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South Australia’s catastrophic harmful algal bloom now affects almost 30% of the state’s coastline, stretching from the Coorong in the state’s southeast to the seafood-rich Spencer Gulf to the west.

With no end in sight, many South Australians are searching for solutions.

Trials of physical, chemical and biological solutions have been run around the world at much smaller scale, usually in aquaculture fish pens and leases.

Unfortunately, the enormous Karenia mikimotoi bloom in SA is far too big for any of these technologies. But they could provide temporary relief at high-risk sites, such as vital breeding grounds for vulnerable species such as the giant Australian cuttlefish.

How can algae be managed at smaller scales?

This disaster arose from a triple threat: marine heatwaves linked to climate change, floodwaters and cold upwellings carrying nutrients algae need, and marine habitat loss leaving coasts extra vulnerable. Prevention is the best cure – so we need to tackle each of these threats.

In the meantime, the bloom’s persistence presents an opportunity to experiment with potential solutions.

Chemical

Anyone who has managed a pool knows how effective chemicals are in removing unwanted algae. But in the sea, chemicals can have unintended impacts. There’s more than one type of algae out there and we don’t want to kill the good guys.

In response to algal blooms at sea, researchers have even tried chemical crop-dusting by planes.

Clay has been used against marine algal blooms for more than 50 years in China and Japan. The clay particles bind to algal cells in surface waters, causing them to settle to the bottom where they stop growing or die. But to date, it has required a huge amount of clay to be effective.

Modified clay technology is a promising environmentally friendly solution. Released as a slurry, the clay binds and removes phosphorus, essentially removing the bloom’s fuel source.

Physical

Physical solutions often involve mixing the water column to break up the warm surface layers suitable for algal growth.

Other solutions physically block and disturb algae. Pumping air through tubes to create “bubble curtains” can stop algae from passing through.

This technology is useful in aquaculture pens. But bubble curtains can do little against intense algal blooms, forcing fish farmers to simply drag their pens out of harms’ way. So they’re never going to work at scale.

Biological

Natural systems have their own checks and balances. The oceans are full of microorganisms that naturally prey on algae – such as single-celled organisms (ciliates and flagellates) – or suppress it, including bacteria and viruses.

Such natural microbial warfare may help solve the SA bloom, with promising signs of bioluminescent “sea sparkle” algae dining on Karenia.

Scientists in the United States are working to extract natural algicides produced by algae-killing marine bacteria to combat Red Tide blooms in Florida.

Some bacterial algicides only kill specific harmful algae species, offering promise for low-risk application. To date, these solutions have largely been used at small, experimental scale.

By contrast, algicidal bacteria are found in abundance on common seagrasses around the world, providing healthy seagrass meadows with natural immunity. Conserving and restoring seagrass offers one way to tackle the problem longer term.

Helping nature to help itself

SA was once home to 1,500km of shellfish reefs, formed by billions of native oysters. These ecosystems served as the natural kidneys of our coastline. A single oyster is capable of filtering a bathtub of water a day, removing excess nutrients and algae.

Within a century of European settlement, these natural reefs were all but destroyed by overharvesting. The good news: they can be restored. For example, restoring two hectares of shellfish reef at Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach saw oysters filtering over 12 million litres of water a day within 1.5 years of reef construction.

These figures suggest SA’s lost shellfish reefs would have been filtering over half a trillion litres of seawater daily. This natural wastewater treatment system could have removed nutrients washed into our coastal seas before they could feed a bloom.

Diving on the restored shellfish reef during the algal bloom has given us some hope. Despite the soupy green water, the native oysters appear to be doing well. Similarly, oysters on leases in the affected areas are thriving as they feed on the highly nutritious Karenia algae.

By contrast, many filter-feeding bivalves have been devastated by the bloom, notably the habitat-forming razorfish (pen shells) and cockles.

Earlier this month, Premier Peter Malinauskas announced plans to restore a total of 15 hectares of shellfish reef alongside community groups across 15 locations. This provides an opportunity to learn whether larger-scale oyster restoration can help future-proof SA seas against harmful algae.

Rebuildling resilient ecosystems

This devastating algal bloom will eventually dissipate. Once the harmful algae have fallen back to normal levels, nature can rebuild.

But future blooms are likely as the climate warms and strengthens heavy downpours that flush nutrients out to sea. To prepare, we should explore ways of restoring ecosystems able to hasten recovery and rebuild natural resilience.

Investing in scaling up conservation and restoration of filter-feeding shellfish reefs and bacteria-harbouring seagrass meadows – the sea’s kidneys and immune system – will be necessary alongside long-term underwater monitoring.

If we continue with a reactive, fragmented approach to climate, nutrient pollution, and biodiversity loss, we’re guaranteed to face more costly catastrophes. We need to act to build long-term ecological and socio-economic resilience.

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

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

Climate change is making home insurance costlier and, for some, harder to secure. According to one analysis, one in ten Australian properties will be uninsurable within a decade.

Insurance is vital to help people recover after a disaster damages or destroys their home – enabling them to replace personal belongings and rebuild their homes and lives.

Historically, insurers have been required to determine risk – and set premiums – according to losses from past disasters. It has meant insurers cannot account for worsening climate-fuelled disasters, which are causing more damage to homes and triggering more insurance payouts.

In response, insurers around the world have generally raised premiums to cover their losses, excluded some risks from policies or withdrawn coverage from some high-risk locations entirely.

California has just taken a novel approach to this problem. There, insurers are now permitted to use forward-looking computer models of climate change and disasters when setting premiums – as long as they expand coverage in higher-risk areas.

Australia should explore this approach. It has the potential to keep home insurance prices stable, ensure coverage in risky areas, and make homes safer over time.

What’s happened in California?

Even before the devastating LA wildfires in January this year, California’s home-insurance market was buckling after severe disasters and rising costs.

The increasing costs included “reinsurance”, which is insurance one insurance company purchases from another to protect itself, at least partially, if it’s inundated with claims following a disaster.

According to CNN, insurance companies declined to renew 2.8 million homeowner policies in California between 2020 and 2022.

Insurers argued they would cover more homes if they were allowed to use forward-looking climate and catastrophe models – and pass on some reinsurance costs in premiums charged to customers. Californian authorities adopted the changes, which began earlier this year.

Insurers in most US states, and in many other countries, already use forward-looking catastrophe models. The California approach is new because it legally requires insurers using the models to expand coverage in high-risk areas.

The change is expected to make insurance prices more stable from year to year.

Under the previous system, major disasters such as wildfires meant insurers often stopped taking on new policies or did not renew policies in high-risk areas. This pushed more people onto often costlier, more limited state-managed property insurance plans. Meanwhile, remaining customers of private insurers faced hikes in premiums.

Under the new system, premiums are expected to fluctuate less following disasters. This is because future risk would already be built into premiums.

In exchange, insurance companies must expand cover in high-risk areas to at least 85% of their marketshare across California. Those meeting this quota may pass some reinsurance costs to consumers.

Last month, Californian authorities green-lit the model insurers will apply to wildfires. More models for other types of disasters will follow.

The wildfire model was produced by a private firm. California is also exploring a public wildfire model built by universities, to increase transparency and trust in the system.

Where Australia stands

In Australia, the problem of home insurance under climate change has already emerged.

Worsening and more frequent floods, bushfires and storms are pushing up average home insurance premiums. An estimated 1.6 million households are suffering insurance affordability stress.

The problem has prompted some government action. In 2022, for example, the federal government introduced a scheme that provides reinsurance to insurers for cyclone-related damage on eligible policies, including home and contents insurance. It lowers reinsurance costs for insurers, helping retain coverage in cyclone-prone Northern Australia.

In another initiative, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority is assessing how climate change could affect household insurance affordability by 2050.

And from July 2025, most large Australian entities, including some insurers, were required to begin annual climate-risk reporting, providing more consistent information across the economy.

But as premiums continue to climb, more must be done.

Lessons for Australia

Australia should consider following California’s lead. Insurers should be permitted to use forward-looking climate and catastrophe models to assess risk, as long as they maintain or expand coverage in higher-risk postcodes.

Both private firms and universities should be used to develop the models. This provides choice for insurers and a robust cross-check for regulators and the public.

The models should be independently audited and use open data accessible by the general public. This would enable communities and local councils see how risk is calculated and how mitigation efforts lower it. It would mean those who reduce risk – perhaps by clearing vegetation around a home to prevent fire spreading, or raising electrical components above flood height – could be rewarded with lower premiums.

It’s important to note, however, that this approach will not make insurance cheap. In the age of climate-fuelled disasters, those days are over – especially in high-risk areas.

But in the long-term it can keep insurance cover available, temper sharp price spikes, and reward safer homes. That is the realistic goal.

Ehsan Noroozinejad, Senior Researcher and Sustainable Future Lead, Urban Transformations Research Centre, Western Sydney University

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

If miners, the media, policymakers and renewable energy companies are to be believed, Australia is in the midst of a green energy transition aimed at preventing the worst effects of climate change.

This appealing narrative suggests we are progressively reducing greenhouse emissions by replacing fossil fuels with clean alternatives such as wind and solar power, batteries and electric vehicles.

But there’s a real problem in accepting this idea without question. To date, the green energy transition has largely added more energy to the mix, rather than actually replacing fossil fuels. In other words, our decarbonisation is yet to begin in earnest.

For countries with a laser focus on economic growth such as Australia, this means shifting away from fossil fuels is particularly challenging. Growth and fossil fuel use have long been linked.

As one of the world’s top three liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters, Australia exports much of the problem. Tackling climate change would mean picking a fight with powerful industries that have dominated Australia’s economy and politics for decades.

Confronting the true scale of the decarbonisation challenge is daunting. We need to challenge fossil fuel interests in politics and consider whether continual economic growth can ever be compatible with climate stability.

Is the transition a mirage?

For at least two decades in Australia, much effort has gone towards making the green energy transition a reality. Solar panels are now on a third of Australian houses, while wind farms and large-scale solar funnel ever more energy into power grids, reaching new heights of 43% in the main grid this year. Electric vehicles are becoming more common on Australian roads, and the production of green steel is nascent but promising.

Australia’s direct emissions are slowly beginning to fall, due mainly to changes in land uses and, more recently, to renewables replacing coal plants. The latest figures show a 1.4% drop over the past year. But if the emissions of Australian gas and coal burned overseas are considered, Australia’s emissions would still be rising.

Positive trends foster assumptions that less and less fossil fuels will need to be burned.

This, however, isn’t guaranteed. Energy historians have pointed out new forms of energy don’t necessarily replace the older ones. Instead, they are getting added to the mix.

The world economy now uses more wood, coal, oil and gas than ever before. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions are still rising as fossil fuels continue to be used alongside renewables.

Hungry for energy

Energy use, carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth have long gone hand in hand. While some richer countries are managing to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions, these countries often effectively export emissions to poorer nations. It’s proving far harder to make absolute emissions cuts while still growing the economy.

In economics, it’s long been believed that energy consumption is determined by how fast an economy is growing.

Energy economists have since learned the opposite may be true: that only when energy is available, economic growth follows. When new energy sources emerge, they will be used to build more, drive technological change and other economic activities.

While green growth advocates hope new technology will make it possible to keep expanding the economy at minimal environmental cost, these hopes are misplaced.

In theory, renewable energy resources are near-infinite. If the world ran on 100% renewables, continual economic growth might be possible. But adding renewable energy to the mix while we exploit all available carbon-based energy won’t be enough to stop climate change or save species from extinction.

The way we think about the economy has to change from a focus on infinite growth to a restorative approach.

Fossil fuels won’t go without a fight

China’s recent success in stabilising emissions through very rapid renewable energy deployment suggests low-carbon development is still possible. But even this historic effort may not be enough to make the rapid, deep emission cuts needed to stave off the worst of climate change. China’s decades-long focus on economic growth has come at huge cost to its environment more broadly.

China’s massive renewables expansion was possible only because its government has actively pursued decarbonisation as a national priority, alongside building clean energy industries.

It’s a different story in Australia. While the nation has taken up solar at world-beating speed, successive governments have also worked to rapidly expand the LNG industry and keep coal alive.

From the Howard era onward, fossil fuel lobbyists have fought against the adoption of strong emissions targets, downplayed the urgency of climate action, and worked to stop measures such as the short-lived carbon price.

It seems unthinkable for an Australian government to deny a fossil fuel producer anything. Federal approval for Woodside’s giant North West Shelf project to continue is only the latest example of a political system unable to make the changes necessary to meaningfully cut emissions.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. Australia is rich in sun, wind, metals and critical minerals. Prominent figures from Rod Sims to Ross Garnaut to Alan Finkel have laid out how Australia could create large new green industries as the sun sets on fossil fuels. Big Australian companies say rapid emission cuts would spur huge new industries. But our attitude towards exploiting existing energy resources needs to change.

Grasping the true difficulty of keeping Australia’s fossil fuels safely in the ground is an essential first step before we can begin a more honest discussion about how to achieve a prosperous and safe future. Cutting emissions fast enough to avoid the very worst of climate change will require far greater ambition and far-reaching structural change to the economy.

Martin Brueckner, Pro Vice Chancellor, Sustainability, Murdoch University; Charles Roche, Lecturer in Sustainability and Development, Murdoch University, and Tauel Harper, Associate Professor in Communications and Media, Murdoch University

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

Any week now, Australia will set its 2035 emissions target. It must signal the nation’s strong ambition on climate action, to drive policy and investment. And it must avoid being seen as either unrealistic or too costly. The decision is not an easy one for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his cabinet.

If any Australian government has had a clear runway for ambitious climate policy, it is this one. A successful first term, and a landslide win in an election partly fought over climate and energy policy, gives the Albanese government an opportunity for a lasting legacy.

But the tightrope the government must walk spans a wide gulf. The Climate Change Authority’s draft advice floated emissions reduction of 65-75% by 2035. Environment groups are gunning for the high end of the range; some business groups agree, but others won’t.

Yet even a 65% target, at the low end of the range, would mean halving Australia’s current emissions.

The challenge is formidable – but now is not a time for timidity on Australia’s climate policy.

A huge task ahead

Under the Paris Agreement, Australia’s 2035 emissions target is due by the end of September.

Our 2030 target is a 43% emissions reduction, based on 2005 levels. Australia is far from reaching that goal. It can still be achieved, but quick, drastic change is needed.

Australia’s national emissions are at around 28% below 2005 levels. They fell 1.4% over the last year, to almost the same level as three years ago.

Any emissions reduction target of 60% or more for 2035 will be highly ambitious. It would require deep, rapid emissions cuts across the economy.

But it’s technically possible. And it’s desirable economically – to attract investment and position Australia for long-term success.

It’s all about follow-through

The main question is not precisely what 2035 target the government sets. Rather, it’s whether the government follows through – with stronger and extra policies – and if business will get on board.

Useful policies were enacted during the last term of government – for industry, renewables supply and cars. But these are tender beginnings compared to what’s needed.

An economy-wide carbon price at a sizeable level would be ideal. However, the eternally adverse politics under the “carbon tax” label seem to rule it out.

Instead, the government could deploy and calibrate a range of policies in all sectors to achieve a comparable effect. These include emissions markets, regulation, tax and subsidies.

The Productivity Commission has called for a nationally consistent emissions-reduction approach guided by a set of “national carbon values”, representing the implied carbon prices needed to meet Australia’s net-zero goals.

The higher the implied carbon price, the greater the incentive for businesses and others to reduce emissions. These benchmarks would be used by government to ensure efforts are efficient, coordinated and on-target.

Any implied carbon price would need to rise far beyond levels in Australia’s carbon credit markets – currently about A$30-40 per tonne of carbon dioxide.

The European Union’s emissions trading price, for example, has recently been around €70 or A$130 per tonne.

Australia’s fuel excise, converted to carbon terms, is about $190 and rising. Infrastructure Australia, which now requires greenhouse gas emissions to be valued in project proposals, pegs the carbon value at more than $200 a tonne for the 2030s, and rising.

Clean energy gridlock

Old coal power plants are being replaced by wind, solar and energy storage. But progress in the clean energy transition is much slower than what’s needed.

The government’s underwriting scheme takes care of investor worries about low wholesale power prices in future, by guaranteeing a base level of revenue. But proposed power line and clean energy projects are stuck in the quicksand of objections and assessments.

State and federal governments must snap out of the business-as-usual approach to regulation and approval, which is not geared for rapid change.

The tightrope here is between jumping in to rebuild the power supply system as an urgent national priority, and bowing to fears and grumbles – some amplified by politicians – about higher electricity bills, power lines and wind turbines.

Balancing emissions and industry pain

For industry, the tightrope spans necessary modernisation on one side, and the risk of industrial closures on the other.

The Safeguard Mechanism encourages businesses to cut emissions, by requiring them to buy carbon credits if they exceed a certain limit. But the credit market prices are far too low to drive the required investment.

Reform is needed. It could mean tightening rules for carbon credits produced by projects that store carbon in the land sector. It might mean limiting industry’s use of carbon credits and increasing the rates of emissions reduction by each facility. Or it might involve setting a minimum price for carbon credits in the market, and increasing the maximum price.

Land sector lagging on climate action

In land use, forestry and agriculture, very little is being done to reduce emissions.

Much could and should be done. The current carbon credit scheme is inherently limited. Governments must get much more active.

That may mean buying marginal lands for conservation. It might mean regulating land use and forestry more actively, and combining biodiversity projects with carbon storage. It might also mean subsidising new green practices in agriculture.

The tightrope is between creating greener and more efficient land-based industries, and fears of leaving farmers and rural communities stranded.

Shifting gears on transport reform

The government’s new vehicle emissions standards will help make electric cars and smaller cars cheaper. But low-carbon transport policy is not all about the price of cars.

Australia urgently needs an extensive, reliable electric vehicle (EV) charging network, better urban public transport, and more and better rail lines. We should start using carbon-neutral aviation fuels, and charge carbon levies on jet fuel.

And mining and agricultural machinery must electrify and become more efficient. To that end, the fuel excise could ultimately be extended to all fuel use in the economy, covering also aviation, mining and agriculture.

The government’s mooted road user charge should be merely the beginning of reform in this area.

The challenge here is to do tax reform that can fund future public transport infrastructure, when there are many competing budget priorities.

A crossroads for Australia’s climate future

If things go well, Australia’s 2035 emissions target will be strong and broadly accepted as a desirable ambition by the community and by business. This will give a licence for much stronger emissions reduction policies across the economy, spurring investment and economic modernisation.

If things go badly, a strong political constellation for meaningful progress towards net zero emissions would be squandered.

Against the backdrop of Australia’s climate wars, most actions needed to meet an ambitious 2035 target will be seen as politically difficult. But now is the time for decisiveness in the nation’s long-term interest.

Frank Jotzo, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy and Director, Centre for Climate and Energy Policy, Australian National University

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

Human economies are made possible through natural capital – stocks of land, fresh water, oceans, biodiversity and soils, among others. Farming isn’t possible without soil or water. Manufacturing isn’t possible without raw materials to convert into products. Service industries aren’t possible without reliable food.

This may seem like stating the obvious. But what’s obvious isn’t always acted upon. At last week’s high-profile Economic Reform Roundtable, natural capital was conspicuously absent. At the table were bankers, unionists, housing experts and business groups – but only one environmental advocate, former treasury secretary Ken Henry.

The government’s goals were to make the economy more productive and resilient and the budget more sustainable. The health of our natural capital underpins all of these.

This missed opportunity is symptomatic of a wider challenge. The very real risks we face if natural capital degrades are mostly ignored, virtually unmonitored and not part of mainstream economic discussions. Small wonder environment groups launched their own alternative roundtable to make the economic case for nature.

In the mid-20th century, economists and policymakers commonly assumed nature had no limits. By the end of the century, it was abundantly clear this wasn’t true. In the 21st century, this view is patently absurd. Nature has hard limits. Water can be used up. Fisheries can be fished out. Pollinators can die out. The environment and the economy are not separate – one enables the other.

Natural capital underpins the economy

Other countries have moved faster in recognising how fundamental natural capital is to a thriving economy. The United Kingdom’s 2021 Dasgupta Report is one of the best-known explanations. Many businesses recognise the risks of declining natural capital through taskforces on nature-related and climate-related financial disclosures.

Integrating the environment into economic thinking is crucial. It lets us think about these limited resources and ecological systems alongside other factors such as factories, roads, financial capital, labour and knowledge.

Natural capital matters for productivity in many ways, some obvious and others less so. In cities, trees reduce temperatures and cut air pollution. This in turn helps human health, increases productivity and reduces the need for air conditioners and hospitals, lowering energy costs and boosting public finances.

Human wellbeing is improved by access to nature and the services it delivers. When we’re well and happy, we’re more productive at work and take less time off.

We need data on nature

When making economic decisions, properly accounting for the value of functioning natural systems requires starting with good information.

The Bureau of Statistics provides voluminous economic data, from GDP to jobs to building approvals to inflation and more. But these are no longer enough.

What’s needed is “natural capital accounting” – tracking the health of natural systems and the size of the stocks. It shows how much is in our natural capital bank, how it is being used, and what value we derive from it. Many examples exist in projects in Australia and internationally, such as in water and forests.

In 2018, the Australian government adopted this approach, using the internationally agreed System of Environmental-Economic Accounting.

In 2020, the approach was backed by the sweeping Samuel Review into Australia’s main environment laws, and in 2022, the government’s Nature Positive Plan adopted it.

While several natural capital accounts have been produced, their potential has gone largely unrealised.

Faster approvals may boost productivity – but damage nature faster

One widely publicised outcome from the roundtable is a focus on faster approvals for developments. This week, Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt announced updated environment laws will be brought to parliament before the end of the year.

This is welcome. Linking revised laws to boosted economic productivity may be worthwhile. But without natural capital accounting, there’s no guarantee it will work.

If we relied on 20th-century thinking to assess productivity, it would be simple to assume speeding up approvals by cutting red and green tape would be a step forward. But this century is one of environmental consequences.

At present, environmental approvals for big developments allow companies to make natural capital withdrawals – such as converting habitat to a warehouse – even if nature is approaching thresholds of no return, such as the extinction of species or the disappearance of ecosystems. This is a key reason why box-gum grassy woodlands remain critically endangered.

We could avoid this by using natural capital accounting. If the stocks of natural capital are known, developers can avoid wasting time applying for approvals where stocks are too low, while regulators can make faster assessments if the development will consume too much. What defines “too much” would be set in the planned national environmental standards.

This would flip the development process from reactive to proactive. Need more homes? Let’s identify areas with enough natural capital to build them and avoid areas that don’t, such as threatened woodland ecosystems or grasslands. This would save time and money for everyone.

Policymakers already use this approach in banking. Banks have to keep some funds to buffer against unexpected losses, under the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s requirements. Surely we can imagine similar requirements for natural capital.

The age of environmental consequences

If we draw down on natural capital without knowing how much we have, how much is needed, or how it contributes to the economy or wellbeing, we risk what Henry calls “intergenerational bastardry” – worsening the lives of future generations through our actions today.

To achieve productivity in a sustainable way, we need 21st-century thinking, better information and long-term reform based on a clear understanding of how the natural environment and the human economy intersect. Let’s hope policymakers are up to the challenge.

Acknowledgements: Carl Obst contributed to this article.

Michael Vardon, Associate Professor at the Fenner School, Australian National University

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

Sussan Ley is resisting growing internal pressure for the Coalition to quickly discuss and determine the future of its policy on net zero.

