This year’s whale season offered spectacular encounters with these majestic giants as thousands of whales migrated along Australia’s east coast.

But behind the scenes, Australian scientists have noticed a troubling rise in the number of whales caught and tangled in ropes, nets and fishing lines. We documented 48 separate entanglements of humpback whales in the past few months on the east coast. This follows last year’s estimate of 45 entangled whales.

We collected this information from social media posts, newspaper articles and enquiries to authorities. Unfortunately, there is no official database, although we need one. The International Whaling Commission has voluntary reports on its portal.

Consistent with the increasing population size, entanglements of humpback whales in set fishing gear have been rising steadily since the 1990s. In 2017, for example, there were about 20.

Rising entanglements are part of a concerning trend seen in the United States and elsewhere. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed 95 large whale entanglements in 2024, up 48% on the previous year.

Why do whales get tangled?

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) accounted for most of the large whale entanglements we recorded. Fishing gear such as nets and crab pots accounted for around 70% of these reported entanglements. The remainder are due to shark net programs, where gill nets and drumlines are placed along popular beaches to deter or catch sharks.

The biggest threats are posed by fishing gear with long lines or excessive rope in areas where whales feed and migrate. Whales more often get entangled in areas where fishing gear frequently changes locations. The highest numbers of entanglements were during the peak northern migration in June and peak southern migration in September.

Humpback populations are growing. But entanglements are not only due to increasing numbers of whales. Food shortages linked to faster Antarctic sea ice melt are forcing whales to feed in places where more fishing occurs.

What happens to entangled whales?

This whale season, we’ve been able to follow several individual entangled whales through reports from members of the public. In some cases, the same whale was seen over several weeks and thousands of kilometres apart.

One humpback was first spotted in Hervey Bay on July 28 with thick rope around its body. On August 2, it was seen off the Gold Coast. By September 16, it was near Kiama in New South Wales. By then, the rope had finally come off. The whale’s health had severely declined. It had lost weight and was covered in sea lice – a sign of poor condition.

It’s most dangerous for a whale to be tangled in fishing gear with floats and long ropes, as these dramatically reduce its ability to swim and dive. To survive, it’s forced to use vital energy reserves. Shorter lines without floats can still be deadly, cutting deep into tail flukes or pectoral fins and causing painful wounds and infections. As their bodies weaken, whales often lose more than half their body weight, develop infections and become covered in sea lice.

Recovery after being entangled is possible if a whale remains strong enough to complete the migration and reach its feeding grounds. But the outlook is grim for many. Researchers found North Atlantic right whales entangled for several weeks often don’t survive.

How are whales freed?

This season, Australian rescue teams freed 18 whales. Most of these involved whales caught in gill nets and drumlines used in Queensland’s shark control program. Each release represents a remarkable effort from rescue teams.

Unfortunately, removal is no guarantee of survival. The damage may already be done. Survivors can suffer long-term consequences. Female whales that survive severe entanglement often fail to reproduce the following season.

On average, only a third of entangled whales are seen again after the initial report. Less than a quarter are disentangled.

Rescuing entangled whales is a delicate operation requiring expertise, specialised equipment and good weather.

Specialised teams such as the Sea World Foundation Rescue Team on Australia’s east coast and the NSW Parks and Wildlife Service Large Whale Disentanglement Teams are trained for these complex missions.

To free the whales, experts use specialised tools such as hooked knives on long poles, “flying” knives (attached to a rope and buoy), grappling hooks and large floats that can be attached to the tangled gear to slow the whale for a safer approach. Choosing the right ropes to cut, the right cutting location and the right order is crucial.

The success of a rescue depends on many factors, from sea condition to the whale’s behaviour, to the skill and coordination of the disentanglement team.

In many countries, members of the public are not permitted to attempt to free tangled whales. But as numbers of entanglements have grown, concerned Australians have mounted several dangerous rescue attempts, including people jumping onto whales to try and cut the lines. These ad hoc rescue missions can make the situation worse for the whale. If the wrong lines are cut, it can accidentally tighten others. These attempts can be life-threatening for rescuers.

What can we do better?

We need to get better at predicting the movements of entangled whales. By analysing migration patterns and ocean conditions, researchers could develop forecast tools to predict where an entangled whale might travel next, helping rescue teams intercept it more effectively. In some cases, attaching satellite trackers to the trailing gear has provided vital real-time data on a whale’s location and movement.

Better coordination between response groups is also essential. A centralised reporting system and data sharing across states and jurisdictions would help track incidents and whales, streamline rescue responses and strengthen research efforts.

The most important step is to prevent entanglements in the first place. To that end, we need to support the fishing industry to adopt safer practices, such as improving gear management and accountability.

Innovations such as ropeless fishing gear could cut the numbers of entangled whales. At present, they are expensive. Government incentives and shared investment could make these technologies more accessible.

If nothing is done, more whales will be entangled, and we will see more emaciated carcasses wash ashore.

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.

Twice in recent times the Liberals have faced an existential crisis over climate and energy policy: in 2009 over Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and in 2018 over the National Energy Guarantee, a plan to reduce emissions while maintaining reliability at lowest cost.

In each case the party was led by Malcolm Turnbull, first as opposition leader and then as prime minister. Both times, Turnbull suffered a mortal blow to his leadership.

Looking back to the 2018 crisis, the now leader Sussan Ley told the ABC’s Nemesis program after the 2022 election, “unfortunately Malcolm couldn’t unite the joint party room on energy policy and we had a breakaway group in the Nationals who made a strategic decision to blow this up and that was very unfortunate”.

It wasn’t only the Nationals. Andrew Hastie, now again railing over climate policy, told the program he’d threatened to cross the floor over Turnbull’s policy.

The damage done by these battles must live in the memory of today’s Liberal parliamentarians. At least you’d think so. Perhaps not. Descriptions of their current shambles come to mind. Lemmings over the cliff. Dogs returning to their vomit. Some in the Coalition might reflect on the full biblical quote of the latter: “as a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly”.

The Liberals and the Coalition as a whole are now in a full-blown crisis over climate policy. This time it’s about the net zero by 2050 target which, given the long timeline, in theory should be an easier challenge than they faced in 2009 or 2018.

Those Liberals trying to work towards what they hope might be a viable compromise – that acknowledges net zero while loosening the constraint it imposes – are finding it increasingly difficult by the day, as the party at large becomes more feral.

Among the Liberal rank and file, the demonisation of net zero has spread like a contagion. So virulent is it, that some MPs are nervous when they have to front branch meetings.

Yet the Liberals are paralysed until they resolve their position, whatever the consequences. At best, those consequences would be an uneasy internal truce. At worst? A massive blow-up. Ley’s leadership, safe for the moment, could be undermined, possibly fatally.

Angus Taylor, the alternative leader, is a hardliner on net zero who, however, would accept a compromise and hope to stand ready to pick up the pieces if Ley’s leadership later fell apart.

As net zero tears Liberals apart, it sits like a great weight on the chest of the Nationals. Barnaby Joyce, set to jump out of the Nationals party room, has named it among other reasons for doing so. Anti net zero proselytiser Matt Canavan is running the Nationals’ review, which is heading in one direction.

The conveners of the backbench Coalition policy committee for the Australian economy, Jane Hume and Simon Kennedy, have called a meeting for Friday of next week to allow Liberal and Nationals parliamentarians to say their bit.

Hume is previously on record declaring she has “absolutely no doubt” the technology will be there to deliver net zero by 2050, and “this is something we should be embracing”.

Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan is running a taskforce, including representatives from both parties, charged with developing an energy policy. Tehan (who told a conference this week he supported net zero in the Morrison government and “I haven’t changed the view that I had at at the time”) initially gave the impression this would be a relatively leisurely operation. But now the foot needs to be on the accelerator.

In the coming sitting fortnight, its policy crisis will be a distraction for the opposition.

On the other side of the aisle, Environment Minister Murray Watt will be under the pump as he prepares to introduce his legislation to reform the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Anthony Albanese looks to Watt as a fixer (as he does to Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke). Watt’s job over coming weeks or months is to wrangle a deal for these changes that are aimed at producing a more workable interface between development (from housing to energy projects) and environmental protection.

Last term, when Tanya Plibersek was environment minister, this effort, through the Nature Positive bill, collapsed spectacularly.

Watt is juggling stakeholders – developers and environmentalists – with opposing interests. One sticking point for the environmentalists is that Watt proposes the minister would retain the final approval powers for projects, able to override the new environment protection agency.

The long-overdue overhaul of the EPBC act follows the report by Graeme Samuel, former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, to the Coalition government in 2020. That said both the environment and business had suffered from “2 decades of failing to continuously improve the law and its implementation”.

Former treasury secretary Ken Henry earlier this year told the National Press Club:

the EPBC act has patently failed to halt the degradation of Australia’s natural environment. […] Report after report tells the same story of failure.

Landing the reform of the EPBC is one important test for the government’s commitment, at its economic reform roundtable, to removing red and green tape.

But Labor will need the support of either the opposition or the Greens in the Senate. Watt has been talking to both.

Watt gave parts of the planned legislation to the opposition and Greens this week.

Ley, a former environment minister, on Thursday attacked the bill as “a handbrake on investment”. “There’s nothing in what has been said today that gives investors or the Coalition confidence that this government actually understands what the problem is and has a plan to address it,” she said.

Greens spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young also condemned the measures. “We’ve got carve outs for industry and business, fast tracking for big projects, fast tracking for companies so that they can effectively get their approvals faster, easier and cheaper.”

The Greens want a climate trigger, which the government flatly rejects.

The Greens believe the opposition is the government’s preferred dance partner. That’s probably true. Opposition environment spokeswoman Angie Bell sounded encouraging in September, telling the ABC, “I think it would be in the best interest of the nation for the two major parties to come to the table and to make sure that these reforms to the EPBC Act are sensible and serve our country into the future, because these reforms are too important to get wrong”. Bell has had four meetings with Watt.

The government will be flexible in negotiations, and business wants action. But Labor is worried the opposition, with a heap of its own problems, is unpredictable and the Liberals could be held hostage by the Nationals, who have declared major reservations, labelling the legislation an “environmental ideology”.

Given the general state of turmoil the opposition, it’s not an unreasonable fear.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

The Queensland government celebrated the creation of new national parks this year, with Premier David Crisafulli saying it is time to “get serious” and be “ambitious” in protecting nature.

But this claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Despite decades of conservation promises, Queensland remains a globally significant hotspot for destroying forests and native vegetation.

Our new study finds Queensland has lost at least 21% of its original woody vegetation since European colonisation. One-fifth of that loss has happened since 2000, even as the area of land being protected in state or national parks more than doubled.

By 2018, nearly two-thirds of subregions (areas that have similar patterns of climate, geology, vegetation and wildlife) still had less than 10% of their woody vegetation protected. Half were considered at “high” or “very high” risk of further loss.

Despite the creation of new national parks in some areas, bulldozers have kept working across vast parts of the state. Threatened animals, plants and precious landscapes are hanging on by a thread.

Parks in the wrong places

Our analysis compared the loss of forests with the growth of protected areas across all Queensland regions with significant woody vegetation cover, using government data from 2000 to 2018.

This conservation “balance sheet” approach shows not only where protection is growing, but whether it’s keeping pace with ongoing clearing.

We found a dangerous imbalance: for the 20% of vegetation cleared, only about 10% has been protected. And this mismatch was more stark when we looked at different parts of the state.

Most of Queensland’s newly protected areas were in subregions within areas such as Cape York (northernmost point of mainland Australia) and the wet tropics (northeast coast), which already had the highest protection and not under land clearing pressure.

Meanwhile, areas that have historically been heavily cleared kept losing vegetation at some of the fastest rates in the country, with very little new protection added.

These included the Brigalow Belt – a wide band of acacia-wooded grassland between the coast and the semi-arid interior – the New England tablelands in the south of the state, and parts of the Mulga Lands in the south-west.

The illusion of progress

Governments often report the growth of protected areas as evidence of progress toward global targets, such as protecting 30% of land by 2030 under the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

But focusing only on the creation of new parks paints a very misleading picture. If the bulldozing in Queensland continues at current rates, the net outcome for nature is negative, even when more parks are created.

We identified regions of Queensland that are ecological crisis zones and need targeted protection now.

The Brigalow Belt – home to species such as the northern hairy-nosed wombat, bridled nail-tail wallaby, golden-tailed gecko and Brigalow scaly-foot legless lizard – has lost almost half of its original woodland vegetation.

And areas across heavily-populated southeast Queensland continue to be cleared for grazing and infrastructure. These are the landscapes most in need of urgent intervention — not just remote places that look good on international scorecards.

Tougher protection

Stricter limits or moratoriums on clearing in fragile environments could ensure their protection. This will only happen with tougher compliance.

