly at play. New DNA mutations arise and get passed from parents to offspring. If any genetic changes prove to be beneficial, they might give those young a survival edge.

Over the great span of time – through the slow closing of a land bridge here or the rise of a mountain range there – species eventually split. They go on evolving slowly along their own trajectories with their own unique mutations. That’s the process that over the past 3.5 billion years has created the millions of branches on the evolutionary tree of life.

However, new genome sequencing data reveals an unexpected twist to this long evolutionary story. It turns out that the boundaries between species on their own branches of this tree are a little more permeable than previously thought. Rather than waiting around for new mutations to solve a particular problem, interbreeding between different species can introduce ready-made genetic advantages.

Unraveling the story of life, one genome at a time

As an evolutionary biologist, I’ve been studying the stories written in the genomes of animals for over two decades. I focus mostly on colorful songbirds called wood warblers that hail from North, Central and South America. There are approximately 115 species in total, and they come in a dazzling array of bright colors.

Some of these birds might be familiar to you, such as the brilliant Blackburnian warbler (Setophaga fusca), which lights up the tops of the pine trees in the eastern forests of the U.S. and Canada during spring and summer. Other warbler species might be less familiar, like the pink-headed warbler (Cardellina versicolor), which lives only in the highlands of Guatemala and southern Mexico.

The story of these New World warblers was written within the past 10 million years or so – relatively recently in evolutionary terms. They’re all, in effect, “evolutionary neighbors,” sitting next to each other at the tips of the crown of the tree of life. In my team’s most recent work, led by evolutionary biologist Kevin Bennett, we gathered a massive amount of data from warbler genomes – over 2 trillion base pairs, from nearly every species of warbler – to learn more about their evolutionary history.

We found that some species have unexpectedly leaped over evolutionary hurdles by sharing solutions to evolutionary problems. We are now learning from this kind of data that species aren’t just vertical, evolutionary silos, as we once thought. Instead, there is much more horizontal “cross talk” among the branches of the evolutionary tree.

These warblers now join Amazonian butterflies, cichlid fish in Africa, as well as our own hominid lineage, as exemplars of this process of evolutionary sharing.

How does evolutionary sharing actually occur?

Genetic sharing among evolutionary neighbors all happens through hybrids: the offspring produced when individuals from two species mate. Famous hybrids include offspring between polar and grizzly bears – affectionately called “pizzly” bears – as well as mules, the offspring of horses and donkeys.

But unlike mules, which are sterile and cannot reproduce, in instances of natural warbler hybrids, we think these rare offspring can sometimes “backcross”: They breed with one of the parental species, ultimately moving genes across species boundaries. These hybrids are the genetic conduit by which genes are shared across the branches in the evolutionary tree.

But aren’t we all taught in biology class that species can’t interbreed with other species? Isn’t that what helps define a species?

In reality, biology always has its exceptions and fuzzy edges. And this is one: Species result from the very gradual process of speciation, which typically takes millions of years. The taxonomic boxes we humans like to put around “species” don’t typically capture the blurry borders around lineages early in this long process, when otherwise distinct plants and animals can still interbreed.

Indeed, my lab has described many interspecies and intergenus hybrids in warblers, including at least one arising from both. We’ve also identified “hybrid zones” between very closely related species, where hybridization is rampant.

And if the genes within these hybrids are beneficial in the recipient species, they’ll spread – just like a new, beneficial mutation passed to an offspring. In this case, it’s not just a single mutation but can be a whole new complement of mutations in multiple genes.

Shared genes solve ‘evolutionary problems’

Our most recent work in wood warblers shows that the evolutionary solutions they’re sharing are related to their coloration.

In this family of birds, we previously identified genes related to their carotenoid-based coloration. Carotenoid pigments give birds their brilliant orange, yellow and red plumes – colors that are exemplified by the aptly named yellow warbler. But birds, like all vertebrates, can’t synthesize carotenoid pigments on their own. They need to obtain carotenoids from their diet and then chemically process them.

But processing carotenoids appears to be an evolutionary hurdle that not all birds have jumped and a rather difficult problem to solve. Our genome sequencing shows that these warblers have more shared carotenoid genes than other shared genes in their genome, and it’s likely that different versions of carotenoid-processing genes improve the recipients’ fitness.

One carotenoid-processing gene, called beta-carotene oxygenase 2, or BCO2, has been shared several times within this single family of birds. Moreover, BCO2 appears to be so popular that it shows second-order sharing: passing from one species to another, and then on to a third.