A number of Liberals and Nationals urged the debate be brought forward and the process for decision making clarified, at the Liberal and Coalition party meetings on Tuesday.

The pressure reflects the surge in support especially in the Nationals – but also in parts of the Liberal Party – for dumping the 2050 net zero commitment. More generally, it is becoming increasingly politically untenable for the Coalition to remain in limbo over its policy.

The opposition’s hand is also being forced by the fact the government will announce within weeks Australia’s 2035 emissions reduction target under the Paris agreement. This target, which may be a range rather than a particular number, appears likely to be between 65% and 75%, on previous indications. Australia’s 2030 target is a 43% reduction on 2005 emissions.

Sources said Tuesday’s push started in the Liberal party room meeting with the matter raised by South Australian conservative Tony Pasin and then continued at the joint party meeting.

A range of speakers including both conservatives and moderates, with differing positions on net zero, argued the Coalition needed to get on with settling a position.

Initially, the need for a position was about a 2035 target and then broadened into the need to settle its position on net zero.

Pasin later told Sky he had sought clarification on the process for making the decisions but didn’t get it. He said the opposition could not wait 12-18 months to decide a policy.

High profile Nationals Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce are running an intense campaign to change the Coalition’s policy. The government is ensuring Joyce’s private member’s bill to remove legislative references to net zero is regularly debated in the time given each week to private member’s bills.

The Nationals seem certain to dump net zero sooner rather than later, while the Liberals are divided and Ley is trying to stick to her timetable of a comprehensive Coalition review before a decision is made.

The review team includes representation from the Nationals, and is chaired by Victorian Liberal Dan Tehan, who is energy spokesman.

Tehan told Sky on Tuesday, “I’ve said quite clearly on the record a number of times that I support net zero by 2050”.

Last Friday the Queensland Liberal National Party convention overwhelmingly rejected net zero. Meetings of the Liberal organisations in South Australia and Western Australia had done so earlier.

While the party organisation can’t impose policy on the Liberal parliamentary party, the stands increase the pressure on MPs, who have an eye to their preselections.

Frontbencher Andrew Hastie is not waiting for the review. He told the ABC on Tuesday, “I believe in a sovereign, secure, competitive and prosperous Australia, and I think net zero undermines that very thing”. Hastie has been outspoken on the issue before.

The Liberal leader in the senate, and fellow Western Australian, Michaelia Cash, has backed the WA motion against net zero.

Labor predictably capitalised on the Coalition’s problems with its energy policy, with Energy Minister Chris Bowen telling parliament, “What we have is two parties, one Coalition, and many, many ways of killing net zero”.

Ley told a news conference Labor’s coming announcement of its 2035 targets would give the opposition an opportunity to ask the government to demonstrate what these targets will cost, how it would deliver on promises and what they would mean for manufacturing businesses and Australian households.

Deciding the 2035 target finds the government caught between ambition and practicality. For the opposition, the government’s announcement will put it on the spot – but, if the internal heat becomes too much, it would also provide an opportunity to deal with the net zero issue. That would mean, however, dramatically accerelating the Tehan review and the policy-making process.

Whether she sticks to her present timetable or revises it, Ley finds herself in a corner. And that’s just over timing. On the substance of the issue, she is caught between the strong anti net zero lobby within the Coalition and the need to appeal to urban voters and young people, who mostly consider net zero a no brainer.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Many tropical glaciers in the Andes are expected to disappear in the next few decades. Their meltwater sustains millions of people, feeding crops in the dry season, supplying Peru’s capital Lima and other big cities, and even boosting the Amazon river. As glaciers vanish, floods and droughts are becoming more extreme.

But my new research with colleagues suggests solutions may lie in environmental knowledge that the Incas and their predecessors developed centuries ago.

In January 2010, record rainfall caused massive flooding in the Cusco region of Peru. Bridges were washed away, 25,000 people were left homeless and 80% of harvests were destroyed. The railway to Machu Picchu was cut off. Losses were estimated at US$230 million (£170m).

This disaster took place in the heart of what was the Inca Empire, which once spanned an area from what is today near the Colombian border down to central Chile. The Incas’ efficient storage systems, sophisticated road network and ecological management supported up to 14 million people before European conquest and colonisation.

So could some of this modern-day catastrophe have been avoided if the landscape still retained its natural tree cover – forests and high-altitude vegetation that slow water and reduce erosion?

A new paper in the journal Ambio offers a long-term perspective. I was part of a team of researchers from the University of Sussex, the International Potato Center in Lima and Cusco-based NGO Ecoan, who examined microfossils such as pollen in sediment cores from Lake Marcacocha, near Cusco. These act as an environmental archive, recording shifts in vegetation, farming and climate over centuries.

The evidence shows that from around the year 1100, during a period of global warming known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, Andean communities moved higher up into the mountains. They built terraces, irrigated slopes, and planted trees such as alder to make the soil more fertile and provide wood.

Llamas and their cousins alpacas were vital as they were hardy, light-footed, and supplied wool, fuel and fertiliser. Their communal dung heaps even show up in the lake sediments, revealed by spikes in fossils of certain dung-eating mites that thrived when llama caravans were pastured nearby.

Together, these practices stabilised soils, reduced erosion, and allowed large populations to thrive in the Andes.

An ecological and social transformation

When the Spanish arrived in the 1530s, this balance was upended. New livestock – cattle, sheep and goats – trampled vegetation and eroded soils. Their free-ranging herds left waste across the landscape, unlike llamas and their easily-collectible dung.

At the same time, the Spaniards cut down forests for timber and charcoal, in contrast to the Inca who had imposed harsh penalties to protect their woodland resources. The 17th century Spanish pastor and chronicler, Bernabé Cobo, remarked that a Spanish household used as much fuel in one day as a native household would in an entire month.

The lake sediments record the ecological damage of the era: excess nutrients from dung, more erosion, and a collapse of the Inca’s sustainable land management.

This isn’t a simple story in which the Inca were perfect for the environment and the Spaniards entirely negative, but there are clear lessons to be learned. The indigenous people, normally pushed to poorer lands at high altitude, adapted to what pragmatically works.

In the Andes, many highland communities still support each other through deep-rooted traditions, involving collaboration and reciprocity. Some of the most promising climate solutions today build on this heritage.

Communities restoring Andean vegetation

One co-author of the paper, Cusco biologist Tino Aucca Chutas, founded the NGO Ecoan in 2000, to protect rare high-altitude Polylepis cloud forests. These gnarled, moss-covered trees capture water from clouds and release it slowly, making them vital for downstream water supply. Only small fragments of the original forests remain.

Through the regional movement Accion Andina, founded by Ecoan and non-profit organisation Global Forest Generation, 12 million Polylepis trees have been planted across the Andes. In 2023, Accion Andina was awarded the prestigious global Earthshot Prize. The ultimate goal is to fully restore the forests over the next century.

Another co-author, Graham Thiele of the International Potato Center in Lima, argues that native agroforestry – combining traditional crops, trees and llamas – should be part of a “second climate-smart agricultural revolution” in the Andes.

The Andes are at the sharp end of climate change. The glaciers are retreating, rainfall is becoming more erratic, and disasters like the Cusco floods will happen more often. But history shows societies have adapted before.

Inca-style terraces, cloud forests and llamas aren’t relics of the past – they are the tools required now, particularly vital with the glaciers soon gone. As South America faces a looming water crisis, the clock is ticking, and the lessons of the Inca may be more urgent than ever.

Alex Chepstow-Lusty, Research Associate, Geography, University of Sussex

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

On August 5, a cloudburst near the Kheer Ganga river triggered a flash flood that tore through Dharali, a village in the Indian Himalayas. Within minutes, the river swelled with water, mud and debris, sweeping away homes, roads and lives.

Every monsoon season, the Himalayas see similar tragedies – flash floods caused by cloudbursts or glacial lake outbursts. The first explanation we often hear is climate change. Extreme rainfall and melting glaciers are part of our warming world, but that is only half the story. The other half lies in where and how we build.

A cloudburst is an extreme, sudden downpour – often more than 100mm of rain in just an hour, falling over a small area. It’s like the sky suddenly emptying a huge bucket of water over the mountainside.

A glacial lake outburst flood happens when a lake formed by melting glaciers bursts through its natural dam of ice or loose rock, releasing a sudden torrent downstream.

Both cloudbursts and glacial lake outbursts send huge volumes of water rushing down steep valleys. On their way, they pick up mud, rocks and trees, turning into debris-laden flash floods that sweep away whatever lies in their path.

These are natural events in higher mountainous regions, such as the Himalayas. They cannot be stopped. What makes them disasters is when towns, hotels and roads are built directly where these floods predictably flow.

Where we build matters

To understand why the damage is so severe, we need to look at the land itself. Geomorphology is the study of how Earth’s surface is shaped. It shows us how rivers, slopes and valleys have been formed and modified over time by floods, landslides and debris flows.

In the Himalayas, many safe-looking places are anything but. Take the alluvial fan, which is a cone-shaped pile of sand, gravel and silt that forms where a steep stream slows and drops the debris it carries. Over time, repeated floods build up this fan. It looks flat and inviting – perfect for a settlement, hotel, or car park – but when the next flash flood happens, the water and debris flow straight back down, burying whatever is built there.

This is not theory but history repeating itself. Dharali, which is built around the ancient Kalp Kedar Hindu temple, has faced flash floods before. Records show the temple has been buried multiple times, most recently in 2013. This also highlights our short memory span.

Climate change and poor planning

Rising temperatures can lead to more intense and erratic rainfall, and this does raise the likelihood of cloudbursts and glacial lake outbursts. But focusing only on climate change makes disasters sound unavoidable.

In reality, much of the destruction is preventable. Poor planning and reckless construction have put people in harm’s way. Roads, hotels, even entire towns, are expanding into zones geomorphology tells us are flood prone.

When disaster follows, we blame the climate. But the harder truth is that our own decisions magnify the risks.

Ignoring geomorphology has serious consequences. For governments, it means billions spent on disaster relief and rebuilding after every monsoon. For developers, it means investments washed away in a single night. For tourists, it means the risk of being caught in floods during what should be a holiday. And for mountain communities, it means living in constant danger.

What is needed is geomorphic literacy. Planners, policymakers, developers and citizens need to read the land and respect its signals. The land itself tells us where floods have happened before, and where they will happen again. Listening to it can save lives.

Flash floods due to cloudbursts and glacial lake outbursts are a natural part of the Himalayan monsoon. They cannot be prevented, and climate change may make them more frequent. But the devastation they cause is not inevitable – it is shaped by where and how we build.

Geomorphology is nature’s diary, showing where water and debris have flowed for centuries. Learning to read it can keep people safe.

The Dharali disaster is a painful reminder that the real danger is not only in the sky, but in our failure to understand and respect the land beneath our feet. Unless we take that lesson seriously and build geomorphic awareness into planning, policy making and public understanding, tragedies like Dharali will keep happening, year after year.

Manudeo Singh, Newton International Fellow at the Department of Geography and Earth Science, Aberystwyth University

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

Last month, Australia’s ban on the import, use and manufacture of three types of “forever chemical” came into effect. These chemicals – PFOA, PFOS and PFHxS – have long lifespans and resist breaking down. They’re considered harmful due to their ability to build up inside living organisms and their toxicity. In 2023, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency declared PFOA to be a human carcinogen (cancer-causing agent), and PFOS a potential carcinogen.

But these three chemicals are just a drop in the ocean. There are now more than 14,000 types of forever chemicals, known formally as per- and poly-fluoroalkyl chemicals, or PFAS for short. In response to public concern, the European Union has proposed to restrict all types of PFAS by 2030.

This approach may seem extreme. But the cost of cleaning up highly polluted PFAS sites and research on emerging harms shows the value. Phasing out the entire class could avoid still worse chemical pollution in years to come.

Australia’s ban on the three most concerning chemicals is positive. But it’s slow. Authorities wait until new evidence of harm emerges for specific chemicals. This risk-based approach leaves the door wide open for thousands of other PFAS chemicals – and all other industrial chemicals being developed at the staggering rate of 1.4 per second.

When it comes to PFAS, caution is wise

Since the 1950s, PFAS chemicals have been widely used in industrial products due to their usefulness in making products nonstick or resistant to water or fire.

The problem is, these forever chemicals are highly persistent. There’s little ability to reverse harm from exposure.

Some of these chemicals may not be harmful. But they often haven’t been tested to find out. This is why the EU is using the precautionary principle: if in doubt, act cautiously to avoid potentially large harms. A total ban would avoid “regrettable substitution”, where banned chemicals are quickly replaced by a slightly different variant.

To date, the most severely affected communities and workers are those at or near chemical production plants, military sites, airports and other sites where PFAS-laced firefighting foam is used.

Since then, concern has broadened out to the much lower levels commonly found in drinking water, food, food packaging, cookware, carpets and air.

Control efforts have been slow

The 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants took aim at 12 industrial chemicals known to be toxic and persistent. In 2004, Australia ratified the convention and moved to control these chemicals.

No PFAS chemicals were in this first group. But over time, the convention was amended to phase out the forever chemicals PFHxS and PFOA and restrict PFAS.

Australia didn’t use the Stockholm Convention to ban these three chemicals. That’s because the government hasn’t completed work on a domestic treaty allowing it to ratify the amendments.

In recent years, public concern has centred on PFAS levels in drinking water. Australia’s expert health panel concluded there was limited to no evidence linking the PFAS group of chemicals to clinically significant harm. The panel stated the limited evidence available on cancer relates to PFOA, not the PFOS chemical used more commonly in Australia.

By contrast, peak bodies in the United States and Europe found some of these chemicals are linked to health issues such as lower birth weights, higher cholesterol, reduced kidney function, thyroid disease and several cancers.

If in doubt, act with caution

One of the clearest definitions of the precautionary principle is in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which states:

where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

This approach has proven its worth in marine pollution agreements for decades, as well as playing a major role in trade disputes regarding hormone-treated beef and genetically modified organisms

To make the wholesale PFAS phase-out successful, the EU’s chemical agency is consulting with manufacturers and users on how the chemicals are used and whether safer alternatives exist. Promising alternatives have been identified.

Some chemical companies and product manufacturers have omitted to share safety information on PFAS chemicals, to the detriment of the environment and human health. The EU’s chemical agency found noncompliance was rising and almost all chemicals on the market lacked crucial information on whether they caused cancer or other harms.

At present, manufacturers have most information about toxicity, while regulators are tasked with protecting the public and the environment without necessarily having enough data. In these cases, it makes sense to adopt the precautionary principle.

Forever chemicals will have a long legacy even if they are banned. Any ban should be accompanied by work defining acceptable levels of PFAS chemicals as a class in water, soil, air and food.

The case for a wider Australian ban

Most PFAS chemicals are imported into Australia. This means PFAS pollution can be handled largely by regulating imports of PFAS-containing products.

For products without an alternative or those essential to, say, healthcare, more research will be needed to eliminate the most risky compounds.

Any move towards a large-scale ban in Australia will incur a manufacturer backlash, as has happened in Europe.

But there’s a clear incentive for policymakers to act. At present, cleaning up PFAS contamination is inevitably paid for by taxpayers – and this cost will only grow. Regulating chemicals such as PFAS based on their individual risk is no longer fit for purpose.

By November 2025, Australia’s Senate committee on PFAS will file its report.

The committee could do a lot worse than looking to the European precautionary plan to ban the whole group of chemicals, while keeping in mind essential use. It would be sensible to permit new chemicals to be used only if they’re safe enough.

Bhavna Middha, ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in Environmental Sociology, RMIT University; Ralph Horne, Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor in Research & Innovation, RMIT University, and Vincent Pettigrove, Professor of Aquatic Ecology, RMIT University

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

Last week’s torrential rain disrupted several Sydney train lines, in what is becoming a familiar story for commuters. Almost one in five trains in New South Wales ran late over the past year, and floods in May also saw a temporary closure of the North Coast line.

Other states are faring little better. In Queensland, the rail line from Brisbane to Cairns was shut for weeks due to floods in 2022.

Over in Western Australia, summer heatwaves routinely force trains to crawl at reduced speeds to avoid track buckling. In Melbourne, a derailment in July shut down two major lines for a week, disrupting the daily commute for tens of thousands of people.

From city transit to cross-country freight, Australia’s rail system is straining as the infrastructure ages and climate extremes grow more intense and frequent.

Old assets meet extreme weather

Much of Australia’s rail backbone was built decades ago. Some lines are more than a century old.

The Trans-Australian Railway, completed in 1917, still carries most freight between WA and the eastern states. It wasn’t designed for today’s rainfall.

In early 2022, extreme rain in outback South Australia washed out 300km of track. The event severed Perth’s land link for 24 days, costing about $320 million. Even in a normal year, the corridor is shut by flooding for an average of 40 days.

In February this year, North Queensland floods forced Queensland Rail to close sections of the North Coast Line, with nine bridges inundated.

In Perth, summer heat forces trains to slow as the steel of the tracks may warp. Speeds drop by 20km per hour at 39°C, and further at 41°C.

These heat restrictions have been imposed every summer for more than 30 years. As heatwaves intensify, so do the delays and the stress on equipment.

In 2024–25, only 82.5% of Sydney trains ran on time, well below the target of 92%. A backlog of almost 40,000 infrastructure defects, including worn rails, poor drainage and ageing signals, leaves the rail network vulnerable in storms.

Failures from commute to consumption

When a rail line fails, the impacts stretch from the morning commute to supermarket shelves.

Thousands of Sydney commuters have been hit with delays after flooding. Melbourne’s July derailment shut the Mernda and Hurstbridge lines, forcing 110,000 daily travellers to squeeze onto crowded replacement buses or find other travel options.

When the east–west line collapsed, WA briefly ran low on staples such as pasta, toilet paper and medicines.

The economic hit of these disruptions is large and recurrent. The Australasian Railway Association estimates major rail disruptions in NSW alone can cost up to $392 million a year in cancelled deliveries, shortages and repairs.

Between late 2021 and early 2023, Australia’s largest freight operator recorded eight interstate corridor shutdowns of a week or more. Each closure sends shockwaves through supply lines, pushing more freight onto highways, driving up costs, and exposing the fragility of a system where one washed-out bridge or buckled track can break a whole logistic chain.

A fragmented system with no-one at the helm

When Australia federated in 1901, railways were left under state control. The legacy has been a patchwork of networks with different rail gauges, standards and rules that didn’t line up at the borders.

Despite a century of effort, the Australian rail industry remains hampered by a pre-federation legacy of fragmentation. We have 29 separate rail networks, each with different standards, codes and rule books, and varied technologies and processes for building, operating and accessing the infrastructure.

A recent review of Australian rail operations found that overlapping agencies make it unclear who is accountable for maintenance. Repairs are often delayed, and nobody wants to take responsibility for failures.

Infrastructure Australia, the nation’s independent adviser on infrastructure, has likewise deemed the lack of resilience across transport corridors a nationally significant problem requiring coordinated, cross-jurisdictional action.

A national plan

So what can be done? Experts and industry bodies such as the Australasian Railway Association (ARA) point to a two-pronged solution: modernise the infrastructure and modernise the governance.

On the infrastructure side, there are positive moves. The federal government has committed new funding, more than $1 billion announced in 2024, to make the national rail network more resilient and reliable.

But more is needed. Industry voices are calling for a concerted, long-term program to “identify, fund and deliver” upgrades nationwide to improve rail lines’ redundancy, reliability and climate resilience. In practice, that means strengthening bridges, raising or rerouting tracks in flood-prone areas, deploying digital signalling and safety systems with IoT monitoring, and building alternative routes to keep services running when a line fails.

Equally important is rethinking governance. A resilient rail system needs a national strategy and better coordination across states.

The ARA has called for a National Freight Resilience Plan to ensure a consistent response to major disruptions. This could be expanded into a broader plan backed by federal leadership. A federal plan might mandate climate-adaptation standards for all federally funded projects and break down state silos.

The benefit? A more reliable, resilient, safer and smoother rail system for all of us.

Haoning Xi, Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle

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

What looks like ordinary sand, rocks or snow flowing in one direction can actually hide swirling currents that move in multiple directions beneath the surface.

When grains move in a landslide, most follow the steepest downhill path. This is the “primary flow”, where particles largely follow the herd. But some grains move sideways or swirl in hidden patterns, forming “secondary flows” that subtly influence how far and fast the material travels.

Understanding how grains move beneath the surface could help explain the physics of avalanches and landslides, and even improve how we handle everyday materials like wheat in silos or powders in pharmaceuticals.

However, nobody has been able to observe these hidden swirls – until now. In a study published in Nature Communications today, we have captured secondary flows inside granular materials for the first time with our advanced X-ray imaging setup.

A bulldozing experiment

The idea these secondary flows exist isn’t new. Researchers have seen these hidden movements in powerful computer simulations of grains between rotating cylinders or in landslides that model each particle’s movement using basic laws of physics. But that’s a purely theoretical way to study them.

Observing the flows in real granular materials – such as sand, snow or similar – has been almost impossible. To look inside the flow, you’d either have to keep stopping the grains for standard X-ray scans or add a liquid that makes them see-through. Unfortunately, both approaches change how the grains naturally behave.

We set out to study the flow of glass beads (a perfect granular material for a lab setting) in a bulldozing experiment, where a conveyor belt pushes grains into a wall, causing them to pile up.

In our lab, we have developed an entirely new method called X-ray rheography which can take three-dimensional images of moving grains. Called DynamiX, this setup allows us to see what’s really happening beneath the surface.

To our surprise, the test revealed ripples on the surface, which earlier studies had linked to hidden secondary flows.

These flows had never been directly observed in three dimensions without stopping the motion or altering the material with fluid.

We could watch these hidden currents in action without disturbing the movement of the glass beads. Yet the complex geometry meant we could capture only the magnitude of the flow in one direction, along the conveyor belt as the primary direction, leaving the rest of the three-dimensional picture incomplete.

What we discovered underneath

To really pin down the secondary flows, we went further than just watching the grains with DynamiX.

We developed another X-ray method to map the surface of the flowing heap from X-ray images, linking tiny ripples on top to the swirling motion underneath. We also measured how grains move through the full depth of the pile, including sideways motions.

The main flow goes all in the same direction. So, the sideways movements we detected were the first direct experimental proof of secondary flows.

By looking inside these hidden flows, we are revealing the surprising versatility of granular materials. They can behave like solids that support buildings or like complex fluids with intricate internal currents.

Swirling motions are common

While we didn’t study landslides directly, our experiments on bulldozed particles reveal something important.

We now know secondary flows are at play whenever particles are pushed, such as when ploughing snow or moving grains in agriculture, for example. The swirling motions we observed appear to be ubiquitous in complex particle flows.

What does this mean for landslides? Detailed experiments like ours provide crucial data that can be used to validate and improve mathematical models. Current models often ignore secondary flows and cannot predict them.

Our work offers the experimental foundation for future modelling. Understanding and modelling these secondary flows could help engineers better predict the destructive power of landslides, including runouts that are currently underestimated.

It could also improve industrial processes, from powder handling in pharmaceuticals to snow clearing and beyond.

While our results are specific to bulldozed grains, they point to a broader principle – secondary flows are a fundamental feature of particle motion which must be considered in any realistic model of granular behaviour.

Beneath the surface of any moving pile of grains, hidden swirling currents are shaping the flow. Recognising these movements is key to understanding everything from avalanches to industrial particle handling.

Itai Einav, Professor in Geomechanics, University of Sydney

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

If you’ve spent any time in the gardening corners of social media lately, you’ve likely come across a trend called “chaos gardening.”