And expanding protection to capture depleted environments, rather than just photogenic or politically-palatable ones, is another way both state and federal governments can act.

Our research also shows an urgent need for a bold restoration agenda. Many of Queensland’s ecosystems are in a perilous state. Incentives and funding are needed for both protecting and restoring habitats where losses are already severe.

From accounting to action

Signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which include Australia, have agreed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss this decade. But as Queensland’s example shows, success depends not just on how much land is protected but on how effectively we prevent nature from being destroyed.

Queensland’s nature protection strategy must move beyond counting hectares of parks. Instead, it should focus on a four tier approach: stopping the destruction of native vegetation, restoring degraded land in areas that provide a biodiversity benefit, ensuring protection targets important areas for biodiversity, and an accounting system that is transparent and captures both losses and gains.

Otherwise, we can only expect more of the same: a small jump in the number of protected areas in politically palatable locations and far less protection for the animals and plants that looking down the barrel of extinction.

Michelle Ward, Lecturer, School of Environment and Science, Griffith University; James Watson, Professor in Conservation Science, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland, and Ruben Venegas Li, Research fellow, School of Environment, University of Queensland, The University of Queensland

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

Salt is an essential nutrient for the human body. But hundreds of millions of years before the first humans, salt minerals once shaped entire landscapes. They even determined where early life on Earth could thrive.

Deep in Earth’s past, over millions of years, ancient seas evaporated, leaving behind thick layers of salt. These were eventually buried and turned into rock. These enormous layers of buried rock salt move slowly over time, deforming other layers of rock around them and creating “salt mountains” at Earth’s surface.

Our new research, published in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, investigates one of these ancient salt mountains – called salt diapirs – which formed beneath a shallow sea in the Precambrian period, about 640 million years ago.

Our study reveals this diapir in southern Australia was actively rising while reef ecosystems were developing in the waters above it. The Precambrian was a critical period for increasing complexity of life on Earth, and our research suggests these salt mountains played an important role.

A geological lava lamp

Salt diapirs are like slow-motion geological lava lamps. In a lava lamp, the warm, soft blobs at the bottom slowly rise through the liquid, bending and stretching as they move.

Underground, rock salt behaves a bit like those blobs – it moves upward over millions of years, forming complex shapes. Thick layers of buried rock salt rise because they’re less dense and more flexible than the overlying rocks.

When the salt rises upward, it forms a structure geologists call a diapir. It’s a kind of dome of salt surrounded by distorted rock layers. These structures can be many kilometres tall and wide.

In present day environments, salt diapirs are found both on land and beneath the ocean floor. They often host vibrant communities of living things – from unique soils to deep-sea organisms that survive without sunlight.

Signs of early life

Geologists studying ancient environments have found preserved evidence of salt diapir structures in the rock record. These are well known from the spectacular Flinders Ranges in South Australia, which formed at a time of major changes in climate and life on Earth during the Neoproterozoic era 1 billion to 541 million years ago.

Our location for this study was the Enorama diapir, in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park, Adnyamathanha Yarta Country.

We found evidence that the formation of this underwater salt mountain provided the right conditions for early life to thrive in the environments right above it. We propose that diapir movement formed the right topography for these ecosystems to develop.

In Earth’s history – especially before complex animals evolved – life often faced long stretches of global hardship: ice ages, extreme heat and major changes in ocean chemistry.

During these times, specialised environments like those around salt diapirs may have acted as refuges, providing shelter when the wider world was inhospitable. When conditions improved, the survivors from these refuges could spread out again, helping repopulate the oceans.

In this way, salt diapirs may have quietly played a role in life’s persistence through mass extinctions and other crises.

Reefs, but not like the ones we know today

In the Precambrian, the sea hosted carbonate reefs, ecosystems that were much less complex than coral reefs are today.

These reefs were formed from stromatolites, colonies of cyanobacteria microorganisms, which precipitated carbonate minerals in-between grains of sand and mud, slowly building rock layers.

Stromatolites have been on Earth for more than 3 billion years, making them one of the planet’s oldest life forms. Over geologic time, carbonate reefs have evolved from simple stromatolites to increasingly complex ecosystems and their connected environments.

While we studied just one salt diapir, there is widespread evidence for salt diapirs in the Precambrian globally. Our research concludes salt diapirs may have played a critical role in the development of stromatolite reefs during this time.

Diapirs are still relevant today

Understanding how salt diapirs grew and shaped ecosystems in the past helps scientists make sense of rock properties deep beneath the surface today. These are directly relevant for modern water, mineral and energy resources.

Buried salt diapirs influence how fluids move through rocks, affecting the flow of water and other materials such as petroleum, copper, carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

Geologists studying ancient salt-related environments are helping design hydrogen storage projects. An alternative to natural gas for energy, hydrogen can be injected deep underground during times of abundant hydrogen production. Then, it can be retrieved when needed.

Lessons from the past, including how life adapted to salty settings, are contributing directly into strategies for a more sustainable future.

The next time you see a grain of table salt, imagine it buried deep beneath the seabed as part of a thick salt layer, slowly rising. As it rises, it reshapes the sea floor and creates environments that support the development of an ecosystem.

Beneath the ocean waves, sunlight filters over stromatolite reefs, tiny creatures shelter in their crevices, and life thrives.

Rachelle Kernen, Research Fellow, Geology, University of Adelaide and Kathryn Amos, Professor, Geology, University of Adelaide

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

Most of our knowledge of New Zealand’s prehistoric bird diversity comes from long-lost species with bones large enough to be studied by eye. But many bird bones are so tiny we can barely see their features without a microscope.

Some 14 to 19 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, the remains of thousands of birds were preserved in and around the vast Lake Manuherikia, located in present-day Central Otago.

We know a lot about some of the lake’s larger birds such as ducks. But we have less information on smaller birds such as the highly diverse passerines, which include songbirds. Modern species in this group include the tūī and tauhou/silvereyes.

The minute bones of passerines are difficult to find in the field, and only come to light after many hours of painstaking sorting under a microscope. But technologies such as micro-CT scanning are now helping to reveal their secrets.

Our new research adds a quirky new passerine to the fossil record of Aotearoa and shows just how unique its ancient biodiversity was. The new species appears to be in the bowerbird family of songbirds, which are not native in New Zealand today.

Made famous by Sir David Attenborough’s nature documentaries, bowerbirds are best known for their elaborate courtship behaviour and the males’ efforts to decorate bowers with coloured fruit or leaves to attract a mate. These showy males are often brightly coloured, while females are more drab – and very choosy about their mates.

Until now, bowerbirds and their fossil relatives have only been found in Australia and New Guinea.

The St Bathans bowerbird

Among all the tiny bones found in the St Bathans fossil site, a curious foot bone stood out. When we compared digital models of the fossil to a great number of other passerines, it bore all the hallmarks of a bowerbird; but this one was much smaller and more slender than living bowerbirds.

It’s name is Aevipertidus gracilis – the gracile one from a lost age.

The size of Aevipertidus gracilis would make it the smallest known bowerbird. Most living bowerbirds are chunky, weighing anywhere from 62 to 265 grams and spending time both on the ground and in the forest canopy.

New Zealand’s bowerbird weighed around 33 grams, similar to a korimako/bellbird but with longer feet.

Our analysis suggests the St Bathans bowerbird foot was most similar in shape to a group known to construct walk-through avenue bowers, such as the brightly coloured flame bowerbird.

We can only speculate about its plumage and behaviour, but Aevipertidus gracilis may also have performed elaborate displays to attract a mate.

The St Bathans bowerbird joins other New Zealand passerines with an ancient history – including huia, kōkako, piopio and mohua – whose ancestors flew across the ocean to Zealandia millions of years ago.

The St Bathans bowerbird lived far from its relatives in warm Australia and New Guinea. If it was a fruit eater, it may have been poorly equipped for temperatures that began dropping dramatically around 14 million years ago and caused a reduction in plant diversity. Ultimately, it may have become a victim of climate change.

Conservation palaeobiology

Fossils like the St Bathans bowerbird as well as genetic research are revealing New Zealand’s story of bird evolution, with extinctions and repeated colonisations across geological time.

For example, prehistoric shelducks colonised ancient Zealandia, only for them to go extinct. Around two million years ago, ancestors of the pūtangitangi/paradise shelduck recolonised New Zealand.

The same is true for the ancient passerine relatives of magpies, which went extinct after the Miocene. But unlike the native shelducks, modern makipai/Australian magpies were introduced by Europeans in the 1860s.

Some researchers suggest these long-extinct species muddy the concept of what is native or introduced in New Zealand, using magpies as an example.

Even though ancient magpie relatives once lived in Zealandia, it doesn’t mean their living cousins belong in the modern ecosystem. This thinking could undermine conservation management and lead to ecosystems being more degraded by invasive species.

The St Bathans wonderland existed in a Zealandia before the Southern Alps rose to create the South Island’s backbone. Lake Manuherikia was home to many plants and animals, including crocodilians and tortoises, making it very different from what is there today. It doesn’t make sense to consider these ancient animals as native in modern Aotearoa.

New discoveries like the St Bathans bowerbird provide wonderful insights into New Zealand’s biological heritage. Let’s celebrate these discoveries as clues to the past and not use them to undermine the ongoing fight to protect the country’s special living plants and animals.

We thank the coauthors on our paper, Daniel Field and Alex Brown, Sasha Votyakova for the artist’s reconstruction, the landowners at St Bathans for access to their land, Jean-Claude Stahl for preparation of the fossil photos, and numerous fieldworkers who helped with our excavations.

Elizabeth Steell, Research Fellow in Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge; Alan Tennyson, Curator of Vertebrates, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; Nic Rawlence, Associate Professor in Ancient DNA, University of Otago, and Pascale Lubbe, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Molecular Ecology, University of Otago

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

Hobart’s Theatre Royal was packed to the rafters on a chilly October evening when the irrepressible nature warrior Bob Brown launched his latest book Defiance.

Given the state of the planet “we just have to be defiant”, Brown told the audience, as the image of activist Lisa Searle was projected onto the screen behind him.

Searle sat atop one of the world’s tallest flowering plants, a eucalyptus tree named Sentinel by its defenders, in Tasmania’s Styx Valley, perched there to prevent its destruction.

Review: Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders – Bob Brown (Black Inc.)

Writing is itself an act of defiance for Brown. Defiance is the latest and last in a long line of books. A collection of “musings about the human-induced plight of the planet”, it contains stories, calls to action, and odes to “our brilliant little planet”. It is written with thanks to “everyone who has ever lifted a finger to ward off its destruction”.

Some of these writings have appeared previously. Some are historical recollections. Many paint pictures of unique Australian environments and places, both protected and despoiled. But all of them decry “the escalating global overconsumption of Earth’s living resources”.

Communal action

Defiance calls for open resistance, taking the plunderers head on by “defying the laws that serve those who are exploiting the planet and its people”. But environmental activism is not just an act of defiance for Brown. It is also an antidote to depression.

He suffered from the “black dog” in the decade before he moved to Tasmania, where he fell in with local activists and, motivated by their ardour, soon found himself director of the nascent Tasmanian Wilderness Society. As history attests, Brown then plunged headlong into the ultimately successful campaign in the early 1980s to save southern Australia’s last great wild river, the Franklin.

Brown’s defiance began in the 1970s. As a young medical doctor visiting the United States, he protested in Chicago in support of students in Greece, who were opposing a military coup d’etat there. Two years later, he was camped out alone and fasting for a week atop kunanyi/Mount Wellington in Hobart in protest at the visit of the nuclear-armed aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

It takes courage to be an environmentalist of Brown’s ilk. Over his activist years, which continue even today, he has been attacked physically and verbally, dragged from under bulldozers, arrested, jailed and shot at. But he has an uncanny way of shaking this off and seeing the upside.

When Brown found himself in Tasmania’s Risdon Prison for participating in the blockade against the flooding of the Franklin River, he played ping pong and volleyball and “enjoyed the features of jail which match the wilderness – no phones, no traffic, no slick advertising, and the early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine”.

Only defiant communal action, Brown argues, can keep the destruction of nature in check. If, as he writes, “materialism’s dream is of a virtual reality to replace the wild Earth”, we cannot stand by and do nothing. In Defiance, he evokes the great tradition of non-violent action, where “ordinary people take affairs into our own hands to overcome the power of corporate influence on governments”.

Brown intended Defiance to be a direct-action handbook, only to be overwhelmed by the stories of defiance and the good fights that needed telling. And there are many examples of communal action in his book.

Defiance is dedicated to Amrita Devi, the original tree-hugging activist, whose bravery has inspired forest defenders around the world. In 1730, Devi and her three daughters, along with 359 fellow Bishnoi people, were beheaded for obstructing the clearing of the Khejarli forest in Rajasthan, northern India.

