During Australia’s unprecedented heatwave in late January, air temperatures reached 50°C in inland South Australia.

Days of sustained heat and hot nights did real damage. A flying fox colony was all but wiped out in South Australia, while Western Australian mango growers suffered major crop losses as fruit literally boiled.

These increasingly extreme heatwaves are now posing a real threat to the crops and livestock on which we rely, as well as Australia’s wildlife and ecosystems.

But in coming decades, intensifying climate change will push summer temperatures beyond the records set this summer. Even after the world reaches net zero, unprecedented heatwaves will persist for centuries.

Most living things are strongly affected by heat. Sustained intense heat can degrade proteins inside plant and animal cells, cause cell membranes to rupture and disrupt metabolic processes essential to survival. That is, sustained heat can weaken and kill living things in many ways.

Everything in Australia has to cope with heat. But the continent’s wildlife and peoples are not prepared for the heat to come, or the changes this will force on natural ecosystems and food production.

We are not powerless. We could introduce more heat-tolerant plant species and engineer landscapes to create heat refuges. But we must plan for it.

Farms under threat

Australian farmers are already feeling the consequences. Wheat yields have stopped steadily increasing and have plateaued, due in part to more frequent heatwaves. Heat causes wheat to photosynthesise less and damages pollen in cereal crops, leading to less fertile seed and big falls in yields.

Heatwaves burn grape leaves, cutting grape yields and worsening wine quality. Almond growers are battling falls in photosynthesis, pollination and nut quality.

These threats are not hypothetical. Farmers are already grappling with the damage, while authorities see heat as a major threat to adapt to across the Riverland, Sunraysia and Mallee agricultural regions.

Heatwaves are driving ecosystems into decline

Extreme heatwaves can trigger mass die-offs of plants and animals.

Satellite and field evidence show extreme heat can scorch the leaves of many plants and trigger widespread leaf death across tree canopies. Without their protective canopy and with less ability to photosynthesise, trees are at higher risk of dying. This is one reason more trees are dying across Australia.

Extreme heat can push entire ecosystems past their physiological limits, causing sudden death across many species.

When several days of extreme heat hit, some organisms will be unable to repair the damage to their cells. As our new research shows, sustained heat is most damaging when the heat stays overnight.

Heat stress builds up progressively over years, weakening ecosystems and leaving them more vulnerable to fire, drought, pests and disease. A ecosystem which may seem OK can be hit by this “ecological debt” months or years later.

What can we do?

As extreme heat becomes a regular feature of Australia’s summer, we face unavoidable decisions over whether to intervene.

The question is what trade-offs we will be willing to accept.

1. Should we introduce more heat-tolerant plant species?

Some native plants, crops, insects and microbes can tolerate extreme heat far better, while others succumb.

If we introduce naturally heat-tolerant plant species or varieties into vulnerable landscapes, we could help ecosystems to keep functioning. But this boost to resilience would alter the character of existing ecosystems.

For farms, advances in molecular biology and crop genetics have made it possible to create crops with better heat tolerance faster than traditional breeding methods.

Precision gene editing and genetic modification approaches can improve heat tolerance by protecting a plant’s most vulnerable reproductive tissues and strengthening cells during extreme heat events. Success will depend on whether governments and communities are willing to adopt them.

2. Should we engineer landscapes to create thermal refuges?

Heat isn’t experienced uniformly. That’s because organisms live in microclimates with varying shade, soil depth, types of plants and moisture.

While leaves and soils are often much hotter than the surrounding air, microclimates can offer cooler refuges. We could scale up these thermal refuges through careful revegetation, canopy restructuring, water placement and better fire and grazing strategies. These could build resilience into landscapes, if authorities were willing to plan, invest and manage these programs at scale. We’re already seeing small-scale examples such as keeping flying foxes cool with water.

That’s not to say thermal refuges are a silver bullet. Feasibility will vary across ecosystems and scales.

In cities and towns, planting canopy trees, restoring wetlands and redesigning built surfaces is proven to reduce surface temperatures and could help species survive.

In farming regions, planting shelter belts of large trees, diversifying crops and working to keep moisture in the soil can protect crop yields and native species.

In more remote or wilder landscapes, going down this path would raise harder questions about what constitutes natural resilience. Would this kind of assisted adaptation favour some species? As heat intensifies, the debate will likely shift from whether we intervene to how deliberately and equitably we do so.

These questions aren’t purely scientific or technical. They pose societal choices around which values we prioritise when trade-offs are unavoidable.

We have to start planning now

We believe it will soon be necessary to intervene in ecosystems to boost heat resilience. We urgently need more research to understand how heat damage accumulates in different organisms and how we can support recovery.

We will also have to identify traits for heat-tolerance in as many native species as possible and learn how to cool landscapes and protect ecosystems at scale.

The stakes are extremely high. We can either act now in a deliberate, evidence-based way – or we can wait until accumulated heat forces change on us, after much has been irreversibly lost.

Owen Atkin, Director of the ANU Agrifood Innovation Institute, Australian National University; Adrienne Nicotra, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Research School of Biology, the Australian National University, Australian National University; Belinda Medlyn, Distinguished Professor, Ecosystem Function and Integration, Western Sydney University, and Michael Kearney, Professor in Ecophysiology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Melbourne

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

The Western Australian government recently announced the controversial closure of commercial and recreation fishing to prevent a collapse in the populations of under-threat species, such as popular dhufish and pink snapper.

Fishing for these demersal (bottom dwelling) species has been closed along a 900-kilometre stretch of coastline in south-west WA. There are plans to reopen the area in spring 2027, but for recreational fishing only.

One additional measure stands out: once the fishery opens, large “no-take” demersal recovery zones are proposed where all bottom fishing will be banned.

While no-take zones are a key part of Australia’s conservation strategy, they are more often used to create marine parks, rather than to improve fisheries. Proposed no-take zones have been historically unpopular with fishers. But perhaps we can have our cake and eat it too. Does closing areas of ocean to fishing result in a boost to fish numbers inside the protected areas and in surrounding fishing grounds?

Our recent research suggests the answer is yes. Setting aside no-take areas of the ocean, combined with standard fisheries management in the areas still open to fishing, can increase overall numbers of spawning fish. This means greater catch rates for fishers in surrounding areas.

Building a digital reef

We focused on the population of spangled emperor fish – a golden-coloured fish prized by anglers – in the iconic Ningaloo World Heritage Area. Currently, 34% of Ningaloo is covered by no-take zones, the largest percentage for any region in Australia. These zones were created to protect the diversity of species and create natural areas for tourism, education and science.

Understanding if no-take areas actually benefit fisheries is a challenging task. To compare the effects of protection and closures with standard fisheries management, we built a computer model for the spangled emperor population at Ningaloo.

We divided the reef into more than 1,800 spatial “cells” and included information about habitat distribution, fish movement, reproduction, mortality rates and how much and where fishing was occurring.

The resulting model is a digital “twin” of the spangled emperor population at Ningaloo. It helped us try to answer the question: how best to conserve and manage this vital resource?

Exploring the possibilities

We explored several scenarios: what would happen with only standard fisheries management in place, compared with the addition of no-take zones or closing the area to fishing for five months. We also looked at what might have been achieved by combining all approaches.

The no-take zones delivered clear benefits, particularly by boosting the number of large mature fish and the number of offspring they produced. Closing the area for a five-month period was similarly effective for increasing fish abundance, but less so for large mature fish. Combining the two approaches resulted in a greater increase in large mature fish and replenishment of young fish.

Interestingly, our model predicted the addition of no-take zones resulted in recreational fishing catch rates doubling in open areas near where the fishers accessed the ocean (for example, within 10 kilometres of a boat ramp).

Bigger, older fish matter

Female fish of many species produce far more eggs as they grow larger. One big, older female can produce as many eggs as a dozen or more smaller adults. No‑take zones protect these large individuals, allowing them to survive longer and build up inside protected areas. Their offspring drift into surrounding waters, replenishing stocks and ultimately boosting catches for fishers.

These benefits are greatest for species that remain relatively local. Highly mobile species may require larger or connected no-take zones to achieve the same effect. In this way, no‑take zones help sustain healthy fish populations and fisheries.

Some in the fishing community have historically opposed protected areas, seeing the loss of access as negative. But when we talked to fishers at boat ramps around Australia, many supported protected areas and sensed what our model confirms: setting aside no-take zones can improve environmental outcomes.

Our research suggests strategic no-take zones – like those in the WA government’s announcement – along with effective management of fishing in other areas could replenish fish populations and increase catches.

We have consistently found that studying no-take zones provides a cost-effective way to understand fish habitat preference, their home-range size and how they spawn. This information will be key to designing no-take zones to protect fish spawning, recover populations and make fishing more sustainable.

Tim Langlois, Research Fellow in marine ecosystems, The University of Western Australia; Charlotte Aston, Postdoctoral research fellow, Indian Ocean Marine Research Centre, The University of Western Australia, and Matt Navarro, Research fellow in marine ecology, The University of Western Australia

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

Over the past decade, southern Australia has suffered numerous extreme weather and climate events, such as record-breaking heatwaves, bushfires, two major droughts and even flash flooding.

While Australia has always had these disasters, our research reveals these new extremes are the result of dramatic climate-driven changes in the upper atmosphere above Australia.

Eight to ten kilometres above the ground, the fast-flowing jet stream air currents have shifted further southwards, dragging rain-bearing winter weather systems away from Australia’s southern coastline.

This means southern Australia has experienced at least 25% less annual rainfall and is currently gripped by a continuing drought. Our findings should be a wake-up call for governments, primary producers and residents of some of Australia’s largest cities: the hotter, drier weather is here to stay.

Drought in the south, wet in the east

Southern Australia comprises the coastal and adjacent areas in the south of the continent, stretching about 4,000 kilometres from Perth to east of Melbourne. This region is home to ten million people, or about 35% of Australia’s population.

The two most recent droughts in southern Australia were the Tinderbox drought, from 2017 to 2019, and the present drought, which has not been named. It began in 2023 and is continuing into February 2026.

Drought is primarily a meteorological, or weather-related, phenomenon. It is defined by intense rainfall deficiencies over three months or longer, which severely impact agricultural production, water supplies and ecosystems.

Notably, six of the past ten years were dry, tipping much of southern Australia into drought. In marked contrast, eastern Australia, including Sydney and Brisbane, experienced moderate to extreme wet conditions, including flash flooding. The map below shows drought in southern Australia in 2023–25.

The meteorological factors that drive drought in southern Australia, and the shift from dry to wet conditions in eastern Australia, can be explained by shifts in the upper atmospheric jet streams. These are fast-flowing, narrow air currents high in the atmosphere, about 8–10km above Earth.

Major changes to the jet streams

Our research reveals dramatic changes to the jet streams in the Australian region, particularly in the past decade. Put simply, jet streams are fast-moving belts of westerly winds in the upper atmosphere. They steer cold fronts and low-pressure systems across southern Australia, from west to east, determining rainfall and temperature patterns.

In the Australian region there is a subtropical jetstream over northern Australia and a polar jet stream in the mid-latitude westerly winds south of Australia. Historically, the jetstreams have steered the rain-bearing systems over southern Australia.

We discovered the subtropical jet stream, which brings rainy weather systems, has shifted about 10 degrees of latitude (roughly 1,000km) southwards towards the pole, since 2015.

This shift has caused traditional rain-producing weather systems to track south of the continent, completely missing southern Australia. Our previous research comparing 1965 to 1992, and 1993 to 2020, also showed the jet streams had shifted towards Antarctica.

This shift is due to climate change from increased greenhouse gas emissions that continues to warm the oceans and atmosphere. As the world keeps warming, the jet streams will be pushed further poleward.

Hence the jet stream changes are responsible for both the current drought, and the Tinderbox Drought (2017–19). Each drought was caused by below-average winter rainfall from April to October. And the greatest relocation of Australian region jet streams occurred in the past decade.

Where were the droughts?

Between 2023 and 2025, almost all of southern Australia experienced a serious to extreme lack of rain, causing severe to exceptional drought conditions. Drought has affected Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, straining existing water supplies.

Brief winter rainfall in July 2025 provided some local relief, however, the impact was short-lived. Recently, the summer months from December 2025 to February 2026 brought extreme heat and record low rainfall. Consequently, drought continues into January and February 2026. In striking contrast, parts of eastern and northern Australia received record rainfall and flash floods.

In southern Australian, coastal and inland areas, river systems and dams are experiencing greatly reduced water supplies. This reflects the continuing long-term impacts of global warming.

In Adelaide, three extremely dry years have reduced water inflows to reservoirs. The city’s single desalination plant quadrupled its output from January last year, to meet demand. Perth has experienced a long-term rainfall decline since 1970. It has two desalination plants and is building a third.

After briefly recovering during the La Niña years from 2021 to 2023, Melbourne’s dams are at their lowest levels since the Tinderbox Drought. Melbourne received well below average rainfall through to October 2025. Its desal plant was activated briefly in 2022, and was reactivated in April 2025. A second Melbourne plant is planned, but will take almost a decade to complete.

Primed to burn

Droughts and low winter rainfall means southern Australia is very susceptible to bushfire. Heatwaves and dry vegetation at the beginning of this summer brought catastrophic bushfire conditions, bolstered by dry, westerly wind changes. This caused catastrophic bushfires in southern Australia. More than 430,000 hectares have been burned in Victoria.

These conditions should be a jolting wakeup call. A possible El Niño, or warming climate pattern, later in 2026 is likely to worsen existing drought conditions in southern Australia. Melbourne’s water storage is at 70% capacity and is in danger of falling much lower. Southern Australia needs to ready itself for a hot, dry year

Milton Speer, Visiting Fellow, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney and Lance M Leslie, Professor, School of Mathematical And Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

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

Let’s say you want to encourage more drivers to shift to battery-electric vehicles. What’s the best way to do it?

Globally, billions have been poured into incentives to encourage drivers to switch. The most popular approaches are rebates to cut the purchase cost and schemes to fund fast public chargers. The logic is simple: make EVs cheaper and public charging easier and consumers will follow.

But my recent research on Australian battery-electric vehicle policies suggests it’s not simple. Highly visible policies subsidising the upfront cost of new battery-electric vehicles represent surprisingly bad value for money.

What shifts the dial much more are quieter policies reducing annual running costs, boosting convenience and strengthening consumer understanding. The best return on investment comes from subsidising home and workplace EV chargers. This is because of the large savings on annual operating cost and the certainty and convenience of charging cheaply at home or at workplace.

As Australian policymakers review tax exemptions on new battery EVs, it’s worth taking a hard look at what actually drives uptake in an economically efficient way.

Australia’s slow start

Sales of battery and plug-in hybrid EVs rose to over 13% of new vehicles last December – the highest percentage to date.

But Australia is lagging. Battery-electric vehicles globally averaged more than 20% of new car sales last year.

To understand what drives uptake efficiently, I asked a panel of Australian industry experts to shortlist top policy contenders based on a systematic review of successful global policies. I ran benefit-cost analyses of the six shortlisted policies and projected how effective they would be over 30 years.

These policies were: purchase rebates, public and private charging, education programs, incentives to cut operating costs and fuel efficiency standards.

How do these policies rank?