The name alone is eye-catching – equal parts fun, rebellious and slightly alarming. Picture someone tossing random seeds into bare soil, watering once or twice, and ending up with a backyard jungle of blooms. No rows, no color coordination, no spacing charts. Just sprinkle and hope for the best.

As a sustainable landscape specialist at Colorado State University Extension, I think a lot about how to help people make designed landscapes more sustainable. Occasionally, a new trend like this one crops up claiming to be the silver bullet of gardening – supposedly it saves water, saves the bees and requires no maintenance.

But what is chaos gardening, really? And does it work? As with most viral trends, the answer is: sometimes.

What chaos gardening is and isn’t

At its core, chaos gardening is the practice of mixing a wide variety of seeds, often including leftover packets, wildflower mixes, or cut flower favorites, and scattering them over a planting area with minimal planning.

The goal is to create a dense, colorful garden that surprises you with its variety. For many, it’s a low-pressure, joyful way to experiment.

But chaos gardening isn’t the same as ecological restoration, pollinator meadow planting or native prairie establishment. Unlike chaos gardening, all of these techniques rely on careful species selection, site prep and long-term management.

Chaos gardening is a bit like making soup from everything in your pantry – it might be delicious, but there are no guarantees.

Chaos gardening’s appeal

One reason chaos gardening may be catching on is because it sidesteps the rules of garden design. A traditional landscape design approach is effective and appropriate for many settings, but it is a time investment and can feel intimidating. Design elements and principles, and matching color schemes, don’t fit everyone’s style or skill set.

Even the apparently relaxed layers of blooms and informal charm of an English cottage garden actually result from careful planning. Chaos gardening, by contrast, lets go of control. It offers a playful, forgiving entry point into growing things. In a way, chaos gardening is an antidote to the pressure of perfection, especially the kind found in highly curated, formal landscapes.

There’s also the allure of ease. People want gardening to be simple. If chaos gardening brings more people into the joy and mess of growing things, I consider that a win in itself. Broader research has found that emotional connection and accessibility are major motivators for gardening, often more than environmental impact.

When does chaos gardening work?

The best outcomes from chaos gardening happen when the chaos has a few guardrails:

• Choose plants with similar needs. Most successful chaos gardens rely on sun-loving annuals that grow quickly and bloom prolifically, like zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, snapdragons and sunflowers. These are also excellent cut flowers to use in bouquets, which makes them doubly rewarding.

• Consider your region. A chaos garden that thrives in Colorado might flop in North Carolina. It is beneficial to select seed mixes or individual varieties suited to your area since factors like soil type and growing season length matter. Different plants have unique needs beyond just sun and water; soil pH, cold hardiness and other conditions can make a big difference.

• Think about pollinators. Mixing in nectar- and pollen-rich flowers native to North America, such as black-eyed Susans, bee balm or coneflowers, provides valuable resources for native bees, butterflies, moths and other local pollinators. These species benefit even more if you plan your garden with phenology – that is, nature’s calendar – in mind. By maintaining blooms from early spring through late fall, you ensure a steady food supply throughout the growing season. Plus, a diverse plant palette supports greater pollinator abundance and diversity.

• Prep your site. Even “chaos” needs a little order. Removing weeds, loosening the top layer of soil and watering regularly, especially during germination when seeds are sprouting, will dramatically improve your results. Successful seed germination requires direct seed-to-soil contact and consistent moisture; if seeds begin to grow and then dry out, many species will not survive.

When does chaos gardening not work?

There are a few key pitfalls to chaos gardening that often get left out of the online hype:

• Wrong plant, wrong place. If your mix includes shade-loving plants and your garden is in full sun, or drought-tolerant plants whose seeds end up in a soggy low spot, they’ll struggle to grow.

• Invasive species and misidentified natives. Some wildflower mixes, especially inexpensive or mass-market ones, claim to be native but actually contain non-native species that can spread beyond your garden and become invasive. While many non-natives are harmless, some spread quickly and disrupt natural ecosystems. Check seed labels carefully and choose regionally appropriate native or adapted species whenever possible.

• Soil, sun and water still matter. Gardening is always a dialogue with place. Even if you’re embracing chaos, taking notes, observing how light moves through your space, and understanding your soil type will help you know your site better, and choose appropriate plants.

• Maintenance is still a thing. Despite the “toss and walk away” aesthetic, chaos gardens still require care. Watering, weeding and eventually cutting back or removing spent annuals are all part of the cycle.

Beyond the hashtag

Beneath the chaos gardening memes, there’s something real happening: a growing interest in a freer, more intuitive way of gardening. And that’s worth paying attention to.

Once someone has success with a zinnia or cosmos, they may be inspired to try more gardening. They might start noticing which flowers the bees are visiting in their garden. They may discover native plants and pay attention to the soil they are tending, seeing how both are part of a larger, living system. A chaotic beginning can become something deeper.

Chaos gardening might not replace the structured borders of a manicured garden or a carefully curated pollinator patch, but it might get someone new into the garden. It might lower the stakes, invite experimentation and help people see beauty in abundance rather than control.

If that’s the entry point someone needs, then let the chaos begin.

Deryn Davidson, Sustainable Landscape State Specialist, Extension, Colorado State University

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

For decades, scientists, policymakers, graziers and land managers have been locked in a surprisingly high-stakes debate over what defines a dingo. Are these wild canids their own species? Or are they simply feral dogs?

The intensity of the debate can seem baffling. But the naming of animals influences how they are perceived and managed. The dingo debate has very real consequences for conservation laws, cultural recognition and respect, and the future of one of Australia’s iconic animals.

In 2020, researchers proposed four conditions dingoes would have to meet to be considered separate from domestic dogs: reproductive isolation (they don’t mate and produce fertile offspring), genetic distinctiveness, independent evolutionary path and distinctiveness from South-East Asian village dogs, which superficially resemble dingoes.

In our new research, we lay out the scientific case showing dingoes do indeed meet these requirements, across genetic, behavioural, ecological and archaeological evidence. We now have a clear answer: dingoes are distinct.

Australia’s wild canines have been on their own evolutionary path for thousands of years. As a distinct lineage, they should be recognised in their own right as a species or subspecies. They are not Canis familiaris, the domestic dog. They should be named either Canis dingo or Canis lupus dingo.

Species aren’t always in neat boxes

One of the greatest challenges for modern taxonomy is how to categorise “species” that don’t fit in neat little boxes but exist along a continuum.

It’s harder still for species whose long and significant associations with humans can lead to substantial changes that are evolutionarily significant.

It’s widely accepted domestic and wild animal populations should be distinguished and be given different scientific names. Domestication is often portrayed as a simple before-and-after event. But this isn’t accurate.

Domestication is a long, messy continuum. Some domesticated species such as cattle and modern dog breeds depend on humans for their survival. But dingoes are different. They have lived alongside people but are also entirely capable of surviving without us, and have done so for thousands of years.

In evolutionary terms, what matters is the trajectory. Did human contact fundamentally alter the appearance, biology and behaviour of the species, locking it into a domestic lifestyle? Or did human influence have little effect, meaning the species has been shaped primarily by natural selection in the wild?

Do dingoes meet the criteria to be considered taxonomically distinct?

Our research shows how the four conditions have been met to consider dingoes separate:

1. Reproductive isolation

Dingoes have been separated from other Canis lineages for 8,000-11,000 years. Genetic studies show dingoes have little contemporary interbreeding with domestic dogs, even when they live in the same areas. While all Canis species can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, differences in breeding seasons and behaviour act as natural barriers. Unlike dingoes, domestic dogs rarely establish wild, self-sustaining populations.

2. Genetic distinctiveness

Genome-wide analyses reveal dingoes descend from an ancient “eastern” dog lineage, while most modern domestic dogs come from “western” and “Arctic” dog lineages. Since their arrival in Australia, dingoes have remained genetically isolated.

3. An independent evolutionary lineage

From a genetic point of view, dingoes are more distinct from domestic dogs than domestic dog breeds are from each other. Modern dog breeds have undergone waves of mixing and human selection, while dingoes have not. This is why dingoes lack the genetic adaptations to starch-rich diets that domestic dogs evolved alongside agriculture and human contact.

Dingoes have carved out their own ecological niche in Australia’s unique environments, from deserts to snowy mountains. They have developed separate traits such as hyperflexible joints and a single breeding season over autumn and winter. By contrast, humans have heavily shaped the evolutionary path of domestic dogs, making them reliant on us.

4. Clear up whether dogs found in South-East Asia are dingoes

Some researchers have suggested dingo-like village dogs in South-East Asia are actually dingoes. While dingoes share some ancestors with these dogs, modern genetic evidence shows dingoes and their closest relatives, New Guinea singing dogs, are a separate population.

What’s in a name?

The question over how dogs evolved is not yet resolved. Some taxonomists believe dogs are a subspecies of wolf, while others disagree. Given this uncertainty, giving dingoes a unique scientific name can be done in two ways.

If we consider dingoes distinct from both dogs and wolves, the most appropriate name would be Canis dingo — recognising the dingo as its own species with a long, separate evolutionary history.

But if dingoes are not distinct from wolves, the correct name would be Canis lupus dingo. This would treat it as a subspecies of wolf, while still acknowledging its wild lineage separate to domestic dogs.

The name of the dingo matters

There is real power in the name of a species.

Under some state laws, dingoes are defined as “wild dogs”. This means dingoes are targeted for lethal control – even in many national parks. If treated as a domestic dog, dingoes can be ineligible for official threatened species lists.

As a result, the species is often overlooked for targeted conservation, while its culturally significant role for many First Nations peoples is often not recognised nor respected.

Defining dingoes as a distinct species or subspecies would allow governments to differentiate them from domestic dogs in laws, policies and conservation programs, and align western science with First Nations knowledge holders who have long distinguished between dingoes and dogs.

Ending decades of confusion will take work

To clear up long-running disagreement over the dingo, we believe the time has come for an independent, evidence-based review by a national scientific body. This would bring together geneticists, ecologists, taxonomists and First Nations representatives.

This approach helped untangle similarly knotty problems overseas, such as the United States National Academies’ review to settle the taxonomy of red and Mexican wolves.

An Australian review could finally end decades of confusion for the dingo and ensure our laws reflect the most up-to-date scientific evidence.

Taxonomic debates might sound obscure. But this naming question will shape the future of one of Australia’s ecologically and culturally significant animals.

We believe the evidence shows the dingo is not a domestic dog – it’s on its own path. The question is whether Australia can accept this evidence.

Kylie M. Cairns, Research fellow in canid and wildlife genomics, UNSW Sydney; Bradley Smith, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, CQUniversity Australia; Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, and Thomas Newsome, Associate Professor in Global Ecology, University of Sydney

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

Antarctica has long been seen as a remote, unchanging environment. Not any more.

The ice-covered continent and the surrounding Southern Ocean are undergoing abrupt and alarming changes. Sea ice is shrinking rapidly, the floating glaciers known as ice shelves are melting faster, the ice sheets carpeting the continent are approaching tipping points and vital ocean currents show signs of slowing down.

Published today in Nature, our new research shows these abrupt changes are already underway – and likely to significantly intensify in the future.

Several authors of this article have witnessed these startling changes during fieldwork on the ice. These changes spell bad news for wildlife, both iconic and lesser known. But the changes will reach much further. What’s happening in Antarctica right now will affect the world for generations to come, from rising sea levels to extreme changes in the climate system.

What is an abrupt change?

Scientists define an abrupt change as a climatic or environmental shift taking place much faster than expected.

What makes abrupt changes so concerning is they can amplify themselves. For example, melting sea ice allows oceans to warm more rapidly, which melts more sea ice. Once triggered, they can be difficult or even impossible to reverse on timescales meaningful to humans.

While it’s common to assume incremental warming will translate to gradual change, we’re seeing something very different in Antarctica. Over past decades, the Antarctic environment had a much more muted response overall to human-caused climate warming compared to the Arctic. But about a decade ago, abrupt changes began to occur.

Shrinking sea ice brings cascading change

Antarctica’s natural systems are tightly interwoven. When one system is thrown out of balance, it can trigger cascading effects in others.

Sea ice around Antarctica has been declining dramatically since 2014. The expanse of sea ice is now shrinking at double the rate of Arctic sea ice. We found these unfolding changes are unprecedented – far outside the natural variability of past centuries.

The implications are far reaching. Sea ice has a reflective, high-albedo surface which reflects heat back to space. When there’s less sea ice, more heat is absorbed by darker oceans. Emperor penguins and other species reliant on sea ice for habitat and breeding face real threats. Less sea ice also means Antarctica’s ice shelves are more exposed to waves.

Vital ocean currents are slowing

The melting of ice is actually slowing down the deep ocean circulation around Antarctica. This system of deep currents, known as the Antarctic Overturning Circulation, plays a critical role in regulating Earth’s climate by absorbing carbon dioxide and distributing heat.

In the northern hemisphere, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is facing a slowdown.

We’re now observing a similar risk in Southern Ocean currents. Changes to the Antarctic Overturning Circulation may unfold at twice the rate of the more famous North Atlantic counterpart.

A slowdown could reduce how much oxygen and carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs and leave vital nutrients at the seafloor. Less oxygen and fewer nutrients would have major consequences for marine ecosystems and climate regulation.

Melting giants

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet as well as some regions of East Antarctica are now losing ice and contributing to sea level rise. Ice loss has increased sixfold since the 1990s.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone has enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than five metres – and scientists warn we could be nearing the point where this ice sheet could collapse even without substantial further warming, though this might take centuries to millennia.

These enormous ice sheets represent the risk of a global tipping point. They contribute the greatest uncertainty to projections of future sea level rise because we don’t know just how quickly they could collapse.

Worldwide, at least 750 million people live in low-lying areas near the sea. Rising sea levels threaten coastal infrastructure and communities globally.

Wildlife and ecosystems under threat

Antarctica’s biological systems are also undergoing sudden shifts. Ecosystems both under the sea and on land are being reshaped by warming temperatures, unreliable ice conditions and human activity bringing pollution and the arrival of invasive species.

It’s essential to protect these ecosystems through the Antarctic Treaty, including creating protected areas of land and sea and restricting some human activities. But these conservation measures won’t be enough to ensure emperor penguins and leopard seals survive. That will require decisive global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Which future?

Antarctica is often seen as a symbol of isolation and permanence. But the continent is now changing with disturbing speed – much faster than scientists anticipated.

These abrupt changes stem largely from the extra heat trapped by decades of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to avoid further abrupt changes is to slash emissions rapidly enough to hold warming as close to 1.5°C as possible.

Even if we achieve this, much change has already been set in motion. Governments, businesses and coastal communities must prepare for a future of abrupt change. What happens in Antarctica won’t stay there.

The stakes could not be higher. The choices made now will determine whether we face a future of worsening impacts and irreversible change or one of managed resilience to the changes already locked in.

Nerilie Abram, Chief Scientist, Australian Antarctic Division and Professor of Climate Science, Australian National University; Ariaan Purich, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, Monash University; Felicity McCormack, Antarctic Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer, Monash University; Jan Strugnell, Professor of Marine Biology and Aquaculture, James Cook University, and Matthew England, Deputy Director of the ARC Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science and Scientia Professor in Oceanography, UNSW Sydney

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

Climate change is reshaping fish habitats. Some fish are winners, others are losing out.

Fish already face plenty of pressure from overfishing and pollution. Climate change is adding more: warmer waters and shifting food supplies cause what’s known as a predator-prey mismatch. This means prey and predator are not in the same place at the same time, which not only affects our diets but also fishing industries and ocean health more widely.

As the ocean heats up, fish try to stay in the conditions they’re best suited to. Some species will move, but others can’t relocate so easily – for example, if they need to live in a certain habitat at a particular life-stage, such as in kelp that offers shelter for breeding. So, depending on the species and location, climate change could create new fishing opportunities for some countries, and big losses for others.

Fisheries managers typically group fish into “stocks”. These are populations of the same species in a defined region, often based on national borders. But those human-made boundaries don’t matter to fish. As they shift in response to climate change, managing their populations will become more complex and will need to be flexible and responsive.

By 2050, waters around the UK are expected to warm by about 1°C if we follow a “moderate” emissions path. If emissions continue to rise unchecked, the increase could reach 2-3°C by the end of the century. At the same time, the food that fish eat (such as tiny plankton) could drop by as much as 30%.

My team and I used advanced computer modelling to predict how 17 key commercial species such as mackerel, cod, plaice, tuna and sardines might respond to two future climate scenarios. Our results show a patchwork of winners and losers.

Take sardines and mackerel. These species live in the upper ocean and are sensitive to temperature. Both are expected to shift northward. This shift would be around 20 miles in the North Sea and up to 80 miles in the north-east Atlantic by 2100 under a moderate emissions scenario.

While sardines may thrive, with a 10% boost in Atlantic abundance, our model suggests mackerel could decline by 10% in the Atlantic and 20% in the North Sea. Consequently, the type and quantity of fish available will change.

Warm-water species like bluefin tuna may benefit within UK waters. Tuna is projected to shift only slightly (by approximately 4 miles) under the same scenario, but their abundance could rise by 10%, potentially bringing more of them into UK waters. That’s good news for fishers already targeting this high-value catch, or those looking to change their main target species.

But bottom-dwelling species like cod and saithe (pollock) face a tougher future. These fish prefer colder, deeper waters and have fewer options to escape warming seas due to depth limitations.

In the North Sea, they’re projected to shift southward by around 9 miles because that’s where the remaining cool, deep water is. But this won’t be enough to avoid a significant decline in their numbers: their populations are expected to drop by 10-15% under a moderate scenario by 2050.

Do the seasons feel increasingly weird to you? You’re not alone. Climate change is distorting nature’s calendar, causing plants to flower early and animals to emerge at the wrong time.

This article is part of a series, Wild Seasons, on how the seasons are changing and what they may eventually look like.

Changing tides

And if climate change accelerates, the declines become far more severe. By the end of the century, North Sea cod and saithe could fall by 30-40%, according to our model. Mackerel abundance could drop by 25% in the Atlantic, while sardines might see only a modest 5% increase, despite moving 155 miles northward. Bluefin tuna could see a 40% rise in numbers, shifting 27 miles further north.

We’ve estimated how species will shift their locations – but computer models can’t account for every interaction between marine species. For example, predator-prey relationships can be crucial in shaping an ecosystem. Bluefin tuna is a predatory species which hunts shoals of herring, mackerel and other fish.

Other predators including dolphins, seals and seabirds will all be influenced differently by climate change, with varying responses in terms of eating their favourite fish snacks.

Our projections also don’t account for continued fishing pressure – for example, 24% of north-east Atlantic fisheries are not sustainable. Further overfishing will compound the strain on fish populations.

To keep stocks healthy, fishery managers need to start planning for these changes now by factoring climate into their stock assessments. Industry regulators will also need to reconsider who gets to fish where as species move.

Fish don’t carry passports. Their shifting habitats will challenge longstanding fishing agreements and quotas. Nations that once relied on particular species might lose access. Others may find new, unexpected opportunities.

With smart management and serious action on climate, seafood can thrive in the future. Doing nothing now isn’t an option — unless we want familiar favourites like cod to vanish from our plates.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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Sevrine Sailley, Senior Scientist, Marine Ecosystem Modelling, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

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

From Melbourne’s proposed Outer Metropolitan Ring Road to Sydney’s recently completed Westconnex, Australia’s addiction to mega roads continues despite the spectre of climate change.

The stream of projects shows Australia’s approach to urban transport is stuck in the car-obsessed past. It’s an approach at odds with state planning policies that prioritise other less-polluting transport modes, such as train and tram extensions, bike lane infrastructure and better pedestrian footpaths.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned, roads hinder national efforts to meet climate targets. They “lock in” emissions, by establishing long-term infrastructure that commits societies to greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come.

Expanding freeway networks undermines efforts to reduce emissions and encourage cleaner transport. It points to a deep-seated flaw in Australia’s urban planning systems which must be solved.

No road to net zero

Australia has committed to reach net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.

Meeting the goal requires, among other measures, dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from transport – which is set to become the nation’s largest source of emissions by 2030.

Globally, roads account for 69% of transport emissions, and this is growing.

Despite this, a number of mega roads are planned or being built in Australian cities. They include:

• Sydney’s M12 Motorway
• Brisbane’s Gateway Motorway and Bruce Highway upgrades
• Adelaide’s River Torrens to Darlington Project
• Perth’s Tonkin Highway Extension and Thomas Road Upgrade
• Melbourne’s Outer Metropolitan Ring Road.

Here, we examine the Melbourne project in more detail.

Melbourne’s mega ring road

The Outer Metropolitan Ring Road would involve a 100-kilometre freeway orbiting Melbourne’s north and west. With a current price tag of A$31 billion, it would be among the most expensive road projects in an Australian city.

In 2009, the Brumby Labor government in Victoria deemed the project could proceed without an “environmental effects statement” – including assessment of it climate impacts.

Rationales for the decision included that the project passes through land extensively disturbed in the past, and because sustainability implications had been considered in overarching state planning blueprints.

It is unclear whether, given the time that has lapsed, whether the project will be reconsidered for environmental approval – and if so, what level of scrutiny would be applied.

Given the project’s potential contribution to transport emissions, authorities should reverse the exemption and ensure it is subject to the highest environmental scrutiny. This is vital to ensure the public is fully aware of – and can object to – the project’s climate impacts.

Our research has previously identified such issues involving public consultation and major road projects. They include Melbourne’s East West Link and West Gate Tunnel, and Sydney’s Westconnex . In the case of Westconnex, the “public interest” was narrowly defined and inadequate in addressing climate change concerns.

A 2017 Victorian Auditor-General Report also found a power imbalance between project proponents and community participants. For instance, proponents usually had legal representation while community members did not.

What’s more, emissions reduction must be central to the policies governing Australia’s built environments, as we discuss below.

Climate must be key

Residents in Australia’s capital cities are largely car-dependent. More climate-friendly transport modes, such as walking and cycling, can be difficult due to long distances between destinations, and lack of supporting infrastructure such as bike paths.

The IPCC recommends minimising emissions generated in cities through:

• infill development (building on unused land in urban areas)
• increasing density (the number of people living in a certain area)
• improving public transport
• supporting walking, cycling and other “active” transport options.

State planning blueprints in Australia typically consider land use and transport together. Victoria, for example, wants more homes built in established areas, close to public transport, services and jobs. Transport plans in states such as NSW and Queensland have similar goals.

However, the need for climate action and emissions reduction is typically not fully integrated across these policies. And federal government guidelines on transport planning also give little regard to net zero targets.

This means major road projects can proceed without direct consideration of emissions reduction and net zero goals.

A different road

Urban planning policies are not the only government levers available to reduce vehicle emissions.

The federal government’s fuel efficiency standards, for example, began in January this year. But some experts say the policy – which is weaker than that initially proposed – does not go far enough to cut transport emissions.

Separately, the National Electric Vehicle Strategy is a positive step. But Australia is badly lagging in EV uptake, and much more work is needed.

As Australian cities continue to grow, the demand for travel will also increase. But new freeway projects are not the answer – they will only make climate change worse.

Reform is needed to ensure emissions reduction is at the heart of transport investment in our cities.

Crystal Legacy, Associate Professor of Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne; Anna Hurlimann, Associate Professor in Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne, and Eric Keys, PhD Candidate, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University

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

In 1770, after Captain Cook’s Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef and was held up for repairs, botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander collected hundreds of plants.