A sign of quality on the mating circuit

My colleagues and I think these genes are so popular because male warblers use these carotenoid colors to attract females that have a discerning eye. Male birds obtain carotenoids from the insects they eat. The idea is that the more colorful a male is, the higher the quality of its diet.

From across the forest, the males’ rich carotenoid colors are signaling that they’d be good dads with good genes. Biologists call this kind of display an “honest signal.” And if males obtain a new gene that allows them to process carotenoids more efficiently, it’s likely to spread faster and farther into the species, as the brighter males will potentially have greater mating success.

Our research with warblers demonstrates how evolution can shuffle genes across the thin lines between species. These close evolutionary neighbors sometimes share DNA, including potentially beneficial mutations, by mating across the species lines defined by humans’ classification systems.

We suspect that the more we look, the more we’ll find this kind of borrowing among evolutionary neighbors. As we unravel the stories told in the genomes of nature’s problem-solvers, it’s likely we’ll find that their threads are deeply intertwined.

David Toews, Associate Professor of Biology, Penn State

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

Reptiles get a bad rap. As symbols of evil or villainy in Western culture, they are often linked to sin and betrayal, an association that dates all the way back to the origins of Judeochristian theology. This is not the case in all cultures though. Many other traditions see crocodiles, snakes and turtles as gods, guardians or symbols of transformation.

Despite this rich cultural history, a lot of popular belief surrounding reptiles is still negative. It is difficult to specify how much of this stems solely from folklore, as our aversion to reptiles is rooted in a mix of social and evolutionary factors.

Studies on primates suggest that we are predisposed to fear certain characteristics of snakes because of potential danger. Their lack of facial expression and dissimilarity from humans also plays a part, contributing to the perception of reptiles as strange, unintelligent creatures.

Additionally, reptiles are a diverse group that we actually know very little about. This, alongside their bad public image, influences how we treat them.

Substandard conditions

Although they tend to go unnoticed compared to birds and mammals, reptiles live alongside us. In the latest European Union report on animals used in research, from 2022, 0.1% were reptiles. Although this may seem small, it represents more than 4,500 individuals, a number that grew by almost 200% in four years. Furthermore, the report only includes animals in authorised procedures, and does not count reptiles captured temporarily.

This means an unknown number of animals are often housed in poor conditions that do not meet their basic needs, affecting both temporarily captured reptiles and those who spend their entire lives in captivity, whether as pets or in zoos. Although studies on this subject are limited, several indicate that their needs are rarely met, leading to health or behavioural problems such as repetitive interaction with the glass of the terrarium, which can cause injuries to the snout.

Improving reptile wellbeing

Environmental enrichment emerged to alleviate these deficiencies and offer animals something to do in environments that rarely change. Today, it is a field of study and a tool for improving animal welfare. It goes beyond merely addressing an animal’s basic needs; its aim is to enable them to thrive.

In practice, this means making additions to the environment (toys, structures, sensory or social stimulation) that promote natural behaviours. The key is not only to introduce changes, but to tailor them to the specific needs of each species and make sure they actually improve their welfare.

In a study based on my own doctoral thesis, we addressed the lack of attention reptiles have received in this field. First, we contacted European zoos to assess how they apply enrichment. Although most of them had measures in place, many of the practices referred to as “enrichment” did not go beyond meeting basic needs, such as maintaining a suitable temperature.

We then designed and evaluated enrichment proposals for two species of lizards of the genus Podarcis. One consisted of introducing smells (on pieces of paper) from other individuals into the terrariums, a natural stimulus that these lizards encounter daily in the outside world. Another consisted of a tree stump with holes that the lizards had to climb into and explore to find food. We also increased the structural and thermal complexity of the terrarium by adding platforms at different heights.

To assess the effects of enrichment on the well-being of the lizards, we observed their behaviour. In an enriched terrarium, the lizards rubbed against the glass less, reducing the risk of injury. They also spent more time moving around and sticking out their tongues, behaviours that show increased exploration of new stimuli. Animals have an innate desire to investigate and obtain information, and that exploration can be rewarding in itself.

In addition, we also measured corticosterone, a stress hormone (similar to cortisol) that can be analysed non-invasively in faeces. We found that its levels increased over time in captivity, except during enrichment phases, suggesting that enrichment reduces stress levels. Although preliminary, the data suggests that enrichment had a positive physiological impact on these lizards.

The lizard trade

Our findings help to challenge common misconceptions about reptiles. They are animals with complex cognitive abilities and social lives that exhibit playful behaviour. They have more needs than we recognise.