Of the six, two clearly stood out as boosts to uptake – private chargers and education programs. Public chargers didn’t give much economic return, but are essential to giving drivers certainty.

Purchase rebates and cheaper operating costs: popular underperformers

Purchase rebates give buyers some money back to effectively make the EV cheaper. These policies aim to support early adopters who might be deterred by higher upfront costs.

The problem is, they don’t work very well. My analysis shows these policies have a benefit-cost ratio of just 0.88, returning just 88 cents in benefits for every dollar spent.

Why? Freeriders. Many well-heeled people who get the rebate would likely have bought the vehicle anyway. But the policies do little to drive change with other groups.

International studies similarly show broad-based rebates are often weak in encouraging people to buy battery-electric vehicles who weren’t already planning to, while benefits disproportionately flow to higher-income households.

Incentives to cut operating costs had the same poor benefit-cost ratio of 0.88. These incentives – such as exemptions from road tolls and parking discounts – are more evenly spread, as they extend to secondhand owners.

Fuel efficiency: exceptional on value, modest on uptake

At the start of 2025, the long-awaited New Vehicle Efficiency Standard came into effect, bringing Australia into line with other developed nations.

Low implementation costs give these standards the highest benefit-cost ratio of all policies assessed at almost 47.

Importantly, the policy is technology-neutral, meaning it acts to cut emissions across all vehicle technologies, including hybrids and internal combustion engines.

But while the standards are a highly cost-effective way to cut transport emissions, they won’t drive mass uptake of battery-electric vehicles. They function as a foundational policy — efficient, essential but insufficient on their own.

Rebates for home and work chargers: strong boost to uptake

Incentives for home or workplace smart chargers are little discussed. But these policies had the highest total return on investment and a benefit-cost ratio of 1.86, as well as strong effects on uptake over time.

Why? Cost savings and convenience. Smart chargers let households charge cheaply at off-peak times or from rooftop solar, which also eases pressure on the grid. Owners strongly value the convenience of charging at home or work, rather than having to go to a public charger and wait for the car to charge. In the future, vehicle-to-grid technologies allowing owners to sell power to the grid will be another incentive.

The policy would be particularly effective in Australia, where off-street parking and rooftop solar are common. To date, Australia doesn’t have a nationwide rebate for home chargers.

Public fast chargers: important but not economically efficient

Australian governments prefer to fund public fast chargers rather than offer rebates for home chargers. This makes some sense, as fast chargers give drivers more certainty they can recharge away from home.

It’s not very efficient, with a low benefit-cost ratio of 0.88. But public charging is more equitable than purchase rebates, as these chargers give renters and people in apartments a way to charge. The chargers boost confidence in the network, even if they are used infrequently.

While public fast-charging has a borderline economic benefit, it’s essential on a social and psychological front.

Public education and exposure: surprisingly effective

Information campaigns and public education are another underappreciated policy option. Test-drives and hands-on demonstrations let people new to the technology become comfortable.

Education policies tackle common information gaps and misconceptions around range, battery life, charging costs and safety.

These programs are cheap and highly effective, with a benefit-cost ratio of 3.05 and an initial boost to uptake.

Which way forward?

In earlier research, we found different policies were more effective at different stages of battery-electric vehicle adoption. This means it’s important for policymakers to put the right policies in place at the right time.

Until now, Australian policymakers have focused on building the network of public chargers and giving rebates to reduce purchase prices.

But as our research shows, it’s not always the shiniest, most popular policies which do the heavy lifting.

We could get far better traction with less visible but more effective policies around private chargers and education programs – and making sure purchase rebates go to people who need them.

Anilan V, Postdoctoral Researcher, Adelaide University

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

You might have heard the common claim that electric cars aren’t really green – that their lithium-ion batteries rely on “blood” minerals such as cobalt, mined in terrible conditions.

The critique had some truth to it. But this claim is no longer accurate. Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers have been shifting away from cobalt because it’s expensive, toxic and ethically fraught.

What’s replacing it? Cheaper lithium-ion battery chemistries based on lithium iron phosphate (LFP), which avoid cobalt entirely. If you remember high-school chemistry, you’ll remember batteries have an anode and a cathode. The anode is nearly always graphite. But the cathode can be made from many different minerals and compounds.

This means battery makers have a great deal of choice over which minerals to include. There’s huge innovation taking place in batteries, as the market grows and diversifies across vehicles and energy storage. Even cheaper chemistries are emerging based around salt (sodium-ion), while high-performance solid state batteries are coming close to reality.

What happened to cobalt?

For years, cobalt has been a mainstay in cathodes due to its useful properties, including how much energy it can help store.

When the first commercial lithium-ion batteries arrived in the 1990s, the chemistry relied on cobalt (lithium cobalt oxide). Over time, lithium nickel mangananese cobalt (NMC) oxide and lithium nickel cobalt aluminium (NCA) oxide came to dominate the market, as their high energy density made them ideally suited for portable electronics.

As demand for lithium-ion batteries accelerated, sourcing cobalt began to be a problem. Three quarters of mined cobalt comes from one country: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has half the world’s reserves. Australia is second, with 20%.

Cobalt is toxic. In the DRC, many people risk their health in small mines under conditions often described as slave-like. Illegal and legal mines can do huge environmental damage.

This and other issues led researchers to begin working on reducing or cutting cobalt out altogether. This led to low-cobalt chemistries, in which most of the cobalt was swapped for nickel, manganese or aluminium. To date, it’s been difficult to remove cobalt entirely, given how much of a boost it gives to battery capacity and stability.

In parallel, US researchers found the mineral olivine – made of lithium, iron and phosphate (LFP) – was a good candidate for battery cathodes. This discovery gave rise to cobalt-free LFP batteries. LFP chemistry is cheap, non-toxic and safe, though slightly less energy-dense.

These batteries have had a meteoric rise. Last year, 50% of all EV batteries and more than 90% of stationary home and grid batteries used this chemistry.

Given world-leading battery makers now rely heavily on this chemistry, it’s likely LFP batteries will dominate the market for EV and stationary storage applications in the near term.

What’s on the horizon?

The global market for lithium-ion batteries has risen sixfold since 2020 and strong growth is projected to continue. EVs are taking more and more market share – especially in developing nations – and huge grid-scale batteries are proving essential in modern power grids.

What’s next?

Many next-generation batteries nearing the market are being developed for specific jobs – such as powering drones – or to outcompete current technology. Here are four new types to watch:

Sodium-ion: The world’s biggest battery maker, CATL, and other manufacturers are exploring an entirely different chemistry – sodium-ion – in a bid to eventually replace lithium-ion batteries as home or grid batteries. Sodium-ion batteries are typically heavier and less energy-dense than lithium-ion, so they wouldn’t work well in vehicles. But the chemistry has real promise for stationary energy storage.

Lithium-sulfur: These batteries rely on lithium and sulfur or sulfur-carbon composites. They can currently store four to five times more energy than traditional lithium-ion batteries, making them particularly useful for drones and other technologies where maximum power is needed. The challenge is giving them longevity, as the reactions in these batteries are harder to reverse. That means these batteries are harder to recharge many times at present. Several Australian companies are active in this space.

Solid state: Until now, lithium-ion batteries have relied on a liquid electrolyte as the medium for ions to shuttle between anode and cathode. Solid state batteries do away with the liquid, making them inherently safer. They could potentially lead to a drastic boost to energy storage. They’re not mainstream yet because it’s still tricky to get them to work at room temperature without using high pressure. If engineers figure this out, an EV using solid state batteries might travel 1,000km on a single charge.

Flow batteries: In the 1980s, Australian engineers at UNSW invented the vanadium redox flow battery. A cross between a conventional battery and a fuel cell, these typically larger batteries can feed power back to the grid for 12 hours or more, much longer than current lithium-ion battery systems.

These batteries are likely to be useful in renewable-heavy power grids. Lithium and sodium-ion batteries could provide shorter bursts of power to the grid, while flow batteries could kick in for longer periods.

So do we still need cobalt?

These developments are promising. But they don’t mean an end to cobalt entirely. Smaller amounts of cobalt will still be in the lithium-ion batteries in portable devices and EVs for the foreseeable future.

What we are likely to see is more recycled cobalt coming into the mix, as governments accelerate recycling of lithium-ion batteries and promote recycled minerals to be used in new batteries. Over time, the role of “blood cobalt” could disappear.

Neeraj Sharma, Professor of Chemistry, UNSW Sydney

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

Setting sail from the busy port of Plymouth in Devon, the tall ship Pelican of London takes young people to sea, often for the first time.

During each nine-day voyage, the UK-based sailing trainees, who often come from socio-economically challenging backgrounds, become crew members. They not only learn the ropes (literally) but also engage in ocean science and stewardship activities.

As marine and outdoor education researchers, we wanted to find out whether mixing sail training and Steams (science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics and sustainability) activities can inspire young people to pursue a more ocean-focused career, and a long-term commitment to ocean care.

Research shows that a strong connection with the ocean can drive people to be active marine citizens. This means they take responsibility for ocean health not only in their own lives but as advocates for more sustainable interactions with the ocean.

Over the past year, we have worked with Charly Braungardt, head scientist with the charity Pelican of London, to create a new theory of how sail training with Steams activities can change the paths that trainees pursue.

Based on scientific evidence, our theory of change models how Steams activities can cause positive changes in personal development and knowledge and understanding of the ocean (known as ocean literacy). It shows how the voyages can develop trainees’ strong connections with the ocean and encourage them to act responsibly towards it.

Tracking change

Surveys with the participants before and after the voyage, and six months later, measure any changes that occur – and how these persist. Through our evaluation, we’re exploring how combining voyages with Steams activities can go beyond personal development to produce deep, long-lasting effects.

Our pilot study has already shown how the sail training and Steams combination helps to develop confidence, ocean literacy and ocean connections.

For example, the boost to self-esteem and feelings of capability that occur on board help young people develop their marine identity – the ocean becomes an important part of a person’s sense of who they are. As one trainee put it: “I think the ocean is me and the ocean will and forever be part of me.”

Swimming, sailing, even just building a sandcastle - the ocean benefits our physical and mental wellbeing. Curious about how a strong coastal connection helps drive marine conservation, scientists are diving in to investigate the power of blue health.

This article is part of a series, Vitamin Sea, exploring how the ocean can be enhanced by our interaction with it.

As crew members, trainees access a world and traditional culture largely unknown to them before the voyage. They learn to live with others in a confined space, working together in small teams to keep watch on 24-hour rotas.

Trainees are encouraged to step out of their comfort zone through activities such as climbing the rigging and swimming off the vessel. Our pilot evaluation found the voyages built the trainees’ confidence and social skills, boosting self-esteem and feelings of capability.

One trainee said: “I’ve felt pretty disappointed in myself not committing to my education or only doing something with minimal effort. But after this voyage, I want to give it my all.”

The Steams voyages encourage the development of scientific skills and ocean literacy through the lens of creative tasks at sea. These activities are led by a scientist-in-residence who provides mentoring and introduces research techniques.

The voyage gives trainees the opportunity to use scientific equipment, ranging from plankton nets and microscopes to cutting-edge technology such as remotely operated vehicles. The Steams activities introduce marine research as a potential career to these young people. One said they wanted to train as a marine engineer at nautical college following the voyage.

Ocean experiences provide a foundation for ocean connection. Trainees experience the ocean in sunshine and in gales, day and night, rolling with the waves and observing marine life in its natural environment.

Citizen science projects such as wildlife surveys and recorded beach cleans also develop their ocean stewardship knowledge and skills. One trainee explained how they have “become more interested [in] our marine life and creative ways to help protect it”.

Over the next 12 months, the information we collect from the voyages will help us to better understand the benefits and contribute to an important marine social science data gap in young people. It is important to understand how to develop young people’s relationships with the ocean, and the knowledge and skills that will empower the next generation of marine citizens.

As one trainee put it: “Being out on the Pelican showed me how vast and powerful the sea is – and how important it is to respect and care for it.”

Pamela Buchan, Research Fellow, Geography, University of Exeter and Alun Morgan, Lecturer in Education, School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Plymouth

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

As the Atlantic warms, many fish along the east coast of North America have moved northwards to keep within their preferred temperature range. Black sea bass, for instance, have shifted hundreds of miles up the coast.

In the Mediterranean, the picture is very different. Without an easy escape route towards the poles, many species are effectively trapped in a sea that is warming rapidly. Some native fish are even being replaced by more heat-tolerant species that have slipped in through the Suez Canal.

It’s a process affecting coastal species around the world: without a continuous pathway to cooler waters, many are in trouble. Escape becomes difficult where coastlines run east–west or are broken into enclosed basins and islands. In these settings, species have to move huge distances just to gain a few degrees of latitude – the so-called “latitudinal trap”.

It’s also a process that has repeated throughout history. When we analysed 540 million years of fossil data for a recent study published in the journal Science, we found that species along east-west coastlines were more likely to go extinct than those with easier movement north-south.

We hypothesised that the shape and orientation of coastlines could help species escape – or trap them. If coastlines provide direct, continuous pathways to move north or south, species should be able to better track shifting climates. But, where species have to travel a long way for minimal latitude gain, their extinction risk is raised during episodes of environmental change.

Coastlines themselves are not fixed. Over millions of years, plate tectonics rearrange continents, sometimes producing long north-south coasts, like those of the Americas today, and at other times sprawling east-west seaways such as during the Ordovician a bit over 400 million years ago.

This means climate shocks can produce very different extinction outcomes depending on the layout of continents at the time.

To test this hypothesis, we analysed fossil data for about 13,000 groups of related shallow-marine invertebrate species, such as clams, snails, sponges and starfish, spanning the last 540 million years. We then paired these records with reconstructions of ancient geography.

For each fossil, we estimated how difficult it would have been for that species to shift its latitude along shallow coastlines. We measured this as the shortest number of steps to travel 5°, 10°, or 15° latitude north or south. (For context, Great Britain covers about 9° from top to bottom). Short distances imply a relatively direct escape; long distances imply a long or maybe impossible escape route.

We found that, over the last 540 million years, extinction risk was consistently higher for marine animals with long escape routes.

Geography amplifies catastrophe

This pattern intensified during Earth’s five mass extinction events. In our models, species with longer distances showed increases in extinction risk of up to 400% during mass extinctions, compared with about 60% during other intervals, highlighting that geography becomes far more consequential when climate change intensifies.

Although our analyses focused on geologic timescales, our results help us understand how shallow marine species may respond to climate change today. Species living in the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico or other regions with semi-enclosed geography, or around the margins of islands, may have more difficulty as the ocean warms.

Coastline geometry may matter less for species that are good at dispersing themselves, however, especially those that have a long planktonic larvae phase where they drift around the ocean before becoming fixed in place. The survival of those species depends more on factors like ocean currents than coastline orientation.

Estimating whether a species is at risk of extinction is typically done with reference to attributes such as body size or geographic range size. But our work shows that extinction risk also depends on geography. Survival during climate upheaval depends not only on a species’ biology – but on whether the map itself offers an escape.

Cooper Malanoski, Postdoctoral research associate, University of Oxford and Erin Saupe, Associate Professor, Palaeobiology, University of Oxford

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

Recent investigations have uncovered forced labour in agricultural supply chains, illegal fishing feeding supermarket freezers, deforestation embedded in everyday food products, and unsafe conditions in factories producing “sustainable” fashion. These harms were not visible on labels. They surfaced only when journalists, whistleblowers or activists exposed them.