Brown also celebrates “nature’s defenders” in Australia, including luminaries Melva and Olegas Truchanas, who tried to save Tasmania’s Lake Pedder, and Lionel Murphy, the High Court Justice who played a crucial role in saving the Franklin River.

He writes of Anmatyerr woman and globally renowned Indigenous artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, who believed the power of her work would protect her Country, and whose legacy includes the magnificent Earth’s Creation. Ordinary stories about local acts of defiance are equally acknowledged.

Dance, love, read a book

There is an element of being up against the impossible in such defiance. Today, the scales have tipped even further against activists, with laws in Australia curtailing civil disobedience.

Following its stories of collective action, Defiance turns to what activists are up against: the brutes in suits, “as rich in dollars as they are poor in spirit”.

Brown has no hesitation in denouncing their unrelenting pursuit of growth, because Earth’s living resources cannot sustain it. He delivers blistering broadsides against capitalism, corporations, plutocrats and “greenophobia”, which he calls “the fear or hatred of environmentalists”.

Brown has been staring down corporate power as an activist, green politician, state leader, Australian senator and environmental advocate for half a century. In Defiance, the conservative media, the egoists, the billionaires who rule the world, and the politicians who are too compromised or too feeble to resist corporate power are called out as complicit.

But Brown also makes it clear that having fun is not incongruent with saving the planet. Indeed, he warns that “angst at the imminence of Earth’s destruction isn’t helpful”. Anxiety shouldn’t trip you up on the path to action, he warns. There is always time on hand to turn things around. You can still “dance, love, be loved”, or read a book by the river.

This is not to treat environmental destruction lightly, but to sustain the human efforts to address it. After decades of activism, Brown remains full of optimism in Defiance.

Defiant people make things happen, author Geraldine Brooks observes in her foreword to the the book. Indeed, the arc of the moral universe only bends towards justice if brave people make it so.

There is no creeping conservatism about the octogenarian Brown; if anything, he is more infectiously defiant than ever. His book concludes with a series of odes to wild places that reveal his close, indeed transpersonal, connection with nature. He wants everyone to share how it feels to see a wedge-tailed eagle rise on thermals, or the sun break through the clouds and light up a patch of forest in a distant valley.

“We need natural beauty,” he writes, because “our minds and bodies are made for wildness”.

Kate Crowley, Adjunct Associate Professor, Public and Environmental Policy, University of Tasmania

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

For more than 60 million years, venomous snakes have slithered across Earth.

These ancient, chemical weapon-wielding reptiles owe their evolutionary success in part to the effectiveness of their bite, which they deliver at an astonishing speed before their prey can escape.

Now, a study I coauthored reveals, in astonishing detail, exactly how these bites work. Published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology, it is the largest study of its kind to-date, and uses advanced video techniques to show how various snake species have evolved very different strategies to deliver their deadly bites.

Thousands of snakes on Earth

There are approximately 4,000 species of snake on Earth – about 600 of which are venomous.

Scientists started visually recording the strikes of these snakes to better understand them in the 1950s, when high-speed photography and cinematography were first developed.

Since then, these technologies have improved dramatically, allowing scientists to capture and study the action of venomous snake bites in much greater detail. For example, past research has shown there are clear differences between strikes to capture prey, versus those used for defence.

But most recent studies that have examined snake bites have been limited by a number of factors.

Firstly, they have captured the bites using only one camera. This means we only get a side-on view, whereas the snakes can slither in all directions. Secondly, the recordings have been of a relatively low resolution – in large part because they were made in the field with low lighting conditions. Thirdly, they have often focused on a single snake species or a limited number of species. This means we miss out on seeing how many other species may behave differently, or strike faster.

Welcome to Venomworld

For our new study, my colleagues and I studied the bites of 36 different species of venomous snakes. These species were from the three main families of venomous snakes: vipers, elapids and colubrids. They included western diamondback rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox), blunt-nosed vipers (Macrovipera lebetinus) and the rough-scaled death adder (Acanthophis rugosus).

All the snakes we studied were housed at an institution in Paris, France, called Venomworld. There, we built a small experimental arena consisting of plexiglass panels lined with a cardboard floor, in which we placed the individual snakes.

We presented the snakes with a simulated food source – a cylindrical hunk of medical gel, heated to 38 degrees so it resembled prey for those that can detect heat.

Two high-speed cameras, placed nearby at different angles, automatically captured the snakes striking the gel at 1,000 frames per second.

Using the footage from these two different views, we recreated the strike in 3D to investigate, in detail, its various components such as its duration, acceleration, angle, and how fast the snake’s jaw opened.

In total, we captured 108 videos of successful strikes – three for each of the species included in the study.

Striking and slashing

There were major differences between the strikes of the snakes we studied.

Vipers struck the fastest, moving at speeds of more than 4.5 metres per second before sinking their needle-like fangs into the fake prey. Sometimes they would quickly remove and reinsert their fangs at a better angle. Only when the fangs were comfortably in place did the snakes shut their jaws and inject venom.

Some 84% of the vipers included in the study reached their prey in less than 90 milliseconds. This is faster than the average response time for a startled mammal – the preferred prey of many vipers in the wild.

On the other hand, elapid snakes, such as the Cape coral cobra (Aspidelaps lubricus), crept towards the fake prey before lunging and biting it repeatedly. Their jaw muscles would tense, releasing venom.

Colubrid snakes, such as the mangrove snake (Boiga dendrophila), which have fangs farther back in their mouths, lunged towards the prey from further away. With their jaws clamped over it, they’d make a sweeping motion from side to side. In doing so, they tore a gash in the gel to inject the maximum amount of venom.

Our previous research highlighted how the shape of snakes’ fangs is closely tied to prey preference. We can now show how they use these deadly weapons in the blink of an eye – and why they have been able to survive for so long on Earth.

Alistair Evans, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University

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

When Snowy 2.0 is in the news, it’s usually about money. The cost of the huge project has gone well beyond the initial A$6 billion estimate and will now cost more than $12 billion.

But cost overruns don’t affect the real value of this pumped hydro project. When it comes online – likely in 2028 – Snowy 2.0 will bring something fundamentally new to the Australian electricity system: energy storage at a scale far beyond anything else.

It will have five times more storage than all of Australia’s other pumped hydro and grid batteries combined, its capital cost is five times lower than batteries per unit of energy storage, and its lifetime is ten times longer than batteries. Our calculations show Snowy 2.0 will cost about one cent per day per Australian over its 150-year lifetime, assuming the final cost is between $15 billion and $18 billion.

Australia is aiming to have 82% of its electricity supplied by solar, wind and hydro in five years’ time, while coal generation declines rapidly. Storing variable renewable energy for later use will keep electricity supply reliable.

That’s where Snowy 2.0 and other planned large pumped hydro projects come in. Coupled with grid-scale batteries, these energy storage methods will allow us to wean ourselves off gas power.

How will Snowy 2.0 work?

Snowy 2.0 is an expansion of the original postwar Snowy Hydro Scheme. It links two existing reservoirs with a 27-kilometre tunnel and underground hydropower station. When power is cheap, water will be pumped uphill to the top reservoir. When power is expensive, water will run back downhill through the hydro station to produce electricity.

The project will be able to store 350 gigawatt-hours of energy – the equivalent of 7 million electric vehicle batteries, or 350 large grid batteries.

There has been scepticism over whether Snowy 2.0 will be able to perform as intended due to constraints in how much water can be moved around the system.

In fact, the Tumut River system, around which Snowy 2.0 is constructed, has plenty of flexibility, including five interconnected reservoirs with a total capacity 30 times larger than required for Snowy 2.0, and six hydropower stations.

Pumped hydro and batteries solve the energy storage problem

For years, Australia’s grid operators have relied on gas-fired power stations to meet sudden demand. Unlike coal, gas can fire up within minutes. The problem is, gas is no longer cheap, and now generates only 5% of east coast electricity. East coast gas prices have tripled since LNG exports began in 2015, inflating household power bills.

Gas has been a necessary evil to keep the grid reliable. But it’s now possible to begin displacing it using a combination of short-term storage in batteries and long-duration storage in large pumped hydro such as Snowy 2.0.

Batteries and pumped hydro are already replacing gas and coal generators in stabilising the grid. Energy storage now keeps Australians powered during increasingly common sudden failures of ageing coal power stations, or when transmission lines are damaged.

On sunny and windy days, Australia now regularly produces more electricity than it can use. As a result, wholesale electricity prices can become negative. This means energy storage companies are being paid to take and store excess electricity.

It’s hard for coal stations to shut down and restart quickly. As a result, they now scale back as far as possible when prices are low or negative. Their inability to shut off entirely means some cheap, clean wind and solar can’t be used. Coal is still dominant in overnight generation.

Grid batteries do a superb job of discharging stored electricity at high power to cover regular peak-demand periods in mornings and evenings when solar energy isn’t flowing and energy prices are high. These periods are usually brief, meaning the amount of battery energy needed is relatively small.

But batteries are an expensive way to store enough energy to cover electricity demand for longer periods. That’s because very large quantities of battery chemicals and metals are required. At these times, fossil fuel generators make a lot of money as there’s currently no alternative.

This is where large-scale pumped hydro comes in. Snowy 2.0 and other pumped hydro projects can help meet regular morning and evening peak demand and can also provide much of the electricity required overnight. Pumped hydro uses stored water, which is extremely cheap.

Snowy 2.0 is large enough to generate flat-out for a whole week if needed. This means it can do two useful things at once: meet demand from the grid, and help recharge grid batteries when solar and wind are scarce.

Pumped hydro can act as insurance against high prices. A third of Snowy 2.0’s revenue is expected to come from long-term contracts with retailers, renewable generators and large industrial users.

Snowy 2.0 could snatch a substantial portion of the energy market currently occupied by coal and gas. Building several more large pumped hydro systems would make it possible to get rid of coal and gas altogether.

Fewer new transmission lines

Interstate transmission lines are essential. If one state is wet and windless, power can be imported along transmission lines from neighbouring states with better weather. But many planned transmission lines have run into issues with rural pushback and slow construction speeds.

Large pumped hydro systems make it possible to avoid building some expensive and politically fraught new transmission lines.

If each state or territory had one large pumped hydro scheme, it would reduce the need for more transmission lines by using low- or negative-cost electricity on sunny and windy days to pump water uphill. This would reduce import requirements.

Australia has 23,000 potential pumped hydro sites, far more than we would ever need. Of these, we have identified 315 as premium sites in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. South Australia and Western Australia also have good options, albeit at higher cost.

A good option for energy storage is to build pumped hydro in hilly country and grid batteries near cities to reduce grid congestion and avoid the need for more transmission lines.

For example, Tasmania’s pumped hydro allows the state’s wind energy to be exported to Victoria continuously, maximising the usage of expensive undersea cables. Used in conjunction with batteries near Melbourne, Tasmanian wind can meet high-value morning and evening peak loads in Victoria.

Big project – but big benefit

When Snowy 2.0 comes online, it won’t be long before it proves its worth. Operating alongside grid batteries, it will help push expensive gas generation out of the grid.

Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University; Harry Armstrong-Thawley, Research Officer, Australian National University, and Timothy Weber, Research Officer, School of Engineering, Australian National University

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

As one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, the River Mersey in northern England is no stranger to pollution flowing into its waters.

“It’s gone through periods of extremely bad river water quality where the river was just raw sewage”, explains Patrick Byrne, a water scientist at Liverpool John Moores University. “During the heyday of manufacturing and the industrial revolution, you would’ve had a lot of toxic metals as well from different manufacturing processes.”

Despite a perception that the water quality is better than it used to be, Byrne’s research found that the river now has a new kind of pollution problem: the amount of forever chemicals entering the Mersey catchment area is among one of the highest in the world.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of human-made chemicals used in waterproofing, food packaging and many industrial processes. They’re known as forever chemicals because they persist and are hard to destroy. PFAS have been found in almost every environment on the planet. They accumulate in wildlife and humans and some have been linked to cancer.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we talk to Byrne about why rivers are the “canary in the coalmine” for wider contamination of a landscape, and how so much PFAS continues to end up in them.

Byrne recently published a study of the amount of PFAS making it into the Mersey that was able to pinpoint some of the biggest sources, including of types of PFAS that are now banned in the UK. To his surprise it wasn’t big factories churning out lots of effluent. Instead, the PFAS were mostly coming from old, buried landfills, airports and recycling facilities.

Listen to the conversation with Patrick Byrne on The Conversation Weekly podcast to find out why monitoring PFAS in this way can help environmental regulators prioritise the areas needed to clean up first.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood, Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Mixing and sound design by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from Sunrise, France24 English and ABC New Australia.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

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

Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) rose faster in 2024 than in any year since records began – far faster than scientists expected.

Our new satellite analysis shows that the Amazon rainforest, which has long been a huge absorber of carbon, is struggling to keep up. And worryingly, the satellite that made this discovery could soon be switched off.

