When news broke over the weekend that Australia’s first mainland bird flu case in a mammal – the death of a long-nosed fur seal – had been detected, I felt deep sadness and dread for what’s likely to come next. We should expect large scale deaths of mammals, in addition to birds.

The deadly strain of H5N1 bird flu has been spreading across Australia and devastating wildlife. So infection in a mammal was tragically just a matter of time.

This news comes after more than 1,000 crested terns and more than two dozen little penguins recently died in South Australia and Tasmania, respectively.

Australia’s federal, state and territory governments claim they’re well-prepared to manage this environmental and conservation crisis. Are they? There’s much that needs to be urgently improved.

Stopping the spread of bird flu is impossible, but we can still reduce the severity of its impacts on wildlife and the environment.

Clear communication must start early

There is extensive information on the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s bird flu page.

However, government websites are not where people typically get their information. Before bird flu arrived in mainland Australia in June, there should have been a national public awareness campaign across traditional and social media platforms, and even via letters from local councils. This did not happen.

Some people are clearly unsure about which activities are safe, such as bird feeding, and how to best protect themselves and their pets.

They need clearer information on dealing with sick and dying animals, whose responsibility it is, and what help is available. These issues are causing angst among wildlife carers, veterinarians and local communities, with some councils calling for more funding as they face cleaning up large numbers of dead, infected birds.

In Portland, southwest Victoria, locals have been collecting and disposing of dead birds themselves. They hope to minimise the spread of H5N1 to other wildlife, including much-loved local animals such as Sammy the seal.

Well-resourced, specialist taskforces, such as what occurred in Scotland, would be a better and safer way to ensure suffering animals are humanely euthanised, and their bodies are collected within hours, not days. We cannot access everywhere, due to Australia’s size, but rapid action is possible in many places. This is one of the most practical ways to reduce the severity of H5N1 outbreaks. Reducing animal suffering and trauma for people should be a priority.

Government should be transparent

Australia is the last continent to be affected by H5N1 bird flu – we’ve had years to prepare. Despite this, an official risk assessment pinpointing which birds and mammals are most susceptible was only released about three weeks ago, on August 4. This followed sustained pressure from scientists and scientific organisations.

This risk assessment paints a grim picture. But predicting risk is made even harder by the absence of pertinent information, such as species’ genetic diversity and likely immune function. Had the assessment been released earlier, gaps in our knowledge could have been prioritised for further research before H5N1 arrived on Australia’s shores.

Furthermore, details of federal, state and territory government plans to protect wildlife and important locations (such as breeding sites) were not made public until very recently. Even now, not all plans have been released, and some of those that are public lack sufficient detail.

Slow start to vaccination, and not for mammals

A vaccination program for little penguins is underway at Phillip Island, and will hopefully protect these much-loved birds. Regrettably, these vaccinations commenced after the death of an infected little penguin, meaning it’s possible bird flu is already spreading across Phillip Island.

The program, which requires penguins to be injected with two doses several weeks apart, will likely not achieve maximum benefit for a few weeks. Given bird flu arrived roughly two months ago, its delayed start should be explained by government. It stands in contrast to New Zealand, where vaccination for five threatened bird species began before the first detection in the country.

The protection of marine and land mammals has also not been a high priority for government. There is currently no vaccine legally approved for use on mammals. However, promising trials have occurred in the Hawaiian monk seal and northern elephant seal.

Given Australia has a unique array of mammals and a dire mammal conservation record, it’s remarkable the federal government has not invested in a vaccine. It would have had the potential to protect species such as the Australian sea lion, Tasmanian devil, eastern quoll, and other threatened mammals.

Funding is piecemeal

Australia’s Minister for the Environment, Murray Watt, says government investment has strengthened wildlife populations and made them “more resilient” in the face of bird flu. This is highly questionable.

Australia’s list of threatened species continues to grow, and now numbers well over 2,000. Monitored populations of threatened shorebird species have more than halved since 2000, and similarly, threatened mammal populations have fallen by more than 30%.

The federal government has spent A$113 million on bird flu preparation and response, and states and territories more than $24 million. But this falls far short of what’s needed.

More broadly, spending on environmental protection and recovery is less than 1% of the annual federal budget and set to drop further to less than 0.5%. Calls for an immediate $200 million bird flu funding package have so far been ignored.

Not too late

Overall, government responses to this deadly bird flu outbreak have been insufficient and much too reactive, but it’s not too late.

Australia’s unique species and environments are already suffering enormously through fires, algal blooms, coral bleaching, invasive species and other impacts. Bird flu is another blow, and we are likely yet to have seen the worst of it.

Yet Australia has the financial capacity, scientific expertise and community goodwill to greatly increase our care for the animals and places we all know and love. Governments must rise to this challenge, and significantly boost our response to bird flu as a matter of urgency.

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

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

Backyard bird feeding is one of our country’s most popular pastimes. Research reveals about half of Australian households feed wild birds, with many people doing so daily.

However, this practice could act as a superspreader event – where a disease infects an unusually high number of people or animals – of the H5N1 virus. This deadly strain of bird flu has already decimated wild bird and mammal populations worldwide. It is now spreading across Australia, most recently killing more than 1,000 crested terns and a long-nosed fur seal, the first detection in a mainland mammal.

Although many Australians feed wild birds, the practice is controversial. This is mainly due to concerns about people offering unsuitable foods and birds becoming dependent on humans.

So why is backyard bird feeding such a problem when it comes to bird flu? And can we do it safely?

Not just a hobby

People feed wild birds for various reasons, including to provide food during tough times or simply enjoy their presence. Most care deeply about their avian companions and believe feeding them is helpful.

However, they may not realise the danger this creates for the birds they love.

Feeding wild birds heightens the risk of disease transmission at feeding locations. When we offer supplementary food, such as seeds or meat scraps, this attracts birds of many different species in a combination and number that would not happen in nature. They may carry deadly diseases, such as the H5N1 virus, and potentially spread them to other birds.

This can create a transmission hotspot right on our back deck. And catching bird flu can push our most threatened species, such as the orange-bellied parrot, to the brink of extinction.

The fatal effects of H5N1 are not only contained to birds. Scavenger animals such as possums, red foxes and crows can be exposed to the virus while devouring the carcasses of infected birds. Humans in close contact with infected wildlife, such as wildlife carers and veterinarians, can contract H5N1. However, human infection is rare and typically only causes mild symptoms.

Stopping the spread

Backyard bird feeding may seem like a harmless hobby. But given how many people do it, and the risks it poses to both birds and people, bird feeding activities could lead to many more wildlife deaths.

So if you feed birds in your backyard, how can you do so safely?

The most effective strategy is to stop feeding birds altogether. If you don’t offer food to wild birds, they will be less likely to congregate in your backyard or garden. And they will be fine without your help. Our previous research found most birds that visit feeders obtain most of their nutrition from natural sources, such as insects and worms. So the food we provide is a snack, not an essential meal.

But if you do continue feeding wild birds, here are three precautions to take:

Offer less food

Having feeders full of seeds and leftover meat will attract more birds. So to discourage them from congregating, simply provide less food. Much like COVID-era social distancing rules, this will lower the risk of H5N1 transmission by keeping birds separate.

Avoid hand-feeding

Having a bird swoop down to snatch food from your hand is one of the most intimate interactions we can have with wildlife. But in the era of bird flu, this must stop. While humans are unlikely to contract H5N1, close physical contact with birds through hand-feeding is simply not worth the risk.

Keep everything clean

If you keep feeding wild birds, it’s vital to regularly clean all feeding surfaces and equipment using domestic bleach. If you’re not prepared to do this, you shouldn’t be feeding them at all.

Backyard bird feeding could worsen Australia’s current H5N1 crisis. Indeed, your avian visitors may complain if you give them fewer tasty treats or stop feeding them altogether. But these measures will protect both you and them from this deadly disease.

Please do not touch sick or dead birds or marine mammals. Record the location, take photographs from a safe distance, keep pets away and report the sighting to the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline on 1800 675 888.

Darryl Jones, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security, Griffith University

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

Australia has crossed another grim threshold in its H5N1 bird flu outbreak. For the first time, the virus has infected an Australian mainland mammal: a long-nosed fur seal found dead at Beachport on South Australia’s Limestone Coast, about a four-hour drive southeast of Adelaide.

This is a devastating development, although sadly not an unexpected one. H5N1 is already circulating in wild seabirds along the Limestone Coast, with many infected greater crested terns found at Beachport itself.

This seal likely caught the virus through contact with either infected birds or the environment they share. As of today, there is no evidence that it is part of a wider marine mammal outbreak.

One infected seal is not a seal outbreak. But we know from overseas just how quickly that can change.

We know how bad this can get

When H5N1 reached southern elephant seals in Argentina in 2023 more than 17,000 pups died. At one intensively monitored colony, mortality eventually reached 95%. Genetic evidence strongly supported transmission between mammals, rather than thousands of seals independently becoming infected from birds.

The devastation followed the virus into the Southern Ocean.

On South Georgia island (east of the Falkland Islands), the number of breeding female southern elephant seals fell by 47% between 2022 and 2024, following the arrival of H5N1.

Then, at Australia’s Heard Island (about 1,700 km north of Antarctica), an estimated 13,359 elephant seal pups are believed to have died during the 2025 outbreak.

Antarctic fur seals have also been hit extremely hard. Field observations suggest they may have suffered the greatest number of deaths of any species, although the scale of the outbreaks makes a reliable total impossible.

These are not isolated animal deaths. For already threatened species – such as the Australian sea lion, the Antarctic fur seal and the southern elephant seal – losses on this scale can push species closer to extinction.

What is a long-nosed fur seal – and what happens next?

Long-nosed fur seals, formerly known as New Zealand fur seals, occur in Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. The South Australian population is estimated at around 100,000 individuals.

We do not know exactly how the Beachport seal became infected, but infection could occur through direct contact with infected birds or other seals, or exposure to contaminated beaches or water.

Australia is also home to Australian fur seals and the endangered Australian sea lion, a species found nowhere else on Earth. Its entire population is estimated at fewer than 12,000 animals, around 85% of them in South Australia.

H5N1-infected birds have already been found at Seal Bay on Kangaroo Island, while mass bird deaths are occurring at the South Australian island group The Pages – both important Australian sea lion breeding locations.

Australia’s Macquarie Island (about 1,500 km southeast of Tasmania) is also home to southern elephant seals and endangered Antarctic fur seals – both species that have faced huge losses from H5N1 in other parts of the world.

Seal populations now need urgent surveillance. We can’t stop H5N1 spreading through a colony, but we need to know where it is, how quickly it is spreading and which populations are being hardest hit.

Why are seals so vulnerable?

Seals gather on the coast in dense colonies, in close contact with each other and in contaminated ground and water, creating opportunities for rapid transmission.

But the biology of the virus matters too.

H5N1 is fundamentally a bird virus, but the lineage that spread through marine mammals in South America acquired mutations that improve its ability to replicate in the cells of mammals.

Our recent research (yet to have been peer reviewed) found that H5N1 continued to evolve as it spread through seals, including more changes that help it replicate in mammals. But severe outbreaks in seals also occurred without these changes, suggesting seals may be particularly vulnerable to the virus.

We do not yet know which viral lineage infected the Beachport seal. Rapid genome sequencing will be important to determine whether it carries the mammalian-adaptive mutations seen overseas.

Australia needs a seal plan now

There are currently no commercially available H5 vaccines suitable for mammals available in Australia.

But there is promising overseas work.

In the United States, researchers tested a vaccine – originally developed for dairy cattle – in northern elephant seals. The vaccine was well tolerated and produced a clear, measurable antibody response. Researchers then extended the trial to endangered Hawaiian monk seals in rehabilitation.

This does not yet amount to a vaccination program for free-ranging seals, and the vaccine does not have regulatory approval for use in Australia.

Vaccinating every seal colony would also be impossible. Fur seals typically enter the water as soon as people approach, making vaccination infeasible for this species.

But Australia should urgently investigate whether targeted vaccination could protect select populations where intervention is both feasible and worthwhile – particularly endangered Australian sea lions, and southern elephant seals on Macquarie Island, which remains an enormously important Australian breeding population.

Vaccination will never stop H5N1 spreading through wildlife. But it may help prevent catastrophic losses in the species we can reach.

The Beachport seal is one animal – for now.

But this virus has already shown us what can happen next. Australia should use that warning while we still have time.

Please do not touch sick or dead birds or marine mammals. Record the location, take photographs from a safe distance, keep pets away, and report the sighting to the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline on 1800 675 888.

Jane Younger, Senior Lecturer in Southern Ocean Vertebrate Ecology, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

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

The deadly rabies virus was once common across Europe. A bite from an infected dog, wolf or fox could be fatal.

But then came a breakthrough: an edible vaccine. Since 1978, a billion baits containing the vaccine have been distributed by 30 European nations. Many European nations are now considered rabies-free.