And when they did, something predictable happened. Consumers felt uneasy. Brands issued statements. Promises were made. The point is that the force that set change in motion was not regulation. It was consumers.

Discovering that an ordinary purchase may be tied to exploitation or environmental damage creates a jolt of personal responsibility. In our research, we found that when environmental consequences are clearly linked to people’s own buying choices, many are willing to switch products — especially when credible alternatives exist.

But guilt is private. It nudges personal behaviour. It does not automatically reshape systems. The shift happens when private discomfort becomes public voice.

Consumers are often also the first to make hidden environmental harms visible. They post evidence on social media. They question corporate claims. They compare sustainability promises with independent reporting. They organise petitions, boycotts and review campaigns. By shining a spotlight on the truth, the scrutiny shifts from shoppers to brands.

That shift matters because modern brands depend on trust. Reputation is an asset. When sustainability claims are publicly challenged, credibility is at risk. Research in organisational behaviour shows that firms respond quickly to threats to legitimacy. Reputational damage affects customer loyalty, investor confidence and regulatory attention.

In many high-profile cases, supply chain reforms have followed intense public scrutiny rather than quiet compliance checks. Leaders may not act out of moral awakening — but they do act when inaction becomes costly to their reputation.

Consumers can trigger the emotional chain reaction. They feel guilt. They seek information. They speak collectively. That collective voice generates corporate shame.

Sustainability professor Mike Berners-Lee argues in his book A Climate of Truth that demanding honesty is one of the most powerful climate actions available to citizens. Raising standards of truthfulness in business and media changes incentives. When the gap between what companies say and what they do becomes visible, maintaining that gap becomes harder.

Our research explores how that visibility can be strengthened. The findings were clear. When environmental and social consequences are personalised and traceable, sustainability feels less distant. People see both their own role and the role of particular firms. That dual awareness encourages two responses: behavioural change driven by guilt and corporate accountability driven by shame.

Shame works because it is social. Brands care about how they are seen. When the negative environmental and social effects of supply chains can be publicly connected to named products, corporate narratives become contestable in real time.

Making supply chains socially visible

The technology to improve transparency already exists. Companies track goods through logistics systems, supplier databases and digital product-tagging that collect detailed information about sourcing and production. The barrier is not data collection. It is disclosure.

Environmental indicators — carbon emissions, water use, land conversion risk, labour standards compliance — can be linked to products through QR codes or retail apps. Comparable reporting standards would ensure consistency. Simple digital interfaces would make information accessible. Social sharing tools would allow consumers to compare and discuss findings publicly.

Social media is crucial. It already enables workers, communities and campaigners to challenge corporate messaging. Integrating verified supply chain data into these spaces would shift transparency from crisis response to everyday expectation.

This strategy, with its behaviour change directive, could work more effectively than rules or green marketing campaigns alone.

Regulation is essential but often slow and uneven across borders. Marketing campaigns can highlight selective improvements while leaving deeper practices untouched. Transparency activated by collective consumer voice operates differently. It aligns emotional motivation with reputational consequence.

Consumers are not passive recipients of information. They are catalysts. By feeling the first twinge of guilt, asking harder questions and speaking together, they create the conditions under which companies experience shame. When shame threatens trust and market position, change becomes rational and inevitable.

Shame is uncomfortable. But when directed at opaque systems rather than consumers, it can be powerful. By demanding truth and making supply chains socially visible, consumers can push businesses towards greater transparency — and, ultimately, towards more sustainable practice.

Janet Godsell, Dean and Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Strategy, Loughborough Business School, Loughborough University and Nikolai Kazantsev, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge

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

After weeks of relentless rain and flooding, and even more forecast, 2025’s droughts and hosepipe bans feel like ancient history. But they shouldn’t.

The UK is increasingly caught between these wetter winters and warmer, drier summers. What if this year’s summer brings water shortages again? The seemingly endless rainfall causing flooding across the UK right now could help solve future summer drought problems – if we capture it right.

The stakes are high in Speyside, home to around half of Scotland’s malt whisky distilleries. They had to cope with 2025 being the UK’s warmest and sunniest on record, where prolonged dry conditions led to widespread restrictions on water abstraction. Multiple distilleries were forced into temporary closures, costing the industry millions of pounds and highlighting just how vulnerable even Scotland’s famously wet regions are to water scarcity.

Whisky production represents one of the UK’s biggest industrial water users. Large quantities of water are required for the distilling process and the product itself, so understanding water conservation is both extremely important for the industry, and can also help others recognise the benefits.

If it was possible to retain this winter’s rainfall and release it gradually when it was needed, the nation could become more resilient to both floods and droughts without building expensive new reservoirs.

Managing droughts with floods

Across Speyside, they’re testing ways to slow, store and steadily release water by working with the landscape rather than against it. Distillers have invested in leaky dams (small barriers built across temporary upland streams) to slow the flow of water during heavy rain and allow the rainwater to soak into soil and recharge groundwater.

Leaky dams hold the water at surface level as well helping it store underground. Water in the soil and deeper groundwater move through the subsurface much more slowly than over land – taking weeks or months rather than hours or days – which is why rivers still flow even after long dry spells.

There are other examples of useful interventions. Peatland restoration, wetland creation and tree planting all work by increasing temporary storage in the landscape and slowing the movement of water into rivers.

Research across upland catchment areas in Cumbria and West Yorkshire shows how the principles being tested in Speyside could translate to elsewhere. A large academic review of natural flood management evidence concluded that measures increasing water storage, slowing the flow of water over the land or enhancing soil structure can consistently reduce the peak level of a flood.

This growing body of evidence supports a simple but powerful idea: the UK and other countries could be more resilient to droughts and floods by redesigning landscapes to keep water around for longer.

Three lessons for the rest of the UK

1. Design and location matter

Local factors and hydrology (the study of the movement and management of water) can determine what works best where. For example, planting trees “somewhere” delivers far less benefit than planting them in the right places, especially near rivers, near the source of the river, or where soil can absorb water.

2. Benefits must stack up or they won’t be adopted

Leaky dams and other projects, such as tree planting, are relatively inexpensive, compared with traditionally engineered flood defences or having to deal with flood and drought consequences. They can deliver benefits at a fraction of the cost, while potentially also increasing biodiversity, soil health, carbon capture and improving water quality.

But there are trade-offs, which need to be assessed early. For example, in some cases, large-scale tree planting can also reduce summer water availability in already stressed catchment areas. Tree canopies can temporarily store water on the leaves, but if this water evaporates it doesn’t return to the soil. Tree roots improve the soil so it absorbs and stores more water, but trees can also use more water. The net effects depend on factors such as climate, soil type and tree species.

3. Good governance will unlock funding

When water security has clear economic benefits, businesses are willing to engage. However, investment is not always private, and a recent review showed public funding is often fragmented, with inconsistent planning rules. Strengthening overall governance of these kind of schemes is essential, because farmers, businesses and landowners are far more likely to participate if they benefit.

Managing our landscapes appropriately won’t stop all floods or prevent every drought, but it can make both less severe, while restoring habitats, supporting farming, and protecting industries that rely on dependable water supplies.

Every river carrying floodwater to the sea represents water that could be stored for drier months. Thinking ahead for what happens during heavy rains can be part of forward planning for more extreme weather in years to come.

Josie Geris, Reader in Hydrology, University of Aberdeen and Megan Klaar, Associate Professor, Hydroecology and Catchment Management, University of Leeds

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

When Bad Bunny and his dancers scaled power poles during his Super Bowl performance, he wasn’t just entertaining millions. He was spotlighting how Puerto Rico’s chronic power outages are a legacy of its colonisation.

Puerto Rico is far from alone in this struggle – colonialism and geopolitical power imbalances have shaped access to electricity worldwide.

Puerto Rico has long suffered rolling blackouts lasting days and sometimes months. This leaves residents – especially vulnerable populations – without refrigeration, medical equipment, or air conditioning.

This isn’t just poor infrastructure management, though that is certainly an issue. It’s the ongoing legacy of colonial control over energy systems.

Colonial powers built energy systems designed to extract resources and profits for distant corporations and governments, not to serve local communities. As a result, local communities pay high costs for inadequate power. Similar patterns exist globally, from the Caribbean to the Middle East.

Colonial abandonment, not poor management

Puerto Rico’s chronic blackouts stem from what scholars call “energy colonialism”, where powerful countries and companies control the energy resources of less powerful countries or regions.

Puerto Rico became a US territory in 1898 but does not have voting representation in Congress. While under US responsibility, Puerto Ricans are denied the federal support granted to other US states.

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, it took 11 months to restore the grid – the longest blackout in US history. Yet federal aid was drastically lower than for US states hit by hurricanes around the same period and “tens of billions short of the US$94.4 billion that disaster experts estimated is needed for a full recovery”. As Cecilio Ortiz García, co-founder of the University of Puerto Rico’s National Institute of Energy and Island Sustainability, explains:

the grid has become the poster child of the decay of the colonial system, its institutions and a very vulnerable population. This is colonial abandonment, not poor management.

Unreliable energy feeds hopelessness

Energy colonisation may manifest differently in different colonial contexts. Our research in Lebanon shows several ways colonial dynamics affect energy insecurity.

In Lebanon, energy access has been undermined by Israel’s deliberate targeting of electricity infrastructure in its strikes in southern Lebanon following its invasion of Gaza. It is also undermined by political corruption rooted in colonial governance structures, such as politicians maintaining ties to private diesel generator companies that profit when the public electricity grid fails.

When France colonised Lebanon in the early 1900s, it deliberately designed a political system that divided power along religious lines, a structure still in place today. This system was created to keep Lebanon weak and dependent.

It has fostered political gridlock and corruption, with politicians profiting from failing energy systems rather than fixing them. The state’s dependence on international donors – and donors’ hesitation to subsidise energy infrastructure – has also reinforced energy poverty for residents.

Reliable energy is essential for survival

Colonial energy development dynamics are exemplified by Pacific struggles to access climate finance. Pacific countries divert significant resources to become accredited to key climate funds, in the hope of directly accessing finance. However, both the practice of mobilising finance through intermediaries, and prioritising debt finance – further indebting poor regions – ultimately channels vital resources away from Pacific nations.

As climate disasters intensify, and reliable energy becomes ever more essential for survival, recognising the colonial roots of global energy systems is key. A critical site for recognition, as argued by Puerto Rican energy advocate Juan Rosario is ownership: “the most important thing in this energy revolution is who owns it and who rules”.

Energy justice – grounded in ownership, self‑determination, and equality — must be more nuanced. We need to ask: Who gets to own the energy systems? Who makes the decisions? Who gets the money? Right now, big corporations and governments control energy. Real energy justice means communities run their own power systems and keep the benefits for themselves. Thus, energy justice cannot focus solely on technical fixes. It must also confront the structures of power that shape who benefits from energy systems and who is left vulnerable.

Our research in Lebanon shows how these experiences of energy colonialism are felt – in the wellbeing of communities, and in individual emotions and bodies. In the humanitarian community in Lebanon, people are unable to escape extreme temperature during energy insecurity and blackouts. Feelings of hopelessness and frustration come from persistent energy poverty.

Recognising joy and strength

There are no easy solutions, but we can still take a key lesson from Bad Bunny’s performance. It is vital to call out the structures of power his performance made visible. Bad Bunny’s performance also demonstrated the joy that can be found, even momentarily, from shifting focus from colonial conditions to the strength and resilience of marginalised communities.

Our research showed this strength should be supported and not taken for granted. One participant in Lebanon said:

“Do people have the choice not to be resilient? Like, is there a counterfactual Lebanon where people are not resilient and they suffer more than what they’re suffering now? How do you determine what resilience is versus wanting to live your life? It’s just you waking up and having to find a way.”

Jenna Imad Harb, Research Fellow, Australian National University and Kirsty Anantharajah, Research fellow, University of Canberra

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

Regulating climate emissions just became more difficult. US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repealed its own 2009 legal finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health.

Vindicated by a Supreme Court ruling in 2007, and based on scientific evidence, this so-called endangerment finding by the EPA provided the legal warrant for the regulation of greenhouse gases by the federal government. It underpinned the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulated emissions from power plants. In his first term, Trump had tried to weaken it but a new version was introduced by the Biden administration.

Without the endangerment finding, and in the absence of new laws passed by both Houses of Congress, the federal government lacks the legal mandate for direct regulation of greenhouse emissions. The science hasn’t changed, but the obligation to act on it has been scrubbed out.

If you imagine the United States as a collection of big greenhouse gas pots with lids, the Trump administration has been lifting the lids off one by one, releasing more emissions by stepping up fossil fuel extraction, production and consumption. This legal finding held down the biggest lid on climate emissions — and Trump has pulled it right off. This will have a structural effect globally.

What is the endangerment finding, and how was it developed?

In 1970, when the US environment movement was at its most influential, Congress passed an important piece of legislation called the Clean Air Act. It empowered the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to declare something a pollutant if it endangered public health. Initially, it was used to regulate pollutants such as smog or coal ash, the byproducts of industry.

During the George W. Bush presidency, the EPA made a ruling that greenhouse gases were also a pollutant within the meaning of the Clean Air Act. This ruling was challenged in 2007 by fossil fuel interests in the case of Massachusetts v EPA, but the court ruled (five judges to four) that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were “air pollutants” that endangered human health and welfare. It directed the EPA to assess their impact on human welfare — allowing the agency to regulate them.

However, the Bush administration did not push the EPA to implement the ruling.

How was the endangerment finding used for climate action?

President Barack Obama promised to act on climate during his election campaign but faced a hostile Senate when he came to power. His efforts to enact an emission trading bill failed.

However, the endangerment finding allowed him to use his executive power to direct the EPA to regulate emissions. In his first term, the EPA issued new vehicle emissions regulations for cars and light trucks, and some power plants and refineries.

In his second term, Obama extended those regulations to all power plants. These moves represented the US’s first significant steps towards emissions reductions. They enhanced Obama’s diplomatic credibility in the negotiations for the Paris Agreement in 2015. This provided a footing for bilateral cooperation with China on clean energy, helping to build diplomatic trust between the world’s two biggest emitters. Their lead negotiators worked together in the final days of the negotiations to get the Paris Agreement over the line.

Why has Trump overturned it?

On February 12, Trump announced the EPA would rescind the legal finding it has relied on for nearly 20 years. Among all the wrecking balls he has swung at efforts to decarbonise the US economy, this is the biggest. He claims the legal finding hurts Americans. The EPA’s director, Trump-appointed Lee Zeldin, called the rule the “holy grail of climate change religion”.

“This determination had no basis in fact — none whatsoever,” Trump told the media on Thursday. “And it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world.”

But without federal action to curb emissions, the impact of climate change will intensify. The US is the “indispensable state” when it comes achieving the goals and principles of the Paris Agreement. Although China’s annual aggregate emissions are much higher than the US’s, the US is the world’s largest historical emitter, which makes it the most causally responsible for the global heating that has already occurred.

Yet the Trump administration regards climate change as a hoax. Trump has withdrawn the US not only from the Paris Agreement but also the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In short, the US is now actively fanning the flame of global heating.