Systematic measurements of CO₂ in the atmosphere began in the late 1950s, when the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii (chosen for its remoteness and untainted air) registered about 315 parts per million (ppm). Today, it’s more than 420ppm.

But just as important is the rate of change. The annual rise in global CO₂ has gone from below 1ppm in the 1960s to more than 2ppm a year in the 2010s. Every extra ppm represents about 2 billion tonnes of carbon – roughly four times the combined mass of every human alive today.

Across six decades of measurements, atmospheric CO₂ has gradually increased. There have been some large but temporary departures, typically associated with unusual weather caused by an El Niño in the Pacific. But the long-term trend is clear.

In 2023, CO₂ in the atmosphere grew by about 2.70ppm. That’s a large step up, but not too unusual. Yet in 2024, it was an unprecedented 3.73ppm.

How satellites observe atmospheric CO₂

Until recently, we could only monitor CO₂ through stations on the ground like the one in Hawaii. That changed with satellites such as Nasa’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2), launched in 2014.

The OCO-2 satellite analyses sunlight reflected from Earth. Carbon dioxide acts like a filter, absorbing specific wavelengths of light. By observing how much of that specific light is missing or dimmed when it reaches the satellite, scientists can accurately calculate how much CO₂ is in the atmosphere.

But air is always on the move. The CO₂ above any one point can come from many sources – local emissions, nearby forests, or air carried from far away. To untangle this mix, scientists use computer models that simulate how winds move CO₂ around the globe.

They then adjust these models until they match what the satellite sees. This gives us the most accurate estimate possible of where carbon is being released and where it’s being absorbed.

The decade-long data record from OCO-2 allows us to put 2023 and 2024 into historical context.

The result

From the satellite data, we infer that the largest changes in CO₂ emissions and absorption during 2023 and 2024, compared with the baseline year of 2022, were over tropical land.

The largest change was over the Amazon, where much less CO₂ is being absorbed. Similar slowdowns also appeared over southern Africa and southeast Asia, parts of Australia, the eastern US, Alaska and western Russia.

Conversely, we detected more carbon being absorbed over western Europe, the US and central Canada.

Other data backs this up. For instance, plants emit a faint glow as they photosynthesise – remarkably, we can see this glow from space. Measurements of this glow along with vegetation greenness both show that tropical ecosystems were less active in 2023 and 2024.

Our analysis suggests that warmer temperatures explain most of the Amazon’s reduced capability to absorb carbon. Elsewhere in the tropics, changes in rainfall and soil moisture were more important.

Why 2023 and 2024 were special

In many ways, these years resembled previous El Niño years such as 2015-16, when drought and heat led to less carbon absorption and more wildfires. But what’s interesting about 2023-24 is that the responsible El Niño event was comparatively weak.

Something else must be amplifying the effect. The most likely culprit is the extensive, record-breaking drought that has gripped much of the Amazon basin. When plants are already stressed by a lack of water, even modest warming can push them beyond their tolerance, reducing their ability to absorb carbon.

Roughly half of the CO₂ emitted by humans stays in the atmosphere. The other half is absorbed, more or less equally, by the land and the oceans. If drought or heat means plants are less able to absorb carbon, even temporarily, more of our emissions will remain in the air.

Our ability to meet climate targets relies on nature continuing to provide this vital carbon storage.

Satellite shutdown

It’s not yet clear whether 2023-24 is a short-term blip or an early sign of a long-term shift. But evidence points to an increasingly fragile situation, as tropical forests are stressed by hot and dry conditions.

Understanding exactly how and where these ecosystems are changing is essential if we want to know their future role in the climate, and whether drought will delay their recovery. One step is to urgently send scientists to tropical ecosystems to document recent changes in person.

That’s also where satellites like OCO-2 come in. They offer global and almost real-time coverage of how carbon dioxide is moving between the land, oceans and atmosphere, helping us separate temporary effects like El Niño from deeper changes.

Yet, despite being fit and healthy and having enough fuel to keep it going until 2040, OCO-2 is at risk of being shut down due to proposed Nasa budget cuts.

We wouldn’t be blind without it – but we’d be seeing far less clearly. Losing OCO-2 would mean losing our best tool for monitoring changes in the carbon cycle, and we will all be scientifically poorer for it.

The Amazon is sending us a warning. We must keep watching – while we still can.

Paul Palmer, Professor of Quantitative Earth Observation, University of Edinburgh and Liang Feng, Research Associate, Data Assimilation, University of Edinburgh

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

When Storm Amy battered the Scottish Highlands in early October, it tore through a salmon farm’s sea pens, releasing around 75,000 fish into open water in Loch Linnhe. The scale of the escape is alarming. It comes at a time when wild Atlantic salmon – already classified as “endangered” in Great Britain – are in decline.

For an animal so central to the UK’s ecology, culture and economy, the incident has serious implications.

At first glance, it might sound like a rare bit of good news: thousands of fish freed from captivity, perhaps even helping to bolster wild populations. But the reality is far less heart-warming.

These fish are not wild salmon in any meaningful sense. They are highly domesticated animals, selectively bred over decades for traits that make them profitable in captivity but poorly equipped for survival in the wild.

Aquaculture – the farming of fish and other aquatic species – has become one of the fastest-growing forms of food production in the world. The most valuable of all farmed marine species is the Atlantic salmon, which accounted for 18% of global marine aquaculture production value in 2022. The UK is the third largest producer, with almost all production centred around Scotland’s coast.

Modern salmon farming typically involves rearing young fish in freshwater hatcheries before transferring them to sea cages or pens. Each farm may hold six to ten large nets, each containing up to 200,000 fish.

Having salmon nets open to strong tidal currents is key to their design, allowing clean oxygenated water to enter and waste to be removed. However, this also means that they are vulnerable to adverse weather conditions.

To combat this, more sheltered coastal regions are used, like fjords or lochs, but this only offers so much protection. Storm Amy demonstrated that vulnerability all too clearly.

From wild fish to livestock

Atlantic salmon farming began in the 1970s. Since then, the species has undergone intensive selective breeding, much like sheep, dogs or chickens. Fish have been chosen for faster growth, delayed sexual maturity, disease resistance and other commercially desirable traits.

Around 90% of the salmon used in Scottish aquaculture originate from Norwegian stock. After 15 generations of selection, these farmed salmon are now among the most domesticated fish species in the world. They no longer resemble their wild relatives in important ways.

Farmed salmon differ genetically, physiologically and behaviourally. They are often larger, mature differently and feed on pellets instead of hunting live prey. Changes which make them more vulnerable to predators.

Farmed salmon even have traits which will make them less attractive to wild counterparts. Many would struggle to survive for long in the wild.

The problem isn’t just that farmed salmon die when they escape but what happens when some of them don’t. Studies show that in certain Scottish and Norwegian rivers, more than 10% of salmon caught are of farmed origin, with numbers highest near intensive farming areas.

Although these fish are maladapted to wild conditions, a few survive long enough to reach rivers and attempt to spawn.

When they breed with wild salmon, their offspring inherit a mix of traits – neither truly wild nor farmed – leaving them less suited to their natural environment. This process, known as “genetic introgression”, gradually damages the genetic integrity of wild populations.

Timing makes this latest incident particularly concerning. Wild salmon are now returning to Scottish rivers to spawn. The sudden influx of tens of thousands of farmed escapees increases the chance of interbreeding, and of long-term genetic damage.

The scale of this single escape is extraordinary. Scotland’s total returning wild salmon population is estimated at around 300,000 fish. The release of 75,000 farmed salmon represents roughly a quarter of that number.

Even if only 1% of the escapees survive and breed, that would mean around 750 fish entering rivers and potentially mixing with wild populations. A 2021 Marine Scotland report found that rivers near some fish farms are in “very poor condition”, with evidence of major genetic changes. Worryingly, other nearby rivers previously classed as being in “good condition” could now be at risk too.

Wild Atlantic salmon already face multiple human-driven threats like climate change, habitat loss, pollution and invasive species. Genetic pollution from farmed escapees is yet another blow. It’s one that undermines the species’ resilience to other forms of environmental change.

The release caused by Storm Amy may be one incident, but it’s symptomatic of a wider problem. As storms intensify with a changing climate, the likelihood of future escapes grows. Without tighter regulation, better containment measures and effective genetic monitoring of wild populations, these events could continue to erode what’s left of UK’s wild salmon.

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.

Electric cars made by the Chinese car firm BYD are now a familiar sight on British roads. In September 2025, the company sold 11,271 vehicles in the UK – ten times as many as in the same month last year.

This level of growth means the UK is now BYD’s largest market outside of China. In an industry once dominated by long established brands, the company has become the biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles in the world. So how have they done it?

Generous subsidies from the Chinese government have certainly played a role, but BYD also appears to be a smoothly run operation which could end up revolutionising the automotive industry.

For example, it has secured the supply of the critical materials such as lithium and tungsten used to build electric vehicles and produces its own batteries, reducing reliance on external suppliers.

It has built large-scale gigafactories and industrial parks, and investments in research and development, especially in relation to batteries, have been very effective.

Another key factor is the company’s aggressive pricing strategy. A BYD Dolphin Surf for example, costs £18,650 in the UK – less than half the price of the entry level Tesla, the Model 3, which begins at around £39,000.

Older and more established car manufacturers will be painfully aware of BYD’s swift ascent towards the top of the electric vehicle market. And research I worked on with colleagues into how major companies react to new rivals suggests why some of them are being left behind.

Many make the mistake of ignoring customers’ needs and rely on past success to the extent that they become over confident. Others just seem to lack foresight.

In the car industry specifically, I have seen a variety of market forecasts and technology roadmaps – generated by both companies and industry associations – and been struck by some common themes.

To begin with, they are often linear – inevitably predicting that the speed, features and performance of cars will all gradually improve over time. But technological innovations often appear in leaps and bounds, and depend on a vast network of suppliers to implement, which makes development complex.

They also frequently show a surprising neglect for customers’ desires and fears – and budgets. The price of new cars has increased dramatically over the past two decades, outpacing growth in salaries. Yet many companies, such as Jaguar and Tesla, appear to be focused only on “premium vehicles” for wealthy customers, and will eventually end up competing for a small market.

Car companies also suffer in a similar way to big firms in other sectors (think Blackberry or Nokia), where there is often a clear lack of humility and awareness from many senior executives. As studies have shown, bosses who see their organisations as innovative and flexible are often at odds with more junior employees who view them as stale and slow.

For the high jump?

The need for industry-wide change reminds me of how athletes competing in the high jump evolved over the years. Many techniques were tried and tested, including the “scissors”, the “straddle” and the Fosbury flop, which was eventually deemed the most effective.

Some established car companies are desperately trying to hang onto their equivalent of the straddle jump (petrol and diesel cars), and avoiding a commitment to learning the Fosbury flop (developing electric vehicles).

Because of this, the days of established car companies leading the way seem to be over. Hoping to make decent profits from old models and creating electric vehicles only for the wealthy is a delusional strategy.

So what could established carmakers do?

One option is to change the way they work with suppliers. The usual approach here is transactional and price based, with a carmaker buying components (seats or mirrors, for example) from a supplier but switching if it finds a cheaper deal. The problem is that innovation (and indeed supply chain resilience, as the microchip shortage shows) requires supplier and buyer to jointly invest in future developments. The transactional approach does not allow for this.

Second, they should develop new capabilities, not only in relation to batteries but also to other technologies. It is indicative that BYD wants to be predominantly known as a “technology company” whose ultra-fast charging system promises to be well ahead of its competitors.

Could VW, Toyota and BMW become technology companies? Probably not, but they could be part of a network of firms, including technology and AI ones, that would allow them to benefit from the latest developments in those fields.

Third, carmakers need to focus more on addressing customer needs. Besides understanding and improving their experiences as drivers and passengers, they could work more closely with local authorities and infrastructure providers as most users’ issues – and hesitation – about electric vehicles are related to the ability to charge them up.

These changes are substantial, but achievable, as long as carmakers are prepared to take a more open and collaborative approach to the road ahead.

Pietro Micheli, Professor of Business Performance and Innovation, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick

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

It was a morning unlike anything St. Louis had ever seen. Automobile traffic crawled as drivers struggled to peer through murky air. Buses, streetcars and trains ran an hour behind schedule. Downtown parking attendants used flashlights to guide vehicles into their lots. Streetlamps were ignited, and storefront windows blazed with light.

Residents called Nov. 28, 1939, “Black Tuesday.” Day turned to night as thick, acrid clouds blackened the sky. Even at street level, visibility was just a few feet. The air pollution was caused by homes, businesses and factories, which burned soft, sulfur-rich coal for heat and power. The soft coal was cheap and burned easily but produced vast amounts of smoke.