Although much remains to be done, reptiles and other traditionally overlooked animals are attracting increasing interest. The current situation makes it imperative, as most captive reptiles come from the wildlife trade – a profitable business for some, but one that claims many lives.

Up to 36% of reptile species are traded, often illegally. We know very little about the biology and behaviour of many of these species, yet we buy and sell them as if they were collectibles. Their wellbeing is rarely a priority: before being sold they are kept in unsanitary conditions, with no consideration for space, nutritional, temperature or humidity requirements.

After being sold, the premature death rate is over 70%. In addition to welfare issues, the trade in exotic animals also causes ecological damage, including overexploitation and the introduction of invasive species.

In this context, environmental enrichment is an opportunity to educate and raise awareness, helping to better understand the behaviour, abilities and needs of animals that are often ignored. As long as we continue to keep animals in captivity, ensuring their welfare will be our moral obligation.

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Alicia Bartolomé, Investigadora Doctora en Etología y Bienestar Animal, Universitat de València

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

As Earth continues to warm, Australia faces some important decisions.

For example, where should we place solar and wind energy infrastructure to reliably supply Australians with electricity? How can we secure our food production and freshwater supply? Should we invest in bigger dams to increase our resilience to drought, or better flood mitigation to manage more intense rainfall?

Deciding on the best path forward depends on having reliable and detailed information about about how wind, water and sunlight will behave in our future. This information is provided by climate models, large computer simulations of Earth that are based on the fundamental laws of physics and contain everything from the Sun’s radiation, the carbon cycle and clouds to the ocean circulation in mathematical equations.

Running these models requires the most powerful computers available – also known as supercomputers – as well as large amounts of space to store the model results for use by governments, businesses and scientists alike.

But right now, Australia’s supercomputers are falling behind the rest of the world – and this constitutes a serious risk to our ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

What is a supercomputer?

What makes a computer a supercomputer is its computing size and as a result, its ability to perform a huge number of calculations in a very short time.

Australia has two main national supercomputers for research: Gadi and Setonix.

Gadi, located at the National Computational Infrastructure at the Australian National University in Canberra, is the main machine used in climate computing in Australia. It contains a vast number of computer chips known as central processing units (CPUs) and graphical processing units (GPUs). It has more than 250,000 CPUs and 640 GPUs. It is the CPUs that have made Gadi the Australian climate computer of choice.

Compare this with my humble Macbook Pro M3, which effectively sports 11 CPUs and 12 GPUs, and you understand why Gadi is called a supercomputer.

There has always been a strong connection between supercomputing and climate modelling, with climate models steadily improving as scientists access bigger and better supercomputers.

The secret lies in being able to divide Earth into finer and finer pieces and adding more of the important processes that affect our weather and climate. Both enhance the reliability of the model results.

While most climate models divide Earth into a grid of squares roughly 100km in size, the most advanced global climate models today simulate the behaviour of Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land and ice using a grid of only a few kilometres. It’s like going from a grainy black and white television to an ultra high-definition one.

Doing so requires the most advanced supercomputers. These include LUMI in Europe and the Frontier machine in the United States.

These big machines aren’t just tools for climate scientists. They also underpin the operational delivery of climate information to all sectors of society safeguarding property and lives in the process.

A kilometre-scale climate modelling system for societal applications has just been developed in the European Union. Known as the “Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin”, it represents a major leap forward in our understanding of how climate change will impact Earth – and our ability to respond to it.

How does Australia stack up globally?

So how does Australia stack up in the quest to have a supercomputer that can produce the best climate information possible to future-proof our nation?

The Gadi supercomputer is currently ranked 179th in the world. It was in 24th position in 2020, when it was introduced.

For comparison, the Frontier supercomputer is ranked 2nd. The LUMI supercomputer is ranked 9th. Topping the list is El Capitan supercomputer in the US.

In May 2025 the federal government announced A$55 million to renew Gadi.

This is roughly two-thirds of the funding it received for its previous upgrade in 2019, and will only lead to a moderate increase in our climate computing abilities – well behind the rest of the world.

A major disadvantage

This puts Australia at a major disadvantage when it comes to planning for the future.

But why can’t we just use the more advanced models and supercomputers developed elsewhere?

First, apart from our own ACCESS global model, all climate models are built in the Northern Hemisphere. This means they are calibrated to do well there, with limited attention paid to our region.

Second, making good decisions about Australia’s future requires us to be self-sufficient when it comes to simulating the climate system using scenarios defined by us and relevant to our region.