In a case of history repeating itself, the arguments being made by Zedlin are pretty much the same as those once put forward by the original opponents of the endangerment finding: claiming that the original legislation was supposed to apply only to local pollutants such as smog, but not greenhouse gases, and that the science isn’t clear.

Those arguments don’t stack up, because there is indisputable evidence that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases do indeed harm human health and welfare. The EPA is obliged to regulate harmful pollutants at the specific source.

What’s next?

This move will trigger court cases, which won’t be resolved quickly. Zedlin and Trump will face a crowd of litigants, including environment groups and NGOs. The Trump administration will likely ignore these and steam ahead with its “drill, baby, drill” slogan.

If the lawsuits fail, or Trump ignores them, it will be devastating. There will be no overarching federal legislation directly regulating emissions in the US. What’s more, a new Democrat president committed to climate action will not have this easy lever to regulate greenhouse gases. Instead, they will have to get new climate legislation through an intensely polarised Congress.

However, there are ways forward. Assuming Trump is prepared to leave office after his second term (admittedly, a big if), it is possible a new Democratic administration might have the numbers in Congress to enact new climate legislation. In the meantime, climate action is continuing to ratchet up at the state and city level in many US states.

Robyn Eckersley, Redmond Barry Professor of Political Science, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

Cicero, the Roman Stoic, once wrote to his friend Varro, pending a visit to his home: “If you have a garden in your library, we shall have all we want.” This same desire for good books and natural beauty is at the heart of Byung-Chul Han’s In Praise of the Earth, in which he reflects on gardening as a form of philosophical meditation.

Review: In Praise of the Earth: A Journey into the Garden – Byung-Chul Han (Polity)

Born in South Korea and based in Germany, Han has risen to prominence as a philosopher in the last ten years with a series of short, readable but penetrating works critiquing the values that govern contemporary capitalist society.

Han considers contemporary concerns like burnout, the loss of attention and information overload, drawing on thinkers such as Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche to diagnose the effects of digital capitalism.

As well as these canonical European thinkers, he considers the ideas of Eastern philosophers and poets like Lao Tzu and Bashō. Indeed he has written books on Zen Buddhism and the Chinese idea of shanzhai or “decreation”, which disrupts the usual hierarchy between real and fake.

Han is a rare thinker who can make complex ideas engaging without losing any of their intellectual acuity. He writes slim volumes, easily carried in a coat pocket, which brim with explosive diagnoses of contemporary ills while proposing new ways of living.

In The Burnout Society, for instance, Han critiques the effects of what he calls “the achievement society”, in which efficiency and a relentless drive toward self-optimisation result in feelings of despair, loneliness and exhaustion. Against the tide of self-help manuals focusing on positivity and success, he suggests “rest and contemplation are acts of resistance against a world that demands constant productivity. In pausing we reclaim our humanity.”

In Praise of the Earth suggests the humble practice of gardening can offer one example of this kind of resistance. While he reflects on the deeper implications of gardening and thinking, Han’s book is also practical and personal. It is both a philosophical treatise on gardening and a diary of his experiences tending to his Bi-Won, Korean for “secret garden” in Berlin, over a period of three years.

Han describes gardening as a form of “silent meditation, a lingering in stillness”. Cultivating plants, he suggests, can transform our relationship to time. “Since I have begun working in my garden,” he writes, “I experience time differently. It passes much slower. It expands. The time until next spring feels like an eternity.”

This new sense of time is not only attuned to the changing seasons but to the growth of the plants and flowers he nurtures. “Every plant has its proper time,” he notes. “In the garden many such times overlap. The autumn crocus and the spring crocus have an altogether different sense of time.”

This awareness of overlapping time schemes prompts Han to reflect on what he describes as “the time of the other”, which invites an ethical response of care and concern. This time of the other is not related to acquisition or domination but instead thrives through a mutual act of cultivation.

For Han the time of the garden is fundamentally different to the time of digital capitalism, which is characterised by speed, distraction, and exploitation. “Digitalisation intensifies the noise of communication”.

In contrast, “the garden is an ecstatic place for lingering.”

The language of flowers

As a gardener, Han is entranced by the names of plants. Many of the book’s short chapters bear the names of those he is growing: Willow Catkins, White Forsythia, Anemones … These names prompt reflection: “Since I have taken up gardening, I try to remember as many flower names as possible.”

Reflecting on these names, Han begins to develop new ideas. He notes that astilbes are called Prachtspiere in German, which translates as “splendid splinters”. Spier means “small, tender tip”. He notes, “Without my garden, I would never have come across the word […] Such words widen my world.”

His world also widens as his attention moves from language to nature more broadly and he starts to see plant life all around him in Berlin.

Before gardening, he writes, “I was in some way indifferent not only toward willow catkins but towards all plants. Today I see my former indifference as an embarrassing blindness.” Gardening opens our eyes to the movement of leaves and opens our ears to the buzzing of insects.

This reflection is complemented by Isabella Gresser’s botanical drawings interspersed throughout the book. The delicate, white line drawings on black paper are accompanied by the botanical names of the flowers in question, allowing the reader to linger.

Song of praise

The movement from the particular to the universal is one of the book’s great strengths. The practical problem of keeping a camellia alive on a snowy night prompts a reflection on care, while waiting for a Japanese allspice to bloom sparks a contemplation on the nature of hope. “Hoping is the temporal mode of the gardener,” Han writes.

By attending to the most minute bud of a flower Han believes we can begin to develop a “planetary consciousness”. This consciousness is accompanied by “a deep reverence for the Earth.”

This reverence is in turn complemented by one of the oldest philosophical sensations – that of wonder – which Plato described as the feeling that gives birth to philosophy.

In this spirit, Han writes,

We should learn again to wonder at the earth […] In the garden I experience that the earth is magical, enigmatic, and mysterious. As soon as you treat her as a resource to be exploited you have already destroyed her.

Han’s book is part of a long tradition of philosophical reflections on the art of gardening.

The followers of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus formed a community called “The Garden” where they practised philosophy among trees and flowers. Chinese literati found solace in ornamental gardens designed to reflect Taoist principles such as the unity of opposites.

It is also part of a recent wave of works in which contemporary thinkers reflect on the philosophical significance of gardens. Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Garden (2019), for instance, illuminates the relationship between theological reflections on the biblical Garden of Eden and political theories of liberation.

In Praise of the Earth is a philosophical song, which finds in the most delicate blossom a resounding call for care. “Flowering is rapture,” Han writes and reading this book too, is a rapturous experience.

Thomas Moran, Lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Film, Adelaide University

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

At 2,500 km long, the Murray is Australia’s longest river. It provides 3 million people with drinking water and irrigates around 1.5 million hectares of farmland.

But this intensive use has come at a cost: the lower Murray — defined as the River Murray downstream of the Darling River and its meandering creeks and floodplains — is now dangerously environmentally degraded.

In mid January, the lower Murray was listed as a critically endangered ecological community under Australia’s nature laws. This means there’s an extremely high chance its native ecosystems will become extinct within the immediate future, in as little as ten years. The Macquarie Marshes in northern New South Wales, one of the largest inland wetlands in south east Australia, was listed as endangered on the same day.

The health of the lower Murray matters greatly. It is the lifeblood for a large swathe of southern Australia and supports a diverse range of unique plants and animals, local economies and the well-being of people that love and rely on it.

Connecting the basin to the sea

The lower Murray is one of a growing number of Australian ecological communities at risk of becoming extinct. These communities include all the plants and animals co-existing in an area, in some cases for millions of years.

The lower Murray winds through expansive floodplains, limestone gorges and swamplands as it flows 830 kilometres downstream from its junction with the Darling River to the sea near Goolwa.

The internationally recognised lower reaches of the river, including Lakes Alexandrina and Albert and the Murray Estuary, connect the vast Murray-Darling Basin with the ocean. This includes the famous Coorong, the setting of the book Storm Boy which captured the hearts of Australians and showed us the glory of a rich wetland landscape full of abundant fish and birdlife.

Less water, less life

The lower Murray supports a wealth of native Australian fauna. But the development of weirs and barrages since the twentieth century to regulate the water level and divert water for irrigation have dramatically altered the flow of the river.

This regulation has supported increased European settlement, trade, and agriculture along the river, setting the scene for the region as we know it today.

Nowadays, inflow to the Lower Lakes is about half of what it once was prior to European settlement. In those days, the river experienced flows the plants and animals needed, which connected floodplains to the river and flushed the whole Murray-Darling Basin.

However, river regulation has drastically altered the water flow and ecology of the lower Murray. The destruction of native vegetation, poor water quality and invasive species such as foxes and carp have also taken their toll.

It is increasingly clear the lower Murray region is changing at a rapid rate, to a drier and warmer climate with less flow and more extreme droughts.

To a casual observer, these lower stretches of the Murray appear to be doing okay. The river typically has water, thanks in part to how it is managed, and it still experiences big replenishing floods.

You can still catch an iconic Murray cod (pondi in Ngarrindjeri language), and the pelican (ngori in Ngarrindjeri) still effortlessly roams the Coorong. But look more closely and the danger signs are clear.

Signs of a slow death

Many wetlands on the floodplain have dried up, depriving native animals of their homes, and the several-hundred-year-old river red gums are dying. Poor water quality and algal blooms are now common threats in the lower Murray lakes and Coorong.

The true state of the lower Murray became evident during the Millennium Drought of the 2000s. Between 2007 and 2010, no flow was discharged out the Murray Mouth , with floodplain wetlands drying and the water level of the Lower Lakes dropping to below sea level. This caused the drying of the habitats of freshwater animals and exposed acidic sediments in the Lower Lakes.

The Coorong became hypersaline — five times as salty as the ocean — above what most animals and plants could survive. The Millennium Drought led to the near ecological collapse of Lower Lakes and Coorong, and hints at what the future may hold if the lower Murray ecological community becomes extinct. An extinct river is one so fundamentally degraded that it no longer functions as it should. Everything relying on it suffers or disappears.

Protecting the river

The lower Murray ecological community was first listed as threatened in 2013, before losing that status later the same year. It was nominated again in 2023 with a rigorous, science-based assessment, and was approved in mid January 2026.

Recovery will take considerable effort. Australia’s independent Threatened Species Scientific Committee undertook the lower Murray’s assessment, and gave advice to federal Environment Minister Murray Watt, who made the final decision.

This listing is a wake-up call. The conservation advice identifies what actions are needed to protect and restore the river, lakes and wetlands. These include connecting with communities so the recovery becomes a shared responsibility, and greater research and monitoring to guide management.

The listing does not halt existing activities such as agriculture. But major new developments must now consider impacts on the ecological community, including its critical habitats and key species. Returning water to the Murray through the Commonwealth’s water for the environment program has been important, and must continue as the review of the Murray Darling Basin Plan takes shape.

Beyond more water for the river, complementary measures such as creating fish ladders and reducing invasive species will be needed to give the environment a fighting chance. 

Nick Whiterod, Researcher, Adelaide University ; Margaret Shanafield, Associate Professor, Hydrology/hydrogeology, Flinders University, and Thomas Prowse, Postdoctoral research fellow, School of Mathematical Sciences, Adelaide University

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

Most seals give birth to a pup around the same time each year, and wean them and send them on their way within 12 months in an annual cycle.

Australian sea lions are different. They have an 18-month breeding cycle, out of sync with the seasons, which has puzzled scientists for years.

So compared to other seals, Australian sea lion mothers spend an extra six months or more nursing their pups. Why this is so remains a mystery.

In our latest study, we captured footage of an Australian sea lion mother taking her 11-month old pup on an 8-hour foraging trip to sea. This footage provides the first direct evidence we have that Australian sea lion mothers pass on foraging skills to their pups – which may have helped shape the unique life and reproductive patterns of this endangered creature.

What a sealcam showed

To get a closer look at how Australian sea lions rear their young, we attached an underwater camera, a GPS tracker and a dive recorder to an 8-year-old sea lion mother from the colony at Seal Bay on Kangaroo Island in South Australia.

A few days later, when the mother returned to the colony from sea, we collected the devices, downloaded the data, and took a look at the camera recording. We captured amazing footage of the mother and pup diving at sea together and foraging across different habitats such as sponge gardens, kelp reefs and large sandy plains.

We were even lucky enough to collect footage of the mother capturing a giant cuttlefish and taking it to the surface to devour, with the pup close by throughout the whole capture.

This finding suggests Australian sea lion mothers use social learning to pass on foraging skills to pups, and can demonstrate to them how to locate, capture and consume prey.

Many sea creatures learn from their mothers

This social learning of foraging behaviour from mother to offspring is well known in other marine mammals.

Bottlenose dolphin mothers teach their calves how to use sponges when they forage on the seabed. Orcas and sea otters also inherit dietary preferences from their mothers.

In these species, this social learning of behaviour is thought to be critical to raising young, assisting them in learning how to hunt challenging prey, or to hunt in diverse habitats.

Scientists have speculated before that seals may use social learning when raising pups. However, finding direct evidence of these behaviours has remained elusive.

Earlier research has suggested Australian sea lion pups require lots of experience and knowledge of foraging grounds to hunt successfully. Therefore, the extra months pups spend with their mothers may provide the opportunity for them to develop their foraging skills while accompanying them on trips at sea.

Social learning and biology

The video we collected in this study provides exciting new insight into evolutionary and ecological factors that may have helped shape the unique 18-month breeding cycle and life of the Australian sea lion. Social learning may be an important component of the development of foraging behaviour in Australian sea lion pups.

Australian sea lion mothers take sole care in raising their pups, so they are critical to the survival of the pups, and the success of Australian sea lion populations. Australian sea lions are endangered, with their populations declining by more than 60% over the last 40 years.

Continued research using underwater cameras will improve our knowledge on the unique lives of Australian sea lions. Understanding the ecology and evolutionary biology of the species is key to protecting their populations into the future.

Nathan Angelakis, PhD Candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Adelaide University

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

For decades, southern right whales have been celebrated as one of conservation’s success stories.

Once driven to the brink of extinction by commercial whaling, southern right whales slowly returned to Australian coastlines through the late 20th century. Their recovery reflected the power of international protection, marine sanctuaries and long-term science working together.

But our new research shows this success story is changing. We drew on more than 30 years of continuous shore-based monitoring of southern right whales in the Great Australian Bight, from within the Yalata Indigenous Protected Area in South Australia. We found clear evidence whales are having calves less often, with the average calving interval increasing for 3 to 4 years. This means the number of calves being born has slowed over the past decade.

This decline appears closely linked to climate-driven changes in the Southern Ocean — similar patterns are now being observed across the southern hemisphere.

More than 3 decades of photos

Our study analysed photo-identification data collected by researchers between 1991 and 2024 from a major calving area in the Great Australian Bight. Each whale is identified using its unique pattern of callosities — the hard patches of skin on its head that remain throughout its life.

This allows individual whales to be tracked across decades, providing rare insight into long-term population dynamics and how these change over time. Photo-identification is a globally accepted method used for whale population assessments. By tracking known individuals over time, researchers can directly measure their reproductive histories.