The murky morning was an extreme version of a problem St. Louis and dozens of other American cities had been experiencing for decades. Strict federal air pollution regulations were still 30 years away, and state and local efforts to limit coal smoke had failed miserably.

Today, as the Trump administration works to roll back air pollution limits on coal, the events in St. Louis more than 80 years ago serve as a reminder of how bad a situation can become before people’s objections finally force the government to act. And as I discuss in my book “Black Gold: The Rise, Reign and Fall of American Coal,” those events also highlight how successful that action can be.

A widespread civic effort

Days after Black Tuesday, St. Louis Mayor Bernard Dickmann responded to the crisis by creating a commission to investigate and recommend a solution to the continuing air pollution.

Just before Black Tuesday, Joseph Pulitzer II, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had launched his own anti-smoke newspaper campaign seeking fundamental change. In my research I found the first editorial, on Nov. 13, 1939, which declared “something must be done, or else.” A crack reporter, Sam J. Shelton, was assigned full time to what became the smoke beat. Post-Dispatch news stories, editorials and political cartoons championed the values of cleaner air and the dangers of toxic pollution.

Dickmann’s Smoke Elimination Committee met 13 times over a winter that seemed unrelenting in darkness. News and weather reports record that smoke blotted out the Sun on one out of every three days, and sometimes sunlight never pierced the darkness. Advice poured in, including from a Hollywood-style stuntman and flagpole sitter, Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, who offered to perch in the sky searching for dirty chimneys.

In late February 1940, the commission issued a report recommending restrictions on smoke emissions. The report said residents and industry should either pay more to buy coal with less sulfur or other fuel, or pay for and install new equipment to burn the sulfur-rich coal more cleanly. On April 5, the city’s Board of Aldermen convened to consider the changes in law that would enact the recommendations.

Newspapers reported that more than 300 protesters, including coal dealers, operators and miners, parked their trucks outside City Hall, waving banners. Black smoke spewed upward from coal stoves mounted atop one, newspaper reports said. The boisterous throng marched into City Hall, shouting and often drowning out city representatives. Amid catcalls and boos, the aldermen passed the ordinance 28-1.

Immediately, Raymond Tucker, the mayor’s deputy, began arranging for suppliers of more expensive low-sulfur coal for the city’s residents and businesses. He launched a slick public relations campaign urging residents to comply with the new law. He also hired a team of inspectors to block bootleg shipments of unauthorized sulfur-rich coal and to cite anyone whose chimney’s smoke ran too black.

Coal operators in Illinois, who sold the cheaper sulfur-rich coal, urged their state’s residents to boycott St. Louis goods and filed lawsuits challenging the legality of the new ordinance. Those actions appeared menacing but made little headway.

The true test of the ordinance would arrive with the winter chill.

A winter of change

As winter arrived, legal coal was 10% to 30% more expensive than the high-sulfur coal had been, and some families struggled, especially in poorer areas of the city. Bootleg coal shipments arrived. More than once, Tucker’s armed inspectors fired at a suspect truck that ignored orders to stop, according to newspaper reports from the time.

While hopes were already high that the new, tough measures would clean the skies, the winter of 1940-41 defied even those rosy expectations. By mid-January, the city’s skies were so much cleaner than the year before that they were the talk of the town. They were clear blue, and even on days when there was smoke, it was far less than had been common before the city ordinance passed.

The national press picked up the news, and arriving visitors wrote letters to the editors of their hometown newspapers reporting being astounded by what St. Louis had accomplished that winter. Tucker compiled notes on how many communities in the U.S. and Canada sought details on the transformation. In that document, now held among his archives at Washington University in St. Louis, he listed 83.

“A great city has washed its face,” Sam Shelton wrote for the Post-Dispatch. “St. Louis is no longer the grimy old man of American municipalities.” The “plague of smoke and soot” had been wiped away after a century in “a dramatic story of intelligent, courageous and co-operative effort.” No longer did residents have to endure “burning throats, hacking coughs, smarting eyes, sooty faces and soiled clothing.”

The newspaper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1941 for its campaign, the first time that a major award was conferred for an environmental story.

For years afterward, the coal industry argued that the St. Louis campaign was a fraud that needlessly forced residents to buy more expensive fuel and equipment. But even during World War II, when industrial restrictions meant pollution was worse in the name of driving the war economy, the city’s skies were never as blackened as they had been before.

Tucker, the mayor’s deputy, later used the fame he had achieved from the smoke campaign as a springboard to being elected mayor. He served 12 years. His former boss, Dickmann, was less fortunate, losing his reelection bid in 1941. He blamed it on having forced residents to pay more, even though it meant cleaner fuel for their homes and clearer skies for their community.

Robert Wyss, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, University of Connecticut

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

Fossil fuels still power much of the world, even though renewable energy has become cheaper in most places and avoids both pollution and the climate damage caused by burning coal, oil and natural gas.

To understand this paradox, it helps to look at how countries – particularly major greenhouse gas emitters, including the U.S., China and European nations – are balancing the pressures of rising electricity demand with the global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.

US embraces fossil fuels

The United States makes no secret of its fossil fuel ambitions. It has a wealth of fossil fuel reserves and a politically powerful oil and gas industry.

Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, his administration has been promoting oil and gas drilling and coal production, pointing to rising electricity demand to justify its moves, particularly to power artificial intelligence data centers.

Reviving the “drill, baby, drill” mantra, the Trump administration has now embraced a “mine, baby, mine” agenda to try to revive U.S. coal production, which fell dramatically over the past two decades as cheaper natural gas and renewable energy rose.

The Department of Interior on Sept. 29 rolled out a plan to “unleash American coal power” by opening 13 million acres of federal land to mining. The Department of Energy also pledged US$625 million to try to make coal competitive. It includes lowering the royalty rates mining companies pay and extending the operating lifespans of coal-fired power plants.

However, these initiatives further lock communities with coal plants into a carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Coal’s resurgence would also have public health costs. Its pollution is linked to respiratory illness, heart disease and thousands of premature deaths each year from 1999 to 2020 in the United States.

The Trump administration is also ceding the clean energy technology race to China. The administration is ending many renewable energy tax credits and pulling federal support for energy research projects.

I work in the Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School of Tufts University, where we maintain a suite of databases for analyzing countries’ energy research budgets. The Trump administration’s 2026 U.S. budget request would slash funding for energy research, development and demonstration to $2.9 billion — just over half the budget allocated in 2025. These energy research investments would fall to levels not seen since the mid-1980s or early 2000s, even when accounting for inflation.

China’s clean energy push – and coal expansion

While the United States is cutting renewable energy funding, China is doubling down on clean energy technologies. Its large government subsidies and manufacturing capacity have helped China dominate global solar panel production and supply chains for wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles.

Cheaper Chinese-manufactured clean energy technologies have enabled many emerging economies, such as Brazil and South Africa, to reduce fossil fuel use in their power grids. Brazil surged into the global top five for solar generation in 2024, producing 75 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity and surpassing Germany’s 71 TWh.

The International Energy Agency now expects global renewable energy capacity to double by 2030, even with a sharp drop expected in U.S. renewable energy growth.

However, while China expands clean energy access around the world, its production and emissions from coal continue to rise: In the first half of 2025, China commissioned 21 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power plants, with projections of over 80 GW for the full year. This would be the largest surge in new coal power capacity in a decade for China. Although China pledged to phase down its coal use between 2026 to 2030, rising energy demand may make the plan difficult to realize.

China’s paradox — leading in clean energy innovations while expanding coal — reflects the tension between ensuring energy security and reducing emissions and climate impact.

Europe’s scramble for reliable energy sources

The European Union is pursuing strategies to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels amid the ongoing geopolitical tensions with Russia.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed many countries to supply disruptions and geopolitical turmoil, and it triggered a global energy crisis as countries once reliant on Russian oil and gas scrambled to find alternatives.

In June 2025, the European Commission proposed a regulation to phase out Russian fossil fuel imports by the end of 2027, aiming to enhance energy security and stabilize prices. This initiative is part of the broader REPowerEU plan. The plan focuses on increasing clean energy production, improving energy efficiency and diversifying oil and gas supplies away from Russia.

Renewables are now the leading source of electric power in the EU, though natural gas and oil still account for more than half of Europe’s total energy supply.

The EU’s fossil energy phaseout plan also faces challenges. Slovakia and Hungary have expressed resistance to the proposed phaseout, citing concerns over energy affordability and the need for alternative supply sources. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán said Hungary would continue importing Russian oil and gas. Cutting off these supplies, he asserted, would be an economic “disaster” and immediately reduce Hungary’s economic output by 4%.

The path to reducing Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels thus involves navigating internal disagreements and incentivizing long-run sustainable development. Europe does appear to be gaining in one way from the U.S. pullback from clean energy. Global investment in renewable energy, which hit a record high in the first half of 2025, increased in the EU as it fell in the U.S., according to BloombergNEF’s analysis.

Brazil: Torn on fossil fuels as it hosts climate talks

In November 2025, representatives from countries around the world will gather in Brazil for the annual United Nations climate conference, COP30. The meeting marks three decades of international climate negotiations and a decade since nations signed the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise.

The conference’s setting in Belém, a city in the Amazon rainforest, reflects both the stakes and contradictions of climate commitments: a vital ecosystem at risk of collapse as the planet warms, in a nation that pledges climate leadership while expanding oil and gas production and exploring for oil in the Foz do Amazonas region, the mouth of the Amazon River.

Thirty years into global climate talks, the disconnect between promises and practices has never been so clear. The world is not on track to meet the Paris temperature goals, and the persistence of fossil fuels is a major reason why.

Negotiators are expected to debate measures to curb methane emissions and support the transition from fossil fuels. But whether the discussions can eventually translate into a concrete global phaseout plan remains to be seen. Without credible plans to actually reduce fossil fuel dependence, the annual climate talks risk becoming another point of geopolitical tension.

Kate Hua-Ke Chi, Doctoral Fellow, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

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

What will the world look like in 2100? This question is central to a new free online game called FutureGuessr. Launched in June 2025, this new form of climate communication combines gameplay with visual climate imagery and encourages players to explore future scenarios.

Players are shown an image from the future and asked to guess the location. Information is revealed about how close they are, what the climate change consequences would be, what will happen if no action is taken and how things could be different.

Available to play in English and French, the game takes inspiration from GeoGuessr, the online geography game that has enabled millions of people to travel virtually from their phone and guess where they are. FutureGuessr uses pictures to give users a visual representation of how familiar landscapes will look in 2100 as a result of climate change.

FutureGuessr is part of a broader trend in the use of games in climate communication. Creative board games and video games can reach diverse audiences and communicate climate change in serious, playful, thought-provoking and surprising ways.

Games played for pleasure, like Game Changers (an online story-based game produced by Megaverse) can generate conversations on climate actions by creating an innovative visual game world and integrating climate change into the plot. Collective decision making in the game allows players to learn and discuss climate change with others.

Our research suggests that this helps players critique corporate power, learn about greenwashing and enjoy an aesthetic experience. In the world of board games, Daybreak challenges players to cooperate and stop climate change by trying out different technical, social and economic projects.

Play with purpose

Serious games go beyond entertainment to connect with real-world problems. The most successful ones are fun while engaging with social, environmental and economic issues that players really care about.

Games can support players in thinking about becoming disaster ready and building disaster resilience. A game called The Flood Recovery Game is being used by researchers to identify disaster recovery gaps. It can also help policymakers create more comprehensive strategies to address flooding.

In terms of climate education, interactive in-person game-based workshops like the Climate Fresk already connects millions of people with science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body that assesses the science on climate change. These three-hour workshops also enable people to consider how they might act to create positive climate solutions.

FutureGuessr is a game for pleasure with a serious purpose: to make climate change data visible. Produced in partnership with Résau Action Climat, a network of non-governmental organisations, it shows the negative effects of climate change in familiar locations such as Antarctica and Easter Island.

Research on visual climate communication found that images showing climate impacts such as extreme weather and floods moved people, especially when it featured localised impacts. There is a balance to be struck between highlighting local relevance and linking to the bigger picture. Showing the future of recognisable places we care about might be powerful in building support for climate action.

But photographs from the future don’t exist. FutureGuessr uses images generated from a bespoke AI model which combines maps with photographs of locations and data from IPCC reports.

This has a cost. The climate cost of the AI revolution is increasingly measured and documented, and image generation is one of the most energy intensive tasks you can do with AI. Experts in computing have called for “frugal AI”: to treat AI as finite, only to be used when necessary, and even then, as effectively as possible.

It is important to consider not just the message, but the medium, and the environmental effects of game production. The Playing for the Planet Alliance has produced a carbon calculator for the industry and offers awards and game jams to support the video game industry to take climate action.

Now that the images have been created, an effective use of FutureGuessr might be to generate conversations about the effects of climate change, and about how research, game design and communication can be carried out in the most environmentally sensitive way.