One of those pressed plants is among 170,000 specimens in the herbarium at the University of Melbourne.

Worldwide, more than 395 million specimens are housed in herbaria. Together they comprise an unparalleled record of Earth’s plant and fungal life over time.

We wanted to find a better, faster way to tap into this wealth of information. Our new research describes the development and testing of a new AI-driven tool Hespi (short for “herbarium specimen sheet pipeline”). It has the potential to revolutionise access to biodiversity data and open up new avenues for research.

The digitisation challenge

To unlock the full potential of herbaria, institutions worldwide are striving to digitise them. This means photographing each specimen at high resolution and converting the information on its label into searchable digital data.

Once digitised, specimen records can be made available to the public through online databases such as the University of Melbourne Herbarium Collection Online. They are also fed into large biodiversity portals such as the Australasian Virtual Herbarium, the Atlas of Living Australia, or the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. These platforms make centuries of botanical knowledge accessible to researchers everywhere.

But digitisation is a monumental task. Large herbaria, such as the National Herbarium of New South Wales and the Australian National Herbarium have used high-capacity conveyor belt systems to rapidly image millions of specimens. Even with this level of automation, digitising the 1.15 million specimens at the National Herbarium of NSW took more than three years.

For smaller institutions without industrial-scale setups, the process is far slower. Staff, volunteers and citizen scientists photograph specimens and painstakingly transcribe their labels by hand.

At the current pace, many collections won’t be fully digitised for decades. This delay keeps vast amounts of biodiversity data locked away. Researchers in ecology, evolution, climate science and conservation urgently need access to large-scale, accurate biodiversity datasets. A faster approach is essential.

How AI is speeding things up

To address this challenge, we created Hespi – open-source software for automatically extracting information from herbarium specimens.

Hespi combines advanced computer vision techniques with AI tools such as object detection, image classification and large language models.

First, it takes an image of the specimen sheet which comprises the pressed plant and identifying text. Then it recognises and extracts text, using a combination of optical character recognition and handwritten text recognition.

Deciphering handwriting is challenging for people and computers alike. So Hespi passes the extracted text through OpenAI’s GPT-4o Large Language Model to correct any errors. This substantially improves the results.

So in seconds, Hespi locates the main specimen label on a herbarium sheet and reads the information it contains. This includes taxonomic names, collector details, location, latitude and longitude, and collection dates. It captures the data and converts it into a digital format, ready for use in research.

For example, Hespi correctly detected and extracted all relevant components from the herbarium sheet below. This large brown algae specimen was collected in 1883 at St Kilda.

We tested Hespi on thousands of specimen images from the University of Melbourne Herbarium and other collections worldwide. We created test datasets for different stages in the pipeline and assessed the various components.

It achieved a high degree of accuracy. So it has the potential to save a lot of time, compared to manual data extraction.

We are developing a graphical user interface for the software so herbarium curators will be able to manually check and correct the results.

Just the beginning

Herbaria already contribute to society in many ways: from species identification and taxonomy to ecological monitoring, conservation, education, and even forensic investigations.

By mobilising large volumes of specimen-associated data, AI systems such as Hespi are enabling new and innovative applications at a scale never before possible.

AI has been used to automatically extract detailed leaf measurements and other traits from digitised specimens, unlocking centuries of historical collections for rapid research into plant evolution and ecology.

And this is just the beginning — computer vision and AI could soon be applied in many other ways, further accelerating and expanding botanical research in the years ahead.

Beyond herbaria

AI pipelines such as Hespi have the potential to extract text from labels in any museum or archival collection where high-quality digital images exist.

Our next step is a collaboration with Museums Victoria to adapt Hespi to create an AI digitisation pipeline suitable for museum collections. The AI pipeline will mobilise biodiversity data for about 12,500 specimens in the museum’s globally-significant fossil graptolite collection.

We are also starting a new project with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to make the software more flexible. This will allow curators in museums and other institutions to customise Hespi to extract data from all kinds of collections — not just plant specimens.

Tranformational technology

Just as AI is reshaping many aspects of daily life, these technologies can transform access to biodiversity data. Human-AI collaborations could help overcome one of the biggest bottlenecks in collection digitisation — the slow, manual transcription of label data.

Mobilising the information already locked in herbaria, museums, and archives worldwide is essential to make it available for the cross-disciplinary research needed to understand and address the biodiversity crisis.

We wish to acknowledge our colleagues at the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform, including Karen Thompson and Emily Fitzgerald, who contributed to this research.

Robert Turnbull, Senior Research Data Specialist, The University of Melbourne and Joanne Birch, Senior Lecturer in the School of BioSciences, and Herbarium Curator, The University of Melbourne

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

South Australia’s catastrophic harmful algal bloom now affects almost 30% of the state’s coastline, stretching from the Coorong in the state’s southeast to the seafood-rich Spencer Gulf to the west.

With no end in sight, many South Australians are searching for solutions.

Trials of physical, chemical and biological solutions have been run around the world at much smaller scale, usually in aquaculture fish pens and leases.

Unfortunately, the enormous Karenia mikimotoi bloom in SA is far too big for any of these technologies. But they could provide temporary relief at high-risk sites, such as vital breeding grounds for vulnerable species such as the giant Australian cuttlefish.

How can algae be managed at smaller scales?

This disaster arose from a triple threat: marine heatwaves linked to climate change, floodwaters and cold upwellings carrying nutrients algae need, and marine habitat loss leaving coasts extra vulnerable. Prevention is the best cure – so we need to tackle each of these threats.

In the meantime, the bloom’s persistence presents an opportunity to experiment with potential solutions.

Chemical

Anyone who has managed a pool knows how effective chemicals are in removing unwanted algae. But in the sea, chemicals can have unintended impacts. There’s more than one type of algae out there and we don’t want to kill the good guys.

In response to algal blooms at sea, researchers have even tried chemical crop-dusting by planes.

Clay has been used against marine algal blooms for more than 50 years in China and Japan. The clay particles bind to algal cells in surface waters, causing them to settle to the bottom where they stop growing or die. But to date, it has required a huge amount of clay to be effective.

Modified clay technology is a promising environmentally friendly solution. Released as a slurry, the clay binds and removes phosphorus, essentially removing the bloom’s fuel source.

Physical

Physical solutions often involve mixing the water column to break up the warm surface layers suitable for algal growth.

Other solutions physically block and disturb algae. Pumping air through tubes to create “bubble curtains” can stop algae from passing through.

This technology is useful in aquaculture pens. But bubble curtains can do little against intense algal blooms, forcing fish farmers to simply drag their pens out of harms’ way. So they’re never going to work at scale.

Biological

Natural systems have their own checks and balances. The oceans are full of microorganisms that naturally prey on algae – such as single-celled organisms (ciliates and flagellates) – or suppress it, including bacteria and viruses.

Such natural microbial warfare may help solve the SA bloom, with promising signs of bioluminescent “sea sparkle” algae dining on Karenia.

Scientists in the United States are working to extract natural algicides produced by algae-killing marine bacteria to combat Red Tide blooms in Florida.

Some bacterial algicides only kill specific harmful algae species, offering promise for low-risk application. To date, these solutions have largely been used at small, experimental scale.

By contrast, algicidal bacteria are found in abundance on common seagrasses around the world, providing healthy seagrass meadows with natural immunity. Conserving and restoring seagrass offers one way to tackle the problem longer term.

Helping nature to help itself

SA was once home to 1,500km of shellfish reefs, formed by billions of native oysters. These ecosystems served as the natural kidneys of our coastline. A single oyster is capable of filtering a bathtub of water a day, removing excess nutrients and algae.

Within a century of European settlement, these natural reefs were all but destroyed by overharvesting. The good news: they can be restored. For example, restoring two hectares of shellfish reef at Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach saw oysters filtering over 12 million litres of water a day within 1.5 years of reef construction.

These figures suggest SA’s lost shellfish reefs would have been filtering over half a trillion litres of seawater daily. This natural wastewater treatment system could have removed nutrients washed into our coastal seas before they could feed a bloom.

Diving on the restored shellfish reef during the algal bloom has given us some hope. Despite the soupy green water, the native oysters appear to be doing well. Similarly, oysters on leases in the affected areas are thriving as they feed on the highly nutritious Karenia algae.

By contrast, many filter-feeding bivalves have been devastated by the bloom, notably the habitat-forming razorfish (pen shells) and cockles.

Earlier this month, Premier Peter Malinauskas announced plans to restore a total of 15 hectares of shellfish reef alongside community groups across 15 locations. This provides an opportunity to learn whether larger-scale oyster restoration can help future-proof SA seas against harmful algae.

Rebuildling resilient ecosystems

This devastating algal bloom will eventually dissipate. Once the harmful algae have fallen back to normal levels, nature can rebuild.

But future blooms are likely as the climate warms and strengthens heavy downpours that flush nutrients out to sea. To prepare, we should explore ways of restoring ecosystems able to hasten recovery and rebuild natural resilience.

Investing in scaling up conservation and restoration of filter-feeding shellfish reefs and bacteria-harbouring seagrass meadows – the sea’s kidneys and immune system – will be necessary alongside long-term underwater monitoring.

If we continue with a reactive, fragmented approach to climate, nutrient pollution, and biodiversity loss, we’re guaranteed to face more costly catastrophes. We need to act to build long-term ecological and socio-economic resilience.

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

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

As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also use water indirectly, through the water required to produce the electricity to power the facility. The amount of water used to produce electricity increases dramatically when the source is fossil fuels compared with solar or wind.

A 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons (64 billion liters) of water directly through cooling, and projects that by 2028, those figures could double – or even quadruple. The same report estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed an additional 211 billion gallons (800 billion liters) of water indirectly through the electricity that powers them. But that is just an estimate in a fast-changing industry.

We are researchers in water law and policy based on the shores of Lake Michigan. Technology companies are eyeing the Great Lakes region to host data centers, including one proposed for Port Washington, Wisconsin, which could be one of the largest in the country. The Great Lakes region offers a relatively cool climate and an abundance of water, making the region an attractive location for hot and thirsty data centers.

The Great Lakes are an important, binational resource that more than 40 million people depend on for their drinking water and supports a US$6 trillion regional economy. Data centers compete with these existing uses and may deplete local groundwater aquifers.

Our analysis of public records, government documents and sustainability reports compiled by top data center companies has found that technology companies don’t always reveal how much water their data centers use. In a forthcoming Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal article, we walk through our methods and findings using these resources to uncover the water demands of data centers.

In general, corporate sustainability reports offered the most access and detail – including that in 2024, one data center in Iowa consumed 1 billion (3.8 billion liters) gallons of water – enough to supply all of Iowa’s residential water for five days.

How do data centers use water?

The servers and routers in data centers work hard and generate a lot of heat. To cool them down, data centers use large amounts of water – in some cases over 25% of local community water supplies. In 2023, Google reported consuming over 6 billion gallons of water (nearly 23 billion liters) to cool all its data centers.

In some data centers, the water is used up in the cooling process. In an evaporative cooling system, pumps push cold water through pipes in the data center. The cold water absorbs the heat produced by the data center servers, turning into steam that is vented out of the facility. This system requires a constant supply of cold water.

In closed-loop cooling systems, the cooling process is similar, but rather than venting steam to the air, air-cooled chillers cool down the hot water. The cooled water is then recirculated to cool the facility again. This does not require constant addition of large volumes of water, but it uses a lot more energy to run the chillers. The actual numbers showing those differences, which likely vary by the facility, are not publicly available.

One key way to evaluate water use is the amount of water that is considered “consumed,” meaning it is withdrawn from the local water supply and used up – for instance, evaporated as steam – and not returned to its source.

For information, we first looked to government data, such as that kept by municipal water systems, but the process of getting all the necessary data can be onerous and time-consuming, with some denying data access due to confidentiality concerns. So we turned to other sources to uncover data center water use.

Sustainability reports provide insight

Many companies, especially those that prioritize sustainability, release publicly available reports about their environmental and sustainability practices, including water use. We focused on six top tech companies with data centers: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Digital Realty and Equinix. Our findings revealed significant variability in both how much water the companies’ data centers used, and how much specific information the companies’ reports actually provided.

Sustainability reports offer a valuable glimpse into data center water use. But because the reports are voluntary, different companies report different statistics in ways that make them hard to combine or compare. Importantly, these disclosures do not consistently include the indirect water consumption from their electricity use, which the Lawrence Berkeley Lab estimated was 12 times greater than the direct use for cooling in 2023. Our estimates highlighting specific water consumption reports are all related to cooling.

Amazon releases annual sustainability reports, but those documents do not disclose how much water the company uses. Microsoft provides data on its water demands for its overall operations, but does not break down water use for its data centers. Meta does that breakdown, but only in a companywide aggregate figure. Google provides individual figures for each data center.

In general, the five companies we analyzed that do disclose water usage show a general trend of increasing direct water use each year. Researchers attribute this trend to data centers.

A closer look at Google and Meta

To take a deeper look, we focused on Google and Meta, as they provide some of the most detailed reports of data center water use.

Data centers make up significant proportions of both companies’ water use. In 2023, Meta consumed 813 million gallons of water globally (3.1 billion liters) – 95% of which, 776 million gallons (2.9 billion liters), was used by data centers.

For Google, the picture is similar, but with higher numbers. In 2023, Google operations worldwide consumed 6.4 billion gallons of water (24.2 billion liters), with 95%, 6.1 billion gallons (23.1 billion liters), used by data centers.

Google reports that in 2024, the company’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, consumed 1 billion gallons of water (3.8 billion liters), the most of any of its data centers.

The Google data center using the least that year was in Pflugerville, Texas, which consumed 10,000 gallons (38,000 liters) – about as much as one Texas home would use in two months. That data center is air-cooled, not water-cooled, and consumes significantly less water than the 1.5 million gallons (5.7 million liters) at an air-cooled Google data center in Storey County, Nevada. Because Google’s disclosures do not pair water consumption data with the size of centers, technology used or indirect water consumption from power, these are simply partial views, with the big picture obscured.

Given society’s growing interest in AI, the data center industry will likely continue its rapid expansion. But without a consistent and transparent way to track water consumption over time, the public and government officials will be making decisions about locations, regulations and sustainability without complete information on how these massive companies’ hot and thirsty buildings will affect their communities and their environments.

Peyton McCauley, Water Policy Specialist, Sea Grant UW Water Science-Policy Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Melissa Scanlan, Professor and Director of the Center for Water Policy, School of Freshwater Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

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

Over recent decades, farmland values in Australia have soared. Nationally, the price of broadacre farmland – used for cropping or sheep and beef grazing – has increased by more than eightfold since 1992.

It might seem like this could only be good news for those who own and operate farms. But this boom carries surprising downsides for the profitability of the farming industry.

Our new study examined the dynamic relationship between farmland prices and the profitability of Australia’s farming sector. To do this, we used national and state-level data from 1992 to 2022.

We found when farm profits rise, farmland prices tend to increase as well, with a lag of two to five years. But there’s a catch: higher land values push up production costs, which can erode profits over time.

This feedback loop – where higher profits lifts farmland prices but those higher prices eventually squeeze profitability – has some serious implications for farm business viability.

What’s driven farmland’s surge?

Several factors have contributed to the rapid growth in Australia’s farmland prices in recent years. These include strong commodity prices and good seasonal conditions, periods of low interest rates and increased demand for land.

While some of these forces have rewarded existing landholders, they have also increased barriers to entry for younger or less wealthy farmers to enter the industry.

This isn’t just an Australian phenomenon. Between 2002 and 2023, global farmland values grew at an average annual rate of 10%.

Analysts argue the major drivers of this surge include “growing concerns about food and land scarcity” and the increasing practice of valuing farmland for its environmental benefits, such as carbon storage, water rights, or biodiversity credits. They also note its appeal as a desirable investment, offering stable long-term returns with relatively low risk.

High land values can make it hard to farm

Rising land values can create a complex situation. For one, they mean farmers need more fund to buy new land or to improve existing operations, particularly those looking to expand or who are newcomers to the industry.

Farm expansion is important for farmers, because farm size has proven a key factor driving productivity gains.

Many Australian broadacre farms have benefited from what are called “economies of scale”. By spreading fixed costs such as machinery and management expenses over larger operations, they’re able to lower their average costs and gain a competitive advantage.

Other hurdles

Rising land prices also raise costs in less obvious ways. In recent years, a significant proportion of farmers have grown to rely on leasing additional land to run their operations.

A 2020 report from Rabobank found 45% of farmers in South Australia and 38% in Western Australia lease a portion of the land they operate.

But leasing rates tend to rise in line with land values, which in turn erodes the profitability of those who lease land for farms for farming operations.

The rise in farmland values may also lead to significant borrowing costs for new farmers and existing farmers expanding their businesses if they finance their farmland purchases with debt.

This is because higher property prices require larger loans, which lead to higher interest repayments and ultimately diminish profitability.

For those who do own land outright, there is a potential upside. Higher land prices boost farmer wealth and equity levels. This increases borrowing capacity and supports productivity growth by making it easier for farmers to access capital for further investments, such as upgrading machinery or adopting new technology.

But even for this group, rising land values can inflate property taxes and insurance premiums, eroding profits.

Headed for the exit

This trend has real consequences for farmers and rural communities.

When farmland prices rise sharply, many long-time farmers see an opportunity to sell up and leave the industry. But when they go, their years of knowledge about how to run farms efficiently and productively go with them, leaving a gap that’s hard to replace.

High land prices also push some farmers, especially younger ones, out of the market altogether. In parts of Australia, it’s becoming harder to afford land to buy or lease, which threatens their ability to make a decent living from farming.

If fewer people can make a living on the land, that puts pressure on Australia’s food supply. It also affects the towns and communities built around farming. Fewer farmers mean fewer families in the region, which can lead to schools and local businesses closing and a weakening of the community fabric.

At the same time, when farmland becomes very expensive, there’s more pressure to squeeze every dollar out of it. That can encourage farming practices that put short-term profit ahead of long-term environmental care.

Policymakers, farmers and the public can’t afford to ignore these hidden costs.

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Florian Gerth, who co-authored the research discussed in this article.

Amir Arjomandi, Associate Professor of Economics, School of Business, University of Wollongong; Hassan F. Gholipour, Associate Professor of Property, Western Sydney University; Mohammad Reza Farzanegan, Professor of Economics of the Middle East, University of Marburg, and Sharon Yam, Associate Professor of Property, Western Sydney University

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

Imagine the weight of three Sydney Harbour Bridges. Between 2022 and 2023, product manufacturers were responsible for 540,000 tonnes (or three Sydney Harbour Bridges) of soft plastic packaging in Australia. Even worse, only 6% was recovered for recycling.

Following the spectacular collapse of REDcycle’s recycling program a few years ago, Australians discovered that instead of being recycled as promised, huge stockpiles of soft plastics had been secretly stockpiled in warehouses.

The consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, is proposing a new voluntary scheme where supermarkets and manufacturers work together to collect and recycle soft plastics. Public submissions on the scheme are due by next Monday, August 25.

So what’s being proposed? And how could buying more food without plastic packaging potentially save you money?

How the new recycling scheme would work

The commission’s proposed industry-led scheme aims to collect and recycle more soft plastic packaging from consumers, such as shopping bags and food packaging. Once approved, the program is proposed to run for eight years, with an initial review after three.

Australia’s three largest supermarket chains – Woolworths, Coles and Aldi – are all involved, along with multinational food manufacturers Nestle, Mars and McCormick Foods. It would be run by Soft Plastics Stewardship Australia, a not-for-profit industry body overseen by a board of senior supermarket and manufacturing executives.

It would be funded through a levy on the companies involved. For example, when a manufacturer sells its product to a supermarket, the manufacturer will have “placed” the soft plastic on the market – so they would pay.

The levy would start at A$160 per tonne of soft plastic and is expected to increase over time.

The companies involved may decide to pass on the cost of the levy through the supply chain, including to consumers. So it remains to be seen who’ll end up paying.

Other countries have taken a different approach. For example, in Germany producers have to take back and recycle any packaging from consumers free of charge.

Why soft plastics are hard to recycle

“Soft” plastics are used by manufacturers, suppliers and supermarkets to package everything from fresh produce, frozen foods, chip packets, muesli bar wrappers and deli counter film, to the inner and outer packaging on countless other supermarket items.

Soft plastics are made up of multiple layered and flexible materials, making them difficult to recycle.

They are often contaminated with food, and their “soft” nature tends to jam conventional sorting and processing machinery. They also take up a lot of space without yielding much usable material, making the whole process uneconomical for recycling organisations.

Why is so much supermarket food pre-packed?

For stores, it keeps things moving: pre-weighed packs speed up checkouts, cut staff time, and prolong shelf life for some products. That thin film on a cucumber can stretch its life from 3 days to 14.

Packaging also standardises portions, allows for company branding and promotion, and makes stock easier to store, stack and transport.

For shoppers, the appeal is convenience and familiarity.

When you’re in a hurry, it’s often simpler to grab what’s ready to go than to think about how much food you actually need, and the extra plastic you’ll bring home.

Buying unpackaged food could save you money

Commendable as it is, on its own the proposal for a new recycling scheme is not a long-term fix. Technical solutions to environmental problems – such as recycling soft plastics – can stop us dealing with the ultimate cause: our own behaviour.

Economists call this “moral hazard”. A classic example is drivers who are insured take greater risks when driving. Or in this case, knowing the plastic will be recycled means many of us could feel we don’t need to reduce our plastic use.

But while systematic change is clearly needed, as shoppers we can do our bit – and there can be payoffs for doing so.

Selecting loose fresh fruit and vegetables allows you to check for ripeness and avoid hidden spoilage.

It’s often also cheaper. Last year, Choice compared supermarket unit prices of a range of foods sold both loose and pre-packed. They found loose produce was cheaper 50% of the time, while prepackaged was cheaper 35% of the time (15% it was about the same).

Thinking beyond recycling

We need more profound changes to tackle our local and global packaging waste crisis.

One example is zero-waste shops that sell everything loose, from fresh food to dry goods and liquids.

We can start by changing our behaviour from the bottom up, avoiding pre-packaged goods as much as practical.

But manufacturers and supermarkets need to do their part too, giving shoppers more choice with more loose products and less plastic.

A sustainable solution to too much plastic has to go beyond recycling, otherwise our Harbour Bridge-sized stockpiles will continue to grow.

Louise Grimmer, Associate Professor of Marketing, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania; Robert Hoffmann, Professor of Economics, Tasmanian Behavioural Lab, University of Tasmania, and Swee-Hoon Chuah, Professor of Behavioural Economics, Tasmanian Behavioural Lab, University of Tasmania

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

Australia is home to an extraordinary variety of wildlife, ranging from striking palm cockatoos to elusive mountain pygmy-possums and remarkable rat-kangaroos.

Most of us never get to see these creatures in real life – and that’s a real shame. Spending time in nature looking for wildlife is more than just a hobby – it’s a way to reconnect with the natural world and remember why it matters.

But how do you actually see these creatures for yourself? It’s often easier than you think.

As wildlife researchers, we’ve spent a long time in the field looking for wildlife. Here are ten standout locations where you have a good chance of seeing some genuinely remarkable Australian creatures – and tips on doing so without causing them stress or harming the environment.

1. Kutini-Payamu/Iron Range National Park, Queensland

Located in far north Queensland, Iron Range is renowned for lush rainforests and rich wildlife. Here, you can spot majestic palm cockatoos, secretive green pythons, the striking green, red and blue hues of eclectus parrots and the adorable common spotted cuscus, a species of possum. These species also occur in Papua New Guinea, but the Cape York region is the only place to spot them in Australia.