Long-term datasets like this are rare — and that is precisely what makes them so powerful. The Australian Right Whale Research Program at Flinders University is one of the longest continuous photo-identification studies of any whale species in the world. It has used the same methods over decades. In the context of climate change, where impacts often emerge slowly and unevenly, this long-term evidence is essential.

What we found

Since around 2015, female southern right whales have not given birth as often. These extended calving intervals mean fewer calves are being born overall, and this reduces population growth over time.

For a long-lived species that reproduces slowly, this matters. Small changes in reproductive rates impacts population growth. The slowdown in reproduction signals a shift away from the recovery seen in previous decades.

A signal from the south

The cause of this change is not immediately visible from Australia’s coastline. Southern right whales spend much of their lives feeding thousands of kilometres away in the Southern Ocean, where they rely on the cold, nutrient-rich waters created by Antarctic sea ice. These waters support krill and prey that are crucial for whales to build up the energy reserves they need for pregnancy and lactation.

Over the past decade, the ocean has warmed, the ice is melting and there have been dramatic shifts in food availability weather patterns. Our analysis shows longer calving intervals coincide with these environmental changes, suggesting the impacts of climate change on conditions in the Southern Ocean are linked to whales having fewer calves.

A global pattern emerges

Importantly, this is not just an Australian story.

Similar trends are being reported in southern right whale populations off South America and South Africa, where researchers have documented reduced calving rates, whales in poor condition and environmental changes.

Southern right whales are a sentinel species: animals whose health reflects broader changes in their environment. Our findings signal deeper disruption in ocean systems that also support fisheries, affect how the climate is regulated and influence marine plants, animals and other species.

Southern right whales are long-lived, reproduce slowly, and rely on energy-rich feeding grounds. This makes them particularly vulnerable to climate-driven changes in prey.

What needs to change?

Protecting the Southern Ocean and its increasingly vulnerable natural ecosystems demands urgent collective climate action. This must bridge disciplines, industries, governments and interconnected regions.

This action should include the expansion of sanctuaries across the migratory ranges of threatened species. It should also limit threats, such as whales being struck by ships, getting entangled in ropes and being exposed to noise pollution.

The future of southern right whales is likely to be closely tied to the management of krill harvesting and addressing climate change.

We need to listen — and act — while there is still time.

The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of research collaborators and all of the people involved in the long-term research program that make this work possible.

Claire Charlton, Leader of Australian Right Whale Research Program, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University

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

In less than ten years, Australia has to cut its emissions 62–75% below 2005 levels. Given reductions in emissions over the past 20 years, that translates to cutting emissions 47–65% below current levels. As of last year, that’s about 440 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Under current climate policies, official projections indicate annual emissions will fall 32% by 2035, leaving a sizeable 70–150Mt gap. That’s big. Australia’s cars, trucks and other road vehicles emitted a total of 82Mt last year, for instance.

In a new report, we show Australia will need new policies that provide clearer signals and stronger incentives to stand a chance of reaching its goal.

Policies strong and weak

Economists have long seen a broad-based price on carbon as the most efficient way to drive down emissions.

But Australia’s decades-long climate wars and the repeal of the so-called carbon tax in 2014 has effectively taken this option off the table.

Instead, we have a suite of different policy approaches in three broad groups:

Strong policies

Around 64% of Australia’s net emissions are covered by strong regulation and incentives. In electricity (34% of emissions), clear policy direction coupled with investor momentum is replacing coal and gas generation with renewables and storage. This is already driving lower prices. Emissions are projected to fall 86% by 2035. In industry (30% of emissions), the Safeguard Mechanism covering the 200 largest industrial emitters is projected to cut emissions around 40% by 2035.

Weak or missing incentives

Policies for transport (19% of emissions) and smaller industrial facilities (13%) are falling short. Compared with most advanced nations, the vast majority of transport emissions in Australia are unregulated. The government’s New Vehicle Efficiency Standard gives car buyers more low- or zero-emission options, but lacks incentives to reduce day-to-day emissions. Industrial emissions for smaller facilities are not subject to incentives or constraints.

Opt-in opportunities

The remaining 4% of net emissions come from agriculture, waste and land use. Here, carbon stored in growing vegetation (74Mt) effectively offsets most of the emissions from agriculture (82Mt) and waste (14Mt). Most agricultural operations are export-oriented and have few low-cost ways to cut emissions. The immediate goal is to work towards a future where importers of emissions-intensive food bear the costs of quality credits used to offset these emissions.

Bridging the emissions gap

Here are six new ways to accelerate emissions cuts.

1: Fix electricity

Despite progress, there’s unfinished business in electricity policy. Current policies guide new investment but not how power generators are operated. As a result, coal and gas plant operators don’t have incentives to cut emissions.

The solution, as Grattan Institute experts have argued, is to expand the Safeguard Mechanism to cover electricity by creating a limit for total electricity sector emissions which would reduce over time.

2. Wind back fossil fuel subsidies

Incredibly, governments are still doling out fuel tax credits to make it cheaper for heavy freight to burn diesel. Removing these subsidies would boost government coffers by $4 billion a year and motivate fleet owners to shift to more efficient and lower-emission trucks. Next, policymakers could remove tax incentives encouraging Australians to buy bigger utes and light commercial vehicles.

3. Expand the Safeguard Mechanism

The Safeguard Mechanism requires Australia’s largest emitters to progressively cut emissions, either directly or by buying Australian Carbon Credit Units as offsets to meet their emissions obligations.

A well-regulated carbon credit system reduces the cost of complying with the mechanism by more than 60%. This enables Australia to impose more stringent obligations on industry than other nations, including in sectors such as steel and air transport that currently lack cost-effective options to cut emissions.

Expanding the Safeguard Mechanism to cover smaller industrial facilities would drive uptake of low-cost emission reductions, according to the Productivity Commission. Our research shows lowering the threshold from 100,000 to 25,000 tonnes would drive greater cuts in on-site emissions, boost demand for carbon credits, and increase long-term credit prices.

4: Tackle carbon credit price malaise

Carbon credits act as a visible carbon price. If their value goes up, businesses have an incentive to reduce their direct emissions and rely less on credits. But this logic only stacks up if investors are confident in policy settings – and expect the carbon price to rise over time.

Reaching net zero will require a rising carbon price. We project credit prices will be flat or falling over the next three years, at around $35 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent, before growing to around $70 per tonne by 2035. But we cannot rule out the chance of prices staying low. If this happens, it will suppress business investment in directly reducing emissions.

Governments should reduce this risk by transparently intervening if prices are too low, such as by stepping in to buy credits. As maximum prices are already set through the cost containment measure, this would effectively create a price corridor similar to the Reserve Bank’s target range for inflation.

We find higher prices could lead to an extra 80Mt in cuts by big industrial facilities over ten years, with less reliance on credits.

5. Remove handbrakes on investment

In 2023, the Safeguard Mechanism underwent reform. But these reforms aren’t yet leading to investment in low-emissions facilities and equipment due to weak carbon credit prices, policy uncertainty and a slow start to obligations.

The government could bring forward the next review of the mechanism to this year to align it with the carbon credits review and make policy announcements possible earlier. This would give investors the certainty they need to invest.

6. Expand carbon credits to include nature

Linking carbon credits to promoting nature outcomes could boost the value proposition. Moving from the current carbon focus to “nature positive carbon credits” would reward landholders for using their land to store carbon and restore habitat and put upward pressure on credit prices.

No time to waste

Australia is already living through the consequences of climate change.

To do its part in preventing climate change from worsening, Australian policymakers need to design and introduce more policies to reach its new emissions target.

Reform is never easy. But most Australians know full well that the costs of doing nothing will be far greater than the costs of sensible policy action.

Steve Hatfield-Dodds, Honorary Professor of Public Policy, Australian National University

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

“Right – flood’s on. Get ready.” That’s what Jody Cheetham has told her staff the last two times she’s watched the river rising, following after heavy rain in Lismore in northern New South Wales.

In February and March 2022, record rain and floods inundated Lismore, killing five people.

The floods caused major damage to 1,400 homes, 656 commercial and industrial properties, schools, sewer and water treatment facilities. Three out of four businesses were hit.

Cheetham is the chief executive of Multitask, a local disability services provider. Like so many in Lismore, home to 44,000 people, Multitask lost “absolutely everything” in those floods. But they and others in Lismore now have plans in place to stop that happening again.

As communities across Australia rebuild from a summer of fires, heatwaves and floods, we need more examples of how small businesses and communities can recover.

That’s why we spent the past year working on (Not) Business as Usual, a new report and video case studies being launched today. They capture how Lismore is preparing for the next time disaster strikes.

Trial and error over years

One of the lessons from our research is that recovering from a disaster isn’t perfect or fast. Even when you think you’re prepared, you have to learn through trial and error.

That’s been true for Cheetham and her team at Multitask, who have had two practice evacuations of their five buildings in the centre of town since 2022.

“The first one wasn’t that good. We didn’t have the equipment, didn’t have the boxes, so the trial runs have been really important,” Cheetham says.

Multitask has also looked at practical steps to make any future flood recovery faster, easier and cheaper.

For example, after having to deal with mud-caked, flood-damaged facilities in 2022, they’ve stripped back their building interiors to more easily cleanable materials, such as a stainless steel kitchen. They’ve also moved electrical power points above flood level.

Different versions of what Multitask has done can be seen as you walk around Lismore today, from the local library to a furniture business to the region’s music conservatorium. It’s rebuilt with fully waterproof walls and a new goods lift, so even its biggest instruments, such as pianos, can be moved to higher floors.

Rebuilding for the next flood

“We can’t eliminate the risk, but we can minimise the impact,” says Bruce Parry, Summerland Bank’s community and sustainability manager.

The bank was founded in 1964 in the Northern Rivers as a customer-owned bank. It made an early commitment to rebuild in Lismore. But it’s done so with the lessons of the 2022 floods in mind.

“You can’t hold the flood out, the water is going to get in. It’s what you do when that happens that is important,” Parry explains. “We’ve done a lot to make sure the materials we have used can either be removed, or can go under the water, under the flood, and then hosed out.”

Repeating past mistakes is costly

Beyond what businesses can do to recover on their own, our project also sought to find out what infrastructure improvements would minimise future flood impacts in Lismore.

After talking to around 40 business and service organisations, their number one priority was needing electricity to get back to work.

Damage to electricity networks hits communications, electronic payment systems, storage and distribution of perishables, water supply, sewerage, and transport.

Business leaders were frustrated it took six weeks in 2022 to get power restored to the central business district.

They were even more frustrated that the overhead poles and wires delivering electricity into their shops – all run from centralised power supplies, many of which were knocked out by flood debris further away – were rebuilt exactly the same way.

Their message to government and electricity providers is simple: with the power back on, we can get on with business. So why aren’t you making sure our power supply is more resilient than before?

But small businesses shouldn’t have to go it alone. Becoming more resilient to power outages during a disaster is best done at a community scale.

This challenge and other ideas we discussed – such as building storage and temporary business operations on higher ground – are resource intensive. It’s helped having Lismore City Council and NSW Reconstruction Authority staff at the table for these conversations, as those solutions would require government support.

Our report and video case studies will be released at a flood plan workshop hosted by Business Lismore today. Events such as this represent the latest incarnation of something we need more than ever: sharing local knowledge and experience for others to learn from.

Dan Etheridge, Director, The Living Lab Northern Rivers, Office of Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Education Impact), Southern Cross University and Caitlin McGee, Research Director, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney

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

Australia is still dragging its feet on decarbonising the economy. Last September, the Albanese government committed to a 62–70% reduction in carbon emissions by 2035 and net zero by 2050. However, only one month later, the government conceded it would fall just shy of its 2030 target and likely miss net zero without significant changes.

Delays to the construction of renewable energy projects around the country means coal-fired power stations scheduled for closure have had their operations extended. The many reasons for Australia’s slow progress on decarbonisation are well documented, and include a lack of transmission lines, poor federal coordination, and uncertainty over the lifetime of coal-fired power stations. But the implications of these delays for workers has been largely overlooked.

In our recent book, we analyse numerous reports and studies that forecast the clean energy transition will stimulate a jobs boom. In these predictions, new green career opportunities will mean workers who lose their jobs in fossil fuel sectors can take advantage of new job opportunities in a “just transition” — one in which no-one is left behind.

But are these claims true? Our research shows many of new renewable energy jobs are short-term and insecure: they are heavily focused on the construction and installation phase of projects, rather than long-term operations. The delays in the energy transition presents additional challenges for workers and their communities.

Old coal power plants are becoming unsafe

Coal-fired power generation still contributes 45% of Australia’s total electricity generation. Many of the roughly 15 remaining coal-fired power stations are ageing and becoming increasingly unreliable.

Recent research published by Reliability Watch found these power plants have suffered a combined 119 breakdowns over the six months to September 2025, and were unable to meet their generation commitments 22% of the time. For workers employed in these power stations it means their workplaces are becoming less safe to work in.

Queensland’s Callide Power Stations has suffered a series of serious incidents in recent years, including a generator unit explosion and cooling tower collapse in which workers’ lives were put at serious risk.

Similarly, Victoria’s 1970s-era Yallourn W Power Station has suffered a series of major breakdowns. In June 2025, a large section of an air duct crashed down onto scaffolding used for ongoing maintenance work. Luckily no workers were in the vicinity at the time. The plant is scheduled to close in 2028.

With delays in renewable energy coming online, state governments have had to extend the operational life of some ageing generators, such as the Eraring plant in New South Wales. Unions, quite rightly, are raising concerns about how worker safety can be maintained until closure.

Promised careers put on hold

To remain competitive in the job market, workers at coal plants slated to close have been encouraged to become more employable by gaining sustainability and environmental skills. Authorities have encouraged education and training providers to meet the workforce needs of the new “green” economy.

Universities and TAFE institutes have responded by developing new programs to provide qualifications in emerging occupations such as green construction, battery manufacturing, green steel, hydrogen production and offshore wind. The Clean Energy Council has even developed a careers guide for people interested in new clean energy jobs.

The problem is, the new jobs may not arrive in time. Workers who will lose their jobs when Yallourn closes have been encouraged to reskill to work in the offshore wind industry.

Unfortunately, ongoing delays in offshore wind developments means it’s unlikely there will be any local jobs in offshore wind when the power station closes in two years’ time. For energy regions, the uncertainty surrounding new renewable energy projects places them at risk of becoming “left-behind places” with high unemployment and socio-economic disadvantage.

In an earlier Conversation article, we pointed out workers in offshore oil and gas are also facing uncertainty, but decommissioning work could provide important job opportunities. Coordination of transition strategies at federal and state level will be vital in assisting both these groups of workers.

The environmental justification for accelerating Australia’s decarbonisation efforts is unquestionable. However, the tens of thousands of workers who will be relied on to deliver this transition must not be overlooked. They must be a primary consideration in any real “just” transition.

Darryn Snell, Associate professor, School of Management, RMIT University and Al Rainnie, Adjunct professor, Business, Adelaide University

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

Under the soils of the Kimberley lies one of the world’s last undeveloped large-scale reservoirs of onshore gas, according to the gas company hoping to extract it.