This has recently been brought into sharp focus with recent cuts to climate science in the US.

In short, good decisions on our future require self-sufficiency in climate modelling. We actually have the software (the ACCESS model itself) to this, but the current and planned supercomputing and data infrastructure to run it on is simply outdated.

An ambitious solution

Learning lessons from the international community, it is time to think big and integrate the power of existing climate modelling with the emerging abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to build a “digital twin” of Australia.

With weather and climate at its heart, the digital twin can enable directly integrated new major features of Australia such as its ecosystems, cities and energy and transport systems.

The cost of such a facility and the research and operational need to enable it is large. But the cost of poor decisions based on outdated information could be even higher.

Christian Jakob, Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century, Monash University

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

As an ecologist who studies stingrays, people always ask me: what do these creatures eat? It may well be the reason I’ve spent the past three years tackling this very question.

We do know that, generally speaking, stingrays like eating benthic invertebrates – creepy-crawlies buried in the sediment along the sandy bottom. But there’s much we don’t understand about how the diet varies among different species depending on their size and where they live. In short, it’s more complex than you’d think.

My colleagues and I at James Cook University published a new study in Marine Ecology Progress Series that adds to this growing body of knowledge about what’s on the menu for these “flat sharks” – and what this could mean for protecting threatened species.

A smorgasbord of invertebrates

Shallow beach flats across Australia serve as nursery grounds for a variety of ray species, which is unsurprising given they also offer a smorgasbord of buried invertebrates.

However, due to high abundances of young rays, these areas may be more competitive than communal. Therefore, targeting different food items is a good strategy for reducing competition as well as starvation risk.

Figuring out how their diets gel with competitiveness isn’t just academic curiosity. Rays, including stingrays and their relatives, now rank among the most threatened vertebrate groups on Earth. However, we can’t properly identify valuable nursery habitats without a clear understanding of their underlying resources.

For juveniles in particular, information on what they eat has always been scarce, since this generally involves catching mass numbers of them and dissecting their stomachs to get their “last supper”. The good news is we now use other, non-lethal methods to fill in the gaps.

My team and I spent the better part of two years catching nearly 200 rays at Lucinda Beach in North Queensland. Lucinda was a model location for this dietary campaign and home to four ray species: the Australian whipray (Himantura australis), cowtail stingray (Pastinachus ater), brown whipray (Maculabatis toshi), and the giant shovelnose ray (Glaucostegus typus).

Once captured, we gently flushed their stomachs with a battery-powered water pump to extract freshly consumed items. We also collected muscle tissue samples for an analysis of carbon and nitrogen, which is another method for determining how much their diets overlapped.

What emerged was a surprisingly nuanced picture of who eats what and why.

Picky eaters

Aligning with other dietary studies from Australia, rays ate a mix of benthic crabs, prawns, molluscs and worms – yet diets varied at the species level.

For example, Australian whiprays showed a clear preference for prawns, shrimp and small crabs. In contrast, the cowtail stingray had the most generalised diet, regularly eating polychaete worms, bivalves and snails alongside the occasional prawn.

Notably, giant shovelnose rays and brown whiprays were both highly picky eaters, specialising almost exclusively on one type of prawn.

Does this support the idea of a competitive nursery environment? Most likely yes. The cowtail stingray has carved out its own niche by preferring prey that other species largely ignore, while Australian whiprays maximise their chances by consuming various crustaceans.

As for the two specialists, including the critically endangered giant shovelnose ray, they’re essentially betting their survival on a single menu item.

What makes rays choose their foods?

While it’s difficult to pinpoint a single cause for dietary differences among species that live in the same place, the answer lies partly in body shape, unique foraging behaviours, and prey availability.

In terms of tooth and jaw shape, some species like the cowtail stingray have hexagonal plated teeth that are more adept at crushing hard-shelled items than other species.

Body size is another factor because larger species have greater mechanical power for digging than smaller ones. We suspect this is why the two smallest species in our study – brown whiprays and giant shovelnose ray – were limited to feeding on prey found in the surface layers of the sediment.

Finally, prey availability shapes what’s on offer to nursery competitors. Rather than being an all-you-can-eat buffet, invertebrates are patchily distributed. This further influences the best places for rays to forage and their access to nutritionally rich morsels.

Survival in a changing world

These findings open new avenues for both ecological understanding and ray conservation. Rather than treating the dietary needs of all rays the same, this shows a need to account for species-specific requirements.