Spotting tips: Walk the trails with binoculars during peak times for bird activity, early morning or late afternoon. At night, use a head torch to spot pythons, frogs, death adders, geckoes, rufous owls, cuscus and other nocturnal fauna.

2. Atherton Tablelands, Queensland

Inland from Cairns lies the Atherton Tablelands, an elevated region with a cooler climate and abundant and diverse wildlife. Here, you can spot vibrant Ulysses butterflies, shy platypuses and rare marsupials. Australia’s largest snake, the scrub python, can block entire roads as it warms itself up before the night’s hunt. Rare waterfall frogs can be spotted in fast-flowing falls.

Lumholtz’s tree kangaroos can be spotted hopping along limbs at Curtain Fig National Park and Mount Hypipamee National Park, alongside green ringtail possums and striped possums with elongated fingers to ferret out grubs.

Meanwhile, musky rat-kangaroos can be seen “gardening” on the forest floor at Lake Eacham and Lake Barrine. These are the smallest kangaroos and the only non-hopping species. Your best chance of sighting an elusive northern quoll or northern bettong is at Davies Creek National Park.

Spotting tips: Take guided night walks to glimpse nocturnal wildlife. Use a head torch with a red filter. Move quietly and regularly stop to listen for movement and animal calls. Binoculars are a must for spotting creatures high in the canopy.

3. Western Treatment Plant, Victoria

Surprisingly, Melbourne’s Western Treatment Plant is a mecca for birdwatchers. The huge wastewater facility is recognised as a wetland of international importance. Migratory birds such as sharp-tailed sandpipers and red-necked stints can be seen, while well-hidden bitterns, rare orange-bellied parrots and Australia’s dancing crane, the brolga, can be glimpsed feeding in dense heath during cooler months. Almost 300 species have been recorded here.

Spotting tips: Visit during migration seasons (spring and autumn) for the best birdwatching opportunities. Use binoculars, telescopes, or telephoto lenses for close-up views without disturbance. Visitors need a permit.

4. Lunawanna-allonah/Bruny Island and Wukaluwikiwayna/Maria Island, Tasmania

South of Hobart lies Bruny Island, a sanctuary for endangered species such as eastern and spotted-tailed quolls. Most of Tasmania’s endemic bird species are found here, such as green rosellas and forty-spotted pardalotes. Rare swift parrots can also be seen.

North of Hobart is Maria Island, an island national park where no cars are allowed – and where Tasmanian devils, bandicoots and wombats can readily be seen.

Spotting tips: Join guided tours to see nocturnal wildlife or birds in Bruny Island’s tall forests. Eastern quolls can often be seen at night on the main road when heading north from the island’s isthmus. Tasmanian devils and bandicoots can be seen around campsites at Maria Island at night.

5. Flinders, Portsea and Blairgowrie piers, Victoria

Snorkelling the cool waters beneath Flinders, Portsea and Blairgowrie piers is a revelation. Here live spectacular weedy sea dragons, sand octopuses, big-belly seahorses, ornate cowfish, smooth and eagle rays, Port Jackson and banjo sharks and vividly coloured nudibranchs.

Spotting tips: Snorkel or dive during calm weather for best visibility. Keep your distance from marine life for their safety (and yours).

6. Sydney Harbour and cliff tops, New South Wales

Sydney’s iconic harbour and surrounding cliffs are well suited for marine life enthusiasts. Every winter, humpback and southern right whales migrate past the headlands, while pods of bottlenose dolphins can be seen year-round. White-bellied sea eagles, Australasian gannets and short-tailed shearwaters add to the spectacle in the skies.

Spotting tips: Join whale-watching cruises between May and November for the best chance. Clifftop spotting is best done with binoculars from Royal National Park, North Head, Clovelly and The Gap.

7. Binybara/Lee Point, Northern Territory

Just north of Darwin is Lee Point, one of the best places to glimpse the elusive black-footed tree-rat. Weighing almost a kilo, this threatened native rodent is an expert climber and lives in tree hollows.

Around 200 bird species have also been recorded here. Flocks of great knots, eastern curlews and grey-tailed tattlers feed on the mudflats, while the woodlands are home to the dazzling colour of Gouldian finches and the charismatic blue-winged kookaburra.

Spotting tips: Visit at night to see the tree-rat moving between trees, or come at low tide to watch thousands of shorebirds feeding. Binoculars will be invaluable.

8. Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, Western Australia

Offshore from Perth, Rottnest Island is rightly famous for its smiling quokkas. But other unique species such as King’s skink and venomous dugites can be seen here too, while osprey nests occupied for decades can be seen on rock stacks. The reefs around the island have WA’s southernmost coral.

Spotting tips: Cycling is the best way to explore different habitats on the largely car-free island. Keep your distance from quokkas and other wildlife to ensure they stay wild.

9. Kunama Namadgi/Kosciuszko National Park, New South Wales

Australia’s highest peaks are home to the nation’s most remarkable alpine wildlife. Birdwatchers can spot gang-gang cockatoos feeding in eucalypts, while lucky hikers might glimpse an alpine dingo crossing a snow-dusted plain, or see a strikingly coloured Corroborree frog in a bog or fen.

This is the only place in the world where you can encounter a critically endangered mountain pygmy-possum. These tiny marsupials hibernate under winter snow and emerge to feed on bogong moths in spring.

Kosciuszko is also home to the native smoky mouse and – remarkably – to Leadbeater’s possum, long thought to be confined to Victoria’s Central Highlands.

Spotting tips: For the best chance of spotting a mountain pygmy-possum, visit between late spring and early summer when the snow has melted. Stick to alpine boulder fields such as those around Charlotte Pass and Mount Kosciuszko. You may need to camp overnight to see nocturnal possums and the smoky mouse. Binoculars and patience are essential to glimpse these shy species.

10. Karta Pintingga/Kangaroo Island, South Australia

Southwest of Adelaide lies the large Kangaroo Island, home to echidnas, tammar wallabies, a rare subspecies of the glossy black-cockatoo and Kangaroo Island dunnarts. Koalas are common. While the island’s isolation has protected these species, the 2020 megafires caused much damage. Wildlife is now bouncing back.

Spotting tips: Explore national parks and conservation areas with a local guide. Observe from a distance.

Take care of wildlife

Wildlife spotting has to be done with care. Think of yourself as a guest in someone else’s home.

Keep a respectful distance, don’t touch wildlife, move quietly and use binoculars or a zoom lens for a closer look rather than creeping closer.

If you’re out after dark, make sure your head torch has a red light option. This light is vastly less damaging to animal eyes optimised for the dark.

When snorkelling or diving, avoid hitting corals and sponges with your fins.

It can be tempting to use playback of calls to attract birds such as owls. But this is very disruptive and can do real damage.

Avoid moving logs, bark, stones and other habitat in your effort to see animals. This is disruptive and risks bites from venomous creatures.

Clean and disinfect your boots before moving between areas to avoid spreading soil-borne pathogens such as cinnamon fungus and chytrid fungus.

Whatever you do, don’t feed wildlife. It might seem harmless, but it can change their natural behaviour, make them ill and even make them dependent on people.

Posting sightings on citizen science apps such as iNaturalist and FrogID can help scientists learn more about these species and aid their conservation.

Enjoy the journey

As wildlife researchers, we often seek out species in their natural habitat. These moments never lose their impact.

It’s a remarkable thing to see a creature in its natural habitat. A successful sighting gives a sense of awe and joy. At a time when many people are cut off from nature, deliberately seeking out these species is a powerful and rewarding act.

Patrick Finnerty, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Conservation and Wildlife Management, University of Sydney; Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, and Rhys Cairncross, Ecologist and PhD Researcher, University of Sydney

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

Poohsticks, the game in which Piglet and Winnie the Pooh throw sticks into the river from one side of a bridge, and then rush over to the other side to see whose stick appears first, is all about current flow. Disappointingly, neither Piglet nor Pooh mention fluid dynamics despite its pivotal importance in determining who won.

Unlike sticks, though, animals can respond to those flows. The movement of water and air – with their winds and currents – can affect flying and swimming animals profoundly. And as we recently discovered, penguins are far more tuned in to these dynamics than anyone realised.

Anyone who’s ever swum in the sea will know how cross-currents can drag you along the coast, even when you’re trying to swim straight in. Magellanic penguins, a South American penguin, face this challenge daily, but they appear to have found a clever solution.

Penguins can swim far from land but seem to know exactly where they are. More importantly, they seem to know how to get back to their breeding colonies, whether currents are confounding them or not.

To understand how they do this, our team – which included researchers from Argentina, Germany, Japan and the UK – fitted high-tech tracking tags to Magellanic penguins breeding in Argentina. These birds often forage up to 43 miles offshore, far beyond the range of visual landmarks. And it’s unlikely they’re using the seafloor as a map, as Magellanics rarely dive that deep.

The tech we placed on the penguins recorded some pivotal information. Global positioning systems (GPS) gave the birds’ positions when they were at the surface between dives. And trajectories underwater could be calculated using dead reckoning. This is what a car navigation system does when it goes into a tunnel – it starts with the last GPS position and uses vectors on the car heading and speed to work out the path.

Our team did this with the penguins’ data, calculating the underwater pathways for every second of their one to three day trips. We then integrated this with the currents. This was no simple undertaking because currents change dramatically over the tidal cycle and vary with position.

So what could the penguins do in such a dynamic environment? One option (assuming they somehow knew both where they were and where home was) would be to head straight for the colony. But doing this would often have meant swimming against strong currents, sometimes of up to 2 metres per second (around 4.5mph). That’s about the same speed as an Olympic swimmer.

Although penguins can cruise at that speed, going faster to beat the current would cost them a lot of extra energy.

Interestingly, we found that during slack water, when the currents were trivial, the penguins headed directly home. So, somehow they knew where they were in relation to the colony. Theories about how animals might do this include them using magnetic field sensing, celestial cues, or even using smell to find their way but it’s a mysterious and hotly debated topic among experts.

When the current was strong, the penguins generally aimed in the right direction to return home. But they often combined this with swimming in the same general direction as the current, which typically flowed across the direct line to the nest. So, some birds appeared set to overshoot the colony, probably landing further down the coast.

However, the yin and yang of tidal currents means that what flows one way on the rising tide reverses on the ebb. The penguins seemed to understand this. They swam roughly equivalent, but mirror-imaged, trajectories on both incoming and outgoing tides, according to the direction of the current.

This strategy effectively cancels out potential overshoots over the course of a tidal cycle. Once they were close enough to the colony, the penguins launched into a final burst of power and made a direct line for home. This strategy increases the length of the path to get home. But it’s easy travelling since much of the work to move is done by the current and the increased distance gives the penguins opportunities to find prey.

Navigational experts

This suggests that Magellanic penguins can detect both the direction and speed of ocean currents. While some theories propose that animals sense small-scale turbulence to gauge flow, the mechanisms remain poorly understood.

Still, what these penguins manage is remarkable. It’s a kind of navigational party trick that helps ensure they return reliably to feed their chicks, seemingly untroubled by shifting currents.

Ocean and air circulation patterns are becoming more chaotic with climate change. If penguins, and other marine animals, can keep navigating our waters with skill and instinct, it’s one small piece of good news in a rapidly changing world.

Rory Wilson, Professor of Aquatic Biology and Sustainable Aquaculture, Swansea University and Richard Michael Gunner, Postdoctoral Researcher in Wildlife Biology, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

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

For the tenth time this year, a wildfire warning covers most of Scotland. The latest alert came after a recent, and not the first, gorse fire on Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh’s iconic ancient volcano that draws millions of visitors every year. Fire crews think human activity caused the fire. This is exactly the kind of incident that triggers our instinct to find someone to blame.

But with over 41,000 hectares already burned across Britain in 2025 (an area larger than the Isle of Wight) pointing the finger misses the point. News reports focus on who lit the spark, but Arthur’s Seat was primed to burn: flammable gorse has flourished since sheep stopped grazing the slopes. The real question isn’t who started this fire, but why we are caught off guard when fires happen in the wrong places.

This isn’t just an Edinburgh problem. Millions of Britons live near fire-prone landscapes, from Dorset heathlands to the Scottish Highlands.

My colleagues and I work with national parks in southern Africa to understand how they manage this challenge. The challenges I see in South Africa mirror what Britain now faces because of climate change: how to keep people and infrastructure safe when fire an unavoidable part of our reality.

Research shows that climate change has made the UK’s risk of ideal conditions for wildfires six times higher. While ignition sources haven’t changed much – most UK fires still start from human activity like discarded cigarettes or campfires – the conditions that allow fires to spread have transformed. Warmer, wetter winters create more plant growth and therefore fuel, which turns bone-dry during hot, dry spells.

Fire is a natural and vital feature of many landscapes globally. In fire-adapted ecosystems it can clear invasive species while promoting native grasses, reduce the buildup of dead vegetation that fuels dangerous blazes and create some of our most iconic places where plants and animals thrive.

The problem isn’t fire itself, but where, when and how it happens. Over 1.8 million British homes now sit within 100m of countryside edges – exactly where most wildfires occur. During one of Britain’s biggest wildfires on a North Yorkshire moor in 2018, flames nearly reached homes and critical infrastructure: the trans-Pennine railway, M62 motorway, major power lines and drinking water reservoirs. Another recent fire in the same area was close to a ballistic missile base.

I have interviewed fire managers in South Africa, where humans have worked with fire for millennia. Their approach suggests a fundamentally different relationship with fire, understanding fire as part of a landscape’s natural processes. Instead of treating every fire as a crisis, they study how fire behaves – when it helps ecosystems, when it threatens communities, and how to work with these patterns rather than against them.

Take Cape Town as an example, where fire authorities publish daily risk ratings that residents check like weather forecasts. High-risk days mean banned barbecues and closed trails. When safe, fire crews deliberately burn mountain slopes in small sections – having the right fires at the right times to prevent catastrophic ones. Property owners in Cape Town form neighbourhood fire protection associations to support each other and the emergency services during unplanned fires, creating a coordinated response network.

The UK is catching on

The UK government is reviewing its wildfire management strategy, focusing on prevention, collaboration and risk reduction. Landowners are also taking a more proactive approach. The Cairngorms national park in Scotland approved the UK’s first comprehensive wildfire management plan in June 2025, introducing seasonal fire management plans and setting up community groups to communicate fire risk and response. Fire services in the Cairngorms now use drones for real-time aerial mapping and off-road vehicles to fight fires in tough terrain.

However, we are still playing catch up. Fire services recorded 286 wildfires between January and April 2025. That’s over 100 more than the same period in 2022’s record year. Yet services receive little dedicated wildfire funding.

Britain could learn from South Africa’s holistic approach. Starting with the need to understand our own landscapes first. What role does fire play in our landscapes? How can we safely manage fire risk in different landscape types? Which of our ecosystems and places might actually benefit from carefully managed fire?

Edinburgh could start by studying Arthur’s Seat as Cape Town studies Table Mountain – not to implement identical solutions, but to understand how fire behaves in this specific landscape. This means researching how gorse burns, whether controlled burns could reduce dangerous fuel loads, and how visitors can safely coexist with proactive fire management.

The lesson isn’t to transplant South African methods to British soil, but to embrace their comprehensive approach to understanding fire. Every landscape is different. What works on Cape Town’s fynbos shrubland won’t necessarily work on Scottish moors. But the principle of studying fire as a part of the landscape rather than simply an emergency to suppress could transform how Britain manages its growing fire risk.

Fire isn’t the enemy. Poorly understood, unmanaged fire is. Climate change guarantees greater fire risk. Britain’s choice is clear: continue reacting with shock to each blaze, or develop our own integrated understanding of how fire works in British landscapes. The Arthur’s Seat fire was a warning shot. The question is whether we’ll heed it.

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Elliot Convery-Fisher, Research Fellow in the Socio-Ecology of Fire Management, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

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

People often prioritize aesthetics when choosing plants for their gardens. They may pick flowers based on colors that create visually appealing combinations and varieties that have bigger and brighter displays or more fragrant and pleasant-smelling flowers. Some may also choose species that bloom at different times in order to maintain a colorful display throughout the growing season.

Many gardeners also strive for ecological harmony, seeking to maintain pollinator-friendly gardens that support bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinators. But there are some notable ways in which the preferences of humans and pollinators have the potential to diverge, with negative consequences for pollinators.

As a cognitive ecologist who studies animal decision-making, I find that understanding how pollinators learn about and choose between flowers can add a helpful perspective to garden aesthetics.

Pollinator preferences and rewards

Over millions of years, plants have evolved suites of floral traits to attract specific types of pollinators.

Pollinators can be attracted to flowers based on color, pattern, scent and texture. For instance, hummingbirds typically visit bright red and orange flowers with narrow openings and a tubular shape. The striking red cardinal flower is one that is primarily pollinated by hummingbirds, for example.

Bees are often attracted to blue, yellow and white flowers that can be either narrow and tubular or open. Lavender, sage and sunflower plants all bear flowers that attract bee pollinators.

Flowers offer rewards to visiting pollinators. Nectar is a sugar-rich solution that flowers produce to attract pollinators, which use it to meet their energy needs.

Flowers have an ulterior motive for providing this energy source. While drinking the nectar, pollen can get stuck on the pollinator and transferred to the next flower it visits. This process is essential for the plant’s reproductive success. Pollen contains the plants’ male gametes, which, when deposited onto another flower in the right place, can fertilize the female gametes and produce seeds that grow into new plants. Pollen is also nutrient-rich, containing proteins, lipids and amino acids. Many species, such as bees, collect pollen to feed their developing young.

A battle for resources

Pollinators visit flowers in search of floral rewards. But modifying the features of flowers for aesthetics can be a hindrance to pollinators trying to get these rewards. For example, popular garden plants such as roses and peonies are often bred to have more petals and larger flower heads, making them more visually striking and appealing to humans. But these extra petals may block a pollinator’s access to the center of the flower, where floral rewards are located.

Further, plants have limited resources. Spending them on building aesthetically pleasing but energetically expensive features can mean there’s less left to invest in signals and rewards essential for attracting pollinators. In extreme cases, breeding for aesthetics has led to plants with what scientists and gardeners call “double flowers.” In these varieties, extra petals replace reproductive parts entirely. These plants are often altogether unrewarding for pollinators, since the flowers no longer produce nectar or pollen. Double flowers occur from mutations that convert the pollen-producing stamens and other reproductive organs into petals. They can occur naturally but are rare in wild populations.

Since these double flowers cannot spread pollen or produce seeds effectively, they are unable to reproduce in the wild and pass these mutations on. To cultivate them as garden varieties, people propagate these plants through cuttings – small sections cut from the stem that can be rooted to grow clones of the parent plant. Many common garden plants have popular double-flowered varieties, including roses, peonies, camellias, marigolds, tulips, dahlias and chrysanthemums.

Roses, for example, have become synonymous with having many densely-packed petals. But these popular garden varieties are usually double-flowered or have many extra petals blocking access to the center of the rose and provide no rewards to pollinators.

Consider making your gardens friendlier to pollinators by avoiding these double-flowered plants, and ask your local garden center for recommended varieties if you need help.

Sometimes gardeners intentionally prevent plants from flowering, which limits or eliminates their value to pollinators.

For example, herbs such as thyme, oregano, mint and basil are generally most flavorful and tender before the plant begins to flower. Once it flowers, the plant diverts energy to reproductive structures, and leaves become tougher and lose flavor. As a result, gardeners often pinch off flower buds and harvest leaves frequently to promote continued growth and delay flowering. Letting some of your herbs flower occasionally can help pollinators without affecting your kitchen supplies too much.

Finding the right flowers

Flowers with unusual colors and stronger fragrances can be difficult for pollinators to detect and recognize.

People might favor bright and unusual flower colors in their gardens over naturally occurring shades. But this preference might not align with what the pollinators have evolved to favor in nature. For example, planting human-preferred colors, such as white or pink morphs of hummingbird-pollinated flowers that are typically red, can reduce a flower’s visibility and attractiveness. Even when cultivated varieties have a similar enough color to natural ones to attract pollinators, they may lack other important visual components, such as ultraviolet floral patterns that can guide pollinators to nectar sources.

Breeding plant varieties to accentuate particular aesthetic traits may have unintended consequences for other traits. Changes in flower color through selective breeding can also affect leaf color, as genes involved in pigment production can affect multiple plant tissues. Besides changing the overall appearance of the plant, changing leaf color may alter background contrast between flowers and the leaves, which can make flowers less conspicuous to pollinators.

Many pollinators use a combination of color and scent to detect and discriminate between flowers. But breeding for traits such as color and brightness can alter floral scents due to unintended genetic changes or energetic trade-offs.

Scent helps pollinators locate flowers from farther distances, so unfamiliar or reduced fragrance may make flowers harder to find in the first place. Disruption in either color or scent can make flowers less noticeable to pollinators expecting a familiar pairing and can hinder a pollinator’s ability to learn which flowers are suitable for them in the first place.

A balanced approach for healthy gardens

When flowers are harder to find, pollinators are less likely to visit them. When they offer poor or no rewards, pollinators quickly abandon them for better options. This disruption in plant-pollinator interactions has implications not only for pollinator health but also for garden vitality. Many plants rely on animal pollinators to reproduce and make mature seeds. These are either collected by gardeners or allowed to drop to the ground and sprout on their own to grow new flowering plants the following year.

When selecting plants for a garden, gardeners who want to support pollinators might consider choosing native varieties that have evolved alongside local pollinators.

In most areas of the country, there are native plants with colorful and interesting flowers that bloom at different times, from early spring to late fall. These plants tend to produce reliable floral signals and offer the nectar and pollen needed to support pollinator nutrition and development.

Sterile varieties and double flowers offer little or no rewards for pollinators, and gardens with them may not attract as many pollinators. Letting herbs flower after some harvesting is another simple way to support beneficial insects.

With choices informed by not just your aesthetic preferences but also those of pollinators, you can create colorful gardens that support wildlife and stay in bloom across various seasons.

Claire Therese Hemingway, Assistant Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee

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

In March 2025, surfers and swimmers were the first to notice the harmful algal bloom taking hold in South Australian waters. People catching waves at a popular break on the Fleurieu Peninsula later reported feeling sick with flu-like symptoms.

Over the five months since, an “unprecedented” environmental disaster has unfolded, devastating marine ecosystems and the South Australian economy. It has also fundamentally changed the way people connect to the ocean.

This particular bloom – caused by Karenia mikimotoi – is deadly to various marine species, while in humans it can cause milder illness and irritation.

But the impact on mental health and wellbeing is profound.

When people can no longer use “blue spaces” such as the ocean to surf, swim, fish and walk on the beach, they are losing activities that calm and relax them – exactly when they’re most sick with worry about their beloved coastline.

A perfect storm

South Australia’s algal bloom is the result of a “perfect storm” – a marine heatwave, nutrient rich water from previous flooding, and a rare cold-water upwelling.

Current public health advice tells surfers and swimmers to stay out of water if it looks “discoloured, foamy, or where there’s dead marine life”.

Given that dead marine life is washing up across many South Australian beaches, this means it’s hard to find any place to surf or swim.

Recreational fishers are advised that catching fish (and other marine species) is safe if it’s cleaned thoroughly before eating. But many are not throwing their lines in due to concerns about depleting the surviving marine life.

Blue spaces and health

Activities such as swimming, surfing and fishing are not only enjoyable, they have a range of health benefits.