Last month, the Western Australian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended approval for Bennett Resources, a subsidiary of Black Mountain Energy, to begin exploration by drilling 20 wells across ten sites near the Kimberley’s Martuwarra Fitzroy River and applying hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

If officially approved and results are favourable, exploration is likely just the start. The company – majority-owned by US oil and gas company Black Mountain – wants to begin full-scale production to extract an estimated 420 billion cubic metres of gas. Doing so would require hundreds or thousands of wells drilled into many aquifers, with connecting roads, gas processing plants, wastewater ponds, water treatment plants, compressor stations and new pipelines.

For the mining-friendly WA government, the economic benefits would appeal. But the EPA’s recommendation has triggered an immediate backlash from Aboriginal and environmental groups. The Office of Appeals Commissioner reports an unprecedented number of appeals have been lodged before the February 10 deadline.

As health and Indigenous knowledge experts, we have real concern about these plans. We now know much more about the harms fracking can do to the health of humans, wildlife, groundwater and rivers.

What is this project?

Black Mountain Energy has exploration rights over a 3,700 square kilometre area in the Canning Basin between Fitzroy Crossing and Derby. The exploration wells would be drilled west of Fitzroy Crossing.

Major oil and gas companies interested in this basin’s gas reservoirs have progressively pulled out due to vast infrastructure costs.

But Black Mountain Energy appears determined. The company first announced its plans in 2020 but encountered difficulties raising funding. It’s not guaranteed to proceed even with state backing, as the federal government has to sign off too.

If these first wells go ahead, fracking rigs will drill down 2–5km into the rock, before shifting into horizontal mode. Then, the rigs force megalitres of fresh water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock layers to fracture them. This allows methane gas contaminated with toxic gases, including benzene and toluene, to be collected at the surface. Millions of litres of contaminated salty wastewater are also produced and must be managed. The process is repeated up to 70 times per well.

Some of the wells will be drilled within 2km of important tributaries of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River system.

Most gas would be exported, which would likely require a new pipeline to Karratha, almost 1,000km away.

How was this assessed?

The moratorium on fracking in WA was only lifted in 2018, following a state Inquiry into Hydraulic Fracturing. The government stated 20 protections would be in place before fracking would be allowed, but only half of these are complete.

The WA government points to the fact fracking is banned in 98% of the state. But the 2% where it isn’t banned covers parts of the breathtaking and culturally rich Kimberley region.

In considering this exploration project, the state EPA found the harm to the environment, culture and human health to be “unlikely” or “insignificant”.

But an independent federal scientific committee on onshore gas and coal found there were risks to threatened species from ecological disturbance and possible chemical contamination.

Since 2018, the evidence base of the environmental, physical and spiritual health risks around fracking have advanced significantly through documentation of Aboriginal knowledge and Western scientific research.

Threats to a sacred river

For the Kimberley’s First Nations groups, the waters of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River System lie at the heart of their spirituality.

Aboriginal people consider the Martuwarra River of Life and its groundwater systems to be an ancient life force – serpent beings that bring the Kimberley vast life and landscapes.

Stories carried through generations emphasise a deep moral responsibility to protect and manage the river and its groundwater. The deeply held spiritual beliefs of the people of the Kimberley are grounded in their values, ethics and virtues as a duty of care under First Law to protect public interests, ground and surface waters of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River, and the whole living system.

The Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council (chaired by co-author Anne Poelina) and the Kimberley Land Council strongly reject both the Valhalla proposal and the EPA’s view that cultural risks from fracking and water contamination are low.

Evidence from Western scientific research

As well as adding to climate change, these projects can damage waterways and groundwater, wildlife and human health at every step, from extraction to transport to processing to liquefaction and eventual burning.

Since the 2018 fracking inquiry, the rigour and quantity of evidence showing the harms have significantly increased. There are now consistent findings of harm to people living near fracking operations in nations such as the United States, Canada and Australia.

This evidence base captures risks to water quality (through contamination and over-extraction) and air quality (including emissions of toxic gases such as benzene and toluene).

Risks to human health associated with air and water contamination include increased risk of hospitalisation for cardiovascular, respiratory and kidney diseases and some cancers, especially in children. Higher rates of birth complications and birth defects have been observed downwind and downstream of oil and gas operations.

To our knowledge, there are no studies demonstrating these risks to environment, climate and health can be reduced through regulation.

What’s next?

More than 35,000 people live in the Kimberley, and around half identify as Aboriginal. The region is extremely sensitive to climate change and its people are at heightened risk from most health issues associated with oil and gas operations.

The WA EPA recommended approval of this exploration project without fully examining the evidence. The agency excluded human health concerns due to transient and “sparse populations”.

Policymakers must heed the accumulated evidence showing clear risks of harm. To approve drilling and fracking in the Kimberley is to approve a process we now know does damage to many things we care about, from human health to wildlife to culture to sacred rivers.

Black Mountain Energy was approached for comment but did not respond before deadline.

Melissa Haswell, Professor of Health, Safety and Environment, School of Public Health and Social Work, Queensland University of Technology; Anne Poelina, Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council & Professor and Chair Indigenous Knowledges & Senior Research Fellow, Nulungu Institute of Research, University of Notre Dame Australia, and David Shearman, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Adelaide University

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

It is common to think of time as moving in only one direction – from point A, through point B, to point C.

However, many Indigenous peoples – including Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand – experience time non-linearly.

Rather than picturing time as a straight line, we imagine it as recurring, spiralling, and recalling itself.

How we conceptualise time could impact how we respond to ecological crises.

Indigenous time/s

As Māori, we understand time – wā – non-linearly.

Researchers Hana Burgess and Te Kahuratai Painting contrast Māori time with colonial time, saying:

With settler colonial ontologies, time is flattened, made one dimensional, reduced to a linear process […] Along this arrow of time, the “present” is placed at the pinnacle of existence, disconnected from both the past and future.

Māori, however, do not place the present at the centre; as the same researchers put it, “there is no centre”.

We think with and as ancestors, and prophecy informs many of our movements.

For us, non-linear time finds natural expression in a metaphor: the koru, or unfolding fern frond. Researcher Paula Toko King and colleagues note this represents

the continuous cycles of life and death and the unfolding of the cosmos, emerging from the realm of potentiality.

Spiralling time should not be confused with circularity.

As writer Makere Stewart-Harawira explains:

a circle invariably returns to the point of origin, [however] the spiral never returns exactly to the point of origin but moves progressively forward in a process of constant motion and expansion.

Significantly, as Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte notes:

Spiraling time is an important topic of discussion when Indigenous persons compare their conceptions of temporality across different cultures.

Non-linear time

For many of us – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – non-linear time can be difficult to conceptualise, at first.

Consider memory, dream, imagination, and fantasy, all of which weave past, present, and future in ways that frequently impact how we act.

Think about your favourite season: every time it recurs, it is at once freshly present and reminiscent of past seasons. It may even prompt you to think about future ones.

We do not always realise that our experience of time is non-linear. And yet, for most – if not all – of us, it is. To experience time non-linearly is natural.

Importantly, as Kyle Whyte explains:

Spiraling time does not foreclose linear, future thinking.

This is true of non-linearity generally, which is closer to linearity than the prefix “non-” suggests (yet another way in which binaries constrain our thinking).

3 important insights

Non-linear time could help us to navigate compounding ecological crises, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and mass extinction.

The common refrain, “we’re minutes to midnight” is often used to prompt a sense of urgency and push us to act quickly without considering all the consequences of doing so. Non-linear time subverts this, offering three important insights.

First, these crises will impact, and are impacting, people and peoples differently. Marginalised communities are closer to “midnight” than others. For those who are feeling the effects of these crises, it makes more sense to say, “we’re (already) minutes past midnight”. In recent years, for instance, my iwi (Māori tribe), Kāi Tahu, has had to discuss the possibility of a managed retreat from the coastline, as many of our marae (gathering places) are located on the coast.

Second, non-linear time encourages us to think about – and plan for – what comes “afterwards”. These crises are unlikely to lead to human extinction, and there will be non-humans who survive with us; so it benefits us all to think about how we might navigate collapse, and steps we could take now to transition to alternative ways of living.

Linearity leads us to place too much emphasis on static points, such as thresholds, which typically elevate humans over others. We might ask: what comes after “midnight”?

Third, non-linearity challenges us to imagine beyond anthropocentrism. We conceptualise time in human ways, but it is not only us who are threatened by, and forced to navigate, these crises. Breaking free of linear time helps us to think about the world beyond “the human”. It leads us to wonder.

And what do we learn? That we humans are not the only ones here; that it isn’t only us and “the environment”; that to reduce non-humans to dimensions of “the environment” – as we do when we treat others as exploitable resources – is, ultimately, oppressive; and that only by broadening our concern will we realise justice.

It’s true, “midnight” can be a dangerous time for humans; but by attending to non-humans – including nocturnal animals like kiwi, wētā, and the brushtail possums I love – we will continue to find the dawn, not alone but together.

Philip McKibbin, PhD Candidate, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney

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

The Trump administration took a major step in its efforts to unravel America’s climate policies on Feb. 12, 2026, when it moved to rescind the 2009 endangerment finding – a formal determination that six greenhouse gases that drive climate change, including carbon dioxide and methane from burning fossil fuels, endanger public health and welfare.

But the administration’s arguments in dismissing the health risks of climate change are not only factually wrong, they’re deeply dangerous to Americans’ health and safety.

As physicians, epidemiologists and environmental health scientists, we’ve seen growing evidence of the connections between climate change and harm to people’s health. Here’s a look at the health risks everyone face from climate change.

Extreme heat

Greenhouse gases from vehicles, power plants and other sources accumulate in the atmosphere, trapping heat and holding it close to Earth’s surface like a blanket. Too much of it causes global temperatures to rise, leaving more people exposed to dangerous heat more often.

Most people who get minor heat illnesses will recover, but more extreme exposure, especially without enough hydration and a way to cool off, can be fatal. People who work outside, are elderly or have underlying illnesses such as heart, lung or kidney diseases are often at the greatest risk.

Heat deaths have been rising globally, up 23% from the 1990s to the 2010s, when the average year saw more than half a million heat-related deaths. Here in the U.S., the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome killed hundreds of people.

Climate scientists predict that with advancing climate change, many areas of the world, including U.S. cities such as Miami, Houston, Phoenix and Las Vegas, will confront many more days each year hot enough to threaten human survival.

Extreme weather

Warmer air holds more moisture, so climate change brings increasing rainfall and storm intensity and worsening flooding, as many U.S. communities have experienced in recent years. Warmer ocean water also fuels more powerful hurricanes.

Increased flooding carries health risks, including drownings, injuries and water contamination from human pathogens and toxic chemicals. People cleaning out flooded homes also face risks from mold exposure, injuries and mental distress.

Climate change also worsens droughts, disrupting food supplies and causing respiratory illness from dust. Rising temperatures and aridity dry out forests and grasslands, making them a setup for wildfires.

Air pollution

Wildfires, along with other climate effects, are worsening air quality around the country.

Wildfire smoke is a toxic soup of microscopic particles (known as fine particulate matter, or PM2.5) that can penetrate deep in the lungs and hazardous compounds such as lead, formaldehyde and dioxins generated when homes, cars and other materials burn at high temperatures. Smoke plumes can travel thousands of miles downwind and trigger heart attacks and elevate lung cancer risks, among other harms.

Meanwhile, warmer conditions favor the formation of ground-level ozone, a heart and lung irritant. Burning of fossil fuels also generates dangerous air pollutants that cause a long list of health problems, including heart attacks, strokes, asthma flare-ups and lung cancer.

Infectious diseases

Because they are cold-blooded organisms, insects are directly influenced by temperature. So with rising temperatures, mosquito biting rates rise as well. Warming also accelerates the development of disease agents that mosquitoes transmit.

Mosquito-borne dengue fever has turned up in Florida, Texas, Hawaii, Arizona and California. New York state just saw its first locally acquired case of chikungunya virus, also transmitted by mosquitoes.

And it’s not just insect-borne infections. Warmer temperatures increase diarrhea and foodborne illness from Vibrio cholerae and other bacteria and heavy rainfall increases sewage-contaminated stormwater overflows into lakes and streams. At the other water extreme, drought in the desert Southwest increases the risk of coccidioidomycosis, a fungal infection known as valley fever.

Other impacts

Climate change threatens health in numerous other ways. Longer pollen seasons increase allergen exposures. Lower crop yields reduce access to nutritious foods.

Mental health also suffers, with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress following disasters, and increased rates of violent crime and suicide tied to high-temperature days.

Young children, older adults, pregnant women and people with preexisting medical conditions are among the highest-risk groups. Lower-income people also face greater risk because of higher rates of chronic disease, higher exposures to climate hazards and fewer resources for protection, medical care and recovery from disasters.

Policy-based evidence-making

The evidence linking climate change with health has grown considerably since 2009. Today, it is incontrovertible.

Studies show that heat, air pollution, disease spread and food insecurity linked to climate change are worsening and costing millions of lives around the world each year. This evidence also aligns with Americans’ lived experiences. Anybody who has fallen ill during a heat wave, struggled while breathing wildfire smoke or been injured cleaning up from a hurricane knows that climate change can threaten human health.

Yet the Trump administration is willfully ignoring this evidence in proclaiming that climate change does not endanger health.

Its move to rescind the 2009 endangerment finding, which underpins many climate regulations, fits with a broader set of policy measures, including cutting support for renewable energy and subsidizing fossil fuel industries that endanger public health. In addition to rescinding the endangerment finding, the Trump administration also moved to roll back emissions limits on vehicles – the leading source of U.S. carbon emissions and a major contributor to air pollutants such as PM2.5 and ozone.

It’s not just about endangerment

The evidence is clear: Climate change endangers human health. But there’s a flip side to the story.

When governments work to reduce the causes of climate change, they help tackle some of the world’s biggest health challenges. Cleaner vehicles and cleaner electricity mean cleaner air – and less heart and lung disease. More walking and cycling on safe sidewalks and bike paths mean more physical activity and lower chronic disease risks. The list goes on. By confronting climate change, we promote good health.

To really make America healthy, in our view, the nation should acknowledge the facts behind the endangerment finding and double down on our transition from fossil fuels to a healthy, clean energy future.

This article includes material from a story originally published Nov. 12, 2025.

Jonathan Levy, Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University; Howard Frumkin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington; Jonathan Patz, Professor of Environmental Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Vijay Limaye, Adjunct Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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

In 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that greenhouse gas emissions, including from vehicles and fossil fuel power plants, endanger public health and welfare. The decision, known as the endangerment finding, was based on years of evidence, and it has underpinned EPA actions on climate change ever since.

The Trump administration now wants to tear up that finding as it tries to roll back climate regulations on everything from vehicles to industries.

But the move might not be as simple as the administration hopes.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin sent a proposed rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget in early January 2026 to rescind the endangerment finding, and the White House announced that Zeldin would make the move official on Feb. 12, 2026.

There’s no question that rescinding the endangerment finding would be challenged in court. The world just lived through the three hottest years on record, evidence of worsening climate change is stronger now than ever before, and people across the U.S. are increasingly experiencing the harm firsthand.

Several legal issues have the potential to stop the EPA’s effort. They include emails submitted in a court case that suggest political appointees sought to direct the scientific review that the EPA is using to defend its plan. A federal judge also ruled on Jan. 30 that the Department of Energy violated the law when it handpicked five researchers to write that climate science review. While that ruling doesn’t necessarily stop the EPA, it raises questions.