Our research team has been developing edible bait vaccines for Tasmanian devils to protect them from devil facial tumour disease. This approach could be adapted to protect devils and other scavenging mammals from bird flu.

What’s missing is the right vaccine. Bird flu vaccines for mammals are still largely experimental. Getting a new vaccine tested and approved in time to be useful during this outbreak of bird flu would be very challenging – but not impossible.

The good news is that vaccine development took a huge leap forward during the COVID pandemic. Vaccines were being tested in humans about two months after genomic sequencing of the novel coronavirus.

Investing in new bird flu vaccines for wildlife will be useful to help prepare for future outbreaks.

How to dispense a vaccine

Tassie devils suffer from one of the world’s few known contagious cancers. When devils tussle and bite, they spread the tumour. Mortality rates are high.

In 2019, we began work on an oral bait vaccine to help prevent transmission of the disease. In fieldwork, we have tested use of a bait dispenser and several types of baits to increase how many are eaten by wild devils. Possums, quolls, pademelons and rats also eat these baits.

We recently developed a motion-activated smart bait dispenser able to recognise devils in milliseconds and deliver bait.

Our dispenser includes a microchip scanner so we know which animal likely took the bait and their current body temperature. Data is transmitted in real time. We don’t know if devil facial tumour disease or influenza would give devils a fever, but this system will help us find out.

In the lab, we developed a vaccine which stays stable in baits and can infect the cells of devil facial tumours. We hope to start small-scale trials in devils in the near future.

Which species could this help?

We can’t vaccinate all Australian wildlife – and we don’t have the data to predict which Australian species will be most vulnerable to bird flu – or to future diseases.

Given this, it makes sense to try different vaccination methods and focus on threatened species. Official estimates suggest up to 10% of Australian mammal species are at high to extreme risk from bird flu.

We believe our approach could quickly be used for devils and scavenging mammal species if a new bird flu vaccine was developed. It could potentially work for colonies of birds which scavenge on land such as brown skuas – the first species found to have bird flu in Australia.

It’s important to protect scavengers, as these animals can get a massive dose of bird flu after eating from a carcass. This gives the virus more opportunities to mutate and adapt to their new hosts.

But our approach won’t work for seals, sea lions and other pinnipeds, as they do not eat while on land. It would also be challenging to use the dart guns used for animals such as bison and elephants. Hand injections or the use of needles on a pole could be an alternative.

We will need to find a solution. More than 13,000 southern elephant seal pups died after the H5N1 strain of bird flu arrived on Australia’s Heard Island last year. Testing confirmed the virus was present in carcasses.

But not all species are affected equally — infections were detected in six other bird and mammal species on Heard Island, but mass die-offs were seen only in elephant seals. An Australia fur seal has now died after infection.

Better vaccines urgently needed

To date, Australia has a single bird flu vaccine approved for emergency use in little penguins and captive birds.

This vaccine uses dead flu viruses that are designed to be injected. Unfortunately, this type of vaccine doesn’t work well for baits. We need to use weakened or modified live viruses, as they can more readily enter host cells to create an immune response.

In the United States, researchers have trialled a new vaccine which inserts a bird flu target into a weakened human virus. The vaccine protected mice from bird flu and induced a similar immune response in cattle. This approach is similar to both our Tassie devil tumour vaccine and a highly successful US rabies bait vaccine. This vaccine is generally distributed by aircraft with no follow up booster drops.

Oral rabies vaccines have been hugely successful despite the fact we don’t know how many baits each wild animal eats. Some may eat several and others none. To make sure this approach is safe, Canadian scientists tested much stronger doses on key species and found no ill effects. In the US, an exhaustive review found the approach was safe and effective.

Approving new vaccines for animals often takes years. Authorities often include strict dosing requirements. Both of these may have to change if we are to tackle bird flu in time.

The success of edible rabies vaccines suggests it’s worth making dose schedules more flexible. Vaccine development, too, could be sped up.

If we want better options to tackle bird flu and future wildlife diseases, we need to start now.

Andrew S. Flies, Senior Research Fellow in Immunology, University of Tasmania and Prithul Chaturvedi, Doctoral Student in Medical Engineering, University of Tasmania

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

Since the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu was first confirmed in Australian wild birds in June, it has rapidly spread around the continent – and among different species. The virus has been linked to the deaths of more than 1,000 crested terns in South Australia, as well as two dozen little penguins in Tasmania. It has also jumped to long-nosed fur seals.

Attention has now turned to vaccination. Wildlife officers in Victoria have begun an unprecedented program to vaccinate thousands of little penguins, while the federal government has committed funding to protect vulnerable native birds.

The science is modern. But some of the practical questions are surprisingly old. Ancient Greek and Roman writers were already asking how birds became sick, what signs to look for, and what could be done when disease appeared in them.

We cannot identify any ancient disease securely as avian influenza. Ancient writers do, however, provide evidence for close observation of outbreaks of disease among poultry and attempts to prevent them.

Birds and people in ancient Greece and Rome

Birds were deeply woven into everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome. They were eaten, bred, sold, kept around houses and watched for religious signs. Their usefulness meant people observed them closely.

Discussing birds, the Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder (23/24–79 CE) wrote that:

The people of Delos began the practice of fattening hens.

Birds were fattened and bought and sold as economically valuable sources of meat and eggs.

Birds could also live very close to people. Athenaeus, a Greek writer who lived around the late second and early third centuries CE, describes the purple gallinule as a bird which, once domesticated, lived familiarly within the household:

it keeps a close eye on the married women in the house, and feels so strongly about the situation, if one of them is seduced, that when it suspects that this is going on, it informs its master by hanging itself.

Birds also had religious importance. Greeks and Romans interpreted their flight, cries and feeding behaviour as signs from the gods, while Roman officials famously observed sacred chickens before major decisions.

So birds were not peripheral to human life. They were food, property and companions, and also part of religious life. This helps explain why illness among them was noticed so readily.

Did ancient Greeks and Romans observe bird health?

Ancient writers paid close attention to what healthy and unhealthy birds look like.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the Greek philosopher and naturalist, thought weather could affect them.

In his History of Animals, he writes that “for the birds it is the rainy years that are unbeneficial”, and then gives a very simple diagnostic sign:

When birds are in poor health their plumage shows it, for it is disturbed and does not have the same orderliness as when they are healthy.

It is a wonderfully down-to-earth observation: sick birds looked different, and their feathers gave them away.

Did ancient Greeks and Romans know about avian influenza?

Ancient writers could not identify avian influenza as we understand it today, and no ancient outbreak can be securely diagnosed as H5N1. But they clearly recognised diseases affecting poultry and tried to control them.

The best evidence comes from Columella, a Roman agricultural writer of the first century CE. In his On Agriculture, he discusses what he describes as a “fatal disease”, a kind of cold that affected poultry.

Its symptoms were swelling and pus in and around the eyes, loss of appetite, and mucus in the throat.

According to Columella, the first response was to maintain hygiene standards in the area:

we shall give them the purest possible water in the cleanest possible vessels.

Farmers, he advised, should

frequently fumigate the hen-houses and keep them cleansed from dung.

If “the pestilence persists”, Columella recommends remedies including garlic soaked in warm oil. In severe cases, when the pus “surrounds the eyes and the fowl now rejects its food”, he describes surgical treatment.

He also tried to identify causes. The disease, he says, arose especially when birds suffered from “the cold and from poor feeding”, or when “water standing in the poultry-yard is drunk”.

So it’s clear that even in antiquity people already connected bird health with clean water, waste removal and shared living conditions.

Is there an ancient lesson?

The lesson from antiquity is fairly simple. Columella noticed that the health of poultry depended partly on the conditions in which birds were kept: clean water, adequate food and clean housing mattered.

That has a clear modern parallel. H5N1 is caused by a virus, but close contact between birds and contaminated environments can help it spread.

The ancients did not understand the biological mechanism. But they already recognised that disease among birds can quickly spread, and that measures need to be taken quickly to prevent this.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

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

Transboundary waters — rivers, lakes and aquifers residing in more than one country — are facing challenges due to climate change, with conflicts over these waters increasing.

Existing analyses of water conflict usually focus on basins in Africa and Asia, rather than those in North America and Europe, which have typically been more co-operative. But that could be changing.

Analysis from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that climate change’s most pressing impacts in the coming decades will be on water resources, with implications for governance. This isn’t just an issue for rivers like the Nile: these impacts are happening everywhere, including North America.

Current analyses of water conflict do not properly consider the 21st-century landscape. My doctoral research focuses on transboundary water governance, climate change and water conflict.

I believe there are three distinct factors that may increase the likelihood of conflict over shared waters in North America and Europe in the coming decades: an increase in generative AI-driven data centres, a decline in democratic processes and debate, and climate-related uncertainty.

Transboundary waters in the 21st century

Droughts and water scarcity have long been considered factors in water conflict. In North America, the Colorado River basin is experiencing extreme water shortages, and water demands within the Great Lakes basin are increasing.

The Danube River, spanning 10 European countries, has seen record-low water levels this summer, causing power plants to shut down due to a lack of water. A recent United Nations report has warned that the world is in a state of “water bankruptcy,” as more than half of the planet’s large lakes have declined in storage size since the 1990s.

At the same time, water conflict events are also on the rise around the world. We need to better understand the factors causing it. Scholars have noted that while water scarcity or variability could indeed increase tensions between countries that share water resources, political and economic factors are more likely to spark actual conflict.

Data centres

Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) technologies like AI chatbots and their infrastructure — data centres — require massive amounts of water. A recent study has estimated that AI could consume 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027. This would have catastrophic impacts on water resources.

A recent assessment by Stanford University researchers shows that of the 9,500 data centres on Earth, a majority are concentrated in North America and Europe, and one-quarter “already sit in locations where water demand exceeds local supply for at least part of the year.”

Data centres and genAI are becoming flashpoints of conflict. Local communities are pushing back against the construction of massive data centres that act like “server farms” for AI technology.

Protests have happened in major cities like Vancouver, in the working-class boroughs of New Jersey and villages in Lombardy, Italy. Communities are skeptical of the benefits of these centres, as reporting has shown their presence is linked to high water use and water pollution.

Local council meetings have become the new battlefield, where citizens are pushing back against data centres in their backyards, and urging pauses to construction or full moratoriums as New York State recently enacted.

Democratic decline and illiberalism

As right-wing populists, parties and policies gain traction in North America and Europe, liberal democratic institutions are weakening. The hollowing out of institutions in the United States and other western countries could impact the stability of longstanding water agreements between nations.

Combined with rising climate skepticism and a rejection of science as a basis for decision-making, this narrows the space for public and inter-state engagement.

In North America, U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” policies and climate denial are eroding co-operative norms and processes in the Great Lakes and on the Mexico-U.S. border.

Deep uncertainty

Experts have defined climate-related uncertainty as the “inability to predict the scale, intensity, and impact of climate change.” As the effects of climate change grow, previous predictions will no longer be adequate guides for future scenarios.

This means that the information and models that North American and European institutions have — once considered a key advantage in co-operative basin management — can no longer be relied upon to accurately manage transboundary waters.

There’s also disagreement on the very nature of climate problems and “which future state of the world will actually materialize.” This ambiguity means that there is no shared agreement on how to prioritize climate actions vis-à-vis national sovereignty concerns and water rights.

The fate of the 2015 Paris Agreement reinforces this point. No North American or European state is on track to keep emissions below 1.5 C and the U.S. has again withdrawn from the agreement. These uncertainties could disrupt transboundary water governance institutions (whether weak or strong) in the coming decades.

So, should we prepare ourselves for the “water wars” of the 21st century? No, not in the way that’s perceived in popular media. The picture is much more complex, but the absence of full-scale war doesn’t mean we’re in the clear.

The backdrop of the 21st century will be one where the world around us changes dramatically, and to protect our planet’s waters, we need to better understand these new economic and technological factors that underlie water disputes. That’s because the seeds of conflict are all around us.

Ryan Durante, PhD Candidate, Global Governance, Balsillie School of International Affairs

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

It’s official: Australia’s data centre boom will not be solely powered by renewables.

At the National Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the federal government softened its stance on using coal and gas to power energy-hungry data centres.

Initially, the government said it would require new data centres to rely on renewables, backed up by batteries and gas. However, this has changed. Its new standards, set to be legislated in early 2027, leave room for some jurisdictions to use fossil fuels instead. Queensland and the Northern Territory have welcomed this shift.

So what are these new standards? And how do they fit into Australia’s energy “clean energy” transition?

Desperate for data

In our increasingly online world, data centres are a critical piece of digital infrastructure. These facilities store and process data around the clock. And they are needed to meet surging demand for generative artificial intelligence (AI), used in everything from health care to journalism.