While we can count on generalists adjusting their diets to be able to live in different habitats, the dietary pickiness of specialist feeders could be their weakness in a rapidly changing world.

The upside is that identifying nursery habitats based on prey availability, such as for the giant shovelnose ray, could give us clear conservation targets.

We are yet to answer several key questions. How long do young rays stay in a nursery? How do their movements reflect feeding opportunities? What extent does resource limitation influence habitat use? For threatened species running out of time, these answers can’t come soon enough.

I would like to acknowledge Aliah Banchik from the Sydney Institute of Marine Science for her creative contributions to this piece and to all student volunteers at James Cook University who made the study possible.

Jaelen Nicole Myers, Research Officer, TropWATER, James Cook University

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

Roman concrete is pretty amazing stuff. It’s among the main reasons we know so much about Roman architecture today. So many structures built by the Romans still survive, in some form, thanks to their ingenious concrete and construction techniques.

However, there’s a lot we still don’t understand about exactly how the Romans made such strong concrete or built all those impressive buildings, houses, public baths, bridges and roads.

Scholars have long yearned for more physical evidence from Roman worksites to provide clues.

Now, a new study – led by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in the journal Nature Communications – sheds new light on Roman concrete and construction techniques.

That’s thanks to details sifted from partially constructed rooms in Pompeii – a worksite abandoned by workers as Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

New clues about concrete making

The discovery of this particular building site hit the news early last year.

The builders were quite literally repairing a house in the middle of the city, when Mount Vesuvius blew up in the first century CE.

This unique find included tiles sorted for recycling and wine containers known as amphorae that had been re-used for transporting building materials.

Most importantly, though, it also included evidence of dry material being prepared ahead of mixing to produce concrete.

It is this dry material that is the focus of the new study. Having access to the actual materials ahead of mixing represents a unique opportunity to understand the process of concrete making and how these materials reacted when water was added.

This has re-written our understanding of Roman concrete manufacture.

Self-healing concrete

The researchers behind this new paper studied the chemical composition of materials found at the site and defined some key elements: incredibly tiny pieces of quicklime that change our understanding of how the concrete was made.

Quicklime is calcium oxide, which is created by heating high-purity limestone (calcium carbonate).

The process of mixing concrete, the authors of this study explain, took place in the atrium of this house. The workers mixed dry lime (ground up lime) with pozzolana (a volcanic ash).

When water was added, the chemical reaction produced heat. In other words, it was an exothermic reaction. This is known as “hot-mixing” and results in a very different type of concrete than what you get from a hardware store.

Adding water to the quicklime forms something called slaked lime, along with generating heat. Within the slaked lime, the researchers identified tiny undissolved “lime clasts” that retained the reactive properties of quicklime. If this concrete forms cracks, the lime clasts react with water to heal the crack.

In other words, this form of Roman concrete can quite literally heal itself.

Techniques old and new

However, it is hard to tell how widespread this method was in ancient Rome.

Much of our understanding of Roman concrete is based on the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.

He had advised to use pozzolana mixed with lime, but it had been assumed that this text did not refer to hot-mixing.

Yet, if we look at another Roman author, Pliny the Elder, we find a clear account of the reaction of quicklime with water that is the basis for the exothermic reaction involved in hot-mixing concrete.

So the ancients had knowledge of hot-mixing but we know less about how widespread the technique was.

Maybe more important is the detail in the texts of experimentation with different blends of sand, pozzolana and lime, leading to the mix used by the builders in Pompeii.

The MIT research team had previously found lime clasts (those tiny little bits of quicklime) in Roman remains at Privernum, about 43 kilometres north of Pompeii.

It’s also worth noting the healing of cracks has been observed in the concrete of the tomb of noblewoman Caecilia Metella outside Rome on the Via Appia (a famous Roman road).

Now this new Pompeii study has established hot-mixing happened and how it helped improve Roman concrete, scholars can look for instances in which concrete cracks have been healed this way.

Questions remain

All in all, this new study is exciting – but we must resist the assumption all Roman construction was made to a high standard.

The ancient Romans could make exceptional concrete mortars but as Pliny the Elder notes, poor mortar was the cause of the collapse of buildings in Rome. So just because they could make good mortar, doesn’t mean they always did.

Questions, of course, remain.

Can we generalise from this new study’s single example from 79 CE Pompeii to interpret all forms of Roman concrete?

Does it show progression from Vitruvius, who wrote some time earlier?

Was the use of quicklime to make a stronger concrete in this 79 CE Pompeii house a reaction to the presence of earthquakes in the region and an expectation cracking would occur in the future?