To understand how we got here, it helps to look at history for some context.

The Supreme Court started it

The endangerment finding stemmed from a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The court found that various greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, were “pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act,” and it gave the EPA an explicit set of instructions.

The court wrote that the “EPA must determine whether or not emissions from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

But the Supreme Court did not order the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Only if the EPA found that emissions were harmful would the agency be required, by law, “to establish national ambient air quality standards for certain common and widespread pollutants based on the latest science” – meaning greenhouse gases.

The EPA was required to follow formal procedures – including reviewing the scientific research, assessing the risks and taking public comment – and then determine whether the observed and projected harms were sufficient to justify publishing an “endangerment finding.”

That process took two years. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced on Dec. 7, 2009, that the then-current and projected concentrations of six key greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – threatened the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Challenges to the finding erupted immediately.

Jackson denied 10 petitions received in 2009-2010 that called on the administration to reconsider the finding.

On June 26, 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the endangerment finding and regulations that the EPA had issued under the Clean Air Act for passenger vehicles and permitting procedures for stationary sources, such as power plants.

This latest challenge is different.

It came directly from the Trump administration without going through normal channels. It was, though, entirely consistent with both the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for the Trump administration and President Donald Trump’s dismissive approach to climate risk.

Trump’s burden of proof

To legally reverse the 2009 finding, the agency must go through the same evaluation process as before. According to conditions outlined in the Clean Air Act, the reversal of the 2009 finding must be justified by a thorough and complete review of the current science and not just be political posturing.

That’s a tough task.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has talked publicly about how he handpicked the five researchers who wrote the scientific research review. A judge has now found that the effort violated the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that agency-chosen panels providing policy advice to the government conduct their work in public.

All five members of the committee had been outspoken critics of mainstream climate science. Their report, released in summer 2025, was widely criticized for inaccuracies in what they referenced and its failure to represent the current science.

Scientific research available today clearly shows that greenhouse gas emissions harm public health and welfare. Importantly, evidence collected since 2009 is even stronger now than it was when the endangerment finding was written.

For example, a 2025 review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine determined that the evidence supporting the endangerment finding is even stronger today than it was in 2009. A 2019 peer-reviewed assessment of the evidence related to greenhouse gas emissions’ role in climate change came to the same conclusion.

The Sixth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report produced by hundreds of scientists from around the world, found in 2023 that “adverse impacts of human-caused climate change will continue to intensify.”

In other words, greenhouse gas emissions were causing harm in 2009, and the harm is worse now and will be even worse in the future without steps to reduce emissions.

In public comments on the Department of Energy’s problematic 2025 review, a group of climate experts from around the world reached the same conclusion, adding that the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group review “fails to adequately represent this reality.”

What happens if EPA does drop the endangerment finding

As an economist who has studied the effects of climate change for over 40 years, I am concerned that the EPA rescinding the endangerment finding on the basis of faulty scientific assessment would lead to faster efforts to roll back U.S. climate regulations meant to slow climate change.

It would also give the administration cover for further actions that would defund more science programs, stop the collection of valuable data, freeze hiring and discourage a generation of emerging science talent.

Cases typically take years to wind through the courts. The Environmental Defense Fund, for one, has announced plans to sue once the rescission is published in the Federal Register.

But unless a judge issues an injunction, I expect to see an accelerating retreat from U.S. efforts to reduce climate change. An example is the removal in early February of the climate science chapter from a new “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence” that advises judges. Republican state attorneys general had complained to the Federal Judicial Center of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine that the manual “treated human influence on climate as fact.”

I see no scenario in which a legal challenge doesn’t end up before the Supreme Court. I would hope that both the enormous amount of scientific evidence and the words in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution would have some significant sway in the court’s considerations. It starts, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” and includes in its list of principles, “promote the general Welfare.

This article, originally published Feb. 2, 2026, has been updated with the White House announcing a date for rescinding the endangerment finding and the removal of judicial advice on climate change.

Gary W. Yohe, Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University

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

When we think about birds, we often picture their colourful plumage: the iridescence of a peacock’s tail or the electric blue flash of a kingfisher. Or we might consider how they use voices, from the song of the nightingale to the coo of a dove or the shriek of a jay.

So it’s easy to imagine that vision and hearing must be the senses these birds use to explore their environment and interact with each other. However, smell is also vital to birds for navigating, foraging and even communicating. Yet this sense is often underestimated or ignored entirely.

Some of the blame for this long-standing underestimation can be assigned to influential 19th century naturalists like John James Audobon, whose early experiments on turkey vultures led him to conclude that they could not smell and must use sight to locate their carcass suppers.

He presented vultures with paintings of dead sheep, which they pecked away at. But when he shrouded putrid carrion with plant material the vultures ignored it. However, later work revealed flaws in Audobon’s research – these birds prefer fresher meat and locate it using scent, even when it is visually obscured.

The turkey vulture’s keen sense of smell was put to use by oil company engineers in 1930s California. Workers were having trouble with leaks along a 42-mile-long natural gas pipeline but noticed that vultures would often congregate around these leaks. Natural gas alone is odourless, but a chemical called ethyl mercaptan is added so humans can detect its distinctive eggy smell at close range. Ethyl mercaptan is also released by decomposing meat, so vultures associate it with food. The engineers used this to their advantage, intentionally pumping through large doses of ethyl mercaptan and observing the vultures to pinpoint and repair leaks.

More recently, research has explored the many ways that birds use their sense of smell in the wild. At the University of Sheffield, I am investigating whether long-tailed tits, a small UK garden bird, might use their sense of smell to recognise family members. Like we humans often help close family with childcare, long-tailed tits will feed chicks belonging to siblings, parents and children during the breeding season. How these little birds identify who is and isn’t a close relative is not entirely clear yet, but their scents may hold the key.

Starlings and blue tits, meanwhile, use scent to seek out aromatic plants such as yarrow, hogweed and elder, which they weave into their nests. The strong-smelling compounds in these plants defend their chicks against parasites, in the same way that we might use citronella to ward off mosquitoes.

Hoopoe chicks manufacture their own chemical defences. These are colourful birds with a long, curved bill and a distinctive orange crown of feathers. Young hoopoes produce a thick, dark, foul-smelling substance called preen oil from a gland just above their tail that contains bacteria. These beneficial bacteria break the preen oil down into pungent chemicals that keep germs at bay.

New Zealand’s national icon, the flightless kiwi, is mostly nocturnal and feeds on worms and insects found underground, so cannot rely on vision when foraging. Instead, kiwis have nostrils at the very tip of their long bills, which they probe the earth with to sniff out their subterranean prey.

Crested auklets are small, black seabirds that smell like tangerines. This odour is produced by special feathers and is involved in social communication. Both male and female auklets will rub their bills into the nape of another bird’s neck to get a good whiff, using this smell to assess their quality as a potential mate. So, it pays to produce a good strong dose of this natural cologne.

Petrels and shearwaters fly across hundreds of kilometres of open ocean in search of sustenance, using their sense of smell to detect dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a chemical produced by phytoplankton (microscopic plant-like organisms). The odour of this chemical, often compared to that of boiled cabbage, signals where in the sea is likely to be rich with food. Additionally, the varying intensity of this chemical allows them to create an olfactory map in their heads for navigating back to their nests on land.

Sadly, this impressive olfactory ability can land these birds in trouble. Ocean plastic causes blooms of phytoplankton, which pump DMS into the air in unusual quantities. Seabirds can be confused by these chemicals that are usually associated with food and will often consume the plastic, which can be fatal. Because of their reliance on scent for foraging, DMS-sensitive birds, which also include albatrosses, are nearly six times more likely than other species to ingest plastic.

Like birds, humans have been historically underappreciated when it comes to smell. An idea that – again – largely stems from the pontifications of 19th century scientists.

Humans, however, are sensitive to an enormous range of odours. One experiment showed that, when blindfolded, human participants could track the scent of chocolate across a field. We use our sense of smell all the time in our daily lives – sometimes without fully realising it – in avoiding danger (noticing the smell of smoke), selecting food (passing up off milk or picking a particularly ripe orange) or even choosing a partner. Research suggests people are often drawn to the odour of those with a very different set of immune genes to their own.

So, even for animals that don’t have a dominant sense of smell, odours form a key part of the way they interact with the world.

Joey Baxter, PhD Candidate in Biosciences, University of Sheffield

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

As soon as you drive over the top of the Peak District and down into Sheffield you can see the light pollution – and it’s horrible, said a participant in a research project into darkness and light pollution.

In the last 100 years, the places where people can experience darkness have reduced dramatically. Now only 10% of the people living in the western hemisphere experience places with dark skies, where there is no artificial light. And the starry skies they can see are limited by artificial light. The number of stars that people can see from most of the western hemisphere is getting fewer and fewer.

Researchers trying to find out about public attitudes to darkness attended events over three days in the North York Moors National Park. Here, in one of the UK’s seven dark sky reserves (where light pollution is limited), the researchers explored how immersive and fun experiences, such as guided night walks and stargazing and silent discos, reshaped public perceptions of natural darkness and sparked ideas of what they might change in their lives.

Working with a professional film-maker, the research team recorded how people responded to taking part in events in darkness. Participants in the research included five tourism businesses, two representatives from the park and 94 visitors.

Darkness disappears

Light pollution is increasing globally by approximately 10% per year (estimated by measuring how many stars can be seen in the sky at night), diminishing night skies and disrupting ecosystems.

But increasing awareness of light pollution has led to an increase in national parks hosting events to explore this issue, according to my recent study.

The study’s findings indicated that participants in the North York Moors Dark Sky Festival events not only started to feel more comfortable in natural darkness but also talked about changing their own lifestyle, including using low-impact lighting in their homes, asking neighbours to switch off lights in their gardens at night, and monitoring neighbourhood light levels.

The research team used filming and walking with visitors to capture not just what people said, but what they did in darkness. During guided walks, participants experimented with moving without head‑torches, cultivating night vision, and tuning into sound, smell and learning how to find their way around without artificial light.

Walking in silence helped visitors build a deeper connection with the nocturnal environment. One visitor said that being in the dark just for that moment of peace, and just to listen and tune in to the environment was a privilege and something to conserve.

One said: “I remember as a child I’d see similar stuff from a city [and that] sort of thing, and now we’re doing whatever we can do to save things like this.”

Visitors reported leaving with new skills, greater awareness and commitment, such as putting their lights at home on timers, and working on bat protection projects. These actions demonstrate that this kind of experience in nocturnal environments can change behaviour far beyond festivals.

Dark Sky activists, such as those in the North York Moors National Park, have learned that the public connect with the issues around light pollution and become more engaged if the activities are fun.

Shared experiences help people understand complex messages about climate, biodiversity, and responsible lighting, and help people feel more confident about walking in the dark. Several participants commented that walking without light was good and wasn’t as bad as they thought. Another said: “I find walking at night with a full moon is really quite a magical experience.”

By the end of the walk, some visitors (when on relatively easy ground) were happy to switch head torches off and enjoy feeling immersed within the nocturnal landscape.

Dark‑sky festivals show how joy and fun can build public awareness and an understanding of why darkness matters.

However, limited public transport to rural night events as well as safety concerns about walking in darkness, and the cost of festivals all restrict participation.

Why light is a problem

Research shows that artificial light at night disrupts circadian rhythms, impairs some species ability to find their way around and is a cause of declining populations of insects, bats and other nocturnal fauna.

There is also evidence that outdoor lighting generates needless emissions and ecological harm that is intensifying at an alarming rate.

To rethink this shift, the study argues that darkness could be considered a shared environmental “good”, requiring collective care to prevent overuse, damage and pollution.

Small changes in lighting shielding (which controls the spread of light), warmer coloured lights, and half lighting (switching street lighting off at midnight) can be significant and less damaging to animal life.

The national park’s next major step has been to establish a Northern England Dark-Sky Alliance to halt the growth of light pollution outside the park boundaries, particularly along the A1 road in northern England, which would help restore natural darkness for nocturnal migratory species, such as birds like Nightjars.

If we can make living with more darkness in our streets, and in our leisure time, feel more normal and more comfortable, then nighttime becomes not something that needs to be fixed, but a shared commons to be restored.

Jenny Hall is a speaker at an upcoming discussion on Cities Under Stars: Tackling Light Pollution in Cities, in conjunction with The Conversation, as part of this year’s Dark Skies Festival. Find out more, and come along.

Jenny Hall, Associate Professor in Tourism and Events, York St John University

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

When viewers tune in to the 2026 Winter Olympics, they will see pristine, white slopes, groomed tracks and athletes racing over snow-covered landscapes, thanks in part to a storm that blanketed the mountain venues of the Italian Alps with fresh powder just in time.

But at lower elevations, where cross-country and other events are held, athletes and organizers have been contending with rain; thin, sometimes slushy snow; and icy, machine-made surfaces.

“Most of our races are on machine-made snow,” 2026 U.S. Olympic team cross-country skier Rosie Brennan told us ahead of the Games. “TV production is great at making it look like we are in wintry, snowy places, but this year has been particularly bad.”

As scientists who study mountain snow, water resources and the human impact of warming winters, we see winter’s changes through data: rising temperatures, shrinking snowpack, shorter snow seasons.

Olympic athletes experience changing winter conditions personally, in ways the public and scientists rarely do. Lack of snowfall and more frequent rain affect when and where they can train, how they train and how dangerous the terrain can become.

We talked with Brennan and cross-country skiers Ben Ogden and Jack Young as they were preparing for the 2026 Winter Games. Their experiences reflect what many athletes describe: a sport increasingly defined not by the variability of natural winter but by the reliability of industrialized snowmaking.

What the cameras don’t show

Snowmaking technology makes it possible to create halfpipes for freestyle snowboarding and skiing competitions. It also allows for races when natural snow is scarce – the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing relied entirely on machine-made snow for many races.

However, machine-made snow creates a very different surface than natural snow, changing the race.

In clouds, each unique snowflake shape is determined by the temperature and humidity. Once formed, the iconic star shape begins to slowly erode as its crystals become rounded spheres. In this way, natural snow provides a variety of textures and depths: soft powder after a storm, firm or brittle snow in cold weather, and slushy, wet snow during rain or melt events.

Machine-made snow varies less in texture or quality. It begins and ends its life as an ice pellet surrounded by a thin film of liquid water. That makes it slower to change, easier to shape, and, once frozen, it hardens in place.

‘They’re faster, icier and carry more risk’

When artificial snow is being made, the sound is piercing – a high-pitched hiss roars from the pressurized nozzles of snow guns. These guns spew water mixed with compressed air, and it freezes upon contact with the cold air outside, creating small, dense ice particles. The drops sting exposed skin, as one of us, Agnes Macy, knows well as a former competitive skier.

Snow machines then push out artificial snow onto the racecourse. Often, the trails are the only ribbons of snow in sight – a white strip surrounded by brown mud and dead grass.

“Courses built for natural snow feel completely different when covered in man-made snow,” Brennan, 37, said. “They’re faster, icier, and carry more risk than anyone might imagine for cross-country skiing.”

There’s nothing quite like skiing on fresh snow. After a storm brings a blanket of light, fluffy powder, it can almost feel as though you’re floating. The snow is forgiving.