However, both in Australia and overseas, local communities are increasingly worried about the potential risks of a rapid data centre rollout. These include strained water supplies, less land for housing, and persistent noise. Higher power bills are another concern, given how much energy data centres consume. The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates they will represent 13% of national grid demand by 2035–36, up from just 3% in 2025–26.

This week, Australia’s state and federal leaders agreed to develop mandatory standards for large data centres. These will regulate how much energy, water and land these facilities use. They will also cover skills and training, such as providing apprenticeships for workers involved in constructing and operating data centres.

However, the new standards leave responsibility for planning approvals in the hands of each state and territory. And questions remain around whether the proposed rules would apply to existing data centres, of which there are more than 250 across Australia, not just future projects.

New standards are a step in the right direction. However, they leave some major regulatory gaps, particularly when it comes to individual states.

No national standard

The federal government’s previous position required new data centres to pay for grid upgrades, avoid pushing up household bills and source additional clean energy, rather than simply rely on existing supply.

However, the new standards grant carve-outs for Queensland and the Northern Territory to use coal and gas. Queensland argues its publicly owned electricity system allows it to manage any cost or supply issues. The NT argues it should be free to use local gas, given it lies outside the National Electricity Market, which is largely limited to the eastern states.

Technically, this state-by-state approach could work. Data centres need “firm” power, or electricity that is available when renewable generation drops or is disrupted. The Australian Energy Market Operator says batteries, pumped hydro and gas can act as firming technologies.

Enforcement is key

However, these carve-outs must not compromise the government’s goals of lowering climate emissions and ensuring that energy remains affordable.

That is why enforcement matters. Consider New South Wales, for example, whose new policy framework is built on six key principles. These include strong environmental and efficiency standards and no net costs to consumers and communities.

Developers wanting to build data centres that meet these requirements can get a faster 75-day assessment of their planning application. Non-compliant proposals are not automatically rejected, but do lose access to this fast-tracked process and can be modified, approved with conditions, or simply refused.

To properly enforce our new standards, Australia must learn from other regions.

The European Union requires major data centres to report their energy and water use. It is also developing a ratings system to compare how efficient each centre is, alongside minimum standards for energy consumption and water use.

In Ireland, the government considers various factors – including grid demand and broader renewable energy goals – when assessing new data centre proposals.

Ensuring communities benefit

Australia, like many countries, is racing to regulate its rapidly expanding data centre sector.

To do so, we can draw on international approaches that mandate clear approval processes and public reporting.

We must also engage communities throughout the development process, starting with early consultation. This will ensure data centre projects offer concrete benefits, such as shared energy infrastructure and structured apprenticeships, not just increased capacity.

We need more research about how data centres affect water supplies, peak power prices, noise levels and emissions. Importantly, studies must use real operating data, not just estimates provided by developers.

The federal government has given states and territories more say in how they power data centres. But strong enforcement is key to ensuring every project keeps energy costs low, protects the environment, and offers lasting benefits for local communities.

Ehsan Noroozinejad, Associate Professor & Global Challenge Lead, Urban Transformations Research Centre, Western Sydney University

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

Household and business power prices could rise if artificial intelligence (AI) data centres end up being powered by coal or gas generation, a federal assistant minister has said.

Cabinet Secretary and Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton spoke to The Conversation’s politics podcast on Wednesday afternoon – before the details of a national agreement on AI emerged from a National Cabinet meeting between the prime minister and state and territory leaders.

During the interview, Charlton defended his government’s push for national agreement that new data centres be powered by new renewable energy projects, backed by gas, warning that the alternative would “push up the price” of power.

Look, I’m not agnostic to the outcome for Australians. I want to make sure that Australian households do not face higher power prices because of data centres. And if we are allowing data centres to use power from, for example, coal-fired generation, then they are going to be competing for that existing power from that source with households and businesses. That will push up the price.

If we allow data centres to use gas from the East Coast Reservation, for example, then they will be drawing gas that would otherwise be used by households and businesses. So the problem with that proposal is if we allow the data centres to draw on finite sources of energy, they will inevitably put upward pressure on the price of those finite sources.

However, if we require the data centres to bring new incremental energy, which is renewable energy, additional to what we already have, then they won’t push up prices for Australian consumers.

But Wednesday’s National Cabinet meeting ended with Queensland and the Northern Territory winning agreement that they could power their data centres with coal and gas.

That backdown came after Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen had previously threatened to override state governments that didn’t use renewables to power their data centres.

‘Very serious’ public concerns

Charlton, who is playing a central role in shaping the government’s AI strategy, said he accepted that the public had “real” concerns about data centres.

I think the backlash against data centres is very serious. And the reason I think it’s very serious is because I think the concerns that many people have are real.

When you look at the United States, the consequences for local communities of the unplanned and unmanaged rollout of data centres has been very severe. I mean, if you think about energy costs in the United States, we’ve seen very significant increases in consumer energy prices.

In the largest electricity grid in the United States, the PJM grid, prices went up by more than 60%. Big part of that was due to data centres. There are families in the Unites States who turned on their taps after a cluster of new data centres was put near their homes and they lost water pressure.

So I think to the extent that the backlash against data centres is based on real community concerns, we should take it very seriously. That’s really the Australian government’s approach. It’s to make sure that those types of impacts don’t happen in Australia, to make that data centres don’t push up power prices, to make the data centres don’t complicate people’s access to water. And by addressing those very real concerns, thereby increase public confidence and reduce the backlash against them.

On AI and productivity

When asked if AI would be a “small silver bullet” to increase productivity, Charlton said:

I would hope so. Artificial intelligence is effectively a significant technological innovation and technological innovation is one of the primary drivers of productivity growth. Productivity growth […] is that enabling us to produce more output for the same amount of inputs. And artificial intelligence, because it will help us to do a lot of work, should be a significant source of productivity gains. How quickly those gains come is another question.

[…But] there’s no point getting productivity growth at the expense of employment, because then your total output does not go up. What we need is productivity growth that augments and enhances the human labour to make that human labour more productive, get higher returns from that human labour, and ultimately drive up wages and living standards. That’s the outcome that we want.

On managing AI risks

Charlton flagged further reform to come on AI safety:

We’ve already seen around the world in the last few elections significant attempts at interference. And artificial intelligence will be a tool for the people who want to interfere in elections. There’s no question about that.

Now, this is part of the government’s broader artificial intelligence safety agenda. That safety agenda is looking at a whole range of different risks that are posed by artificial intelligence. Risks, for example, to child safety, and that’s why minister Wells is leading the digital duty of care. Risks to privacy and that is why minister Rowland is leading reform in the Privacy Act. Risks in critical infrastructure, being addressed by minister Burke. Risks in the economy, being led by assistant minister Leigh. The government is working hard on all the range of risks that are posed by artificial intelligence.

On Australia’s inflation challenge

Charlton declared inflation is “a terrible feature of our economy”, while defending his government’s record in bringing it down from recent highs and acknowledging “there’s no question we’ve got more work to do”.

[Inflation] increases prices. It hurts the cost of living. It’s very damaging for family budgets.

The good news is that inflation has come down a lot in the last four years. Four years ago, inflation was in the sixes, it is now in the threes. That is still too high, as the treasurer has said many times. The government has been […] helping to put downward pressure on inflation by running responsible fiscal policy.

This government delivered two budget surpluses last term. That is two more than the Liberals delivered in their entire three terms in Parliament […] So there’s no question we’ve got more work to do in terms of getting inflation down. But this is a government, through fiscal discipline and through work on the productivity side and supply side of the economy, that’s committed to supporting those objectives.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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Australia is a land of lizards and snakes. From common blue-tongues in suburban gardens to rare shovel-nosed snakes in the desert, reptiles are a defining part of the continent’s wildlife.

But our new national review, by a team of 23 Australian herpetologists (reptile and amphibian experts), reveals they are in far more trouble than currently recognised.

We identified at least 127 threatened terrestrial lizard and snake species. That is 13.1% of the reptile species where enough information was available to assess their extinction risk, and almost twice the 7.1% officially classified as threatened in Australia’s previous nationwide assessment in 2017.

This does not mean the number of threatened lizard and snake species simply doubled overnight. It partly reflects better use of available information on species’ populations and threats, and the discovery of new species. But it is also symptomatic of our government’s environmental department struggling with intensifying threats and a backlog of assessments.

This matters because Australia is home to about 10% of the world’s lizard and snake species, and roughly 98% of them occur nowhere else. If they disappear here, they disappear from the planet.

Unknown species in greatest danger

In 2017, 43 Australian lizards and snakes were classed as “data deficient”. This might sound benign, but it means there was not enough information to assess how likely they are to become extinct.

Our review found evidence that up to 38% of these poorly known species are threatened. That rate is 5.4 times higher than those species we had enough information about in 2017.

Meanwhile, we keep discovering new species. Between 2017 and 2025, the number of recognised terrestrial lizard and snake species rose from 955 to 1,066. Many newly named species, such as Tagalaka slider and Dauan Island gecko, occupy small areas and little is known about them. Of 115 species for which a conservation assessment has not been attempted as of August 2025, modelling suggests about 25 may be threatened.

This creates a major conservation problem: we cannot protect a species until we know it exists, where it lives and what threatens it. Yet Australia’s capacity to describe and distinguish reptile species is declining when it’s most needed.

The threats are worse and converging

The 2019–20 Australian megafires showed us how quickly devastation can happen. The fire footprint overlapped the ranges of 445 lizard and snake species – nearly 40% of Australia’s known species. Monitoring found many populations persisted, but some declined sharply. For lizards and snakes confined to a single mountaintop or rainforest, one severe fire can destroy most of their habitat.

Climate change makes this worse. Some rainforest skinks are predicted to lose all of their suitable habitat by 2050, even under relatively optimistic emissions projections.

There are other pressures across the continent. Livestock and feral herbivores remove ground cover plants and damage reptile shelter. Invasive buffel grass transforms arid habitats and fuels hotter fires. Cats and foxes are estimated to kill 697 million Australian reptiles each year.

Threatened-species lists are inconsistent

Animal and plant species can be listed as being at risk under international, national, or under state and territory laws. However, these systems frequently reach different conclusions.

Of the 127 snake and reptile species on our updated list, 71 were listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (which tracks extinction risk), and 70 under federal law. Only 48 appeared on both lists.

And listings are only a starting point. Few threatened reptiles are the subject of funded recovery programs, and population monitoring remains patchy. Without repeated surveys, we don’t know if numbers are dropping, and their recovery becomes more unlikely.

Christmas Island provides a stark warning: its forest skink went from abundant to extinct in little more than a decade. By the time its decline was fully recognised, the chance to save it had been lost.

Now is the time to act

Australia needs properly funded recovery programs for all threatened lizards and snakes, not only a handful of well-known species. Long-term monitoring across the continent will tell us where they live. And we need targeted surveys for the least studied species before they disappear.

First Nations leadership and knowledge should be central to this work. Australia’s first Indigenous-led recovery plan, for the great desert skink, combines cultural knowledge, on-Country monitoring and shared control of actions such as fire and predator management.

For species already close to extinction, captive breeding and planned translocation – where species are moved from one place to another – can buy them time. Christmas Island’s blue-tailed skink vanished from the wild, but a captive population produced animals now breeding after being released on islands in the Cocos group.

In 2027, Australia will reassess the conservation status of all its lizards and snakes against IUCN Red List criteria. We have a chance to build a clearer national picture, measuring not only how close species are to extinction, but if our actions are helping them recover.

The warning signs are visible – we need to act to stop reptile species disappearing before we find them.

Jules Farquhar, Senior Research Officer, Monash University; Chris J Jolly, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in behavioural ecology and evolution, Macquarie University; Conrad Hoskin, Professor, College of Science & Engineering, James Cook University; David Chapple, Professor in Ecology and Conservation, Monash University, and Margaret Haines, Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University

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We share our planet with millions of plants and animals.

This variety of life is known as biodiversity, a term encompassing everything from microscopic genes to entire ecosystems, such as deserts and vibrant coral reefs.

Places that support a wealth of species are known as “biodiversity hotspots”. South America’s tropical Andes region – which has the world’s largest variety of amphibian, bird and mammal species – and the coastal forests of eastern Australia are just two examples.

Our new study suggests biodiversity hotspots are emerging in new, and in some cases unexpected, locations.

So why is this happening? And what does it mean for species across the globe?

Spotting a hotspot

Scientists generally agree there are 17 megadiverse countries worldwide, including Brazil, Indonesia, India and Australia. But even within their borders, there are regions that are particularly rich in species, such as the Amazon rainforests of Brazil and Ecuador.

Finding biodiversity hotspots relies on scientifically describing the key characteristics of each individual species that occurs in a particular place. This includes identifying the features that distinguish a new species from all other known species, before giving it a formal and unique Latin scientific name.