To answer any of these questions, further research is needed to see how prevalent lime clasts are in Roman concrete more generally, and to identify where Roman concrete has healed itself.

Ray Laurence, Professor of Ancient History, Macquarie University

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

In October, Australia signed a A$13 billion rare earths and critical minerals agreement with the United States. This is designed to boost supply of minerals vital to everything from military technology to clean energy.

Australia has large reserves of many of these minerals, while the US is trying to find alternative supplies after China gained a stranglehold on much of the global supply.

But there’s a sting in the tail. To date, Australia hasn’t produced many of these elements domestically, preferring to mine the ores here and do the highly polluting processing overseas. Turning ores into minerals comes with a host of pollution issues, from radioactive waste to dangerous chemicals.

For Australia to become a major rare earths and critical minerals player, it will have to better manage these environmental risks.

Costs unequally shared

In the 1990s, major US rare earth mines such as Mountain Pass scaled down or shut their most polluting processing activities.

As the US and other rich countries retreated, the most hazardous processing shifted to countries under economic pressure or more willing to bear the environmental burden. China ultimately absorbed much of this capacity. This is why it now refines about 80% of the world’s rare earths.

What’s happened in rare earths isn’t unique. There’s a global pattern of rich countries outsourcing pollution, groundwater contamination and other social and environmental costs to poorer and less-regulated nations. Recent media investigations have found significant and ongoing damage done by rare earth mining, ranging from heavy metal pollution to radioactivity to discharges of dangerous chemicals.

Australia has benefited from outsourcing pollution. For more than a decade, Australian rare earths producer Lynas has dug up ores in Western Australia and shipped them to its Malaysian refinery, where the dirtiest processing was done. This may satisfy national environmental regulations. But it can simply relocate the harm. Lynas has vigorously defended its processing plant, saying independent experts have found operations were safe and compliant with regulations.

In 2020, the Malaysian government required Lynas to relocate the processing stage producing low-level radioactive waste.

In response, Lynas opened a new plant in Kalgoorlie to do this processing domestically with muted pushback. Another miner, Iluka, is constructing Australia’s first fully integrated rare-earth refinery north of Perth.

But while domestic processing capacity is expanding, overseas facilities are still likely to play a role in processing for years to come.

Cleaner processing technologies such as improved solvent extraction and closed-loop systems do exist, but they remain expensive and hard to scale. As a result, producers still rely on overseas facilities where hazardous steps can be performed more cheaply or under lighter regulation.

The better path: shared and responsible governance

Solving the problem of offshore pollution has to be done by distributing responsibility fairly.

Here is what’s required to make Australia’s rare-earth supply chains sustainable:

• robust environmental standards applying to both mining and processing
• transparent and traceable supply chains
• incentives rewarding cleaner production and penalising polluting practices.

Industry self-regulation — where companies label, report and monitor many of their own environmental practices — has been repeatedly shown to be vulnerable to weak oversight and regulatory gaming. Given the urgency of climate and ecological risks, relying on voluntary standards alone is no longer sufficient.

A better approach is co-regulation, where government, industry and communities collectively design rules, share data and jointly monitor compliance.

European Union frameworks such as Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the Digital Services Act were designed in this way, demonstrating how ongoing engagement with multiple actors can work to create adaptive, participatory and enforceable regulations.

This approach could work well for critical minerals by embedding sustainability and social licence throughout supply chains before environmental damage is done.

Green tax incentives or certification schemes can help by rewarding cleaner producers. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is already pushing producers outside the EU to improve emissions reporting even before it comes into effect on January 1.

But these tools need careful design to avoid slipping into “green protectionism”, where higher environmental standards end up penalising developing nations that have fewer resources to comply.

The transparency gap

It’s hard to verify whether critical minerals were sustainably produced, as our recent United Nations white paper points out.

One solution we outline is a digital product passport – a verifiable digital identity tracking minerals through mining, extraction, processing, manufacturing, use, recycling and further use. These passports would make it possible to validate green claims, make recycling and transport across borders more secure and efficient and boost trust for consumers and investors. Responsible producers would earn a genuine premium for doing the right thing.

Digital product passports will come into use in the EU next year for products, such as textiles, car batteries and construction materials.

Without transparent traceability, Australian miners – who often meet higher environmental standards – risk losing market share to cheaper but less sustainable alternatives, as seen in the nickel sector.