People won’t act just based on facts alone. The development of creative ways to communicate the climate emergency that connect people with why this matters is essential for people and communities. Already, some games are making an increasingly visible contribution to the conversation but we need greater transparency in the environmental impacts of game production, and consideration of how to minimise these impacts through visible commitments to sustainability as modelled by Daybreak.
FutureGuessr demonstrates value of bringing games and visual climate communication together to raise awareness of how climate change affects landscapes everywhere on the planet. We all need to play for the planet. Our research shows that whether played for purpose or pleasure, games can create space for serious conversations about how to tackle climate change.

Lynda Dunlop, Senior Lecturer in Science Education, University of York and Steven Forrest, Lecturer in Flood Resilience, University of Hull

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

Over the weekend I was at an environment conference on the tiny island of San Servolo, just off the coast of Venice. You are surrounded by water on all sides, stretching for miles.

Given this visual reminder of how low-lying Venice is it’s hard not to think about the increasing threat of flooding and the long-term implications of climate change for this historic city and the surrounding region of wetlands as well as towns and villages along the coast.

Venice is, after all, famous for its aqua alta, (high waters) and floods. It sits on the Mediterranean’s biggest lagoon which has an average depth of less than one metre. With increasing numbers of extreme storms, it’s clear that rising waters here are likely to cause greater and greater damage to people’s homes and livelihoods.

So in many ways the view was an ideal geographical prompt for the fourth Dolomite Conference on Global Governance of Climate Change and Sustainability, organised by the Vision thinktank. The conference brought together speakers from around the world to discuss climatic challenges and ideas for what could mitigate those changes. Debates ranged widely. From the way flooding and wild fires may make it difficult, or even impossible, for people to access insurance for their homes to how the health of soil is not being valued and its ability to grow crops is steadily declining.

I spoke to some delegates to see what they thought was the biggest challenge that their home faced from climate change.

Los Angeles

Paulina Velasco is the deputy chief of staff for district six in Los Angeles. She sees the biggest challenge ahead as “making sure that we have all the people in the room who know what’s going on”.

“Not just the academics talking about the statistics, but also people in the community, the people who have asthma because the air quality is so bad and they live next to a freeway, ensuring that it’s not just one way [of] looking at things from a high level, but making sure that everyone has an understanding and we can act as a community.”

Looking ahead to the upcoming LA Olympics 2028, Velasco felt there was an opportunity to change behaviour that could help the city tackle climate change threats.

“The question is not just what’s going to happen in the Olympics or what’s going to happen in the world cup, but how are we going to recycle all the plastic or make sure we drive less.”

It was about what was going to happen so that people act differently, taking more public transport, for instance, in ways that can be sustained after the Olympics, she said.

Brazil

Julia Paletta, a PhD researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the issue that concerned her most about Brazil was emissions coming from land use change. Brazil is an agricultural country and the pressing issue was extending agriculture into new areas, such as the Amazon, causing deforestation. By some estimates the Amazon rainforest could become a dry grassland if deforestation continues at pace.

“With Brazil hosting Cop30 [the UN climate conference] this year I think the big discussion is going to be around the Amazon,” she added. She felt it was going to be “a very important moment for the global community being there and seeing the Amazon”. Not only because this was a pristine area, but also a very important place to be preserved. “It’s very important not only to Brazil, but overall to the world.”

Belgium

Taube Van Melkebeke is head of policy at the Green European Foundation, a foundation aligned to the European Green party arranges debates and training around green issues.

She said: “The biggest hurdle for Belgium is a lack of systemic planning that really takes into account different dimensions, both the short and the long term, such as social and economic aspects, and energy security.”

“I think there is a lack of political long term-ism, which is, of course, partially embedded in our political systems. But I also do think that there is a lack of political will and political insights to really connect the dots.”

I often find that conferences can be gloomy places where people come together to discuss problems and can easily disappear into a rabbit-hole of depression, rather than proposing solutions. This conference’s organisers decided to do something different, by asking postgraduate students to put forward discussion points with suggestions of what could change, not just what was wrong.

There was an excellent session on soil erosion, which covered everything from the weight of tractors and farm vehicles, to how societies have focused on machinery and forgotten the importance of keeping the soil healthy. Students from Bocconi University came up with proposals and then experts from farming, policy and government were asked to respond.

It is this kind of approach that could make a long-term difference. Putting people from different walks of life into the same room, and asking them all what happens next and what could work has got to be a fruitful way of creating change, and that feels positive.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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Rachael Jolley, Environment Editor, The Conversation

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

A new version of Minecraft aims to teach students about coastal erosion, flood resilience and climate adaptation, and shows how children can use computer games to learn about complex situations.

CoastCraft is a new custom world from the educational arm of the Minecraft team that can be downloaded and added to the game. It is set in the seaside town of Bude, Cornwall, and players attempt to protect the coastal landscape from the various effects associated with sea-level rises and climate change. The game takes about an hour or two to complete.

Bude is experiencing increasing coastal erosion and the project was developed in conjunction with the UK Environment Agency and Cornwall Council as part of a £200 million flood and coastal erosion innovation programme.

In the game, students use animations to help them understand coastal erosion and rising sea levels before being able to explore and engage with a range of coastal management strategies (including relocating key infrastructure, using nature-based solutions such as plants, or potentially doing nothing at all).

I played the game for a few hours and found that the mechanics of Minecraft lent themselves very well to understanding the principles of environmental management.

If you do a bad job, the sea encroaches on the terrain and certain infrastructure is lost (for instance, a car park or toilets). These dynamics add to the immersive experience of the game. They also really nail the realities of future climate change in a way that is potentially far more relevant and digestible than scientific models and projections.

In making the decisions, you get to move around the map to chat with key people about the potential impact of going ahead with a decision and any other factors. You are limited by how much you can spend. Some decisions, like relocating the lifeguard hut, are very expensive (costing 75% of your total funds), while nature-based management, such as sand dune protection, costs nothing. Through this players are actively introduced to decision-making and the implications of their actions.

Throughout the game, there is a major emphasis on balancing the economic, social and environmental impact. You are able to fast-forward to 2040 and then again to 2060 to see what your decision-making looks like down the line.

After each round, you are sent back to a roundtable of NPCs (non-playing characters) who scrutinise your decisions before revealing a sustainability score on how well you managed to reconcile the competing economic, societal and environmental demands. Once you have finished the game, you can return to the main base and also chat to NPCs about different careers in coastal management.

At the University of East Anglia my team ran a series of workshops with staff and students from different disciplines to help establish what and how climate change should be taught (see figure below).

We suggest that teachers should try to include a range of skills into their curriculum design and planning (see image above) to help students understand the multiple ways in which the challenges of climate change can be managed. CoastCraft is an excellent example of this.

In this game students are in an immersive, digital experience that not only provides basic scientific knowledge but also introduces the idea that choices around environmental management have multiple outcomes that need to be anticipated. It shows that the balance between the environment, economy and society is a fragile one needing attention. Research found involving students in role-playing activities (in that case a pretend climate summit) could help them to understand the realities and politics of decision-making.

Making decisions

In CoastCraft, the experience of getting students to actively engage with decisions and trade-offs, deciding what forms of expertise to listen to or base decisions on, and then getting to witness how decisions affect the future can also be important in helping students understand the politics and challenges of local climate change adaptation.

Games can be used as a teaching method to convey complex environmental stories and immerse students in situations they may not otherwise have access to.

Recently, educational charity Students Organising for Sustainability found that only 22% of respondents felt that children and young people were prepared for climate change through their education. Anecdotally, I’ve had multiple students tell me that they want to learn about how to help solve the problem of climate and sustainability, not simply find out about why it is happening.

CoastCraft has managed to capture the politics of coastal management in an immersive experience. This is an impressive achievement, showing gameplay can be relevant and educational and still fun.

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Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda, Senior Research Associate, Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

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

Imagine a sloth. You probably picture a medium-size, tree-dwelling creature hanging from a branch. Today’s sloths – commonly featured on children’s backpacks, stationery and lunch boxes – are slow-moving creatures, living inconspicuously in Central American and South American rainforests.

But their gigantic Pleistocene ancestors that inhabited the Americas as far back as 35 million years ago were nothing like the sleepy tree huggers we know today. Giant ground sloths – some weighing thousands of pounds and standing taller than a single-story building – played vital and diverse roles in shaping ecosystems across the Americas, roles that vanished with their loss at the end of the Pleistocene.

In our new study, published in the journal Biology Letters, we aimed to reconstruct the diets of two species of giant ground sloths that lived side by side in what’s now Southern California. We analyzed remains recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits of what are colloquially termed the Shasta ground sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis) and Harlan’s ground sloth (Paramylodon harlani). Our work sheds light on the lives of these fascinating creatures and the consequences their extinction in Southern California 13,700 years ago has had on ecosystems.

Dentin dental challenges

Studying the diets of extinct animals often feels like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with only a portion of the puzzle pieces. Stable isotope analyses have revolutionized how paleoecologists reconstruct the diets of many ancient organisms. By measuring the relative ratios of light and heavy carbon isotopes in tooth enamel, we can figure out what kinds of foods an animal ate – for instance, grasses versus trees or shrubs.

But the teeth of giant ground sloths lack enamel, the highly inorganic and hard outer layer on most animal teeth – including our own. Instead, sloth teeth are made primarily of dentin, a more porous and organic-rich tissue that readily changes its chemical composition with fossilization.

Stable isotope analyses are less dependable in sloths because dentin’s chemical composition can be altered postmortem, skewing the isotopic signatures.

Another technique researchers use to glean information about an animal’s diet relies on analyzing the microscopic wear patterns on its teeth. Dental microwear texture analysis can infer whether an animal mostly ate tough foods such as leaves and grass or hard foods such as seeds and fruit pits. This technique is also tricky when it comes to sloths’ fossilized teeth because signs of wear may be preserved differently in the softer dentin than in harder enamel.

Prior to studying fossil sloths, we vetted dental microwear methods in modern xenarthrans, a group of animals that includes sloths, armadillos and anteaters. This study demonstrated that dentin microwear can reveal dietary differences between leaf-eating sloths and insect-consuming armadillos, giving us confidence that these tools could reveal dietary information from ground sloth fossils.

Distinct dietary niches revealed

Previous research suggested that giant ground sloths were either grass-eating grazers or leaf-eating browsers, based on the size and shape of their teeth. However, more direct measures of diet – such as stable isotopes or dental microwear – were often lacking.

Our new analyses revealed contrasting dental wear signatures between the two co-occurring ground sloth species. The Harlan’s ground sloth, the larger of the two, had microwear patterns dominated by deep pitlike textures. This kind of wear is indicative of chewing hard, mechanically challenging foods such as tubers, seeds, fungi and fruit pits. Our new evidence aligns with skeletal adaptations that suggest powerful digging abilities, consistent with foraging foods both above and below ground.

In contrast, the Shasta ground sloth exhibited dental microwear textures more akin to those in leaf-eating and woody plant-eating herbivores. This pattern corroborates previous studies of its fossilized dung, demonstrating a diet rich in desert plants such as yucca, agave and saltbush.

Next we compared the sloths’ microwear textures to those of ungulates such as camels, horses and bison that lived in the same region of Southern California. We confirmed that neither sloth species’ dietary behavior overlapped fully with other herbivores. Giant ground sloths didn’t perform the same ecological functions as the other herbivores that shared their landscape. Instead, both ground sloths partitioned their niches and played complementary ecological roles.

Extinctions brought ecological loss

The Harlan’s ground sloth was a megafaunal ecosystem engineer. It excavated soil and foraged underground, thereby affecting soil structure and nutrient cycling, even dispersing seed and fungal spores over wide areas. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some anachronistic fruits – such as the weird, bumpy-textured and softball-size Osage orange – were dispersed by ancient megafauna such as giant ground sloths. When the Pleistocene megafauna went extinct, the loss contributed to the regional restriction of these plants, since no one was around to spread their seeds.

The broader consequence is clear: Megafaunal extinctions erased critical ecosystem engineers, triggering cascading ecological changes that continue to affect habitat resilience today. Our results resonate with growing evidence that preserving today’s living large herbivores and understanding the diversity of their ecological niches is crucial for conserving functional ecosystems.

Studying the teeth of lost giant ground sloths has illuminated not only their diets but also the enduring ecological legacies of their extinction. Today’s sloths, though charming, only hint at the profound environmental influence of their prehistoric relatives – giants that shaped landscapes in ways we are only beginning to appreciate.

Larisa R. G. DeSantis, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University and Aditya Reddy Kurre, Dental Student, University of Pennsylvania

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

With the passing of Dr Jane Goodall, the world has lost a conservation giant. But her extraordinary achievements leave a profound legacy.