The problem is there are many species western science hasn’t even discovered. Research suggests about 80% of the world’s plants and animals are yet to be formally studied. This is true even for well-researched vertebrate groups such as mammals, birds and reptiles.

For instance, each year researchers discover more than 2,000 new vascular plant species, which are distinguished by a range of features such as their special tube-like tissues. However, studies show as many as 100,000 more plant species remain unknown to science. And of the mammal species we know about today, one in ten were discovered only after the 1990s.

Shifting locations

Our research suggests the discovery of new species is altering where we understand biodiversity hotpots to be located, including here in Australia.

In our new study, we examined discoveries of land-based species over 100 years to find out how they may have reshaped our understanding of global diversity patterns.

To do this, we identified when and where species were first found for each decade between 1920 and 2020. In the end, we collected data on more than 9,700 species of birds, 5,200 of mammals, 8,600 of reptiles and 7,200 of amphibians.

Our results suggest we’ve found and named nearly 40% of land-dwelling species over the past century. Most of these species discoveries have occurred in tropical regions such as the rainforests of Brazil, Ecuador and New Guinea. This aligns with the well-established pattern that polar areas, such as the Artic and Antarctica, typically have fewer species than tropical locations.

New Guinea’s montane forests – where plants grow on the slopes of mountains – had high discovery rates of new mammal species. When it comes to reptiles, Australia is a standout. The number of known reptiles nationwide has more than doubled over the past century, rising from 376 species in 1920 to 933 in 2020.

Our research suggests discoveries of new species are leading to the emergence of several biodiversity hotspots including Indonesia, the central Andes of South America and the island nation of Madagascar.

One-third of areas previously known for their rich amphibian life have been replaced by new amphibian hotspots, including the tropical forests of south-east Asia and the montane forests of the Andes. We observed a similar trend in reptiles. Roughly 20% of formerly recognised hotspots are now overshadowed by our new knowledge of regions with even higher reptile diversity, including the savannas and shrublands of northern Australia.

Why this matters

Understanding where biodiversity hotspots are, and how they are changing, is vital for conservation.

Our research suggests emerging biodiversity hotspots for reptile and frog species are increasingly in cooler environments, including the little explored cloud and montane forests of the Andes. However, by making these forests drier and warmer, climate change is threatening the survival of many newly discovered species.

These emerging hotspots are also vulnerable to deforestation and land clearing. Without major and immediate conservation action, the species living in these places will disappear, potentially before scientists even discover them. This is known as a “dark extinction”.

Protecting our biodiversity hotspots matters. But we cannot save species we don’t even know about, so we must invest in field surveys and taxonomy projects that lead to new species discoveries. Otherwise, these rich ecosystems will keep losing species that science never had the chance to name.

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

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A catastrophic flash flood has struck northern Nepal on the Tibetan border, killing at least 157 people and leaving hundreds missing, including at least 34 Australians. The death toll is expected to rise.

Foreign tourists are among those feared dead or missing. Nepal’s tourism ministry reported 403 tourists unaccounted for, including 341 foreign nationals.

Footage shows torrents of mud and debris sweeping through settlements and carrying buildings and vehicles with them.

Early evidence suggests this was not an ordinary rain-driven flash flood, but what disaster science describes as a “cascading event”. So what do we know so far?

Not an ordinary flood

Investigators are examining a chain of events high in the Himalayas where one natural hazard seems to have triggered another.

Such phenomena are known as “cascading hazards” – chain reactions where an initial event directly triggers a sequence of subsequent events, often creating a much larger disaster.

Climate change is known to be driving faster glacier melt in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, but scientists say it is too soon to pinpoint its role in these floods.

We know the flooding struck the steep, fast-flowing Bhotekoshi river system near Nepal’s border with Tibet at around 9am local time on Wednesday morning. It travelled downstream through the mountain district of Rasuwa and into neighbouring districts, including Nuwakot and Dhading.

The flooding carried a huge volume of water. It’s reported the Trishuli River rose by as much as nine metres within 30 minutes at one monitoring point downstream.

In parts of the historic hilltop town of Nuwakot, local officials report scores or hundreds of houses being swept away. Nepal’s Department of Roads says at least 19 motorable bridges and around 40 kilometres of roads have also been damaged or washed away. A 42km road connecting Betrawati with the Rasuwagadhi border crossing between Nepal and China’s Tibet autonomous region has been destroyed at multiple points.

What caused such a massive flood?

Rainfall does not appear to explain the scale of the flood. No heavy rainfall was recorded in the affected area beforehand.

The strongest evidence so far points to a massive glacial collapse high in the mountains. Satellite images show a large section of glacier breaking away at an altitude of around 5,200 metres and falling more than 1,200m into the valley below.

This appears to have produced an enormous ice-rock avalanche, large enough to generate a seismic signal.

The key question is how that avalanche produced such a huge volume of fast-moving water and debris. The most compelling explanation so far comes from Nepal’s hydrology department. Satellite images appear to show the avalanche blocking the river with ice and debris about 20km upstream of the Nepal-Tibet border. It’s been suggested that water accumulated behind this temporary dam before it failed and sent a sudden surge downstream.

When one hazard triggers another

The disaster in Nepal shows why cascading events can be particularly difficult to anticipate, prepare for and survive.

The Nepal flood may have involved several links in a cascading chain. An ice and rock collapse produced an avalanche. The avalanche entered a river, where it may have blocked the flow and temporarily stored water. Its failure then produced or intensified the flood downstream.

Early accounts show the avalanche may also have picked up water, rock and sediment as it travelled, producing an increasingly destructive debris-rich flow.

Cascading hazards are different from “compound hazards”, where multiple hazards combine or occur together without one necessarily triggering another. In a cascade, it is the causal links between the hazards that matter.

These chains can also amplify as they progress. A hazard beginning in a remote location can trigger a much more destructive hazard affecting people far away.

As in the case of the catastrophe in Nepal, the hazard itself can also change form. What starts as an ice and rock collapse can ultimately reach communities as a debris-laden flood.

Beyond individual hazards

The Nepal disaster is still an unfolding event, and the exact sequence that produced the flood will become clearer in the coming days.

But it already points to a broader challenge for disaster risk management. We tend to classify and assess hazards separately, such as fires and floods.

But cascading hazards do not fit into conventional categories. Managing them requires understanding where individual hazards can occur, but also how one can trigger or amplify another.

Australia’s National Emergency Management Agency has warned that the growing trend of concurrent and cascading disasters is expected to continue and, in many cases, increase.

We need to better understand what these chains of hazards could look like in our own local environments, such as the intense storms and flooding that hit the Otways in Victoria in January. This will help us assess risk and plan for natural disasters.

Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne and Zahra Shahhoseini, Lecturer - Disaster Resilience Infrastructure, RMIT University

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More than 150 people are dead and hundreds more missing after an enormous wave of water, ice, mud and rock cascaded more than 170 kilometres down the Bhote Koshi River valley in Nepal. The valley is the main link between Kathmandu in Nepal and Lhasa in Tibet. At least 34 Australians are missing. There was little warning.

Footage of the debris-laden flash flood is shocking. It is, unfortunately, not surprising.

As an expert in glaciers, I have tracked their accelerating retreat around the world as they melt – and the disasters that can follow. Early analysis suggests the abrupt collapse of a glacier triggered the disaster.

As climate change intensifies, glaciers worldwide are melting – even in high regions such as the Himalayas. The Himalayas are especially vulnerable, because the steep slopes of many of these very tall mountains are made of permafrost – rock and soil frozen for centuries. As temperatures rise, these slopes are beginning to melt or destabilise. If an earthquake or slope failure occurs, it can trigger a sudden and devastating debris flow.

It’s too early to say this was the exact cause. But we know that the great ice stores of the Himalayas – known as the world’s “third pole” because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – are no longer safe.

What do we know about this disaster?

What happened in Nepal is likely due to an enormous ice-and-rock landslide sweeping down a mountain pass and gathering up ice, water, rock, trees and dirt.

The landslide was so large it was originally thought to be an earthquake, as the seismic energy registered as a 4.4 magnitude quake on seismographs.

By the time it reached Gyirong Port – a China-Nepal border crossing – the wall of debris resembled a tsunami of dirt. Early estimates suggest the wave may have been 30 metres high.

What are the likely causes?

Sometimes, disasters like these can be caused when glacial meltwater trapped in a lake by a landslide breaks free. One of these events – known as a glacial lake outburst flood – hit Nepal in 2024.

But early analysis suggests this isn’t the case here. Satellite imagery suggests the landslide may have carved away large parts of a glacier, triggering its collapse.

We don’t know yet what caused the glacier to collapse. But glaciers worldwide are broadly in retreat – and flood and debris flow disasters can follow.

A smaller flood hit the same district in Nepal last year, killing nine people. Also last year, a melting glacier in Switzerland triggered a huge debris flow that destroyed the village of Blatten. In 2023, a landslide and subsequent flood in my home country of Georgia killed 33 people at a mountain resort.

But this disaster is one of the largest so far.

Permafrost is vulnerable

The high-elevation glaciers of the Himalayas can respond differently to climate change than glaciers at lower elevations or in relatively warmer regions. Thawing and degrading permafrost can also contribute by making steep Himalayan slopes less stable.

Permafrost is ground containing rock, soil and ice that has remained at or below 0°C for many years. As the climate warms, the ground can thaw, weakening the ice that helps bind rock and soil together.

On steep mountain slopes, this loss of frozen ground can make slopes less stable and make rockfalls, landslides and other forms of ground movement more likely. An earthquake, rockfall or other disturbance can then trigger a rapid downslope movement of rock, soil and debris.

Can these disasters be prevented?

No one died when the Swiss glacier collapsed. That’s because early warning systems were in place. Authorities evacuated residents before it fell.

As temperatures rise and climate-related disasters become more frequent or severe in some regions, early warning systems will become increasingly important for villages and towns located near glaciers or thawing permafrost.

These systems can monitor rapidly rising river levels, intense rainfall and seismic waves to alert authorities before disaster strikes.

However, installing and maintaining effective early warning systems can require significant investment. That’s a challenge for lower-income and developing countries. In good news, the Green Climate Fund last year announced funding for better monitoring systems in Nepal.

There’s another problem, too. Meltwater from Himalayan glaciers feeds rivers that are vital to billions of people across Nepal, Pakistan, India and China.

As the climate warms, increased glacier melt can temporarily increase river flows and, in some places, contribute to flood risk. But as glaciers continue to shrink, their contribution may eventually decline and lead to less water availability – particularly during the dry season.

Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, investment in early warning systems and better monitoring of vulnerable mountain regions can help communities prepare. These measures cannot prevent every disaster, but they can save lives and give people a better chance to adapt to a changing climate.

Levan Tielidze, Research Fellow in Glacial Geomorphology, Monash University

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Murujuga is a sacred cultural landscape of land and sea Country across the Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago, in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

It contains an estimated 1 million to 2 million petroglyphs, or rock engravings, that tell the story of the relationship between Ngarda-Ngarli Traditional Owners and this landscape over at least 50,000 years. These petroglyphs hold deep meaning for Ngarda-Ngarli, embodying cultural, spiritual, ancestral and environmental knowledge.

In July 2025, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in recognition of its outstanding cultural and spiritual significance. This brought renewed attention to Murujuga, which exists alongside longstanding industrial complexes that process commodities such as liquefied natural gas (LNG). Concerns have been raised that industrial pollution is degrading the rock art.

At the heart of our work is a question: how can this extraordinary place, and the rock art it contains, be protected into the future?

Today we released the third annual peer-reviewed report of the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program (MRAMP). This government-funded research effort doesn’t resolve every question – understanding a system as complex as Murujuga takes time. The research is undertaken by a team of more than 30 multidisciplinary researchers, and independently peer reviewed by a range of international experts. It is solely written by the researchers.

This work gives us a clearer picture than ever before of what’s driving changes observed in the rock surfaces.

A shift in the evidence

Last year we found some rock surfaces near industrial areas showed increased surface porosity, meaning there were measurable structural differences compared with rocks further away. These rocks have weathered or deteriorated more, and may be at greater risk of fading or flaking if this continues.

This year, we used an expanded dataset to build a more complete snapshot of porosity across Murujuga. Importantly, both datasets told the same story: there is a statistically significant porosity pattern across the peninsula, with higher porosity being found closer to industrial sites. Put simply, rocks closer to industrial sites are more porous than those further away.

Earlier monitoring pointed to nitrogen dioxide, the most abundant air pollutant gas at Murujuga, as a possible cause. But our data at the time couldn’t clearly separate its effects from other air-borne pollutants, particularly sulphur dioxide.

This year’s results change that picture. Several lines of evidence – atmospheric chemistry, rainfall pH and laboratory testing – now point to historic levels of sulphur dioxide from a range of industry and shipping, and the acid rain it can produce, as the most relevant factor.