While digital traceability of critical minerals has many advantages, its implementation will face legal challenges. There’s no standard list of critical minerals for instance. Minerals are often mined in one country, processed in another and sold in a third, making it hard to assess how cleanly they have been produced. Solving these issues will require collective effort between producers and buyers.

Towards a truly clean transition

Australia’s rare earths deal with the US is strategically important. But ramping up production of these metals and minerals risks reproducing environmental inequalities.

The next phase of the clean-energy transition must not simply shift pollution to poorer countries – it must eliminate the problem through cleaner technologies coupled with traceability, shared responsibility and accountability across borders.

Correction: This article originally stated Lynas still depends on overseas facilities for hazardous processing. However the company opened a plant in Kalgoorlie last year to carry out processing that results in low-level radioactive waste. The article has been amended to reflect this.

George Tian, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Technology Sydney and Jeanne Huang, Associate professor, University of Sydney

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

South Australians are suddenly hearing a lot about oyster reefs — from government, on the news and in conversations, both online and in person. It’s not accidental.

Their state is grappling with an unprecedented and harmful algal bloom. The crisis has drawn attention to another, long-forgotten environmental disaster beneath the waves: the historical destruction of native shellfish reefs.

Reefs formed by native oysters, mussels and other aquatic mollusks carpeted more than 1,500 kilometres of the state’s coastline, until 200 years ago. In fact, they went well beyond the state border, existing in sheltered waters of bays and estuaries from the southern Great Barrier Reef to Tasmania and all the way around to Perth.

These vast communities of bivalves, which feed by drawing water over their gills, would have helped clean the ocean gulfs and supported a smorgasbord of marine life.

Their destruction by colonial dredge fisheries — to feed the growing colony and supply lime for construction — has left our contemporary coastlines more vulnerable to events like this algal bloom. And their recovery is now a central part of South Australia’s algal bloom response.

Rebuilding reefs

South Australia’s A$20.6 million plan aims to restore various marine ecosystems, with two approaches to restore shellfish reefs.

The first is building large reefs with limestone boulders. These have been constructed over the past decade with some positive results. Four have been built in Gulf St Vincent near Adelaide.

Boulder reefs provide hard, stable substrate for baby oysters to settle and grow on. When built at the right time in early summer, when oyster babies are abundant and searching for a home, oyster larvae can settle on them and begin growing. But these are large infrastructure projects – think cranes, barges and boulders – and therefore take years to plan and execute.

So alongside these large reef builds, the public will have the chance to help construct 25 smaller community-based reefs over the next three years. From Kangaroo Island to the Eyre Peninsula, these reefs will use recycled shells collected from aquaculture farms, restaurants and households using dedicated shell recycling bins. There will soon be a dedicated website for the project.

The donated shells will be cleaned, sterilised by months in the sun, and packaged into biodegradable mesh bags and degradable cages to provide many thousands of “reef units”. From these smaller units, big reefs can grow.

This combined approach — industrial-scale reefs and grassroots restoration — reflects both the scale of the ecological problem and the appetite for public participation.

What about the algal bloom?

Little can be done to disperse an algal bloom of this magnitude once it has taken root. Feeling like powerless witnesses to the disaster, the ecological grief and dismay among coastal communities is palpable. Naturally, attention turns to recovery – what can be done to repair the damage?

This is where oysters come in. They cannot stop this bloom. And their restoration is not a silver bullet for addressing the many stressors facing the marine environment. But healthy ecosystems recover faster and are more resilient to future environmental shocks.

For shellfish reefs, South Australia already has some impressive runs on the board. Over nearly a decade we have undertaken some of the largest shellfish restorations in the Southern Hemisphere. Millions of oysters have found a home on our extant reefs, providing filtration benefits and supporting diverse marine life.

And although the algal bloom has decimated many bivalve communities, thankfully native oysters have been found to have a level of resilience. During a dive last week we witnessed new baby oysters that had recently settled on the reefs, seeding its recovery.

In the past decade we have built a scientific evidence base, practical knowledge, and community enthusiasm for reef restorations that benefits the broader marine ecosystem. This is why shellfish reefs feature so prominently in the algal bloom response plan.

Where will these new reefs go?

We need time to identify the best sites for big boulder reefs. For now, the priority is monitoring the ecological impacts and resilience to the ongoing algal bloom. But work on community-based reef projects has already begun .

These reefs will broaden our scientific understanding of how underwater animals and plants find them. Sites will be chosen based on ecological knowledge and community interest in ongoing marine stewardship.