Goodall was a world-leading expert in animal behaviour and a globally recognised environmental and conservation advocate. She achieved all this at a time when women were commonly sidelined or ignored in science.

Her work with chimpanzees showed it was wrong to assume only humans used tools. She showed us the animals expressed emotions such as love and grief and have individual personalities.

Goodall showed us scientists can express their emotions and values and that we can be respected researchers as well as passionate advocates and science communicators. After learning about how chimpanzees were being used in medical research, she spoke out: “I went to the conference as a scientist, and I left as an activist.”

As childhood rights activist Marian Wright Edelman has eloquently put it, “You can’t be what you can’t see”.

Goodall showed what it was possible to be.

Forging her own path

Goodall took a nontraditional path into science. The brave step of going into the field at the age of 26 to make observations was supported by her mother.

Despite making world-first discoveries such as tool use by non-humans, people didn’t take her seriously because she hadn’t yet gone to university. Nowadays, people who contribute wildlife observations are celebrated under the banner of citizen science.

Goodall was a beacon at a time when science was largely dominated by men – especially remote fieldwork. But she changed that narrative. She convinced famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey to give her a chance. He first employed her as a secretary. But it wasn’t long until he asked her to go to Tanzania’s remote Gombe Stream National Park. In 1960, she arrived.

This was not easy. It took real courage to work in a remote area with limited support alongside chimpanzees, a species thought to be peaceful but now known to be far stronger than humans and capable of killing animals and humans.

Goodall is believed to be the only person accepted into chimpanzee society. Through calm but determined persistence she won their trust. These qualities served Goodall well – not just with chimps, but throughout her entire career advocating for conservation and societal change.

At Gombe, she showed for the first time that animals could fashion and use tools, had individual personalities, expressed emotions and had a higher intelligence and understanding than they were credited with.

Goodall was always an animal person and her love of chimps was in part inspired by her toy Jubilee, gifted by her father. She had close bonds with her pets and extended these bonds to wildlife. Goodall gave her study subjects names such as “David Greybeard”, the first chimp to accept her at Gombe.

Some argue we shouldn’t place a human persona on animals by naming them. But Goodall showed it was not only acceptable to see animals as individuals with different behaviours, but it greatly aids connection with and care for wildlife.

Goodall became an international voice for wildlife. She used her profile to encourage a focus on animal welfare in conservation, caring for both individuals and species.

A pioneer for women in science

With Goodall’s passing, the world has lost one of the three great “nonagenarian environmental luminaries”, to use co-author Vanessa Pirotta’s phrase. The other two are the naturalist documentary maker, Sir David Attenborough, 99, and famed marine biologist Dr Sylvia Earle, who is 90.

Goodall showed us women can be pioneering scientists and renowned communicators as well as mothers.

She shared her work in ways accessible to all generations, from National Geographic documentaries to hip podcasts.

Her visibility encouraged girls and women around the world to be bold and follow our own paths.

Goodall’s story directly inspired several authors of this article.

Co-author Marissa Parrott was privileged to have spoken to Goodall several times during her visits to Melbourne Zoo and on her world tours. Goodall’s story was a direct inspiration for Parrott’s own remote and international fieldwork, supported by her mother just as Goodall’s mother had supported her. They both survived malaria, which also kills chimpanzees and gorillas. Goodall long championed a One Health approach, recognising the health of communities, wildlife and the environment are all interconnected.

Co-author Zara Bending worked and toured alongside Goodall. The experience demonstrated how conservationists could be powerful advocates through storytelling, and how our actions reveal who we are. As Goodall once said:

every single one of us matters, every single one of us has a role to play, and every single one of us makes a difference every single day.

From the forest floor to global icon

Goodall knew conservation is as much about people as it is about wildlife and wild places.

Seventeen years after beginning her groundbreaking research in Gombe, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute with the mission of protecting wildlife and habitat by engaging local communities.

Her institute’s global network now spans five continents and continues her legacy of community-centred conservation. Researchers have now been studying the chimps at Gombe for 65 years.

Goodall moved from fieldwork to being a global conservation icon who regularly travelled more than 300 days a year. She observed many young people across cultures and creeds who had lost hope for their future amid environmental and climate destruction. In response, she founded a second organisation, Roots & Shoots, in 1991. Her goal was:

to foster respect and compassion for all living things, to promote understanding of all cultures and beliefs, and to inspire each individual to take action to make the world a better place for people, other animals, and the environment.

Last year, Roots & Shoots groups were active in 75 countries. Their work is a testament to Goodall’s mantra: find hope in action.

Protecting nature close to home

One of Goodall’s most remarkable attributes was her drive to give people the power to take action where they were. No matter where people lived or what they did, she helped them realise they could be part of the solution.

In a busy, urbanised world, it’s easier than ever to feel disconnected from nature. Rather than presenting nature as a distant concept, Goodall made it something for everyone to experience, care for and cherish.

She showed we didn’t have to leave our normal lives behind to protect nature – we could make just as much difference in our own communities.

One of her most famous quotes rings just as true today as when she first said it:

only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help shall all be saved.

Let’s honour her world-changing legacy by committing to understand, care and help save all species with whom we share this world. For Jane Goodall.

Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University; Kylie Soanes, Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Biodiversity, The University of Melbourne; Marissa Parrott, Honorary Research Associate in BioSciences, The University of Melbourne; Vanessa Pirotta, Postdoctoral Researcher and Wildlife Scientist, Macquarie University, and Zara Bending, Associate, Centre for Environmental Law, Macquarie University

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

This month marks 60 years since Dame Jane Goodall first ventured into the wilds of Gombe, Tanzania, at the tender age of 26 to study the behaviour of chimpanzees. She has devoted her life to species conservation and campaigned tirelessly for a healthier environment.

Jane is an icon of our era. Among her groundbreaking discoveries are that chimpanzees have personalities, use tools, have wars and can eat meat — all of which made us question our own behaviour as closely related great apes.

She established the Jane Goodall Institute, and her Roots and Shoots program now operates in more than 100 countries to encourage young people to be compassionate, helping people, animals and the environment.

When I first read about Jane’s work, I was amazed anyone could get so close to animals — in her case chimpanzees — to understand their minds, society and lives. For several decades, my research attempted to do the same for intensively farmed animals.

Jane and I ended up in the same philosophical place: committed to exposing the horrors of factory farming, and proudly vegetarian because of the damage eating meat does to animals, the environment and to people eating the end products.

With this in mind I relished the prospect of meeting Jane. She gave us all unique insights into the inner lives of one of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, as well as pioneering a compassionate approach to animals, a cause very close to my heart.

Clive Phillips: Jane, you famously dispelled the myth that humans are the only tool-users. Do humans have any unique characteristics to distinguish them from other animals?

Jane Goodall: Well, I believe the most important thing distinguishing us is the explosive development of the human intellect. We have developed communication using words, which means we can learn from our elders, we can plan for the future and we can teach our children about things that are not pleasant.

Above all, we can bring people together from different backgrounds to discuss a problem and try and find the solutions.

Phillips: Do you think this “human uniqueness” implies a responsibility towards animals?

Goodall: I would say it’s a humanistic responsibility. I mean, once you are prepared to admit that we humans are not the only beings on the planet with personalities, minds and, above all, emotions, and once you are prepared to admit that animals are sentient and can not only know emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, but especially they can feel pain — then, as humans with advanced reasoning powers, we have a responsibility to treat them in more humane ways than we so often do.

Phillips: You mentioned the importance of pain in animals and sentience. Does that give us a moral duty towards them? Or, do you think we have a right to manage them?

Goodall: Well, I don’t know about having a right to to manage them. But the problem is that because of the way our societies have developed, the harm we inflict on the environment, and the devastation we’ve caused so many species, we now have an obligation to try and change things so animals can have a better future.

We now know it’s not only the great apes, elephants and whales that are amazingly intelligent. We now know some birds like crows and the octopus can be, in some situations, more intelligent than small human children. Even some insects have been trained to do simple tests. This was unthinkable a while back.

We also know, for example, that trees can communicate to the micro fungi on their roots, under the soil. And this is amazing. It’s very exciting for any young person wanting to go into this field — these really are exciting times.

Phillips: Do you believe climate change will alter the relationship we have with other animals, and our ability to manage and use them in the way we do at the moment?

Goodall: We shouldn’t be managing and using them. We should be giving them the opportunity to live their own lives in their own way. And we should stop interfering.

We should protect habitat so that they can continue to flourish in their natural habitat. Those animals that we have subjugated to domestication should be treated as animals: sentient sapiens with feelings, knowing fear and depression and pain.

And we should really start thinking about what we’re doing in our factory farms, in our labs and with hunting. To me, that’s the most important thing.

Phillips: And that will, in itself, address some of the climate change issues, I imagine.

Goodall: Yes. Eating meat involves billions of animals in factory farms that have to be fed. Areas of environment are cleared to grow the grain, fossil fuels are used get the grain to the animals, the animals to the abattoir and the meat to the tables.

Water is wasted changing vegetable to animal protein, and methane the animals produce in their digestion is one of the most intense greenhouse gases. All of this means we have to do something about continuing to eat more and more meat.

Phillips: And yet the world is eating more and more meat.

Goodall: Well, we have to change attitudes. Yes, we’re eating more meat, but at the same time the number of people who are becoming vegetarian and vegan is increasing.

Phillips: It reminds me of one of your early discoveries of chimpanzees eating meat. Do you think that had an implication or any bearing on the human diet?

Goodall: Humans are not carnivorous, we are omnivorous. And there is a big difference. Our gut is not like a carnivore’s guts, which is short to get rid of the meat before it goes bad and inside your gut. We have a vegetarian gut, an omnivore’s diet. This means our gut is much longer to get all the goodness out of leaves and all the other things we eat.

So when you think of chimps — yes, they hunt, and they seem to love hunting. But it’s been estimated that meat occupies only about 2% of their diets. That’s just for some individuals. Others hardly ever eat meat at all.

Phillips: How can we best get the message across that a vegetarian diet is the most sustainable for the planet, and good for animal welfare?

Goodall: We’re working with young people from kindergarten through university, now in more than 50 countries, growing all the time. It involves young people of all ages choosing projects to make the world better for people, animals and the environment.

They are changing the way their parents think, and the vegetarian ethic is very strong in many of them. So I say you’ve got to change the mindset and children help to change the behaviour of their parents.

Phillips: That’s a tremendous piece of advocacy, given the huge concerns there are about animals’ contribution to climate change and other dangers they pose to our water supplies and the quality of our land.

Do you think there should be any legal control of the use of animals for intensive animal production?

Goodall: Yes, I do. I think it should be banned. A) for the tremendous suffering caused to the animals; B) for the harm to the environment; and C) for the harm to human health. There should be legislation that limits or bans these intensive farms.

This is an edited version of the original interview.

Clive Phillips, Professor of Animal Welfare, Centre for Animal Welfare and Ethics, The University of Queensland

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

Have you heard offshore windfarms kill whales? (They don’t.) Or that electric vehicles catch fire more often than petrol cars? (It’s the opposite.) Perhaps you’ve heard “natural” gas is clean? (It can be worse than coal.)

This is what climate misinformation looks like. These claims are common, influential and damaging. They’re often spread for a reason: to slow the uptake of clean alternatives to fossil fuels. Unfortunately, they are shaping public opinion.

This week, a Senate inquiry is hearing testimony from officials, climate scientists and researchers about the scale of the problem and its effects on Australian politics. Policymakers are also hearing about the main culprits: oil, gas and coal companies, as well as key enablers such as public relations firms. I was one of the experts called to give evidence.

My research has followed the money trail between the fossil fuel industry and public relations firms. As a co-editor on a forthcoming book on climate obstruction, I can say that large PR firms have too often put their commercial interests, and the interests of fossil fuel giants, ahead of those of the public. My colleagues and I made this clear in our submission to the inquiry.

What’s the point of misinformation?

In the climate domain, researchers typically use the word “misinformation” to refer to any falsehoods about climate change. They can be spread innocuously or through a deliberate campaign.

Misinformation matters because it can influence attitudes and behaviours of both the public and political elites. Tackling climate change effectively requires public support for clean energy and many other changes. Misinformation erodes this support for climate science and climate policies. The more often false information is repeated, the more likely we are to think of it as true.

These campaigns can inflate the sense of opposition to climate action and give policymakers a false sense of how widespread support for climate action is.

Australian policymakers have previously moved to ban or restrict advertising for products known to be dangerous. Cigarette advertising is banned because cigarettes cause cancer, and now there’s a growing push to ban fossil fuel advertising due to the damage done by emissions.

How do PR firms spread climate misinformation?

PR and advertising firms have long been paid to craft political campaigns for oil and gas companies often to block or slow climate policies.