The chemistry behind this is well understood: sulphur dioxide reacts in the atmosphere or on the rock surface to form sulphuric acid. This can dissolve the manganese and iron oxide minerals that give the rock varnish its dark colour, to create porosity.

Historic emissions the problem

These findings are significant, because sulphur dioxide emissions have fallen sharply since the 1980s, both at Murujuga and globally. Our evidence suggests it was historic peaks in sulphur dioxide, rather than current emissions, that made these rocks more porous.

It’s likely this process acted in conjunction with microbial activity on the rock surface.

Working out how those factors interact is a key task for our fourth and final report, out next year. Experiments to date suggest ammonia may influence some of the chemical and biological processes occurring on rock surfaces. However, current evidence suggests industrial ammonia emissions are too recent to explain the long-term porosity pattern observed across Murujuga. Historic sulphur dioxide remains the strongest explanation supported by the available evidence.

This conclusion rests on a large body of evidence. Across three years, we’ve measured rock surface condition 186,000 times. And these results have been backed by air quality monitoring across the peninsula, continuous rainfall chemistry sampling, and more than 5,500 laboratory tests on rock samples.

Together, they point to the same conclusion: the elevated rock porosity is most consistent with historic sulphur dioxide emissions, rather than current air pollution.

What about current air pollution?

This is the question we’re asked most often. It deserves a careful answer.

During monitoring, we did not observe acid rain. Air quality has generally remained below environmental thresholds developed through our program. We have not found measurable acceleration of rock deterioration linked to current pollution. However, this is different from proving that no effect, however small, could ever occur.

All rock weathers naturally over time, and monitoring can only rule out effects large enough for current methods to detect. Other researchers, working with different experimental methods and smaller sample numbers have reached different conclusions.

Our research is built on three years of continuous, multidisciplinary monitoring, rather than a single study.

What happens now?

Damage to landscapes such as Murujuga rarely have a single cause. We’re tracking how many factors interact, sometimes over decades.

The fourth and final year of this research will focus on the interplay of air quality, rock surfaces and microbial communities. We will also complete the environmental criteria to protect Murujuga in the long term, with a focus on ammonia and ozone, in addition to sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. However, ongoing monitoring will continue to ensure the protection of the rock art.

Murujuga has been cared for by Ngarda-Ngarli for more than 50,000 years. Our hope is this evidence continues to support that stewardship, and helps protect this extraordinary cultural landscape for many generations to come.

The Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program is funded by the WA Department of Water and Environmental Regulation.

Ben Mullins, Professor, School of Population Health, Curtin University; Belinda Churnside, Director, Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation Board, Indigenous Knowledge; Katy Evans, Professor, Curtin Frontier Institute for Geoscience Solutions, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, and Nicola Armstrong, Professor of Statistics and Data Science, Curtin University

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You’ve probably heard eating fish and other seafood is good for your health. One of the main reasons is that seafood is an excellent source of two important omega-3 fats called EPA and DHA.

EPA and DHA are critical for the development and function of brains, eyes and healthy hearts. They also reduce chronic inflammation, which is linked to many chronic diseases. They can also reduce the risk of premature births and perhaps even some types of cancer.

While humans can produce EPA and DHA from ALA (an omega-3 fat found in plants) and it’s possible to get them from foods such as linseed and walnuts, seafood is the main source for most people.

However, our new study shows many fish and other seafood will become less rich in omega-3s over time, due to rising ocean temperatures as the climate changes. In fact, we found omega-3 could drop by 50% under very high warming scenarios.

This is very bad news for human health but also for the health of other animals in the food web.

What is the food web?

Marine algae are among the only forms of life that produce EPA and DHA omega-3s. Examples of marine algae include seaweeds and diatoms (a type of phytoplankton).

Marine algae form the base of marine food webs – a term that means the feeding relationships of different species within an ecosystem. This means marine algae are crucial sources of micronutrients to all animals.

When animals, such as invertebrates like crabs and starfish, eat marine algae, they obtain EPA and DHA.

This is passed up the food chain as fish or other larger animals eat those invertebrates. Eventually, the EPA and DHA reaches humans through the seafood we eat.

However, if EPA and DHA levels get disrupted along the food chain, less of those crucial fatty acids are available for animals higher up – including humans.

What we did and what we found

Our systematic review aimed to understand how climate change may affect these essential fats.

We collected and analysed data from 489 separate experiments involving 132 marine species. These included algae, invertebrates and fish. Bringing together findings like this from many studies shows how marine life is changing globally.

We looked at two aspects of climate change – ocean warming and acidification. Since 1980, ocean temperatures have risen by 0.6°C and the number of heatwaves has doubled. By 2100, ocean temperatures could rise by 4.1°C.

The burning of fossil fuels is driving up CO₂ in the atmosphere, which causes ocean acidification. These environmental changes can have diverse effects on marine life.

We looked at what the research shows could happen in response to three levels of warming: low (0– 6°C hotter), medium (6–10°C hotter) and high (more than  10°C hotter).

Our systematic review found that warming of 0–6°C (which can already happen during marine heatwaves) led to 19% lower omega-3 fatty acids in fish in experiments lasting between 24 hours and six months.

That does not include the additional warming impact on the nutritional quality of food fish eat, which our study suggests would happen in the wild.

Under high warming scenarios (more than  10°C hotter), omega-3 reduced by 50% in fish, 34% in algae, and 51% in invertebrates.

Levels of saturated fats – which are less beneficial and abundant in many meats and dairy products – increased by up to 22%.

These disruptions along the food chain have the potential to reduce nutritional value throughout the entire marine ecosystem. This is a significant ecological and public health concern.

We found ocean acidification had less impact on fatty acids than warming, suggesting rising temperature is the dominant driver of this problem.

Why is this happening?

To survive, all living things need to maintain cell function under different environmental conditions.

Under warmer environments, cell membranes (which contain fats) become more flexible and fluid.

To counteract this, individual organisms can replace omega-3s with more rigid structural saturated fats.

These keep the membranes more stable – a process called homeoviscous adaptation.

Why is this a problem?

This is a problem globally. People in tropical regions often have poorer-quality diets and don’t consume enough of these omega-3 fats. And people in developed countries are also not eating enough omega-3 fats.

This problem will be harder to solve if climate change reduces the omega-3 in seafood.

This is especially relevant considering fish stocks are already under pressure from overfishing and other human impacts.

The ecological consequences are also far-reaching, as omega-3s are important for growth, reproduction and immune function in marine organisms themselves.

What do we need to do?

To limit the worst of climate change, experts have called for urgent cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Our research highlights the importance of managing food security. It is crucial to make sure essential nutrients can still be provided to human populations in their traditional foods in the future, even as the climate changes.

There is a huge amount of food waste, with up to 80% of fish parts discarded during food processing. Given the projected declines in nutrition into the future, these wasted fish parts could be better utilised.

This might, for instance, include making fish oil products rich in omega-3 and other nutrients, or using these fish parts as nutritional aquaculture feed.

Bethany Rose Dawson, PhD Candidate, School of Biological Sciences, Adelaide University ; Camille Mellin, Senior Lecturer and ARC Future Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, Adelaide University , and Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, Adelaide University

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

Antarctica is one of the driest, coldest places on Earth. Very little life survives its extremes.

In the soils dotted around the frozen ice sheets, however, communities of microbes do survive. And one of the keys to their success is a surprisingly communal strategy.

Unrelated organisms share the tools for survival by transferring genes among themselves, including genes that allow them to make energy from the air itself.

In new research, we studied the genomes of 676 microbe species and discovered that almost all of them (around 98%) showed evidence of swapping genes with other microbes. The study is published in Nature Communications.

Energy from the air

Our findings suggest this process, known as horizontal gene transfer, is a key to Antarctic microbe survival.

Genes involved in energy production were among the most frequently transferred. In particular, the genetic tools that allow microbes to generate energy from atmospheric gases, a process known as “aerotrophy”, were very commonly shared. This is probably because they help microbes harvest scarce resources from their harsh environment.

Aerotrophy allows microbes to use tiny amounts of gases in the atmosphere, such as hydrogen and carbon monoxide, as an energy source.

In most environments, aerotrophy is like a backup generator, allowing bacteria to survive when other resources such as food and sunlight are scarce.

But in Antarctica, it seems to be needed for everyday survival. The genes have been repeatedly passed between different and distantly related microbial species.

How do microbes share genes?

Imagine having the superhuman ability to make food from thin air and then randomly sharing it with some of your neighbours. While humans don’t work that way, microbes sometimes do.

Horizontal gene transfer is kind of like randomly airdropping bits and pieces of your genetic code to those around you, whether you’re related or not. It’s a useful way to gain new capabilities that may provide an advantage in challenging environments.

Humans only pass genetic information to their offspring, through what is known as vertical gene transfer. But horizontal gene transfer in microbes can happen in three different ways.

The first way is by scavenging free DNA in the environment, usually from dead cells. The second is by receiving DNA through microscopic bridges temporarily established between microbial cells. And the third way is via infection by a virus that accidentally brings some of its last host’s DNA along for the ride.

Microbes can acquire genes, but nature decides which ones stay

Adding a new genetic tool is only the beginning. After a microbe acquires a new gene, that gene must prove useful in its new host.

In microbes, if the transferred gene provides an advantage, it quickly becomes established throughout a population via natural selection. This process also weeds out harmful transfers.

Over many generations, small changes naturally appear in genes. For genes that provide important survival benefits, such as aerotrophy, changes that preserve their function are more likely to be maintained. Genes that no longer provide an advantage are gradually lost.

This process acts like a long-term quality check. Microbes can gain new abilities through gene exchange, but only the genetic tools that continue to improve their survival odds are kept. This helps explain why we continue to find the same energy-generating genes in distantly related Antarctic microbes, even across locations separated by thousands of kilometres.

Living off air underpins terrestrial Antarctic life

Aerotrophy appears to have helped Antarctic soils sustain diverse communities of microbes that play essential roles in Antarctic ecosystems. These microbes drive the flow of nutrients and energy through the ecosystems.

As Antarctica undergoes rapid environmental change, these microbial processes are also increasingly important to understand. Warming temperatures can alter microbial activity, potentially affecting the important processes that sustain these ecosystems.

Understanding how Antarctic microbes survive and respond to environmental pressures will give us new insights into how this ancient ecosystem might respond to warming.

Beyond their ecological roles, these microbes also challenge the way we think about Antarctica. Rather than an empty white continent, Antarctica harbours somewhat hidden but highly adaptable ecosystems filled with microbial life. These tiny survivalists have evolved strategies to endure some of the harshest conditions on Earth, including extreme cold and dryness, prolonged winter darkness, and nutrient scarcity.

By understanding how these microbes survive, scientists can learn more about the fundamental limits of life itself. Those insights could help us understand how organisms might survive in other extreme environments, including on future space missions or even on icy worlds beyond Earth.

Yongyi Peng, PhD Candidate in Environmental Microbiology, Monash University and Ry Holland, Research Fellow in Microbial Ecology, Monash University

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

Imagine a plume of brown sediment is washed off the land into Queensland rivers and carried out to sea. Here, it can settle on seagrass and inshore corals, potentially smothering them. River water often also carries nitrogen from fertiliser residue, which can fuel algal growth and damage coral health.

We have long known that poor water quality is a serious threat to areas of the Great Barrier Reef close to shore. The reef faces other major challenges, such as marine heatwaves driven by climate change that trigger large-scale coral bleaching. But unlike climate change, water quality is something Australia can directly control.

Since 2014, the federal and Queensland governments have collectively spent more than A$5 billion on catchment programs for reef health. Many of these aim to improve water quality by reducing fertiliser runoff from farmland and tackling erosion to stop sediment entering waterways.

Our new research shows water quality is improving in many rivers that flow to the reef. This is good news.

What did we learn?

To find out if water quality is changing, our research team analysed up to 37 years of monitoring data from seven major river systems to track changes in fertiliser runoff (dissolved inorganic nitrogen) and suspended sediment. These are two of the five key pollutants scientists use to track changes in river basins. Our research is the largest and most comprehensive analysis of catchment water quality for the reef to date.

These river basins drain around two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef water catchments, an area the size of New Zealand. Given the complexity of the data, and the size of some catchments, we did not necessarily expect to detect measurable improvements in water quality.

However, the data showed small but measurable improvements in nitrogen and sediment across most monitoring sites. Rivers with improved long-term water quality include the Herbert, Burdekin and Pioneer Rivers, as well as the Tully and Fitzroy.

Our data show that water quality didn’t follow a predictable pattern of steady improvement. Most rivers improved in bursts, often following major shifts in rainfall patterns, cyclones, land use or fertiliser practices.

In 2028, Australia will have to report progress on its water quality plan to UNESCO, which has monitored the Great Barrier Reef since it was listed on the World Heritage List in 1981. Trends in these two pollutants will form part of this response.

What changed?