There is mounting empirical evidence about the range of benefits from spending time in “green spaces”, such as parks and bushland.

In 2020, a review of evidence about “blue spaces” – meaning oceans, rivers and lakes – found similar benefits.

For example, swimming outdoors in nature – sometimes known as “wild swimming” – can reduce fatigue and improve mental health. There is also early evidence that it can promote immune functioning.

Surfing also has physical and mental health benefits, and increases community connections. One study of recreational fishers found three in four (75.5%) fish for stress relief.

But these are benefits people in areas affected by the algal bloom are no longer getting.

Grief and anxiety

The algal bloom means people can’t access blue spaces and their health benefits. In fact, the devastation can mean engaging with blue spaces actually makes people’s mental health worse, through worry and grief about the environment.

Eco-anxiety describes the extreme fear, worry, sadness or a generally heightened emotional state we may feel in response to changes in the climate or environment. When people experience grief and other negative emotions about changes to a place they love, this is sometimes called “solastalgia”.

Both eco-anxiety and solastalgia can be responses to global changes, such as warming temperatures and rising sea levels. But they are felt most acutely among those affected directly by a disaster.

Research after Australia’s 2019–20 bushfires found high levels of eco-anxiety and solastalgia among those who survived, with the environment becoming a source of pain and grief.

Given this harmful algal bloom is being referred to as an “underwater bushfire”, it is unsurprising we are seeing people describe similar concern, worry, sadness and loss.

I am part of a team from the University of South Australia currently researching this impact, by surveying people who live near and use the beach to better understand their experience.

Are there any silver linings?

Grief about the destruction of a place we love is the sign of how much we care about it – and this can be galvanising.

Research shows eco-anxiety can be a form of practical anxiety. This means unlike other forms of worry it is more likely to also drive behaviour change.

We are already seeing this in South Australia. Over 12,000 recordings on iNaturalist – a website where members of the community upload photos and help identify species – provide shocking visual evidence of the loss and devastation.

Distressed beachgoers who are participating in citizen science programs such as these help keep the spotlight on the disaster, as well as rescuing stranded sea animals and protesting for action from government and industry.

Amid the grief, it’s important to try and still maintain our connection to our environment. When we can’t spend time in our usual natural spots, we can still benefit from connecting with nature beyond blue spaces – even if it’s simply visiting a park or planting something new.

Brianna Le Busque, Lecturer in Environmental Science, University of South Australia

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

Human-driven climate change threatens many species, including birds. Most studies on this topic focus on long-term climate trends, such as gradual rises in average temperatures or shifts in rainfall patterns. But extreme weather events are becoming more common and intense, so they warrant further attention.

Our new research shows extreme heat is having a particularly severe effect on tropical birds. We found increased exposure to extreme heat has reduced bird populations in tropical regions by 25–38% since 1950.

This is not just a temporary dip – it’s a long-term, cumulative effect that continues to build as the planet warms.

Our research helps explain why bird numbers are falling even in wild places relatively untouched by humans, such as some very remote protected tropical forests. It underscores the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to conserve the remaining biodiversity.

Digging into huge global datasets

We analysed data from long-term monitoring of more than 3,000 bird populations worldwide between 1950 and 2020. This dataset captures more than 90,000 scientific observations.

Although there are some gaps, the dataset offers an unmatched view of how bird populations have changed over time. Some parts of the world such as western Europe and North America were better represented than others, but all continents were covered.

We matched this bird data with detailed daily weather records from a global climate database that stretches back to 1940. This allowed us to track how bird populations responded to specific changes in daily temperatures and rainfall, including extreme heat.

We also looked at average yearly temperatures, total annual rainfall, and episodes of unusually heavy rainfall.

Using another dataset that reflects human industrial activity over time, we accounted for human pressures such as land development and human population density.

By combining all these sources of data, we created computer models to evaluate how climate factors and human impacts influence bird population growth.

Our research confirmed the work of other climate scientists showing extreme heat events have increased dramatically over the past 70 years, especially near the equator.

Birds in tropical regions are now experiencing dangerously hot days about ten times more often than they did in the past.

What we found: extreme heat is the biggest climate threat to birds

While changes in average temperature and rainfall do affect birds, we found the increasing number of dangerously hot days had the greatest effect – especially in tropical regions.

This is a major concern because tropical birds often have small home ranges and are highly specialised in terms of the habitats and climates they persist in. In many cases tropical birds exist within a small range of heat tolerance.

At temperatures beyond a bird’s limit of endurance, they go into hyperthermia, where their body temperature rises uncontrollably. In this state, birds may adopt a drooped-wing posture to expose more skin for heat loss, hold their beaks open and pant rapidly, spread their feathers, and become lethargic or disoriented. In severe cases, they lose coordination, fall from perches, or even collapse unconscious.

If they survive the experience, they can suffer long-term damage such as heat-induced organ failure and reduced reproductive capacity. Heat exposure reduces breeding success by lowering adult body condition and reducing time spent foraging – because the birds must rest or seek shade during the hottest hours.

It also causes heat stress in eggs and nestlings. In extreme events, nestlings may die from hyperthermia, or parents may abandon nests to save themselves.

Heat also increases a bird’s demand for water — not because they sweat (birds lack sweat glands) but because they lose water rapidly through evaporative cooling. This happens mainly via panting (respiratory evaporation) and, in some species, gular fluttering (rapid vibration of throat skin to increase airflow), as well as evaporation through the skin. As temperatures climb, these processes accelerate, causing significant dehydration unless birds can drink more frequently or access moister food.

Our study found that across tropical areas, the impact of climate change on birds is perhaps even greater now than the impact of direct human activities such as logging, mining or farming. This is not to say habitat destruction due to these activities is not a serious issue – it clearly is a major concern to tropical biodiversity. But our study highlights the challenges climate change is already bringing to birds in tropical regions.

A clear warning

Our research highlights the importance of focusing not just on average climate trends, but also on extreme events. Heatwaves are no longer rare, isolated incidents – they are becoming a regular part of life in many parts of the world.

If climate change continues unchecked, tropical birds – and likely many other animals and plants – will face increasing threats to their survival. Change may be too fast and too extreme for many species to adapt.

And as tropical regions host a huge share of the world’s biodiversity, including nearly half of all bird species, the ripple effects could be far-reaching.

Conservation strategies must take this into account. Protecting habitats from human industrial development remains important, but it’s no longer enough on its own. Proactive action to help species adapt to climate change needs to be part of wildlife protection plans – especially in the tropics.

Ultimately if we are to preserve global biodiversity, slowing down and eventually reversing climate change is essential. That means cutting greenhouse gas emissions, investing in ways to draw down existing carbon dioxide levels, and supporting policies that reduce our impact on the planet. The fate of tropical birds – and countless other species – depends on it.

James Watson, Professor in Conservation Science, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland; Maximilian Kotz, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), and Tatsuya Amano, Associate Professor, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland

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

As the annual humpback whale migration is underway with thousands of whales passing by the Australian coast, there are reports of dolphins joining the mass movement.

But this isn’t a one off. In fact, our new study, published today in Discover Animals, shows interspecies interactions between dolphins and whales are widespread and frequent around the world.

An astonishing interaction

There have been several reports of whale and dolphin interaction in the past.

One that astonished the public back in 2004 featured a humpback whale in Hawaii repeatedly lifting a bottlenose dolphin on its head.

Researchers suggested such close contact between whales and dolphins is likely very rare – and maybe related to care giving.

But other forms of interactions resembling joint feeding, play and harassment are now being frequently documented thanks to drone technology. Many are also featured on social media.

A ‘whale’s-eye view’ of the world

For our new study, we undertook an analysis of 199 independent whale-dolphin interaction events involving 19 different species. These interactions spanned two decades and occurred across 17 countries.

We drew from social media platforms – such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram – and footage contributed by citizens to get a variety of observations.

Each entry was carefully reviewed to identify the species involved, validate the interaction and categorise behaviours. Two additional cases came from camera tags attached to humpback whales. These offered an underwater “whale’s-eye view” of their encounters with dolphins.

We categorised behaviours such as rolling, tail slaps, bow riding, and rubbing, and classified dolphin positions relative to whale body parts such as head, flank and tail fluke.

Having fun or fighting?

The study contradicted earlier assumptions that interspecies interactions between dolphins and whales are very rare.

The most common interaction was dolphins swimming near the whale’s head (akin to bow riding). This accounted for 80% of observed dolphin positions. Humpback whales were the most involved whale species, while bottlenose dolphins led the dolphin side.

Based on videos we analysed, dolphins initiated most interactions through bow riding, swimming in formation, or even touching whales.

In more than one-quarter of the events, the whales responded in seemingly similar ways. For example, humpback whales often rolled, exposed their bellies, or gently turned toward dolphins.

Tail slaps and other signs of distress or aggression were rare (roughly 5% of cases).

As a result of this, we classified more than one-third of all interactions between humpback whales and dolphins as positive or possible social play.

The two camera-tag videos revealed previously undocumented interaction. Dolphins were observed following humpback whales not only at the surface but down to the ocean floor. They maintained eye contact or even touched the whales’ head – suggesting intentional, possibly social, engagement.

Reflecting advanced emotional capabilities

The findings reshape our understanding of how social marine mammals interact across species. They suggest interspecies interaction among marine mammals may be far more prevalent and complex than previously believed.

Dolphins may seek out whales as companions for stimulation, play or even courtship-like behaviour. Meanwhile, certain whale species, particularly humpback whales, may not only tolerate but also engage with dolphins in a social capacity.

This interspecies dynamic adds a new dimension to marine mammal social ecology and could point to cultural elements in whale and dolphin societies. The playfulness, cooperation and apparent enjoyment observed in many interactions reflect advanced cognitive and emotional capabilities.

The study also demonstrates the power of new technologies and community science. Social media and drones proved invaluable for collecting a range of diverse behavioural data that traditional surveys might miss.

Social media data has limitations, such as geographic and observer bias caused by different angles, heights, equipment and frequency of use of social media. But it does complement other data and helps uncover previously unknown behaviours.

Whales and dolphins don’t just coexist but also seek each other out. Future studies incorporating acoustic recordings and longer observation periods could further unravel the motivations and meanings behind these fascinating encounters.

Olaf Meynecke, Research Fellow in Marine Science and Manager Whales & Climate Program, Griffith University

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

Until now, many of Western Australia’s most pristine coral reefs have avoided the worst bleaching brought by marine heatwaves. But their luck has now run out. The state’s longest lasting, largest and most intense underwater heatwave has hammered them.

The unusual heat began late last year off the northwest coast, before spreading south, eventually affecting seas along more than 1,500km of coastline. Surface temperatures hit up to 4°C above average in places.

For coral, sustained heat stress is measured using degree heating weeks (DHW). At 4 DHW, coral bleaching is likely. At 8 DHW, many corals are at risk of bleaching and dying.

The data so far suggests heat stress on most reefs was more than double that. Central Ningaloo hit 20 DHW. Off some parts of the Pilbara coast, heat stress hit an almost unthinkable 30 DHW.

My colleagues and I have recorded the result: intense bleaching at iconic Ningaloo reef, as well as across the spots we hoped would be more resilient, such as the Rowley Shoals well offshore, and the vast but little-known reefs of the northern Kimberley.

It’s undoubtedly the most widespread coral bleaching event yet recorded in WA. For the worst-hit reefs, it’s hard to see how recovery to their previous glory is possible, given temperatures will continue to rise in the coming years.

Sustained heat over a huge area

The heat started building towards the end of 2024. In the absence of monsoonal storms and cyclones, the unprecedented heat stress continued to rise throughout December 2024 and January 2025. Soon, reefs and other ecosystems off the Kimberley coast began to suffer. Ningaloo was feeling the heat by February.

A late monsoon gave a slight reprieve, but the heat was back on in March and April. By then, the underwater heatwave had swept across the northwest coast between Ningaloo and remote offshore reefs such as Ashmore and the Rowley Shoals. It took until May for the heat to begin to dissipate.

Because unusually warm water sat in place for months in some regions, corals had no reprieve. Worse, the heat spread far down into the ocean. Our surveys of coral 20–30 metres below the surface found similar levels of heat stress and bleaching as those in shallower water, while higher temperatures were documented hundreds of metres deep in some places. While cyclones and other storms often offer temporary cooling by churning up the sea and mixing warm water with cooler, there was very little reprieve this time. The seas were simply too hot.

It will take months for scientists to understand the full extent of what’s happened underwater. Many of these reefs are remote. What we do know is coral reefs over a 1,500km span of ocean are bleaching at levels ranging from medium (11–30% of all corals) up to extreme (more than 90%).

At the Rowley Shoals’ Mermaid and Clerke Reefs, field surveys in April found very high (61–90%) death rates across most coral types. Bleaching had hit every type of habitat, from sheltered lagoons to the 30m-deep outer reef slope.

At Ningaloo, coral bleaching and death was at high levels (31–60% of corals) in the northern and central regions in May, with southern Ningaloo less affected, while reefs across the vast Kimberley ranged from high (31–60%) to very high levels.

One way to measure marine heatwaves is by using satellites to monitor sea surface temperatures. But when our researchers arrived at the remote Ashmore Reef, they found the temperatures in shallow lagoons were even hotter in real life than they were in satellite data.

It’s often said coral reefs are the tropical jungles of the sea due to their wealth of species. When the coral bleaches or dies, it threatens many other species. Our scientists saw this clearly. The most obvious change was a drop in the numbers of colourful coral-eating butterflyfish.

There are some small silver linings to the event. WA coral reefs still remain among the world’s healthiest. Bleaching damage can be patchy. Some coral species are less susceptible, and some parts of the reef can escape the worst of the heat. Bleaching hasn’t been spotted this year at Shark Bay, the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, or WA’s southernmost reefs at Rottnest Island.

Will coral have a future?

Witnessing this silent devastation has taken a toll on our scientists and everyone in the reef community in WA. It is very hard to see these natural marvels suffering.

What makes it worse is that we know this isn’t a single event. On the contrary: climate change gets steadily worse, year after year. As ocean temperatures rise and rise, the destruction underwater can only increase.

The bleaching in WA is only a small part of the spate of underwater heatwaves that has swept through coral reefs globally since 2023 – the fourth event of its kind to affect all the world’s coral reefs. More than 80% of the world’s reefs have suffered bleaching, including the Great Barrier Reef.

It’s not the end of WA’s coral reefs. Reefs can recover, given enough time. Not all reefs, sites on a reef or types of coral are affected equally. While some will be devastated, others will escape the worst damage and others still may prove resistant to future conditions or adapt faster. Only time will tell what their path to recovery might look like.

But giving these these hard-hit coral reefs a chance will require rapid, meaningful action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Good management of local issues and trialling ways of helping coral reefs cope with the heat will also be essential.

James Paton Gilmour, Research Scientist: Coral Ecology, Australian Institute of Marine Science

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

In the vast, arid landscapes of South Australia’s northeast, on the lands of the Adnyamathanha and Wilyakali, a surprising discovery is changing our understanding of one of Australia’s most endangered birds.

The plains-wanderer (Pedionomus torquatus) has long hovered on the brink of extinction. Conservation efforts focus on protecting its known grassland habitats, mainly in Victoria and and New South Wales. But our new research shows more than 250 of these birds are thriving in habitats previously considered unsuitable, on the western edge of its range.

We used tracking devices – attached to a harness resembling a tiny backpack – to discover that this new population prefers open shrublands to grasslands. This could change how we conserve one of Australia’s most unique birds.

Studying the Goldilocks bird

Most people agree Australia is home to some pretty special birds, but the plains-wanderer often goes unnoticed. This small, mottled brown, ground-dwelling bird is the sole surviving member of an ancient lineage. It’s often called a “living fossil” because its closest relatives died out long ago.

It’s so unique that in 2018 the Zoological Society of London put the plains-wanderer on top of its “evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered” bird list. Fewer than 2,000 plains-wanderers remain in the wild.

Known as a habitat specialist, the plains-wanderer has been nicknamed the “Goldilocks bird” because its survival depends on conditions being just right.

Historically, this included well-managed native grasslands in Victoria and NSW, while habitat in SA was considered too degraded or unsuitable.

Our new research challenges this view, uncovering a population thriving in habitat nobody expected the species to use.

Strap on the birdie backpacks

Against all expectations we found 272 plains-wanderers living in Boolcoomatta Station Reserve, 100km west of Broken Hill in semi-arid rangeland.

To learn more about this new population, we used miniature GPS data loggers to track their movements for a month. Then we used VHF (very high frequency) devices to locate the birds, so we could retrieve and download the information.

Both devices are lightweight and designed to sit comfortably between the birds’ wings, like a tiny hiking pack. Researchers conducted extensive testing with captive birds to ensure the fit was safe and comfortable.

Once we had ethics approval in place, we fitted 29 plains-wanderers with these miniature backpacks. Then, like following breadcrumbs through the bush, we traced the steps of our tracked birds to find the habitats they selected.

Choosing shrublands over grasslands

We found this new population of plains-wanderers consistently selected open shrublands dominated by a low-growing woody herb, Sclerolaena.

This prickly, hardy, drought-tolerant plant does not seem like particularly hospitable habitat. It’s more often associated with grazed rangelands than endangered birds. But time and again, our GPS-tracked birds chose these sparse, open areas. Their preferred habitat featured about 55% plant cover with large patches of bare ground. The plants were an average 11cm tall.

Grassy places could also be found in the landscape. But these areas were particularly dense, providing the wrong kind of cover for plains-wanderers. The birds’ consistent avoidance of these denser grasslands suggests vegetation structure, rather than just plant species, is key.

This challenges decades of ecological thought. The plains-wanderer, long considered a “grassland specialist”, may actually be more selective about vegetation structure than species composition. In other words, habitat use is not solely about grass cover but the right mix of plant height, density and bare ground.

Unanswered questions

Our discovery of more than 250 so-called grassland specialists in shrubland raises important questions about the management of this threatened species.

For decades, conservation efforts have focused on protecting core habitat of the plains-wanderer in NSW and Victoria. While these areas remain crucial, our findings suggest the species lives in a broader range of habitats than previously thought. Interestingly, the habitat we found is widespread in SA’s arid interior, opening up new possibilities for conservation in areas often dismissed as unsuitable.

Peripheral populations of threatened species are often overlooked, but they remain vital for survival of a species. These populations may have unique traits, behave differently, or buffer declining core habitats.

Our findings show conservation shouldn’t focus solely on assumptions about habitat. If we only search where we expect to find a species, we risk missing important parts of the bigger picture — or, in this case, vital parts of the population.

Yet, there is much we still do not know about this population. Where did it originate? How far does its range extend? How will it cope with droughts and climate change? Our discovery raises more questions than answers.

To better understand this population, we are now conducting genetic analyses to explore how it interacts with the core population. The results should tell us more about how closely they are connected.

We are also incorporating this new data into computer models to identify other possible hidden populations, refine the species’ range, and aid in population discovery.

Perhaps most importantly, this research allows us to protect not just the places we’ve always looked — but the places we’ve overlooked.

Keep searching for more surprises

It’s uncommon to write a positive story about a species listed as critically endangered, especially when they’re in better condition than expected.

Even as biodiversity loss accelerates, discoveries like this remind us nature still holds surprises.

This find serves as a strong reminder to keep searching, not just in the usual spots, but in the misunderstood areas at the edges of a species’ range. Because sometimes, hope can be found in the most unexpected places.

Saskia Gerhardy, PhD Candidate, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide and Steven Delean, Lecturer in Biostatistics and Ecology, University of Adelaide

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

Living in cities exposes people to all sorts of chemical pollutants. Many are harmful even at low concentrations. But it is hard to know what the risks and consequences might be.

The animals we share our cities with can indicate potential sources and effects of such pollution. In this way, they act as sentinels — just like the canary in the coalmine, used to alert underground miners to the presence of dangerous levels of toxic gases in the 19th century.

Our research on house sparrows in three Australian towns revealed subtle but disturbing effects of pollution on these birds.

In the mining town of Broken Hill, New South Wales, sparrows suffered from exposure to lead in areas where thousands of people live. Similarly, in Portland, Victoria and George Town, Tasmania, sparrows living near aluminium smelters were affected by the smelting byproduct fluoride. The results suggest the health and wellbeing of city people may also be at risk.

Anxiety: aversion to the human gaze

Sparrows have lived alongside people for thousands of years. In that time they have picked up useful skills, such as feeding off food scraps, while avoiding harm.

Most people are familiar with the sight of a sparrow boldly feeding from leftover food at a café, even indoors. If the birds are ignored they often feed within arm’s length. But as soon as someone looks directly at them, they fly away and become very wary.

This is one of the sparrow’s super skills, allowing them to thrive in the urban environment. People mostly ignore them and cause them no harm. But if a person is focused on them, they respond as if they suspect something bad might happen.

Sensitivity to the human gaze is well studied in human psychology. It has also been shown in urban gulls that steal food in Europe.

We explored the effects of lead pollution on sparrow gaze sensitivity in Broken Hill.

Sparrows have small home ranges (about 300 metres). We established enclosed feeding stations at four sites across the city. We also tagged each bird and measured the amount of lead in their blood.

Then we erected boards with a photograph of a man either looking directly at the feeding station, or to the side. We presented different pictures over several days. Our results showed a clear distinction between responses to the images.

Sparrows flocked to the feeding stations. But they took much longer to visit the feeder when the man in the picture appeared to be looking at them. Those living in areas with high lead levels were especially sensitive to the direction of gaze.

Video recordings of sparrows revealed those with high levels of lead in their blood were more anxious. They spent more time looking up and checking for predators than sparrows in areas where lead pollution levels were relatively low.

Anxiety is a common symptom of lead poisoning in people. It is caused by damage to the nervous system during development.

Our research showed sparrows living in contaminated areas of Broken Hill were more anxious. This would help reduce the risk of being caught by a predator. But there are downsides to being an anxious sparrow, not least because less time is spent feeding.

Another common consequence of lead poisoning is impaired mobility. When we analysed video recordings of sparrow escape flight, we found sparrows with high blood lead levels were slower to take off. Every second counts when being attacked by a sparrowhawk or cat.

Longevity: checking chromosomes for ageing

The length of the “telomeres” — caps that prevent chromosomes from damage — has proven to be a good marker of how long an individual will live.

When we measured telomere length in the sparrows across Broken Hill, we discovered sparrows with higher levels of lead in their blood had shorter telomeres. Generally, birds with shorter telomeres die at a younger age.

Previous studies of humans exposed to lead through industrial occupations also found telomere shortening.

Brittle bones and pitted teeth

We also studied sparrows in two towns near aluminium smelters: Portland, Victoria and George Town, Tasmania.

Fluoride is a major byproduct of aluminium smelting. After fluoride is emitted into the air it falls back to Earth where it can contaminate land, water and plants. So animals may breathe it in, drink contaminated water or eat contaminated food. Fluoride then accumulates in the animal’s bones and teeth.

Earlier studies found high exposure to fluoride deposited around the Portland aluminium smelter caused bone lesions in nearby kangaroos and dental problems in koalas.

We found sparrows living up to 10km from these smelters had unnaturally high fluoride levels in their bones.

Excess fluoride uptake changes the balance of the essential bone minerals, calcium and phosphorus. These minerals play an important role in bone structure. Changes in their composition could compromise bone strength, with implications for activities such as flight.

Heed the lessons

Pollution affects virtually all aspects of life — from how organisms behave to how they age and grow. The health of the environment, animals and people are tightly intertwined.