There are many ways communities can take part. Community involvement and education is a cornerstone of the work, and individuals can recycle their oyster, scallop and mussel shells. The public can also volunteer time to join shell bagging and caging events, and even get involved building the reefs. In time, there will opportunities for the community to help with monitoring and counting the oysters and other critters settled on the recycled shell.

Future built from the past

The impact of this harmful algal bloom is real and ongoing. But in responding to it, South Australians are rediscovering a forgotten marine ecosystem. Rebuilding shellfish reefs won’t fix it — but alongside catchment management, seagrass restoration, fisheries management and improved monitoring and climate action, it is a powerful tool.

With the help of communities, reefs that were once broken, forgotten and functionally extinct, can be returned. It will take time for these reefs to support cleaner waters and richer marine life. But these community initiatives can show people that we all have a role to play in caring for coastlines.

Dominic McAfee, Postdoctoral researcher, marine ecology, University of Adelaide and Sean Connell, Professor, Sustainable Marine Futures, Environment Institute, University of Adelaide

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

A federal government green energy program is subsidising unnecessarily large home batteries and blowing out in cost.

The Labor government launched its A$2.3 billion Cheaper Home Batteries Program in July, with the aim of bringing down household power bills and reducing people’s reliance on the energy grid. The program was projected to lead to more than 1 million installed batteries by 2030.

There has been a massive uptake. The Clean Energy Regulator, which administers the program, told The Conversation that around 146,000 batteries have been installed in just five months.

But digging into the data reveals some major concerns about the program – many of which I previously anticipated. The average size of the batteries installed under the program is roughly double what a regular household requires to meet its energy needs. And that has resulted in a major cost blowout.

But there are ways to fix the program and ensure its benefits are distributed fairly among Australians.

What exactly is the Cheaper Home Batteries Program?

The program provides discounts of around 30% of the cost of an installed battery.

These batteries are valuable to store the excess energy from millions of rooftop solar systems in Australia. As such, they are an important component of the renewable energy transition.

The federal government has been celebrating the popularity of the program.

In September, when the Clean Energy Regulator revealed 50,000 batteries had been installed in just two months, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen said:

This program is working in the suburbs, in the regions and in our cities. Australians are proving the naysayers and climate change deniers wrong – they want to be part of the clean energy future.

Early warnings have come true

In April I warned about the potential problems with the program if it wasn’t properly targeted, including that it would give higher subsidies for larger batteries which could, in turn, lead to major cost blowouts.

These warnings have come true.

The Clean Energy Regulator told The Conversation that as of December 3, “there are currently around 146,000 batteries installed under the Cheaper Home Batteries Program”.

By the end of the year, it expects this figure to rise to around 175,000.

More than 98% of batteries have been installed for households, with businesses making up most of the rest.

The average system size of battery installation is more than 22 kilowatt-hours, which can cost around A$18,000. The most common system size installation is roughly 19kWh.

More than 80% of validated residential battery installations have been above 10kWh.

For perspective, a typical household battery is around 11kWh, which can cost around A$10,000. And a battery as small as 5–6kWh could be sufficient to store energy in the middle of the day that can cover much of the evening peak for most households.

As of December 3, the program had cost roughly A$749 million, according to a spokesperson for the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

This means around 30% of the cash pool has been spent on less than 15% of the projected 1 million batteries.

At this rate, the budget allocation of $2.3 billion might therefore run out in 2026, rather than 2030 as originally planned.

If this trend continues, and government budget allocations are extended, the total cost of the program could blow out to around $10 billion.

However, projections are vexed in general and there are reasons why the future will not be identical to the past. For example, the discounts per kWh are designed to decrease toward 2030, in line with assumptions of battery cost reductions.

So, what now?

The government says it is “working carefully […] on how to deliver on our objectives and keep the program sustainable for years to come”.

This could include adjusting the program to lower discounts for large batteries.

Currently, batteries above 100kWh are ineligible, and batteries above 50kWh only get a discount with respect to the first 50kWh. A possibility to discuss is lowering the 50kWh threshold to 15kWh.

Means testing could also be introduced, as is the case in some state schemes.

Means testing can refer to assets, such as property values used by Solar Victoria, with potential to use financial assets like for the age pension.

This could help to direct subsidies to the people who need them most.

Co-mingled schemes including multiple technologies, like in the Australian Capital Territory, could also give households more flexibility and provide a genuine opportunity for renters.

The success of this program can’t just be about how many new batteries are installed. It must also be about cost-effectiveness and fairness.

And on that front, it’s clear there’s plenty of work to be done.

Rohan Best, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, Macquarie University

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