In a companion study, we analysed what factors might be responsible.

To do this, we used data on how much fertiliser had been applied to key farmland cropping areas in these regions between 1910 and 2024.

This new data set showed synthetic fertiliser use peaked in the 2000s and 2010s and has now fallen in many sugarcane- and banana-growing regions. The drop is substantial. In 2024, fertiliser use was 25–49% lower compared with each region’s peak.

Importantly, less fertiliser didn’t mean less sugarcane. Crop yields have stayed steady. These declines likely reflect a combination of factors such as improved farm management practices, changes to land use and increasing fertiliser costs.

We’ve worked alongside many of these graziers and farmers through water quality projects and know the effort and costs involved in changing long-established farming practices. Farmers have to balance productivity, cost, time and ongoing challenges such as weather conditions and market demand.

There’s more to do

It’s encouraging to see signs of improvement. But our findings should not be interpreted as meaning all rivers in these catchments are now healthy.

Although the trends are improving, nitrogen and sediment levels in many rivers are still higher than the thresholds considered suitable for supporting healthy coastal and marine ecosystems, such as wetlands, seagrass and near-shore coral reefs.

This isn’t surprising. Environmental recovery rarely happens quickly or evenly. River catchments often take several years to respond to improvement efforts, such as riverbank revegetation for sediment erosion control.

That’s why long-term river monitoring data is so important. Without this, it’s difficult to distinguish short-term fluctuations from genuine change.

The reef still faces enormous challenges from climate change, extreme weather and ongoing land-use pressures, including tree clearing.

What our findings suggest is that water quality trends in many of the river catchments discharging to the Great Barrier Reef are moving in the right direction.

It has not been easy to get here. It has taken long-term effort from farmers, graziers, catchment managers and researchers. Our scientific evidence demonstrates previous management efforts have made an impact, at scale – and that current and future efforts are worthwhile.

In a world increasingly dominated by stories of environmental decline, these slow signs of improvement are worth celebrating.

We would like to acknowledge the research team: Cassandra James and Stephen Lewis (TropWATER, James Cook University) and Petra Kuhnert and Emma Lawrence (CSIRO).

Zoe Bainbridge, Senior Research Fellow, TropWATER, James Cook University and Rebecca Bartley, Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO

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

Treating dirty waste water solves one environmental problem but creates another by releasing large amounts of climate emissions. As microorganisms break down sewage, they release carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – three potent greenhouse gases.

Our new research found a surprisingly simple way to cut greenhouse gas emissions from open wastewater treatment lagoons: growing plants on buoyant rafts.

Water treatment companies have made progress in reducing emissions from their operations, including switching to renewable energy. But the greenhouse gases produced by the biological and chemical processes used to treat wastewater - particularly in open treatment ponds - are harder to tackle.

The first, full-scale trial of its kind worldwide, our project on Phillip Island in Victoria showed reductions in greenhouse gases by nearly a third over two years.

The climate problem hiding in wastewater

During wastewater treatment, organic matter and nutrients are broken down and removed by microorganisms, cleaning the water. But these microbial processes can produce powerful greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

Methane and nitrous oxide pack a much greater climate punch than carbon dioxide. Over a 100-year period, methane is about 27 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, while nitrous oxide is about 273 times more powerful.

Globally, wastewater treatment is estimated to account for around 7% of human-caused methane emissions and 10% of nitrous oxide emissions. Wastewater treatment companies currently have relatively few options for reducing these emissions, particularly from open wastewater lagoons.

Putting plants on the water

Floating wetlands are buoyant platforms planted with native wetland species, such as rushes, reeds and sedges. The plant roots hang down into the wastewater, creating a large surface area where roots, microorganisms and water can interact. The plants can absorb nutrients and pollutants, while microbial communities living on the roots can consume organic matter.

Floating wetlands are already being used to improve water quality in wastewater treatment lagoons, storm water ponds and other polluted water bodies around the world. One advantage is they can be installed on existing ponds and lagoons, without additional land or major changes to treatment infrastructure.

To investigate if they could also reduce climate emissions, we installed a floating wetland the size of nearly two tennis courts (330 m2) in an operating wastewater lagoon on Phillip Island, off the Victorian coast.

The lagoon contained two parallel channels. We installed the wetland in one, and planted it with three Australian native plant species: common reed (Phragmites australis), jointed rush (Baumea articulata) and marsh club rush (Bolboschoenus caldwellii). We used the other channel as a control, allowing us to compare them.

For two years, we continuously measured carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions at the start and the end of each channel. We also measured water quality and nutrient concentrations each month.

A drop in emissions

The results were striking. Overall, greenhouse gas emissions from the channel containing the floating wetland were 22-31% lower than emissions from the control channel. Methane emissions fell by 32-66%, while carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions were reduced by 24-36% and 18%, respectively.

Importantly, the reduction in emissions occurred within four to seven months of installing the floating wetland. We expected this drop in emissions to be linked to the plants removing nutrients from the wastewater, because nutrient removal can reduce the microbial processes that produce greenhouse gases.

However, we could not detect substantial reductions in nutrient concentrations until about 12 months into the study. This suggests that nutrient removal alone cannot fully explain why greenhouse gas emissions began to fall so early. There is still much we don’t know about exactly how floating wetlands reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What does this mean for wastewater emissions?

Floating wetlands may be a promising way to decrease wastewater emissions. But there are still important questions.

Our experiment was confined to two channels within a large wastewater lagoon, rather than measuring emissions across the entire lagoon. Accordingly, the emission reduction potential across the entire lagoon remains to be tested.

We also conducted our study at a single site. Further studies are needed to test whether these results hold across different wastewater systems and lagoon settings.

There are practical questions too. The floating wetland used in our trial relied in part on plastic-based materials. Other floating wetland designs using natural or biodegradable materials may offer a reduced environmental footprint.

Nevertheless, our results provide encouraging evidence that a relatively simple intervention can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from open wastewater lagoons.

We would like to thank Dr Kavindra Paranage, Dr John Award, Dr Divina Navarro, Dr Chris Walker, Meg Humphrys, Mark Dishon, Zoe Geyer, Ilse Hall, Tamika Johnston, Melinda Glew and Johanna Randall for their contributions to and support of the project.

Lukas Schuster, Research Fellow in Environmental Sciences, RMIT University; Martino Malerba, ARC DECRA Fellow, RMIT University, and Professor Peter Macreadie, Director - Centre for Nature Positive Solutions, RMIT University

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

Months out from its projected peak, El Niño is already helping push ocean temperatures into record territory.

July brought the highest global sea-surface temperatures ever recorded for that month, partly fuelled by the fast-developing climate pattern. The latest forecasts suggest there is much more to come.

So, what exactly is El Niño, why is this one potentially so significant and what could it mean for New Zealand? Here are five things to know.

El Niño begins with a huge shift in ocean heat

El Niño is a natural climate pattern involving unusual warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, accompanied by changes in winds and atmospheric circulation.

Here’s how the process normally works. The sun heats the tropical ocean, while trade winds push warm surface water westward across the equatorial Pacific, causing it to pile up around Indonesia, northern Australia and Southeast Asia. Cooler water rises from below in the eastern Pacific.

This build-up means sea levels in the western Pacific “Warm Pool” average about 60cm higher than in the eastern Pacific off South America. Without the trade winds holding it there, that warm water would flow back eastwards. But there is a limit to how much can build up.

Exactly how an El Niño gets underway varies, with weather and tropical storms sometimes weakening the tradewinds and providing the trigger. Once it begins, warm water starts surging back eastwards across the Pacific.

It can take two to three months to cross the ocean, shifting thunderstorms and rainfall as it goes and influencing weather patterns far beyond the tropical Pacific.

El Niño events typically occur every two to seven years, most commonly every three to five. Sea temperatures typically peak around December, with the biggest atmospheric effects occurring around February the following year.

This El Niño will be one for the record books

By December 2025, the tropical Pacific was already primed for an El Niño. Westerly wind bursts associated with tropical storms then helped set things in motion, with subsequent surges reinforcing warming towards South America.

Signs of a major event emerged early this year. Former NIWA meteorologist Ben Noll raised the prospect in February, and by July was warning it could become a very strong – or “super” – El Niño.

Current forecasts suggest the event will continue strengthening towards the end of the year, with sea-surface temperatures in key parts of the tropical Pacific reaching more than a record 3°C above average.

It will push global temperatures even higher

El Niño is unfolding against a backdrop of human-caused warming, with global ocean heat content reaching record levels in every year from 2017 to 2025.

A 1997-98 event contributed to 1998 becoming the warmest year of the 20th century. The 2015-16 El Niño pushed temperatures to another level, while records were reset again during the 2023-24 event.

Strong El Niño events release some accumulated ocean heat into the atmosphere, temporarily boosting global surface temperatures. Global temperatures can therefore resemble a staircase, with major El Niños helping push them onto successively higher steps.

This developing El Niño could provide the next step, with record-high global temperatures possible in 2026 and even more likely in 2027.

Exactly how climate change is affecting El Niño remains uncertain. But there are indications warming may be altering the phenomenon itself, potentially increasing the risk of very strong events.

Its impacts will reach far beyond the Pacific

El Niño has profound consequences worldwide, influencing droughts, floods, storms and heatwaves, as well as agriculture, health, fisheries, wildfire risk and economic activity.

Some effects are already emerging. Dry conditions have disrupted crops in parts of Southeast Asia and Central America, while the UN World Food Programme estimates El Niño could leave nearly 50 million more people facing acute hunger by year’s end.

Much of El Niño’s global reach comes from its influence on rainfall. Exceptionally high sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific shift rainfall towards the ocean, often favouring drought on land. These changes alter atmospheric circulation and weather patterns much further afield, while increasing wildfire risk in dry areas.

Changes in temperature and rainfall can affect diseases such as malaria, dengue and cholera. El Niño also shifts tropical cyclone activity, typically increasing it in central and eastern parts of the Pacific while suppressing it in the tropical Atlantic.

Weakened upwelling off South America also reduces the supply of cold, nutrient-rich water, disrupting marine ecosystems and potentially causing dramatic declines in fisheries and seabird populations.

The economic effects can linger for years, with the potential to cause trillions of dollars in losses.

New Zealand could be in for a dry year

New Zealand is already experiencing some effects of El Niño, including the relatively sunny but cold southerly conditions seen through much of this winter.

Unlike many parts of the world, New Zealand often experiences cooler conditions during El Niño.

Strongest effects typically emerge later in the year. Across the Tasman, it can contribute to drought and wildfire risk in much of Australia, with smoke plumes from fires occasionally reaching New Zealand.

El Niño tends to bring drier conditions to northeastern parts of New Zealand, particularly the North Island, while the southwest – including Fiordland and the West Coast – can become wetter.

Given the potential strength of this event, there is a real risk New Zealand could experience a so-called “dry year”, with consequences for agriculture and hydroelectric generation, and an increased risk of wildfires.

Farmers and others exposed to these risks should prepare for the possibility of drought as conditions develop.

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Scholar, National Center for Atmospheric Research; Affiliate Faculty, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

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

As summer temperatures soar across the United States and Europe, cities are being forced to confront the difficult reality that they’re getting dangerously hot.

Record-breaking heat waves strain power grids, send people to cooling shelters and can make the top floors of some apartment buildings unlivable.

One way to help cool buildings is to install green roofs – living rooftops covered by plants that can transform heat-absorbing rooftops into cooling solutions.

Green roofs have long been promoted as a method to help cities stay cool. Often cities offer developers incentives to install them. But just building a green roof isn’t enough.

My research with colleagues shows that what happens after a green roof is built is as important as the decision to install a green roof in the first place. We found that many green roofs fall into neglect and don’t survive beyond a few years, likely due to the cost of maintenance. When buildings’ operational budgets are cut, landscape elements – including green roofs – are often altered or maintenance is scaled back to save money.

What is a green roof?

Unlike a traditional roof made of asphalt, metal or tiles, a green roof is made up of layers, including insulation, water proofing and drainage, that allow plants to grow atop the building.

Depending on their design, these roofs can support everything from low-growing sedums to shrubs and trees. Rockefeller Center’s rooftop terrace gardens in New York City were designed in the 1930s to hold trees, grass, shrubs and seating areas to double as parklike respites far above the traffic. The roof of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is fully covered by 2.5 acres of wildflowers, succulents and other native coastal flowers.

These roofs are more than just decorative landscaping.

Plants absorb sunlight that would otherwise heat up the building below. They also cool the surrounding air through a process called evapotranspiration, in which they release water vapor. Additionally, they can reduce the amount of energy needed for heating and cooling buildings by acting as insulation. Green roofs also capture rainfall and prevent it from reaching storm drains, reducing flood risks and improving water quality in the community.