Further, in light of strengthening evidence that even low levels of lead and fluoride exposure might be harmful at times, reviewing environmental management controls and pollution limits is warranted.

We should heed the lessons of sentinels such as the sparrow, and reduce pollution at the source. This will benefit urban ecosystems and, in turn, the health and wellbeing of humans.

Simon Griffith, Professor of Avian Behavioural Ecology, Macquarie University; Mark Patrick Taylor, Honorary Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, and Max M Gillings, PhD Candidate, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

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

You’ll pay substantially less to charge an electric vehicle (EV) than if you were refuelling a petrol car to go the same distance.

But what often surprises new EV owners is how much the cost of a charge can vary. Using a smart charger to draw from rooftop solar at home can cost as little as 10 cents per kilowatt-hour — or almost nothing if you use “excess” solar that would otherwise be exported for a low feed-in tariff or not paid for at all. Charging from the grid off-peak might cost around 20 cents per kWh.

For an EV with a 60kWh battery, paying 10 cents per kWH means it would cost about A$6 for a full charge – enough to drive 300–400 kilometres. But if you’re on a road trip and want to charge quickly at an ultra-fast public charger, it might cost up to 60c per kWh – or about $36 for a 60kWh battery. By contrast, driving the same 350km in a new petrol car would cost almost $50 at Sydney’s recent average of 203.5c per litre – and likely more, given petrol cars often burn more fuel than their manufacturers claim.

It makes sense to charge your EV as cheaply as possible, given many drivers are switching to save on running costs and help tight household budgets. Here’s how.

How does EV charging work?

Charging an EV is like charging your phone, but on a larger scale.

How much driving range you gain per hour depends on the charging speed (measured in kilowatts) and the battery’s total capacity (measured in kilowatt-hours). On average, EVs use about 18kWh per 100km of driving, and most EVs have battery capacities between 40kWh and 120kWh.

There are three main charger levels. Each offers different speeds of charging and are designed for different situations.

Level 1: Trickle chargers (1.4–2.4kWh)

Trickle chargers are essentially slow portable chargers plugged into a standard home power point. They add 10–15km of range per hour, making them best suited to overnight charging or emergency top-ups. On the plus side, these chargers come with the car and typically only need access to a standard plug.

Level 2: Top-up chargers (7–22kWh)

Level 2 chargers include home wallbox chargers and destination chargers at hotels, car parks and shopping centres. These AC chargers are faster, adding about 40–120km of range per hour – great for when your car is parked for a while.

Level 3: Rapid chargers (25–350kWh)

You’ll find these fast and ultra-fast DC chargers at motorway rest stops and along major travel routes. They can add 150–300km of range per hour. They’re ideal for long trips and short breaks with quick turnarounds, but they usually cost more.

Home charging is cheapest – if it’s available

If you live in a standalone house with off-street parking, home charging is generally the cheapest option. You can easily use Level 1 or 2 chargers at home, although Level 2 speeds require a wallbox charger. These can cost $1,000–2,000, plus installation.

If you have solar power, it makes sense to plug in your car on sunny days. Over the past 15 years, the value of home solar power exports has fallen 99% as the market hits saturation point. It’s now much more useful to just use the power at home.

Alternatively, charge from the grid overnight on off-peak rates. With the right electricity plan, charging at 20c per kWh is possible.

Not everyone can access cheap charging

Making the EV transition fair will mean ensuring broad access to affordable charging. Apartment residents and regional drivers may be forced to rely on more expensive public options due to a lack of access to dedicated chargers or the need for strata approval.

Community chargers, standardised pricing and smart grid incentives can help here. New South Wales is now offering grants to help apartment residents get EV-ready.

Public charging is fast and convenient – but watch the fees

Public charging stations often offer Level 2 destination chargers for longer stops and Level 3 rapid chargers for quick top-ups. There’s a wide range of pricing models and fees.

Australia’s major public charging networks include Chargefox, Evie, BP Pulse and Tesla Superchargers.

These networks may charge by kilowatt-hour or by time. Many apply idle or congestion fees to encourage drivers not to leave their cars plugged in after charging – especially at busy highway sites.

Level 3 fast chargers are great for topping up quickly, but speed usually means they cost more.

Apps such as PlugShare and NextCharge offer useful ways to find available chargers in real time and check the price.

It’s smart to limit charging to between 20% and 80% of your battery capacity. Charging slows down substantially when almost full, meaning more time and cost for relatively little gain.

Charging on the cheap

It’s hard to give definitive answers on the cheapest way to charge your EV, as costs can vary by charger type, location, electricity tariff, EV efficiency and driving habits. But it is possible to offer general estimates.

Timing, planning and avoiding unnecessary fees will help too, such as:

• charging overnight at home using off-peak or time-of-use electricity tariffs. If you have solar, charge up while solar generation is highest

• consider installing a smart charger so you can schedule and automate charging via an app

• plan your longer trips carefully to avoid expensive or busy chargers.

Cheaper than petrol – and cheaper still with planning

Overall, EVs are more affordable to drive than petrol cars. But you can make the most of the technology by charging smartly.

Charging at home on solar or off-peak electricity offers the best value by far. Public charging adds flexibility but comes at a cost, especially at ultra-fast motorway sites. With a little planning, most drivers can avoid expensive options most of the time.

Making the EV transition fair will mean expanding access to affordable, reliable charging for everyone – not just those with off-street parking or rooftop solar.

Hussein Dia, Professor of Transport Technology and Sustainability, Swinburne University of Technology

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

A new road charge is looming for electric vehicle drivers, amid reports Treasurer Jim Chalmers is accelerating the policy as part of a broader tax-reform push.

At a forum in Sydney this week, state and federal Treasury officials are reportedly meeting with industry figures and others to progress design of the policy, ahead of next week’s economic reform summit.

Much discussion in favour of the charge assumes drivers of electric and hybrid vehicles don’t “pay their way”, because they are not subject to the fuel excise tax.

This view is based on an economic misconception: that fuel taxes are justified by the need to pay for the construction and maintenance of roads.

This is incorrect. In a properly functioning economic system, fuel taxes should be considered a charge on motorists for the harmful pollution their vehicles generate.

That leaves the problem of paying for roads. To that end, a road-user charge should be applied to all motorists – regardless of the vehicle they drive – so no-one gets a free ride.

What is the fuel excise?

The fuel excise in Australia is currently about 51 cents a litre and is rolled into the cost of fuel at the bowser.

Some, such as the Australian Automobile Association claim revenue from the excise pays for roads. But it actually goes into the federal government’s general revenue.

The primary economic function of the fuel tax is that of a charge on motorists for the harmful pollution their vehicles generate.

Paying the cost of pollution

Vehicles with internal combustion engines – that is, those that run on petrol or diesel – create several types of pollution.

The first is carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to human-caused climate change. Others include local air pollution from particulates and exhaust pollution as well as noise pollution.

In economic terms, these effects are known as “negative externalities”. They arise when one party makes another party worse off, but doesn’t pay the costs of doing so.

How big are the costs to society imposed by polluting vehicles? Estimates vary widely. But they are almost certainly as large as, or larger than, the revenue generated from fuel excise.

Let’s tease that out.

A litre of petrol weighs about 0.74 kg. But when burned, it generates 2.3 kg of CO₂. That’s because when the fuel is combusted, the carbon combines with heavier oxygen atoms.

Before the re-election of United States President Donald Trump, the nation’s Environmental Protection Agency estimated the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions at about US$190 (A$292) per metric tonne.

So in Australian terms, that means CO₂ emissions from burning petrol costs about 67 cents a litre, more than the current excise of 51 cents per litre.

Even using a more conservative estimate of US$80 a metric tonne, CO₂ emissions generate costs of around 28 cents a litre, more than half the fuel excise.

A spotlight on health impacts

Motor vehicles are a major cause of air pollution. Air pollution is causally linked to six diseases:

• coronary heart disease
• chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
• stroke
• type 2 diabetes
• lung cancer
• lower respiratory infections.

Estimates of the deaths associated with air pollution in Australia range from 3,200 to more than 4,200 a year.

Even the lower end of that range is far more than the roughly 1,200 lives lost in car crashes annually.

University of Melbourne analysis in 2023 landed at an even higher figure. It suggested vehicle emissions alone may be responsible for more than 11,000 premature deaths in adults in Australia a year.

Putting a dollar value on life and health is difficult – but necessary for good policy making.

The usual approach is to examine the “statistical” reduction in deaths for a given policy measure. For example, a policy measure that eliminates a hazard faced by 1,000 people, reducing death risk by 1 percentage point, would save ten statistical lives.

The Australian government ascribes a value of $5.7 million per (statistical) life lost or saved. So, hypothetically, a saving of 2,000 lives a year would yield a benefit of more than $10 billion.

This is more than half the revenue collected in fuel excise each year.

The best road forward

Given the harms caused by traditional vehicles, society should welcome the decline in fuel excise revenue caused by the transition to EVs – in the same way we should welcome declining revenue from cigarette taxes.

If we assume fuel excise pays for pollution costs, then who is paying for roads?

The cost of roads goes far beyond construction and maintenance. The capital and land allocated to roads represents a huge investment, on which the public, as a whole, receives zero return.

Vehicle registration fees make only a modest contribution to road costs. That’s why all motorists should pay a road-user charge. Such a system will soon be introduced in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The payment should be based on a combination of vehicle mass and distance travelled. That’s because damage to roads is overwhelmingly caused by heavy vehicles.

Then comes the question of Australia’s emissions reduction. The switch to electric vehicles in Australia is going much too slowly. A road user charge targeting only electric and hybrid vehicles would be a grave mistake, slowing the uptake further.

John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

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

Rogue waves have captivated the attention of both seafarers and scientists for decades. These are giant, isolated waves that appear suddenly in the open ocean.

These puzzling giants are brief, typically lasting less than a minute before disappearing. They can reach heights of 65 feet (20 meters) or greater and often more than twice the height of surrounding waves. Once a nautical myth, rogue waves have now been observed around the world. Because they’re so tall and powerful, they can pose a danger to ships and offshore structures.

To rethink what rogue waves are and what causes them, I gathered an international team of researchers. Our study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, sheds light on these oceanic giants using the most comprehensive dataset of its kind.

By analyzing 18 years of high-frequency laser measurements from the Ekofisk oil platform in the central North Sea, we reached the surprising conclusion that rogue waves aren’t just freak occurrences. They arise under the natural laws of the sea. They are not mysterious, but somewhat simple.

27,500 sea states

We analyzed nearly 27,500 half-hour wave records, or sea states, collected between 2003 and 2020 in the central North Sea. These records, taken every 30 minutes, describe how elevated the sea surface was compared to the average sea level. They include major storms, such as the Andrea wave event in 2007.

Under normal conditions, waves arise from wind blowing over the sea surface. It’s like when you blow over your cup of coffee and form small ripples on the surface. At sea, with enough time and space, those ripples can turn into large waves.

We focused on understanding what causes waves to suddenly go rogue and rise far above their neighboring waves. One proposed theory is based on modulational instability, a phenomenon described by complex mathematical models. I’ve revised these models in the past, as my work suggests that this theory doesn’t fully explain what causes rogue waves in the open ocean.

When waves are trapped within a narrow channel, the modulational instability theory describes their rippling movement well. However, it starts to fall apart when you look at the real ocean. In open environments such as the North Sea, waves are free to propagate from multiple directions.

To understand the difference, imagine a crowd of spectators leaving a stadium after a football game. If the exit is a long, narrow hallway with tall walls, people are forced to move in a single direction. Those at the back push forward, and some may even climb over others, piling up between the confining walls. This catastrophic pileup would resemble a rogue wave, caused by their confinement.

In contrast, if the stadium’s exit opens onto a wide field, spectators can disperse freely in all directions. They don’t push on each other, and they avoid pileups.

Similarly, researchers can generate rogue waves in a confined channel in the lab, where they obey modulational instability. But without the confinement of a channel, rogue waves usually won’t follow those physics or form the same way in the open sea.

Our team knew we had to study the open sea directly to figure out what was really going on. The real-world data my team examined from the North Sea doesn’t line up with modulational instability – it tells a different story.

It’s just a bad day at sea

We analyzed the sea state records using statistical techniques to uncover patterns behind these rare events. Our findings show that instead of modulational instability, the extreme waves observed more likely formed through a process called constructive interference.

Constructive interference happens when two or more waves line up and combine into one big wave. This effect is amplified by the natural asymmetry of sea waves – their crests are typically sharper and steeper than their flatter troughs.

Rogue waves form when lots of smaller waves line up and their steeper crests begin to stack, building up into a single, massive wave that briefly rises far above its surroundings. All it takes for a peaceful boat ride to turn into a bad day at sea is a moment when many ordinary waves converge and stack.

These rogue waves rise and fall in less than a minute, following what’s called a quasi-deterministic pattern in space and time. This type of pattern is recognizable and repeatable, but with touches of randomness. In an idealized ocean, that randomness would almost vanish, allowing rogue waves to grow to nearly infinite heights. But it would also take an eternity to witness one of these waves, since so many would have to line up perfectly. Like waiting for Fortuna, the goddess of chance, to roll a trillion dice and have nearly all of them land on the same number.

In the real ocean, nature limits how large a rogue wave can grow thanks to wave breaking. As the wave rises in height and energy, it can’t hold itself beyond a certain point of no return. The tip of the wave spills over and breaks into foam, or whitecap, releasing the excess energy.

The quasi-deterministic pattern behind rogue waves

Rogue waves aren’t limited to the sea. Constructive interference can happen to many types of waves. A general theory called the quasi-determinism of waves, developed by oceanographer Paolo Boccotti, explains how rogue waves form, both in the ocean and in other wave systems.

For example, for turbulent water flowing through a confined channel, a rogue wave manifests in the form of an intense, short-lived spike in vortices – patterns of spinning swirls in the water that momentarily grow larger as they move downstream.

While ocean waves seem unpredictable, Boccotti’s theory shows that extreme waves are not completely random. When a really big wave forms, the waves in the sea around it follow a recognizable pattern formed through constructive interference.

We applied Boccotti’s theory to identify and characterize these patterns in the measured North Sea wave records.

The giant waves observed in these records carry a kind of signature or fingerprint, in the form of a wave group, which can reveal how the rogue wave came to life. Think of a wave group like a small package of waves moving together. They rise, peak and then fade away through constructive interference. Tracking these wave groups allows researchers to understand the bigger picture of a rogue event as it unfolds.

As one example, a powerful storm hit the North Sea on Nov. 24, 2023. A camera at the Ekofisk platform captured a massive 55 foot (17 meter) rogue wave. I applied the theory of quasi-determinism and an AI model to investigate the origin of this extreme wave. My analysis revealed that the rogue event followed these theories – quasi-determinism and constructive interference – and came from multiple smaller waves repeatedly stacking together.

Recognizing how rogue waves form can help engineers and designers build safer ships and offshore platforms – and better predict risks.

Francesco Fedele, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

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

Soaking mid-winter rains have brought some relief to drought-stricken farms and rural towns across southern Australia, but the crisis is not over yet.

And there’s more to this challenging episode than you might think. As climate scientists, we see more than a single drought. Rather, it’s a trilogy of droughts.

Across southern Australia over the past six months, three interconnected phases have unfolded in rapid succession: flash drought, green drought and fodder drought.

Each phase brings its own challenges. Together, they reveal the complex and cascading nature of climate stress in southern Australia.

Flash drought: the sudden onset

To state the obvious, drought in Australia happens when there’s a severe lack of rain.

Unlike traditional droughts that develop over months, flash droughts intensify within weeks. They can come out of nowhere and hit hard.

In early 2025, flash droughts struck Australia in waves:

• January in parts of South Australia

• February along the SA-Victoria border and western Tasmania

• March in the Otway Ranges in southern Victoria

• April in northern Tasmania and southern Mallee in Victoria

• May in central Victoria and southern New South Wales.

The May event was the most intense — short-lived but severe — catching many people by surprise.

Flash droughts are marked by a rapid increase in the “thirstiness” of the atmosphere, as measured by the “Evaporative Stress Index”. When the index drops quickly, farmers often have little time to respond — whether through destocking, securing feed or adjusting plans for sowing crops.

Within four to eight weeks of flash drought onset, the health of pasture in open grasslands declines.

Pasture recovery is slow, often taking more than 12 weeks depending on the amount of sunlight, temperature and soil moisture. The impact on growth can linger for months. This delayed response sets the stage for the next phase: green drought.

Green drought: a deceptive recovery

Many southern regions received winter rain, but not enough to break the drought.

Fields turned green, but these plants lacked the nutritional value needed to support livestock. This phenomenon – known as “green drought” – gives the appearance of drought recovery, but the deeper soils remain stubbornly dry and plants stressed.

Satellite data tracking the greenness of vegetation shows that even after soil moisture briefly improved in June, plant health continued to decline. This is due to ongoing dry soils and high evaporation rates (think thirsty atmosphere), which limit plant growth.

Green droughts are particularly challenging because they mask the true extent of agricultural stress. People see green fields but farmers continue to face shortages of feed for livestock, leading to the next phase: fodder drought.

Fodder drought: the hidden crisis

Fodder drought is the third phase of the drought trilogy — a less visible but deeply distressing condition. It’s about whether there’s sufficient feed to keep livestock alive.

Pasture growth across southern Australia has remained well below average since late January, even though this period typically coincides with the off-peak season. With the late autumn break and soils remaining dry, the winter growing season is faring poorly.

Fodder droughts often go unnoticed by city people, but they have serious implications for rural communities. Farmers become increasingly reliant on imported feed, driving up costs and straining supply chains.

What lies ahead?

As we approach the end of winter, the outlook for rainfall in the drought-stricken communities of SA and Victoria’s Mallee is looking more promising.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s long-range forecast for spring shows a high chance of unusually wetter conditions for much of the southeast. In turn, soil moisture is likely to improve in these regions.

The changing climate

This trilogy of droughts — flash, green and fodder — highlights the complexity of climate extremes. These events are occurring against the backdrop of declining cool season rainfall, which is projected to continue.

It’s not just about rainfall totals; it’s about timing, temperature, soil health and vegetation response. Understanding how these drought types evolve and interact is crucial for building resilience in agriculture.

There’s still much to learn. What triggers the transition from one phase of drought to the next? How long do the impacts last? And what strategies can help farmers adapt?

The current drought emerged as a prolonged dry spell coincided with unusually high temperatures. This placed immense pressure on farms.

A call to action

The trilogy of droughts in 2025 is a wake-up call. As climate variability increases, so does the need for better forecasting, adaptive farming strategies, and policy support. Agricultural drought definitions may need to be updated to reflect the new realities of drought.

Farmers are on the frontline of climate change, so the experiences of those in southern Australia this year offer valuable insights into how communities can prepare for future extremes. By investing in research, improving early warning systems, and supporting rural communities, we can build a more resilient agricultural sector — one that’s ready for whatever the climate throws at us next.

This article includes scientific contributions from Hanh Nguyen and Jessica Bhardwaj from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Tim Cowan, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Applied Climate Sciences, University of Southern Queensland and Thong Nguyen-Huy, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Applied Climate Sciences, University of Southern Queensland

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

Pollinators play a vital role in fertilising flowers, which grow into seeds and fruits and underpin our agriculture. But climate change can cause a mismatch between plants and their pollinators, affecting where they live and what time of year they’re active. This has happened before.

When Earth went through rapid global warming 56 million years ago, plants from dry tropical areas expanded to new areas – and so did their animal pollinators. Our new study, published in Paleobiology today, shows this major change happened in a remarkably short timespan of just thousands of years.

Can we turn to the past to learn more about how interactions between plants and pollinators changed during climate change? That’s what we set out to learn.

A major warming event 56 million years ago

In the last 150 years, humans have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by more than 40%. This increase in carbon dioxide has already warmed the planet by more than 1.3°C.

Current greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperature are not only unprecedented in human history but exceed anything known in the last 2.5 million years.

To understand how giant carbon emission events like ours could affect climate and life on Earth, we’ve had to go deeper into our planet’s history.

Fifty-six million years ago there was a major, sudden warming event caused by the release of a gigantic amount of carbon into the atmosphere and ocean. This event is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

For about 5,000 years, huge amounts of carbon entered the atmosphere, likely from a combination of volcanic activity and methane release from ocean sediments. This caused Earth’s global temperature to rise by about 6°C and it stayed elevated for more than 100,000 years.

Although the initial carbon release and climate change were perhaps ten times slower than what’s happening today, they had enormous effects on Earth.

Earlier studies have shown plants and animals changed a lot during this time, especially through major shifts in where they lived. We wanted to know if pollination might also have changed during this rapid climate change.

Hunting for pollen fossils in the badlands

We looked at fossil pollen from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming – a deep and wide valley in the northern Rocky Mountains in the United States, full of sedimentary rocks deposited 50 to 60 million years ago.

The widespread badlands of the modern Bighorn Basin expose remarkably fossil-rich sediments. These were laid down by ancient rivers eroding the surrounding mountains.

We studied fossil pollen because we wanted to understand changes in pollination. Pollen is invaluable for this because it is abundant, widely dispersed in air and water, and resistant to decay – easily preserved in ancient rocks.

We used three lines of evidence to investigate pollination in the fossil record:

• fossil pollen preserved in clumps
• how living plants related to the fossils are pollinated today, and
• the total variety of pollen shapes.

What did we discover?

Our findings show pollination by animals became more common during this interval of elevated temperature and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, pollination by wind decreased.

The wind-pollinated plants included many related to deciduous broad-leaved trees still common in moist northern hemisphere temperate regions today.

By contrast, the plants pollinated by animals were related to subtropical palms, silk-cotton trees and other plants that typically grow in dry tropical climates.

The decline in wind pollination was likely due to the local extinction of populations of wind-pollinated plants that grew in the Bighorn Basin.

The increase in animal-pollinated plants means that plants from regions with warmer, drier climates had spread poleward and moved into the Bighorn Basin.

Earlier studies have shown these changes in the plants of the Bighorn Basin were related to the climate being hotter and more seasonally dry than before – or after – this interval of rapid climate change.

Pollinating insects and other animals likely moved 56 million years ago along with the plants they pollinated. Their presence in the landscape helped new plant communities establish in the hot, dry climate. It may have provided invaluable resources to animals such as the earliest primates, small marsupials, and other small mammals.

A lesson for our future

What lessons does this ancient climate change event have to offer when we think about our own future?

The large carbon release at the beginning of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum clearly resulted in major global warming. It dramatically altered ecosystems on land and in the sea.

In spite of these dramatic changes, most land species and ecological interactions seem to have survived. This is likely because the event occurred at about one-tenth the rate of current anthropogenic climate change.

The forests that returned to the region after more than 100,000 years of hot, dry climate were very similar to those that existed before. This suggests that in the absence of major extinction, forest ecosystems and their pollinators could reestablish into very similar communities even after a very long period of altered climate.

The key for the future may be keeping rates of environmental change slow enough to avoid extinctions.

Vera Korasidis, Lecturer in Environmental Geoscience, The University of Melbourne and Scott L. Wing, Curator of Fossil Plants, Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Institution

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

Many electric vehicles (EVs) now come with range estimates of 400–500 kilometres, while some premium models claim ranges of more than 600km.

Drivers new to EVs may look at the range figures given by the manufacturer and think that’s how far their new car will go on a single battery charge.

But this isn’t quite accurate. In reality, an EV’s actual range is usually less. Recent real-world testing of five popular EV models by the Australian Automobile Association showed the real range was an average of 11.6% less than the official figures. There was wide variation: BYD’s Atto 3 had 23% less range, while the Smart #3 had just 5% less.