These campaigns involve more than simply running a few television ads for a corporate client. PR firms often run polling, focus groups and media and social media campaigns. Some undertake astroturfing – creating fake community groups to give the impression of widespread support or opposition for an issue or policy.

The largest of these campaigns have been documented in the United States. To gauge how much the oil and gas industry pours into PR firms to run political campaigns, my colleague and I analysed a decade’s worth of the tax records of industry groups active on climate change issues in the US. We found oil and gas lobby groups spent A$1.5 billion on public relations and advertising between 2008 and 2018.

What did this money buy? Here’s one example. Ahead of the US presidential election in 2012, a group named “Energy Citizens” ran an ad campaign titled “I’m an energy voter” across newspapers, television and online, featuring ordinary Americans saying “I vote … for American domestic energy”.

Energy Citizens appeared to be a grassroots campaign. But in reality, it was astroturfing. The oil and gas industry had contracted the large PR firm Edelman to run the campaign. The people in the ads were hired actors. Between 2011 and 2012, our data shows the largest oil and gas industry group, the American Petroleum Institute, paid Edelman A$180 million in contracts for public relations and advertising.

Climate obstruction is common in Australia

This is not a US-specific problem. PR firms have a long history of helping obstruct climate policy in Australia, too. The effective coal industry campaign against an emissions trading scheme in Australia between 2008 and 2010 was created by PR firms and political consultants.

Australia’s poor disclosure practices mean we don’t know how much money industry groups are paying PR companies in Australia.

But we do know PR companies are creating misinformation campaigns and astroturfing groups such as Australians for Natural Gas, which describes itself as a non-government organisation. It was set up by the chief executive of gas company Tamboran Resources, with help from PR firm Freshwater Strategy, according to media reports.

Many PR firms in Australia have worked for the fossil fuel industry, as documented by climate communications charity Comms Declare. In response, some PR professionals are pushing to cut ties with the industry.

Misinformation is dangerous

The problem has been recognised at the highest levels. Last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on PR firms to “stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction”.

Last month, the Australian government released its long-awaited report on the very real and escalating dangers posed by climate change.

This week’s Senate hearings could not be more timely. Climate misinformation is spreading wildly – aided by public relations firms – even as climate change worsens and the risks mount. The question now is, how will policymakers respond?

Christian Downie, Professor of Political Science, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University

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

Native animals can make excellent neighbours. Blue banded bees pollinate our vegetable gardens. Microbats eat up to 1,200 mosquitoes a night and powerful owls keep rodents at bay. But could we go one step further, and change our homes to invite native animals in as housemates?

Cities are biodiversity hotspots and have an important role in tackling the extinction crises for animals, plants and insects. As cities continue to sprawl, our buildings have become increasingly important habitat for wildlife.

Animals are not the only ones to benefit. Evidence shows noticing wildlife at home can lead to better mental health. Co-habitating with wildlife can also help you feel more at home.

But how can we intentionally design our homes to co-inhabit with wildlife? That’s the question explored by When Wildlife Moves In, a new work at the National Gallery of Victoria. The work, created by the authors of this article, uses data from Wildlife Victoria to explore how homes can become shared ecological resources.

Here are eight easy ways to invite wildlife into your home and backyard.

1. Give butterflies a drink from your air con

Urban butterflies are declining at alarming rates around the world. At the same time, water dripping from air conditioners wastes millions of litres of clean water daily. Studies show this water is safe to reuse for nature.

Butterflies, for example, like to sip water from shallow water sources because they tend to get stuck in deeper water.

Solution? Leave an area of gravel beneath your air conditioner vent to create a “puddling” station for butterflies. This will transform what would otherwise go down our drains into habitat for a beloved pollinator.

2. Provide city birds with scarce nesting material

The scarcity of natural nesting materials in cities poses challenges for some animals. Many are forced to get creative – sometimes incorporating dangerous or lethal alternatives such as plastics into their nests.

Solution? Leave a bowl out in your backyard providing nesting materials such as lawn clippings, native grasses, bark strips and untreated hair. This will help native birds such as the Australian magpie and the Pied Butcherbird

3. Move indoor plants away from windows

Glass doors and windows are a serious threat to birds. In the United States alone, as many as a billion birds each year are killed or badly injured flying into glass.

Solution? Move indoor plants out of view through windows and doors so birds don’t mistake them for habitat. Or put anti-collision stickers on your windows, ensuring they are high contrast in colour and spaced no more than 5–10 cm apart.

4. Remove the concrete from your backyard

Concrete slabs destroy soil microorganisms and prevent animals from digging and tunnelling to create nesting sites.

Wombats are ecosystem engineers. Their burrowing aerates soil, improves water infiltration and cycles organic material and nutrients. But urban development fragments their habitat and concrete foundations seal off natural soil ecosystems. When this happens, wombats adapt by creating alternative burrow systems under houses, decks and other human structures.

Solution? Remove the concrete slabs from your backyard and leave open soil with vegetation or a raised deck in its place.

5. Leave the cavities in your houses unsealed

Natural tree hollows are disappearing at an alarming rate due to urban sprawl and tree removals. It has forced microbats and other hollow-dependent species to seek refuge in dark spaces in our buildings, such as wall cavities, roof voids and building crevices.

Solution? Let the bats continue living in your building cavities. If you are bothered by them, wait until they leave, then provide a bat nesting box so they can safely continue living.

6. Plant the ‘missing’ layer birds need

Australian cities are missing a crucial habitat layer — the “middle storey” between ground cover and tall trees. This gap in coverage allows aggressive species such as noisy miners to dominate, pushing out smaller native birds and threatening endangered species.

Solution? Plant more shrubs and bushes to create a bushy layer of 2-4 metres. This helps smaller birds such as Superb Fairy-wrens find places to hide. It’s also useful to include habitat elements such as log piles and rocks.

7. Keep your cats inside

Every free-roaming cat is a threat to wildlife. Feral and free-roaming cats collectively kill more than three billion animals a year in Australia.

Cats have played a leading role in most of Australia’s 34 mammal extinctions since 1788, and are a big reason why populations of at least 123 other threatened native species are declining.

Solution? “Catios”, or cat patios, allow cats to experience nature but keep wildlife safe from predators.

8. Build a frog sauna

Some of the best wildlife-friendly ideas are surprisingly simple. Frog saunas, for instance, are small structures with frog-sized holes, made from black bricks or similar materials that heat up in the sun. These structures help fight chytrid fungus, a devastating disease that’s pushing many Australian frog species toward extinction.

Chytrid thrives in cold conditions but dies in heat, making these warm refuges potentially life-saving for local amphibians. Instructions for building your own frog sauna are free, requiring little more than recycled materials and a sunny spot in your garden.

A shared future

Australian cities are important for conserving biodiversity – and our homes can help. Thoughtful, intentional design can better support the species that need our support.

If you want to find ways to co-habitate with native wildlife, click here for more solutions.

When Wildlife Moves In is part of the exhibition Making Good: Redesigning the Everyday, showing at the NGV Ian Potter Gallery. The exhibition explores how designers are reshaping the products and systems that shape our daily lives.

Bethany Kiss, PhD Candidate, RMIT University; Mark Jacques, Professor of Architecture, RMIT University. Director, Openwork Pty Ltd., RMIT University, and Sarah Bekessy, Professor in Sustainability and Urban Planning, Leader, Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group (ICON Science), RMIT University

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

It’s official: the only Australian shrew is no more.

The latest edition of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the world’s most comprehensive global inventory on extinction risk, has declared the Christmas Island shrew is extinct.

The news may not seem momentous. After all, most Australians know nothing of shrews and would be unaware this one species counted among our native fauna.

But the shrew’s extinction increases the tally of Australian mammals extinct since 1788 to 39 species. This is far more than for any other country. These losses represent about 10% of all Australia’s land mammal species before colonisation. It is a deplorable record of trashing an extraordinary legacy.

So, what are shrews?

Shrews are small, long-nosed, insect-eating mammals, with many species widely distributed across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. On mainland Australia, similar roles are filled by unrelated small marsupials such as dunnarts, antechinuses, planigales and ningauis, which are themselves not writ large on our national consciousness.

Many people will know of shrews only courtesy of Shakespeare. Combining misogyny and zoophobia (an intense fear of animals) he used the name of this inoffensive animal to describe a shrill, ever-complaining, grating caricature of women. The offensive term has stuck through the ages, draining sympathy for and interest in the animal.

The history of Australia’s shrew

It must have been a harrowing voyage. Tens of thousands of years ago, a small family of shrews (or a pregnant female) rafted on floating vegetation, from islands of what is now Indonesia. Haphazardly, they landed on uninhabited Christmas Island, now an Australian territory about 1,500 kilometres west of the mainland. These lucky or reckless pioneers gave rise to Australia’s only shrew species.

For many years the Christmas Island shrew prospered. When European naturalists first visited Christmas Island in the 1890s, at the time of its settlement, they remarked:

[…] this little animal is extremely common all over the island, and at night its shrill shriek, like the cry of a bat, can be heard on all sides.

Change came quickly thereafter. In 1900, black rats were accidentally introduced, stowaways on hay bales. Worse, these rats were infested with trypanosomes, a cellular parasite. These trypanosomes spread rapidly to the island’s two species of native rats (and presumably the shrew).

The long isolation of Christmas Island had cocooned its native mammals, leaving them with no resistance to new diseases. Within a year, island residents began seeing many dying rats stumbling across the forest floor.

By the time naturalists next visited the island in 1908, the two species of native rats and the Christmas Island shrew were thought to have become extinct. Subsequently, many other endemic animals were also lost or suffered serious declines due to the introduction of cats and invasive species of ants, snails, plants, giant centipedes, birds and snakes.

It is a pattern that has occurred repeatedly across the world’s islands. Introductions of plants and animals have subverted island ecosystems and, as a consequence, endemic island species represent a disproportionately high number of the world’s extinctions.

Defying extinction?

But the shrew lived on. After not being seen for more than 50 years, two survivors were caught in the 1950s as bulldozers cleared a patch of rainforest for mining. The shrews were released and the find was not reported until many years later.

Then, nothing for another 30 years. In December 1984, biologists Hugh Yorkston and Jeff Tranter were clearing a rainforest track and came across a live female shrew in a clump of fallen birds’ nest fern. They kept the shrew in a terrarium for 12-18 months, industriously catching grasshoppers to feed it.

At the time, they didn’t consider this a final opportunity to conserve the species through a captive breeding program. When, with extraordinary serendipity, a male shrew was found alive only a few months later in March 1985, it was kept in a separate terrarium. The female was docile but the male was aggressive. It also appeared unwell.

Whatever the reason, there was no introduction, no consummation and no baby shrews. The male died about three weeks after capture while the female lingered on, alone.

No shrews left

Since 1984, there have been no recorded sightings. This means only four Christmas Island shrews have been reported in over 120 years.

Almost no information on the biology of this species has been published, other than the single sentence written by naturalist Charles Andrews in 1900:

[…] it lives in holes in rocks and roots of trees, and seems to feed mainly on beetles.

There are few pictures. However, inklings of the nature of the last known shrew can be seen in a beautiful sketch by the park ranger, naturalist and artist Max Orchard.

In the nearly 40 years since the death of the last known individual, two recovery plans have been compiled, outlining the actions needed to conserve the species. There have been targeted searches. But no shrews have turned up to benefit from those plans.

The most telling evidence of their extinction is the absence of any shrews in the stomach contents of hundreds of feral cats culled over the past few decades.

While the shrew clearly survived until the 1980s, this decade saw the arrival of yet another threat, the Asian wolf snake. This snake quickly spread across the island, most likely causing the extinction of the island’s endemic microbat, the Christmas Island pipistrelle, in 2009 and most of the endemic lizards. The snake’s arrival also probably marked the death knell for any remaining shrews.

We must try harder to prevent extinctions

Extinction can be difficult to prove, especially for a species as cryptic as the shrew. There is peril in categorising a species as extinct when it still survives. This misclassification has been termed the “Romeo error”, where formal recognition of a species as extinct can result in the withdrawal of funding or protection, and hence increase likelihood of actual extinction.

In 2022, the Australian government through then-Minister for the Environment Tanya Plibersek pledged, admirably, to preventing any more extinctions. Although today’s formal recognition of the shrew’s extinction comes after that pledge, the last shrew probably died one to two decades beforehand.

The shrew’s loss is a reminder of the enormity of the challenge of preventing further extinctions, of the diverse ways these losses can happen, of the need to seize opportunities to protect rare species, and of the importance of a national and political commitment to prevent extinction.

I hope the Christmas Island shrew is not extinct; after all it has defied previous calls of its demise. Perhaps somewhere, a small furtive family of shrews are hanging on, elusive survivors, secure in the knowledge of their own existence and waiting to prove the pessimists wrong.

Hugh Yorkston, Jeff Tranter and Paul Meek helped with this article.