Because of these benefits, organizations like the European Commission and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have promoted green roofs in recent years as a way to reduce urban heat islands, make cities more resilient to extreme weather and improve biodiversity by supporting birds, butterflies and other insects.

Some cities even help pay for them by offering incentives, such as tax credits, stormwater fee reductions or sped-up permitting to encourage developers to install green roofs. Philadelphia, for example, offers businesses a tax credit that can cover up to 50% of green roof construction costs.

These programs recognize the public benefits that green roofs can give, but they tend to focus on getting the roofs built rather than on keeping them functioning long term.

Without maintenance, all the work and money invested by builders and the communities can quickly be lost.

What happens to green roofs in the long term?

Most green roof conversations focus on their design: How deep should the soil be? What plants should be used? How much can they cool a building? Less attention is given to what happens to the roof five, 10, or 20 years down the road.

To better understand the long-term fate of green roofs, we studied 46 green roofs across the southeastern United States. Rather than asking how well a newly installed roof performed, we asked whether it was still functioning and being kept up years after construction. The results surprised us.

Nearly half of the roofs were no longer functioning as intended. Nine had been abandoned, with vegetation loss and no maintenance. Twelve roofs had been removed completely.

Even more interesting was what predicted a green roof’s success, or lack of it.

It didn’t matter whether the green roof had received LEED certification, formally recognizing it as sustainable design, or whether it was owned by a private corporation or a nonprofit. What mattered was whether building ownership had changed.

Every time buildings changed hands, green roofs either ended up abandoned or removed altogether, possibly due to a loss of knowledge about the roof. There is also the issue of cost; people who buy buildings with green roofs may have different budgets or priorities and do not necessarily want to spend the time or money to pay for them.

Larger-scale implication

Green infrastructure requires ongoing monitoring and care.

Plants need to be watered, fertilized and sometimes replaced. Irrigation systems need repairs. Invasive species need to be managed. Drainage layers need inspecting to prevent disastrous leaks that damage the building below. Maintenance on green roofs can cost anywhere from a few cents to over $3 a square foot per year and can be time-consuming depending on whether a roof needs to be weeded and watered by hand.

Without that care, many of the benefits used to justify the original investment can disappear.

Imagine planting thousands of street trees, then never watering them again. That would be a poor investment. Yet people often assume green roofs will continue working indefinitely after installation without stopping to consider the work involved in keeping them alive.

Our research suggests that this assumption deserves a closer look.

Looking toward the future

Research consistently shows that green infrastructure plays an important role in helping cities adapt to a warming climate.

It can reduce urban temperatures, improve stormwater management, create habitat and make neighborhoods more comfortable.

But for green roofs to keep delivering environmental benefits decades after installation, communities may need to think beyond incentives for construction.

Long-term maintenance plans, clear ownership responsibilities and funding for stewardship may prove as important as the installation. Climate adaptation isn’t just about building new infrastructure, but also about making sure that infrastructure can continue to thrive years into the future.

Taylor Wishart, Ph.D. Student in Environmental Science, University of Tennessee

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

The companies fishing for Antarctic krill have harvested so much so quickly that the season had to close in August 2026, three months before it was scheduled to end. That’s the second consecutive year of an early closing.

The fishing industry has said these developments are evidence that the management system is working as intended: Once the 620,000-ton limit, called a “trigger level,” is reached, fishing must stop. And the evidence indicates that the krill fishing boats do stop when the trigger level is hit.

However, as someone who has been studying Antarctic krill ecology and their role in the Southern Ocean ecosystem for 16 years, what currently concerns me most is how locally concentrated that harvest has become.

A key species for Antarctic marine ecosystems

Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, is a principal food source for penguins, seals, whales, seabirds and fish. But krill are not distributed evenly across the Southern Ocean: They gather in dense, patchy groups in particular locations. They are most numerous in the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula stretching into the Scotia Sea.

Breeding penguins and seals depend on high concentrations of krill found relatively close to their colonies because they must repeatedly return to those colonies to feed their young. If they don’t find krill nearby, they can’t go much farther into the ocean to seek alternative prey without risking their young starving on the shore. More than 30 years of observations from the Antarctic Peninsula show why this concentration of krill matters. Models using those observations predict overall penguin performance – factors such as breeding success and foraging trip duration – to decline when fishing removes a high proportion of the krill available locally.

Baleen whales are more mobile, but they depend on exceptionally dense krill patches to make feeding worthwhile and often congregate in the same productive hot spots. There is growing concern around the overlap between the krill fishery and important feeding grounds of the recovering fin whale population.

Perhaps obviously, those locations are also attractive to fishing vessels, because it’s most efficient to catch large amounts of krill in those places. Krill meal is used as feed for aquaculture, pets and ornamental fish, among others. While some nations use krill meal as an additional food source for their people, human use of krill products is primarily through dietary supplements containing oils that are extracted from krill.

Efforts to manage fishing

An intergovernmental agency called the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, better known by its acronym CCAMLR, manages the Antarctic krill fishery, among other sea life in the Southern Ocean. It was created in 1982 amid concern that the rapidly expanding krill fishery could remove too much food from penguins, seals, whales and other predators. At present, 26 countries and the European Union are members of the commission.

In 1991 the commission set a precautionary threshold of 620,000 tons on the annual catch of krill across a region known as Area 48, which extends from the Antarctic Peninsula across the Scotia Sea. CCAMLR refers to this threshold as the “trigger level” because reaching it was intended to trigger a management system splitting the region into smaller areas, with their own specific catch limits, before catches could increase further.

The commission recognized that catching even a relatively small amount of krill could damage local ecosystems if it all came from a small area. In 2009, it placed regional caps within the 620,000-ton trigger level, limiting how much could be taken from each of four subareas within the broader Area 48: the Antarctic Peninsula, the South Orkney Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

Regional caps expire

While the regional caps were in effect, krill fishing ran the full year without ever hitting the trigger level.

The conservation measure that established the regional caps expired in 2024, and was not renewed or replaced. The trigger level remains in force, but companies are now allowed to fish for krill in whichever krill-rich areas they find most productive.

In each of the two seasons since then, fishing companies have hit the 620,000-ton trigger level months before the end of the season, in part by focusing their efforts on places where they can catch the most krill.

Global Fishing Watch’s vessel tracking shows that in 2026 the krill fishing fleet operated primarily in the Bransfield and Gerlache straits of the Antarctic Peninsula and northwest of the South Orkney Islands, with little to no fishing in the rest of Area 48.

Krill fishing is now happening in precisely the concentrated pattern the regional-cap conservation measure was created to prevent.

An opportunity

The concentration of fishing comes as the overall ecosystem is becoming more vulnerable as a result of climate change. The Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Sea are among the fastest-warming places on the planet.

Decreased sea ice cover, changing wind patterns and warming ocean temperatures are already altering krill habitat and the Southern Ocean food web. A long-term analysis of the Antarctic krill population in this region found that their densities declined by about 59% between the late 20th century and more recent decades, with the sharpest declines in the northern part of their range.

Because of the rapid changes to the marine environment of the Antarctic Peninsula and the region’s exceptional ecological importance, Argentina and Chile have proposed a marine protected area to conserve important habitats, biodiversity and ecological processes. The proposal, developed through years of scientific planning, would also protect areas important to krill and the predators that depend on them. But eight years after it was formally submitted to CCAMLR, member nations have still not reached the consensus required to adopt it.

The CCAMLR members next meet in October 2026. At that meeting, members need to restore binding spatial limits on krill catches while agreeing on a more sophisticated ecosystem-based management system that distributes fishing at scales relevant to krill and their predators. The proposed marine protected area will also be up for discussion, again. The concerns that led to the committee being created 44 years ago – fears about krill fishing harming krill-dependent Antarctic wildlife – have not diminished over the decades.

Kim S. Bernard, Professor of Biological Oceanography, Oregon State University

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

Oil slicks moving along Iran’s southern coast have reached the Hara mangrove forests of Qeshm Island. Iranian authorities say the extent of the contamination is still being assessed and the source of the oil pollution has not yet been established. But several oil spills have been detected in the region since the war between the US and Iran began.

The Hara forests lie in the Khuran Strait, which separates Qeshm Island from mainland Iran. This waterway is close to the Strait of Hormuz – one of the most strategically important marine corridors on Earth. The Strait of Hormuz is normally discussed through the vocabulary of geopolitics: barrels of oil, shipping lanes, energy prices and global trade.

But beneath that geopolitical map lies another map that receives far less attention. The Strait of Hormuz and its surrounding waters are home to mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds, fisheries and coastal communities. They also provide the seawater upon which some of the world’s most water-stressed societies depend.

The Strait of Hormuz is not only an energy chokepoint. It is an ecological chokepoint. And prolonged conflict exposes both at the same time.

An oil slick on open water is a serious pollution event. But oil entering a mangrove ecosystem creates a different problem. Mangroves occupy the boundary between land and sea, with dense root systems that slow water movement and trap sediments.

The same characteristics that make these ecosystems extraordinarily productive also make them effective traps for pollutants.

While oil can be removed from the water surface, oil that penetrates shorelines and fine sediments can be much more difficult to address. Contamination can affect roots and seedlings and expose organisms living in or feeding on these sediments to pollution. Fish and birds can be affected through ecological pathways extending beyond the visibly contaminated trees.

Qeshm should also not be viewed in isolation. Earlier in the war, another oil slick near Kharg Island in the northern Persian Gulf was tracked. Satellite imagery indicated that currents were carrying contamination through the Khuran Strait towards the mangroves.

Researchers using satellite observations have also reported a marked increase in the frequency and extent of oil pollution in the Gulf since the beginning of the war. This is where the environmental significance of prolonged conflict becomes much larger than any individual spill.

What needs to happen now

The first priority in Qeshm must be containment. Preventing additional oil from entering the mangroves is far more effective than attempting to remove it once it has penetrated a complex inter-tidal environment.

However, containment alone is insufficient. Authorities need to establish the source and chemical characteristics of the contamination, map its spatial extent, combine field observations with satellite monitoring and sample water and sediments.

They will also need to establish baseline conditions in affected and unaffected areas and monitor mangrove condition, aquatic organisms and other ecological indicators over time.

Such efforts may themselves be constrained by the war. Conflict can make scientists, environmental agencies and emergency-response teams less able to reach the places where intervention is most urgently needed.

The response must also avoid causing additional damage. Following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska, high-pressure hot-water washing removed stranded oil but also caused substantial additional damage to shoreline organisms and habitats.

In mangroves, where roots and sediments are particularly sensitive to physical disturbance, similarly aggressive interventions can do more harm than good. Most importantly, monitoring of the Hara mangrove forests cannot stop when the coastline looks clean.

There is a temptation during war to treat environmental damage as secondary: something to assess after questions of military strategy, diplomacy, energy supply and economic loss have been addressed. That hierarchy is difficult to defend.

Environmental systems are infrastructure. Mangroves protect coastlines and sustain marine ecosystems. Fisheries support livelihoods and food security. Soils support agriculture. Aquifers store water and coastal waters feed desalination plants.

Healthy ecosystems provide forms of resilience that become more – not less – important during periods of political and economic instability. Destroying or degrading them thus creates liabilities that can persist long after military operations have ended.

And unlike a bridge, pipeline or building, an ecosystem cannot necessarily be reconstructed. A mature mangrove forest is the product of biological processes that unfold over time. Lost ecological functions may take years to recover, and some changes may prove difficult to reverse.

This is why what is happening at Qeshm deserves attention well beyond Iran. The question is not whether this particular oil contamination represents an ecological catastrophe. We do not yet have the evidence to make that judgment. The more important question is what the event is telling us.

It is telling us that in a region where enormous volumes of hydrocarbons, dense maritime traffic, critical water infrastructure and fragile coastal ecosystems occupy the same narrow geography, environmental risk cannot be separated from geopolitical risk.

If the Iran conflict continues, the probability of further accidents, infrastructure damage, pollution and interrupted environmental management will increase. Some consequences, such as burning vessels, blackened coastlines or dead vegetation, will be immediately visible.

But others will accumulate quietly – in sediments, soils, groundwater, food webs and stressed ecosystems. It is these consequences that may ultimately prove harder to repair. While all wars eventually end, their environmental consequences do not necessarily follow the same timetable.

Nima Shokri, Executive Co-Director, Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), United Nations University; Technical University of Hamburg

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The abandoned houses of Old Podampetta on India’s east coast tell the story of a small fishing village that no longer exists. Families once woke up to the sound of the sea and made their living by reading the tides and winds. But years of coastal erosion and relentless cyclones eventually made staying impossible.

Similar stories are playing out across south Asia. Bangladesh and India recorded nearly 8 million people displaced within their borders by rapid-onset climate hazards in 2024 alone. Most were emergency evacuations before or after disasters such as cyclones, with people hoping to return home as soon as it was safe.