This is because official figures come from a standardised laboratory test done in idealised conditions different to the way people actually drive.

The problem is not confined to EVs. When the same testing was done on popular petrol cars, some were found to use up to 35% more fuel than official figures claim.

Real-world testing is an important public service. Drivers looking for a new EV could knock off 10–20% from official ranges as a rule of thumb. But it’s worth looking for testing of the exact model to see what the true difference is.

How are official range figures produced?

To produce official range estimates, new EVs are run through a standardised test.

This test, the Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure, is used to estimate the distance an EV can drive on a full battery as well as a combustion engine car’s fuel consumption.

Vehicles are tested on a dynamometer – a treadmill for cars – in a controlled laboratory environment on a 30-minute driving cycle. During the cycle, the cars are driven at four levels of intensity: low (up to 60km per hour), medium (up to 80km/h), high (up to 100km/h) and extra high (above 130km/h), with a set sequence of accelerations, steady speeds and decelerations.

Testing is done at an ambient temperature of 23°C, with no passengers, accessories, or use of heating or air conditioning. The EV is driven by computer through repeats of the 30‑minute cycle until the battery is fully depleted. The total distance covered becomes the official range used by the manufacturer.

This testing regime is very useful, as it offers a single consistent way to compare cars worldwide. But the test doesn’t take conditions such as congestion, driving style and weather variations into account.

That means drivers should take the official range figures as a benchmark, not a guarantee.

How EVs perform in real-world driving

Testing the realistic range of EVs requires real-world testing. To get these figures, testers drove the EVs on a 93km circuit in and around Geelong, including a mix of urban, rural and highway driving conditions.

Their findings are similar to international results. European testing suggests everyday use cuts between 10% and 30% off the official range. If an EV is driven hard during winter, the range can drop as much as 40%.

Under Australian conditions, drivers can reasonably expect the real range to be 10–20% less.

What real world conditions affect range?

Real-world ranges can be less for several reasons, such as driving style, weather and extra weight.

Driving style is important. High speeds increase wind resistance and energy use. Driving in hilly terrain uses more energy, though some of this is returned to the battery through regenerative braking, where EVs convert the kinetic energy of braking back into electricity.

Temperature and weather can also have an impact. Very cold conditions can temporarily reduce range, while very hot conditions force the car to use some power to keep battery packs cool. Using air conditioning and heating can also reduce range, particularly in extreme temperatures.

Adding weight (passengers, cargo) can reduce range, as can roof racks or roof boxes.

Trip planning is key

The average Australian commute is around 35km per day – well within the capabilities of even the shortest-range EVs.

But range becomes important when doing longer trips.

Most EVs display real-time consumption and estimated remaining range, which adjusts as you drive. This makes it easier to plan ahead, especially on longer trips.

Some EV owners use route planning tools such as A Better Route. These tools estimate how much energy you’ll use on a given journey, taking into account elevation, speed and temperature.

Setting EVs to eco-driving mode and reducing the use of energy hungry air-conditioning will help get more range. Keeping tyres properly inflated and avoiding unnecessary weight or roof racks where possible will also help.

Cooling or heating your EV before departure — known as preconditioning — can be done while plugged in or running off the battery. Doing it while plugged in is preferable, as it uses grid power rather than draining the battery, helping preserve range.

Petrol and diesel cars use more fuel in the real world

There’s nothing new about the gap between lab-testing and real-world performance.

Combustion engine cars are sold with official figures for their fuel consumption. But they can use significantly more fuel in the real world.

Real-world tests in Europe found fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions from diesel and petrol vehicles were around 20% higher than under lab testing.

Range doesn’t have to be a guessing game

While countries such as Norway and China have streaked ahead in taking up EVs, Australia is still at the early stages. Clear, independent information is essential to help people make informed choices and encourage EV uptake.

Real-world testing helps bridge the gap between marketing promises and the reality on the road, giving drivers the confidence to plan their trips.

Lower real world ranges aren’t a deal breaker. Savvy drivers can use this data together with trip planning and an understanding of conditions to travel with confidence.

Hussein Dia, Professor of Transport Technology and Sustainability, Swinburne University of Technology

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

The latest round of negotiations for a UN global plastics treaty has ended without a deal. After more than three years of talks, deep divisions remain. Agreement is only marginally closer than before talks began. For many countries, campaigners and observer organisations, the outcome is deeply disappointing.

After the final intense meetings which went through the night in Geneva, the chair of the intergovernmental negotiating committee that governs the treaty discussions formally closed the session on August 15 without agreement on the treaty text. This is not the end. The process has not collapsed.

However, there is no confirmed date or venue for the next round of negotiations and no mandate for formal intersessional activities. Many delegates called for a period of reflection and even a reset of the process to allow for a refreshed approach.

As in previous negotiation rounds, progress was slow. Talks were hampered by procedural ambiguity, deliberate delay tactics from fossil fuel and petrochemical countries opposing an ambitious treaty, and the sheer complexity of the issues on the table. Time ran out before a consensus could be reached.

As the talks wrap up, we reflect on three aspects that contributed to this ongoing deadlock:

1. Chair’s efforts fell short

Ambassador Luis Vayas Valdivieso took a more active role than in earlier sessions, pushing the pace and producing two draft treaty texts to focus debate. The first draft omitted key provisions, including limits on plastic production, global rules for regulating plastic products, controls on harmful chemicals and strong financing arrangements.

Many high-ambition countries pushing for strong measures and outcomes, rejected the first draft as imbalanced, unambitious and unfit for further discussion. A second draft, issued just before 1am on the final night after intense consultations, included some improvements but still left out these core elements. Many nations again saw it as one-sided, tilted towards the demands of lower-ambition countries and petrostates.

2. Entrenched positions remain

Throughout the negotiations, lower-ambition states gave little ground. They refused to compromise on their “red lines” while expecting others to give up on theirs.

This repeated familiar arguments over the purpose and scope of the treaty, despite these having been outlined in the UN mandate to deliver the treaty three years ago. Many believe a different approach is needed that focuses more time on points of disagreement, rigorously tests opposing arguments, and actively seeks areas of compromise.

3. Reluctance to vote

The process still relies on consensus for decision-making. In the final plenary, many delegates, particularly those with economic interests in plastics, stressed that consensus is essential. Yet over the past three years, some delegations have urged the chair to break deadlocks by moving to a vote – a rule of UN negotiations that must be applied when consensus cannot be reached.

Voting is seen as politically explosive, with serious implications for multilateralism. So far, the chair has resisted calling a vote, and higher-ambition countries have not pressed for it either, despite their repeated statements about urgency and ambition. Beyond rejecting treaty texts they considered weak, many did not use the tools available to them to push for a stronger outcome. As a result, stalemates have persisted.

The road ahead

The intersessional period – the time between now and the next formal meeting – is critical. Without a fixed date for the next stage of the process, this is the time to reset and prepare for decisive progress. One key focus must be to bridge political divides. High-ambition countries need to build broader alliances and find shared ground with those who may not fully back their vision but are open to stronger action.

Key details such as financing mechanisms, monitoring and reporting systems, and legal models for compliance should be developed now, outside formal negotiations, to save time later. And higher-ambition nations such as those in the EU, Panama, Colombia, Australia, the UK and small island states should coordinate more closely and be willing to use procedural tools such as voting when needed, even if politically uncomfortable.

The goal set by the UN in 2022 to end plastic pollution across its full life cycle is still achievable. But it will require governments to use the coming months to regroup, have frank political discussions and commit to a more decisive approach when they next meet.

The world cannot afford another round lost to procedural deadlock. The plastics crisis is worsening. The science is clear. The solutions are well known. What is missing is not knowledge, but the will to match words with binding action.

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Steve Fletcher, Professor of Ocean Policy and Economy, University of Portsmouth and Antaya March, Director - Global Plastics Policy Centre, University of Portsmouth

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

With conventional waste management systems falling short, many scientists are turning to nature for innovative solutions to the issue of plastic waste. One promising avenue is microbial degradation: harnessing the natural abilities of certain bacteria and fungi to break down plastics in ways that current technologies cannot.

These microbes produce specialised enzymes (proteins that carry out chemical reactions) capable of breaking the long, carbon-rich chains of molecules that form the backbones of many plastic polymers. They effectively use plastic as a food source.

Historically, scientists looking for plastic-degrading microbes have focused on plastic-polluted environments such as landfills and contaminated soils. These are logical starting points, as prolonged exposure to synthetic polymers may encourage the growth of organisms that are capable of using these materials as a food source. This trend has also been observed with other environmental pollutants including oil and pesticides.

This approach has led to the discovery of several promising candidate microbes that can degrade plastic. Among the most famous examples is Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium identified near a plastic bottle recycling facility in Japan.

It can completely degrade polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic most commonly used in bottles and food packaging. It breaks PET into its (environmentally benign) building blocks. These can then be used as food by I. sakaiensis and other organisms.

But plastic-degrading microbes haven’t evolved this capability in response to plastic pollution. Instead, scientists are discovering and repurposing metabolic functions that already exist in nature. The potential for microbes to break down plastic long predates the invention of plastics themselves.

Many microbes already have the ability to decompose natural polymers such as cellulose (plant fibres), chitin (found in fungi and insects) and cutin (found on the surfaces of leaves). These naturally occurring materials share structural and chemical similarities with synthetic plastics. This overlap allows microbes to repurpose existing enzymes to tackle synthetic substances.

My team’s recent research, published in the journal Polymer Degradation and Stability, supports this idea. From unpolluted environments rich in natural polymers (a peat bog and domestic compost), we identified two bacterial strains, Gordonia and Arthrobacter, that degraded polypropylene and polystyrene by nearly 23% and 19.5%, respectively, in just 28 days. Crucially, this occurred without any pretreatment, which is often required to make plastics more susceptible to microbial attack.

While these numbers may seem modest, they are among the highest biodegradation rates ever recorded for these plastics. This suggests that we don’t have to stick to polluted sites. It’s possible that we could find microbes with excellent plastic-degrading potential anywhere.

This aligns with another fascinating study showing that waxworms (Galleria mellonella) can eat plastic bags, thanks to specific gut microbes. Waxworms do not naturally consume plastic, they are common pests in beehives where they feed on honeycomb. But, structurally, honeycomb is similar to polyethylene, the main component of plastic bags.

Drowning in plastic?

These advances are exciting because they show how nature can offer us tools to deal with the plastic problem we’ve created.

Plastic is one of the most pervasive materials on Earth. Lightweight, durable, cheap to produce and infinitely versatile, it permeates nearly every aspect of modern life. In critical applications such as medical devices and equipment, its presence is not just convenient but essential. Lives often depend on it.

But in the wrong context, the qualities that make plastics so useful and durable become their greatest flaw. Most plastics do not readily biodegrade, instead accumulating in natural environments, gradually fragmenting into microplastics that can persist for centuries. This poses a long-term threat to nature and human health.

Global plastic production now exceeds 460 million tonnes annually. Up to half of this is estimated to be single-use items, often used for only a few moments before being discarded.

While diligent users of recycling facilities might assume that most of our plastic is indeed recycled, the reality is sobering: the global recycling rate for plastics is only 9%.

Around half ends up in landfills, while around one-fifth is incinerated, and another fifth is mismanaged so it’s not recycled, incinerated or securely contained. That means it can end up in rivers, lakes and oceans. The result: a planet drowning in synthetic waste.

As plastic production and disposal continue to outpace our ability to manage it, the need for innovative, sustainable solutions is urgent. Recognising this, the UN’s ongoing negotiations for a global plastics treaty aims to build a more circular economy for plastics and end plastic pollution by 2040.

While challenges remain in enhancing the biodegradation capabilities of microorganisms to make them a viable solution for large-scale waste management and environmental remediation, progress is steadily being made.

Advances in microbial engineering, enzyme discovery and environmental microbiology are paving the way towards more efficient and scalable plastic biodegradation systems. With continued research and investment, what was once a distant possibility is now a realistic and promising component of a broader strategy to combat plastic pollution.

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Julianne Megaw, Lecturer in Microbiology, Queen's University Belfast

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

It’s summer, and it’s been hot, even in northern cities such as Boston. But not everyone is hit with the heat in the same way, even within the same neighborhood.

Take two streets in Boston at 4:30 p.m. on a recent day, as an example. Standing in the sun on Lewis Place, the temperature was 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34.6 degrees Celsius). On Dudley Common, it was 103 F (39.2 C). Both streets were hot, but the temperature on one was much more dangerous for people’s health and well-being.

The kicker is that those two streets are only a few blocks apart. The difference epitomizes the urban heat island effect, created as pavement and buildings absorb and trap heat, making some parts of the city hotter.

A closer look at the two streets shows some key differences:

• Dudley Common is public open space sandwiched between two thoroughfares that create a wide expanse of pavement lined with storefronts. There aren’t many trees to be found.

• Lewis Place is a residential cul-de-sac with two-story homes accompanied by lots of trees.

This comparison of two places within a few minutes’ walk of each other puts the urban heat island effect under a microscope. It also shows the limits of today’s strategies for managing and responding to heat and its effects on public health, which are generally attuned to neighborhood or citywide conditions.

Even within the same neighborhood, some places are much hotter than others owing to their design and infrastructure. You could think of these as urban heat islets in the broader landscape of a community.

Sensing urban heat islets

Emerging technologies are making it easier to find urban heat islets, opening the door to new strategies for improving health in our communities.

While the idea of reducing heat across an entire city or neighborhood is daunting, targeting specific blocks that need assistance the most can be faster and a much more efficient use of resources.

Doing that starts with making urban heat islets visible.

In Boston, I’m part of a team that has installed more than three dozen sensors across the Roxbury neighborhood to measure temperature every minute for a better picture of the community’s heat risks, and we’re in the process of installing 25 more. The Common SENSES project is a collaboration of community-based organizations, including the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and Project Right Inc.; university researchers like me who are affiliated with Northeastern University’s Boston Area Research Initiative; and Boston city officials. It was created to pursue data-driven, community-led solutions for improving the local environment.

Data from those sensors generate a real-time map of the conditions in the neighborhood, from urban heat islets like Dudley Common to cooler urban oases, such as Lewis Place.

These technologies are becoming increasingly affordable and are being deployed in communities around the world to pinpoint heat risks, including Miami, Baltimore, Singapore and Barcelona. There are also alternatives when long-term installations prove too expensive, such as the U.S.’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration volunteer science campaign, which has used mobile sensors to generate one-time heat maps for more than 50 cities.

Making cooler communities, block by block

Although detailed knowledge of urban heat islets is becoming more available, we have barely scratched the surface of how they can be used to enhance people’s health and well-being.

The sources of urban heat islets are rooted in development – more buildings, more pavement and fewer trees result in hotter spaces. Many projects using community-based sensors aspire to use the data to counteract these effects by identifying places where it would be most helpful to plant trees for shade or install cool roofs or cool pavement that reflect the heat.

However, these current efforts do not fully capitalize on the precision of sensors. For example, Los Angeles’ massive investment in cool pavement has focused on the city broadly rather than overheated neighborhoods. New York City’s tree planting efforts in some areas failed to anticipate where trees could be successfully planted.

Most other efforts compare neighborhood to neighborhood, as if every street within a neighborhood experiences the same temperature. London, for example, uses satellite data to locate heat islands, but the resolution isn’t precise enough to see differences block by block.

In contrast, data pinpointing the highest-risk areas enables urban planners to strategically place small pocket parks, cool roofs and street trees to help cool the hottest spaces. Cities could incentivize or require developers to incorporate greenery into their plans to mitigate existing urban heat islets or prevent new ones. These targeted interventions are cost-effective and have the greatest potential to help the most people.

But this could go further by using the data to create more sophisticated alert systems. For example, the National Weather Service’s Boston office released a heat advisory for July 25, the day I measured the heat in Dudley Common and Lewis Place, but the advisory showed nearly the entirety of the state of Massachusetts at the same warning level.

What if warnings were more locally precise?

On certain days, some streets cross a crucial threshold – say, 90 F (32.2 C) – whereas others do not. Sensor data capturing these hyperlocal variations could be communicated directly to residents or through local organizations. Advisories could share maps of the hottest streets or suggest cool paths through neighborhoods.

There is increasing evidence of urban heat islets in many urban communities and even suburban ones. With data showing these hyperlocal risks, policymakers and project coordinators can collaborate with communities to help address areas that many community members know from experience tend to be much hotter than surrounding areas in summer.

As one of my colleagues, Nicole Flynt of Project Right Inc., likes to say, “Data + Stories = Truth.” If communities act upon both the temperature data and the stories their residents share, they can help their residents keep cool — because it’s hot out there.

Dan O'Brien, Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, Northeastern University

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

Wild salmon are not just rarer than their farmed cousins – they’re better looking too. In a new study by my colleagues and I, we found that they are noticeably more symmetrical than those reared in captivity. In other words, they’re prettier (by human standards, at least). And that’s not just cosmetic.

The global sale of aquatic species reared in captivity (known as aquaculture) is worth more than US$300 billion (£225 billion) annually. That’s a huge figure that doesn’t even include the wholesale or retail markups and revenue generated from other industries such as processing or packaging.

Of all the cultured aquatic organisms, the Atlantic salmon is the most valuable but is seeing widespread declines in the wild.

To put salmon decline into perspective, in 2024 the aquaculture industry produced somewhere in the region of 3 million metric tonnes of Atlantic salmon for consumption, which is roughly 600 million fish (assuming a harvest weight of 5kg per fish). Yet, there are fewer than two million wild Atlantic salmon returning to rivers every year.

This has led to the Atlantic salmon being classified as endangered in Britain by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Some countries have turned to hatcheries as a way to boost wild numbers, releasing captive-bred fish into rivers to try to strengthen struggling populations.

But rearing fish in artificial hatchery environments changes elements of their biology, making them less likely to survive in the wild. Not only this, but when they are released into the wild, their genetics can pollute local gene pools.

So, while hatcheries seem to offer a solution to declining wild salmon populations, decades of research has shown that they largely have a negative effect on the populations they are trying to save. Despite these problems, hatcheries can sometimes be the only thing standing between a population and extinction.

We carried out our study on the Saimaa salmon in Finland, a critically endangered, landlocked population that’s been around since the last ice age. Once common in the wild, the Saimaa salmon would now go extinct in the wild if it were not for hatchery production sustaining the population. This is because the construction of hydropower stations and deforestation destroyed their natural spawning habitats in the 20th century.

In humans, facial symmetry is often associated with beauty. It’s no coincidence that stars like Zendaya and Harry Styles, whose features exhibit remarkable symmetry, are held up as icons of attractiveness.

In fish, symmetry is associated with low environmental stress. So, it can be a valuable tool for understanding how effective hatcheries are in producing more natural fish.

To understand how hatchery conditions shape fish development, we photographed Saimaa salmon from both sides and compared their features. Some fish had spent a year in tanks, others just a few days before being released into a river. We then measured their symmetry as an indicator of stress.

What we found was striking. Even fish reared in captivity for just one year showed clear signs of asymmetry. And efforts to enrich their lives, such as by adding shelters and fluctuating water flows, did not prevent asymmetry.

The only technique that prevented asymmetry was releasing the fish into a natural river after they had just hatched, minimising their exposure to the hatchery environment.

Fish released into the wild after hatching also had larger pectoral fins and lower jaws, relative to body size, when compared to those reared in captive environments. These traits may be beneficial in the wild where there are more complex river flows and diets. They were reduced in those fish who had spent most of their life in the hatchery.

Letting nature lead

Our research suggests that the hatchery environment – no matter how carefully managed – is no substitute for nature. While hatcheries can act as a stopgap for critically endangered populations like the Saimaa salmon, they are not a long-term fix for species in decline.

If hatcheries must be used, our study show it’s vital to get fish into natural conditions as early as possible. But ultimately, if we want wild salmon to not just survive but thrive, we have to fix the problems that caused their decline in the first place.

Humanity often tries to engineer its way out of environmental crises. But nature isn’t easily replaced. Sometimes, the best solution is to give it the space to recover on its own.

William Perry, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University

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

Each summer in the mountains above Juneau, Alaska, meltwater from the massive Mendenhall Glacier flows into mountain lakes and into the Mendenhall River, which runs through town.

Since 2011, scientists and local officials have kept a close eye on one lake in particular: Suicide Basin, an ice-dammed bowl on an arm of the glacier. Glacier ice once covered this area, but as the ice retreated in recent decades, it left behind a large, deep depression.

In the summers of 2023 and 2024, meltwater filled Suicide Basin, overflowed its rim and escaped through tunnels in the ice, sending surges of water downstream that flooded neighborhoods along the river.

On Aug. 12-13, 2025, the basin flooded again.

The surge of water from Suicide Basin reached record levels at Mendenhall Lake on Aug. 13 on its way toward Juneau, the state capital. Officials urged some neighborhoods to evacuate ahead of the surge. As the water rose, new emergency flood barriers appeared to have limited the damage.

The glacial flood risks that Juneau is now experiencing each summer are becoming a growing problem in communities around the world. As an Earth scientist and a mountain geographer, we study the impact that ice loss can have on the stability of the surrounding mountain slopes and glacial lakes, and we see several reasons for increasing concern.

The growing risk of glacial floods

In many mountain ranges, glaciers are melting as global temperatures rise. Europe’s Alps and Pyrenees lost 40% of their glacier volume from 2000 to 2023.

These and other icy regions have provided freshwater for people living downstream for centuries – almost 2 billion people rely on glaciers today. But as glaciers melt faster, they also pose potentially lethal risks.

Water from the melting ice often drains into depressions once occupied by the glacier, creating large lakes. Many of these expanding lakes are held in place by precarious ice dams or rock moraines deposited by the glacier over centuries.

Too much water behind these dams or a landslide or large ice discharge into the lake can break the dam, sending huge volumes of water and debris sweeping down the mountain valleys, wiping out everything in the way.

The Mendenhall Glacier floods, where glacial ice holds back the water, are classic jökulhlaup, or “glacier leap” floods, first described in Iceland and now characteristic of Alaska and other northern latitude regions.

Erupting ice dams and landslides

Most glacial lakes began forming over a century ago as a result of warming trends since the 1860s, but their abundance and rates of growth have risen rapidly since the 1960s.

Many people living in the Himalayas, Andes, Alps, Rocky Mountains, Iceland and Alaska have experienced glacial lake outburst floods of one type or another.

A glacial lake outburst flood in the Sikkim Himalayas in October 2023 damaged more than 30 bridges and destroyed a 200-foot-high (60 meters) hydropower plant. Residents had little warning. By the time the disaster was over, more than 50 people had died.

Avalanches, rockfalls and slope failures can also trigger glacial lake outburst floods.

These are growing more common as frozen ground known as permafrost thaws, robbing mountain landscapes of the cryospheric glue that formerly held them together. These slides can create massive waves when they plummet into a lake. The waves can then rupture the ice dam or moraine, unleashing a flood of water, sediment and debris.

That dangerous mix can rush downstream at speeds of 20-60 mph (30-100 kph), destroying homes and anything else in its path.

The casualties of such an event can be staggering. In 1941, a huge wave caused by a snow and ice avalanche that fell into Laguna Palcacocha, a glacial lake in the Peruvian Andes, overtopped the moraine dam that had contained the lake for decades. The resulting flood destroyed one-third of the downstream city of Huaraz and killed between 1,800 and 5,000 people.