But for some communities, returning is no longer possible. Instead, they may undertake what is known as planned relocation: permanent movement away from places where climate change has made living increasingly unsafe. Some relocations are initiated by communities themselves, while others are planned and supported by governments.

Planned relocation may be an alternative to repeatedly being displaced and in some cases being forced to move to overcrowded and precarious urban settlements. But our research in Bangladesh and India shows that a successful relocation only becomes a durable solution when people can rebuild their livelihoods, relationships and sense of belonging.

More than a housing project

For people who previously lacked secure housing, relocation can provide shelter and legal recognition. In Bangladesh, an official address can help people access social security benefits and other government support, and secure loans or skills training. As one person we interviewed in Khulna district in the south-west told us:

Earlier, we were living as tenants. We lived in other people’s houses. From time to time, we lived in different places. We did not have a settlement in one place. We did not have a fixed house.

But a house alone is not enough. Another participant said their fear of cyclones had eased, but added: “Here there are no roads … Every time it rains, there is waterlogging in front of our houses.”

These experiences reflect a broader problem of reducing one risk while creating others. Relocation schemes by the authorities have often been poorly compensated and carried out with limited engagement with affected communities. Too often, they focus on moving people to safety without ensuring they can rebuild their lives.

Safety means secure work too

A new house does not replace a lost livelihood. Over the past few years, as part of a project investigating migration as a climate adaptation strategy, we’ve interviewed relocated residents from sites in Khulna and Chattogram, south-eastern Bangladesh, and Kendrapada and Ganjam districts of Odisha, a coastal area in eastern India.

Some households had better access to markets or housing. Others lost the land, forests, fishing grounds or informal work that had sustained them. One relocated participant in Kendrapada explained:

Even if someone wants to do farming they will not be able to do it. We were not compensated for lost agricultural land, we got land only to build a house. There is no work in this village.

They added: “We are having to buy everything here. We never had to buy rice, vegetables or fish [in the place where we lived before].”

In some places, the increased dependence on cash income and the lack of local livelihood opportunities encouraged people to migrate to other parts of Bangladesh and India. Family members working in these places sent back remittances which households use to improve their homes at relocation sites. Relocation does not necessarily end migration – it often changes what form it takes.

This helps explain why some communities resist relocation in the first place. Fishing households, for example, may remain on eroding coastlines because moving inland would mean losing access to the sea. For them, relocation would also mean a move away from work.

Jobs, transport, schools, healthcare and more all influence whether people are able to thrive in their new home. People also need opportunities to maintain cultural traditions at the same time as developing a sense of belonging in their new communities.

What makes planned relocation fairer?

“Is there a sadness greater than having to leave your place of birth?”, one relocated participant in Odisha asked us. They described leaving behind their farmland, trees and home, and arriving somewhere with “not even flowers to offer the Gods”.

Cultural losses such as these shape whether people feel settled, respected and able to rebuild.

Our research suggests things are more likely to go well when communities help plan their own futures from the outset, rather than having decisions imposed on them. But even where communities have limited control over their relocation, it’s still better when people can adapt new spaces to their needs, creating areas for children to play and shared spaces for community activities.

New settlements also need to reflect local climate, culture and everyday life, with homes that support cooking, privacy, livestock and social interactions. And they of course must protect people from hazards such as extreme heat, flooding or cyclones.

The move is only the beginning

Planned relocation should only happen once people can no longer adapt safely where they already live. When it is unavoidable, governments need to plan for more than the move itself – they must help ensure people no longer face displacement-related disadvantages after moving.

Bangladesh has already begun to recognise this. Its 2021 National Strategy on Internal Displacement Management and the action plan that followed both adopt a rights-based approach to planned relocation, treating it as more than an emergency response.

One of the key lessons from those documents for future climate change-related relocation is that moving people away from danger is only the beginning. The people of Old Podampetta mostly moved to New Podampetta, a site just inland from the sea which the community themselves played a central role in choosing. Their new homes are safe from erosion and cyclones, and the proximity to the sea meant minimal disruption to their livelihoods.

Podampetta’s story is an example of how relocation can be approached more thoughtfully, by keeping community needs central and designing policy around them. After all, the real measure of success is developing relocation policies that allow affected communities to live with security, dignity and the possibility of a future in which they can thrive.

Ricardo Safra de Campos, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Exeter; Nihal Ranjit, Senior Associate, School of Environment and Sustainability, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), and Tasneem Siddiqui, Chairperson, Department of Political Science, University of Dhaka

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

On a warm evening in May, swifts scream over rooftops, chasing insects above the traffic. A fox slips along a garden wall while gulls squabble on a supermarket roof. We tend to treat these animals as visitors. But they’re residents too, living alongside us in places designed for people.

My recent research argues this needs to change. Instead of asking how nature can make cities better for humans, urban planners should consider what cities owe the many species that already live in them.

More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, while cities continue to expand into wildlife habitats.

In the UK, swifts provide a distinct example. They nest in gaps under eaves and roof tiles, which can disappear when older buildings are demolished, re-roofed or insulated. UK swift numbers have fallen by around 60% since 1995. In 2021, the species was added to a list of birds at greatest risk of extinction.

The issue isn’t simply how we can make cities greener. It’s who we think cities are for.

For my new study, I compared approaches to incorporating nature into urban planning, including environmental offsetting, sustainable development and nature-based solutions such as green roofs, street trees and wetlands. I also examined cases where governments and courts have given species and ecosystems a different status in decision-making.

The pattern I found was striking. These approaches have become increasingly good at showing how nature benefits people, but much less willing to ask whether other species have interests of their own.

Trees are planted because they cool streets. Wetlands are protected because they can hold floodwater. Parks are funded because they improve our health.

All of those benefits are important. But they can also leave nature looking like a service provider for people. If a tree no longer provides enough shade, or a wetland becomes more valuable as development land, what happens to the argument for protecting it?

This is where the idea of “multispecies justice” comes in. It starts from a different premise, where animals, plants and ecosystems are not simply amenities that provide benefits to people. They are co-inhabitants of places we share.

That changes the question urban planning asks. Instead of only considering what nature can do for us, it asks what responsibilities we have towards the species with which we live.

What would change?

This doesn’t mean turning cities into wildlife reserves. It can involve small changes to decisions that shape urban life.

For example, before restoring a river, planners could consider whether the proposed changes are likely to create conditions in which fish and frogs can thrive. They could then assess the project not only on its effects on flooding or visitor numbers.

A development could be designed around established wildlife routes rather than treating them as obstacles to mitigate later. Environmental assessments could consider what a new road does to the routes used by badgers, bats or other animals, alongside its effects on drainage and emissions. Some places might be left undisturbed during breeding seasons.

There are already examples of governments experimenting with this type of approach. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was recognised as a legal person in 2017, with guardians appointed to represent its interests. Colombia’s Atrato River was recognised as a subject of rights in 2016, with a similar system of guardianship.

These cases aren’t straightforward solutions. The rights granted to rivers still have to operate within existing political and legal systems. Research suggests implementation in Colombia has been uneven.

But they illustrate a different way of thinking. Nature doesn’t have to justify its existence solely through the benefits it provides to people.

The idea is also beginning to appear in more conventional urban planning. Barcelona has built green corridors linking parks to the hills beyond the city so that wildlife can move through it.

In the UK, Scotland has become the first nation by law to require swift bricks in new buildings. These hollow bricks contain a nesting cavity and cost roughly £30 each. But its significance is larger than the brick itself. It treats the presence of another species as something that should be considered when we design buildings, rather than as an unexpected problem to deal with afterwards.

In England, efforts to require swift bricks by law were rejected by the House of Lords. The UK government has instead pursued their inclusion through planning policy and development requirements.

A different way of designing cities

None of this makes urban planning simple. Species can have competing needs, and protecting wildlife can sometimes conflict with other environmental or social goals.

A protected predator might threaten a vulnerable population. Preserving a habitat might complicate a development intended to reduce overheating. There won’t always be a simple answer.

But those conflicts already exist. The difference is that they’re often resolved using systems that give human interests the greatest weight. Multi-species justice asks us to make those choices more explicit.

Cities are already shared habitats. The birds nesting in our roofs, the insects in our gardens, the bats above our streets and the organisms in our soils are not simply passing through. They are part of urban life.

The challenge for planners is to decide whether they’ll continue to design cities primarily around human needs, adding nature where it provides a benefit, or begin to treat the flourishing of other species as a legitimate consideration in its own right.

Saman Sobhani, PhD Candidate in Environmental Economics, Aberystwyth University

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

Summer in Europe is normally cause for celebration. Not this one, however, which will rank as one of the hottest on record. Wildfires have broken out everywhere from France to Greece, while intense drought has turned the grass in London’s famous Hyde Park brown. This week, much of Europe is sweltering through yet another heatwave.

Most European cities are designed to weather cold, not intense heat. But temperatures are now regularly climbing over 35°C. Prolonged, damaging heat is forcing rapid change. Rather than abandoning normal life, urban residents put it on hold until cooler conditions arrive in the evening.

These changes are already measurable. In our recent research, we analysed two years of bank card transaction data from three Australian cities to see what happened when the temperature rose over 35°C. We found overall spending fell 7% during heatwaves. Consumers spent less between midday and early evening, before spending stabilised after sunset.

As extreme heat becomes more common, it will affect businesses and organisations in more cities. More of life will have to happen at night.

People stay home when extreme heat arrives

We used anonymised, large-scale bank card transaction data and daily temperature records from Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide between January 2023 and December 2024. Temperatures reached 35°C or higher on 62 days over this period – 27 in Adelaide, 20 in Melbourne and 15 in Sydney. The dataset captures virtually all point-of-sale spending in three-hour intervals.

When temperatures rose above 35°C, daytime spending fell sharply, especially during the hottest part of the day – 12pm to 6pm. Some spending shifted to cooler periods, such as evenings or the days before, or after extreme heat.

Department and variety stores were among the hardest hit: despite being air-conditioned, spending was 35% lower between 3pm and 6pm on extremely hot days.

Spending on eating out, entertainment and shopping dropped off during the afternoon before recovering in the evening. Spending at convenience stores proved more resilient. Overall, some purchases were postponed but others were lost altogether.

The shift to cooler hours

Heat is no stranger to many cities around the world. But even these places are now finding it too hot.

The daily rhythm of urban life is changing in cities such as Dubai, where summer temperatures can now push past 50°C. The Middle East is warming faster than the global average. In response, authorities have opened floodlit public beaches, which remain open overnight.

In France, Paris and Toulouse have begun keeping parks, gardens and swimming areas open into the night. In Italy and Spain, tourists are increasingly exploring Rome and Seville after sunset. In Seoul, South Korea, more than 120 public libraries now stay open until 10pm to act as climate shelters.

Despite these examples, there’s little evidence of a wider shift. Authorities in many cities are not yet actively planning for a future where extreme temperatures make afternoons unpleasant or dangerous.

Most cities are still organised around a daytime model. Public transport becomes less frequent after the commuter rush in early evening, while community centres, childcare facilities and public buildings tend to close early. Parks often lack adequate lighting or safety measures to make it possible to visit in cooler evenings.

Efforts to make cities more resilient to climate change often focus on redesigning streets, cooling buildings and expanding tree plantings and other green infrastructure. These are essential. But they are only part of the story.

Cities will have to adapt not only through modifying spaces, but also by modifying times. Climate resilience is more than just what infrastructure cities provide – it’s when it is available.

Rethinking the city after dark

To keep cities open later, authorities will need to strengthen social infrastructure – the network of public spaces, cultural institutions, libraries, sports facilities, community centres and other neighbourhood amenities crucial to everyday life in a city.

Public libraries are well-known heat refuges. But if they close before temperatures fall, it leaves people exposed.

Creating night cities doesn’t have to mean large-scale redevelopment. Often, it’s about changing existing patterns.

Sensible measures include:

• boosting frequency and reliability of public transport in evenings, especially during heatwaves
• extending opening hours for libraries and other community facilities
• installing better lighting along pedestrian routes
• ensuring public spaces remain safe and comfortable after dark.

It’s hard for some people to shift schedules to avoid the worst of the heat. Workers with fixed hours cannot simply move their working day, while carers and parents are constrained by school and care schedules. Older adults and people with limited mobility may also depend on public transport and services that become less available after dark.

That means time-shifting will have to be accompanied by investment in accessible evening infrastructure, as well as protections for the workers needed to keep cities running later.

Nightlife – or life at night?

As extreme heat reshapes daily life in more cities, authorities must plan ahead. We will need more research on how cities can best adapt their daily rhythms to rising temperatures.

It’s common to think of a city’s nightlife as revellers visiting bars or watching performances.

But in the very near future, nightlife may come to mean something else: normal life lived at night to avoid broiling by day.

Acknowledgements: Shashi Karunanethy and Dean Magee contributed to the Australian research.

Andreina Seijas, Lecturer, Urban School, Sciences Po

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