On artificial snow, skiers carry more speed into downhill runs. Downhill racers may relish the speed, but cross-country skis don’t have metal edges like downhill skis do, so step-turning or skidding around fast, icy corners can make an athlete feel out of control. It “requires a different style of skiing, skill sets and strengths than I grew up learning,” Brennan said.

How athletes adapt, with help from science

Athletes must adjust their technique and prepare their skis differently, depending on the snow conditions.

At elite levels, this is science. Snow crystal morphology, temperature, ski base material and structure, ski stiffness, skier technique and environmental conditions all interact to determine an athlete’s speed.

Before cross-country, or Nordic, races, ski technicians compare multiple ski pairs prepared with different base surfaces and waxes. They evaluate how quickly each ski glides and how long it maintains that glide – traits that depend on the friction between the ski and the snow.

Compared to natural snow, machine-made snow generally provides a more durable and longer-lasting surface. In cross-country racing, that allows for more efficient and stronger pushes without skis or poles sinking deep into snow. Additionally, improvements in the machines used to groom snow now provide harder and more homogeneous surfaces that permit faster skiing.

While fast skiing is the goal, ski crashes are also the most common cause of injury in the Winter Olympics. With machine-made snow, ski jump competitors and anyone who falls is also landing on a harder surface, which can increase the risk of injury.

Why winters are changing

Weather can always deal surprises, but long-term climate trends are shifting what can be expected of a typical winter.

In the Alps, air temperature has increased by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) since the late 1800s, before rising fossil fuel use began increasing the levels of greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere. Globally, 2025 was the third-warmest year on record, following 2024 and 2023.

For mountain regions, these warmer conditions have consequences. Snow melts earlier and more frequently in midwinter, especially during warm spells that used to be rare.

Midwinter snowmelt events are occurring more often at higher elevations and earlier in the season across many mountain ranges of western North America. At the same time, the snow line – the elevation where precipitation shifts from snow to rain – is moving upslope.

Warming in high mountain environments is also causing the threshold where rain turns to snow to rise by tens of meters per decade in some regions. This means storms that once blanketed entire valleys in snow now may deliver snow only to upper slopes, with rain falling below.

Together, these changes mean that many winter storms produce less snow, over less area, and for shorter durations than they did a generation ago.

Training venues

The changing winter landscape has also transformed how athletes train. Traditional training venues, such as glaciers once used for summer skiing, have become unreliable. In August 2025, the Hintertux Glacier – the only year-round training center operating in Austria – announced its first temporary closure.

“It’s been increasingly hard to make plans for locations to train between races,” Brennan said. “Snow reliability isn’t great in many places. We often rely on going to higher elevations for a better chance of snow.”

Higher-elevation training can help, but it concentrates athletes in fewer places, reduces access for younger skiers due to the remoteness and raises costs for national teams. Some of these glaciers – like Canada’s Haig Glacier or Alaska’s Eagle Glacier – are accessible only by helicopter. When skiers can’t get to snow, dryland training on rollerskis is one of the only options.

Winter athletes see the climate changing

Because winter is their workplace, athletes often notice subtle changes before those changes show up in long-term statistics.

Even athletes in their earlier 20s, like Young, said they have noticed the rapid expansion of snowmaking infrastructure at many racing venues in recent years. Snowmaking requires large amounts of energy and water. It is also a clear sign that organizers see winters becoming less dependable.

Athletes also witness how communities are affected when poor snow conditions mean fewer visitors. “In the Alps, when conditions are bad, it is obvious how much it affects the communities,” Ogden, 25, said. “Their tourism-based livelihoods are so often negatively affected, and their quality of life changes.”

Many winter athletes are speaking publicly about their concerns. Groups such as Protect Our Winters, founded by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones, work to advance policies that protect outdoor places for future generations.

A wintry look, but an uncertain future

For athletes at the 2026 Olympics, the variability within the Olympic region – snow at higher elevations, rain at lower ones – reflects a broader truth: The stability of winter is diminishing.

Athletes know this better than anyone. They race in it. They train in it. They depend on it.

The Winter Games will go on this year. The snow will look good on television. But at the same time, winter is changing.

Keith Musselman, Assistant Professor in Geography, Mountain Hydrology, and Climate Change, University of Colorado Boulder and Agnes Macy, Graduate Student in Geography, University of Colorado Boulder

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

This article contains images that some readers may find upsetting.

Heatwaves linked to climate change have already led to mass deaths of birds and other wildlife around the world. To stem the loss of biodiversity as the climate warms, we need to better understand how birds respond.

Our new study set out to fill this knowledge gap by examining Australian birds. Alarmingly, we found birds at our study sites died at a rate three times greater during a very hot summer compared to a mild summer.

And the news gets worse. Under a pessimistic emissions scenario, just 11% of birds at the sites would survive.

The findings have profound implications for our bird life in a warming world – and underscore the urgent need to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and help animals find cool places to shelter.

Feeling the heat

The study examined native birds in two parts of semi-arid New South Wales: Weddin Mountains National Park near Grenfell and Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve near West Wyalong. At both locations, citizen scientists have been catching, marking and releasing birds regularly since 1986.

This has produced data for 22,000 individual birds spanning 37 species. They include honeyeaters, thornbills, fairy-wrens, whistlers, treecreepers, finches and doves.

Data from the past 30-odd years showed cold winters led only to a relatively small drop in survival rates. But it was a far starker picture in summer.

During a mild summer with no days above 38°C, 86% of the birds survived. But in a hot summer with 30 days above 38°C, just 59% survived.

We then used these real-life findings to model future survival, to the end of the century, for birds at our study sites.

Worryingly, climate projections for the sites we studied show the number of days above 38°C will at least double by the end of the century (or the year 2104). Meanwhile, days below 0°C will disappear during this time.

These projections are broadly similar for all arid and semi-arid regions across Australia.

As winters warm, we predict bird survival in winter would increase slightly by the end of this century. But this would not offset the many more birds killed by extreme heat as summers warm.

But to what extent will populations decline? To answer this question, we considered an optimistic scenario of rapid emissions reduction – resulting in about 1°C warming compared to pre-industrial levels. Under this scenario, we predict annual survival will fall by one-third, from 63% to 43%.

Under a pessimistic scenario, involving very little emissions reduction and 3.7°C warming this century, the survival rate falls to a shocking 11%.

Other lab-based studies around the world have made similar projections for bird populations. But our projections are unusual because they’re based on actual survival rates in wild populations measured over decades.

What happens to birds in heatwaves?

Some birds do manage to survive extreme heat. We then wondered: how does a bird protect itself from soaring temperatures? And can its habitat offer life-saving shelter?

We addressed these questions in a complementary study led by zoologist Lynda Sharpe. It involved comparing the behaviour of individual birds on mild and hot days.

We chose as our subject the Jacky Winter, a small robin common across Australia. Between 2018 and 2021 we followed the fates of 40 breeding pairs living in semi-arid mallee woodland in South Australia. There, the annual number of days above 42°C has more than doubled over the past 25 years.

As heat escalated, Jacky Winters showed a broad range of behavioural responses. This included adjusting their posture, activity levels and habitat use to avoid gaining heat and to increase heat dissipation.

As air temperatures approached 35°C, birds moved to the top of the highest trees where greater wind speeds cooled their bodies. The birds also began to pant, which can lead to fatal dehydration.

Once air temperatures climbed above 40°C, exceeding the birds’ body temperature, they moved to the ground to shelter in tree-base hollows and crevices. They remained in these “thermal refuges” for as long as it took for air temperatures to drop to about 38°C – sometimes for up to eight hours. But this made foraging impossible and the birds lost body mass.

We then examined what parts of the birds’ habitat offered the coolest place to shelter on extremely hot days. Hollows in tree bases were significantly cooler than all other locations we measured. The best of these cool hollows were rare and found only in the largest eucalypt mallees.

Even with their flexible behaviour, the ability of Jacky Winters to survive heatwaves was finite – and apparently dependent on whether large trees were available. Some 29% percent of adults we studied disappeared (and were presumed dead) within 24 hours of air temperatures reaching a record-breaking 49°C in 2019.

Similarly, during two months of heatwaves in 2018, 20% of adults studied were lost, compared with only 6% in the two months prior.

Eggs and nestlings were even more susceptible to heat. All 41 egg clutches and 21 broods exposed to air temperatures above 42°C died.

We found it distressing to witness such losses among birds we had followed for months and years. And it was deeply sad to see the breeding failures after the parent birds had invested so much effort in caring for eggs and tending to young.

We need to act

Our studies show extremely high temperatures are already killing troubling numbers of birds in Australia’s arid and semi-arid regions. These regions comprise 70% of the Australian continent and 40% of the global landmass.

Such losses will only worsen as climate change escalates. This has profound implications for biodiversity in Australia and more broadly.

Obviously, humanity must urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming. But we must also better manage our biodiversity as the climate changes.

Key to this is identifying and protecting thermal refuges such as tree hollows by, for example, managing fire to reduce the loss of large trees.

The authors wish to acknowledge our colleagues, especially Lynda Sharpe and Tim Bonnet, for their important contributions to the research upon which this article is based.

Janet Gardner, Adjunct Research Scientist, CSIRO and Suzanne Prober, Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO

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

This week, Victoria recorded its hottest day in nearly six years. On Tuesday, the northwest towns of Walpeup and Hopetoun reached 48.9°C, and the temperature in parts of Melbourne soared over 45°C. Towns in South Australia also broke heat records.

This heatwave is not an outlier. It is a warning shot.

These weather conditions rival the extreme heat seen in the lead-up to the 2019–20 Black Summer, and they point to a future in which days like this are no longer rare, but routine.

What makes this summer so confronting is not just how hot it has been, but this: Australia already knows how to cool cities, yet we are failing to do it. Why?

Urban heat is not inevitable

Cities heat up faster and stay hotter than surrounding areas because of how they are built. Dense development, dark road surfaces, limited shade, and buildings that trap heat and rely heavily on air-conditioning create the “urban heat island” effect.

This means cities absorb vast amounts of heat during the day and release it slowly at night, preventing the city from cooling down even after sunset. During heatwaves, this trapped heat accumulates day after day and pushes temperatures well beyond what people can safely tolerate.

Future urbanisation is expected to amplify projected urban heat, irrespective of background climate conditions. Global climate change is making the urban heat island effect worse, but much of the heat we experience in cities has been built in through decades of planning and design choices.

Heat is a health and equity crisis

Heatwaves already kill more than 1,100 Australians each year, more than any other natural hazard. Extreme heat increases the risk of heart and respiratory disease, worsens chronic illness, disrupts sleep and overwhelms health services.

Poorly designed and inadequately insulated homes, particularly in rental and social housing can become heat traps. People on low incomes are least able to afford effective cooling, pushing many into energy debt or forcing them to endure dangerously high temperatures. Urban heat deepens existing inequalities. Those who contributed least to the problem often bear the greatest burden.

Australia has expertise, but not ambition

Here is the paradox. Australia is a major contributor to global research on urban heat. Australian researchers are developing national tools to measure and mitigate urban heat, and studies from cities such as Melbourne have quantified urban heat island intensity and investigated how urban design can influence heat stress.

Additionally, Australia already has the technologies to cool cities, from reflective coatings and heat-resilient pavements to advanced shading systems. Yet many of our cities remain dangerously hot. The issue isn’t a lack of solutions, but the failure to roll them out at scale.

Internationally, we are lagging behind countries where large-scale heat mitigation projects are already reducing urban temperatures, cutting energy demand and saving lives.

For example, Paris has adopted a city-wide strategy to create “cool islands”, transforming public spaces and schoolyards into shaded, cooler places that reduce heat stress during heatwaves.

In China, the Sponge City program, now implemented in cities such as Shenzhen and Wuhan, uses green infrastructure and water-sensitive design to cool urban areas and reduce heat stress.

Symbolic change can’t meet the challenge

Too often, urban heat policy stops at small, symbolic actions, a pocket park here, a tree-planting program there. These measures are important, but they are not sufficient for the scale of the challenge.

Greening cities is essential. Trees cool streets, improve thermal comfort and deliver multiple health and environmental benefits. But greenery has limits. If buildings remain poorly insulated, roads continue to absorb heat and cooling demand keeps rising, trees alone will not protect cities from extreme temperatures in the coming decades.

Urban heat is a complex systems problem. It emerges from how cities are built, and is largely shaped by construction materials, building codes, transport systems and planning decisions locked in over generations. Scientists know a great deal about how to reduce urban heat, but many responses remain piecemeal and intuitive rather than systemic.

Designing an uncomfortable future

Research suggests that even if global warming is limited to below 2°C, heatwaves in major Australian cities could approach 50°C by 2040. At those temperatures, emergency responses alone will not be enough. Beyond certain temperature thresholds, behaviour change, public warnings and cooling centres cannot fully protect people.

The choices we make now about buildings, streets, materials and energy systems will determine whether Australian cities become increasingly unliveable, or remain places where people can safely live, work and age.

The battle against urban heat will be won or lost through design, technology, innovation and political will. Cities need to deploy advanced cool materials across roofs, buildings and roads, in combination with nature-based solutions. This will only work if governments use incentives to reward heat-safe design. Heat must be planned for systematically, not treated as a cosmetic problem.

With leadership and a handful of well-designed, large-scale projects, Australia could shift from laggard to leader. We have the science. We have the industry. We have the solutions. The heat is here. The only real question is whether we act, or keep absorbing it.

A/Prof. Elmira Jamei, Associate professor, Victoria University

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

Millions of people in southeastern Australia are sweating through a record-breaking heatwave. The heat this week is likely to be one for the history books. The heat began on Saturday January 24th. On Australia Day, three sites in South Australia and two in New South Wales broke their all-time temperature records. Ceduna reached a whopping 49.5°C in the shade – just 1.2°C off the highest temperature ever recorded in Australia.

Today, temperatures have topped 49°C in northwest Victoria and South Australia for the first time on record, and many towns face days of heat over 40°C. Regions such as the Otway Ranges in Victoria are facing extreme fire danger. Renmark in South Australia has reached 49.3°C and Walpeup in Victoria has reached 48.7°C.

This is shaping up as the worst heatwave since the Black Summer of 2019-20. The intense heat that summer contributed to catastrophic bushfires which burnt 21% of the continent’s forests, an area still considered globally unprecedented.

Independent analysis found the last heatwave between January 5 to 10 was made over five times more likely by global heating. This current heatwave is substantially worse, but we’ll have to wait for attribution studies to understand how much global heating has contributed to its overall severity.

The sustained heat hitting the southeast will be widespread and prolonged. It’s likely more all-time temperature records will be broken this week, as the body of hot air stagnates over the south and southeast. People in exposed areas should heed warnings from the Bureau of Meteorology and advice from health and emergency response authorities.

What’s driving this heatwave?

The Pilbara region in northwest Western Australia is sometimes called the nation’s “heat engine”. This large, sparsely populated area is very dry. When heat hits Pilbara rocks and sands, it can quickly build up. Weather conditions are very stable, and Pilbara heatwaves can last weeks.

But that doesn’t explain how the heat gets to population centres in Australia’s south and southeast.

Over summer, there are often active monsoonal troughs (areas of low atmospheric pressure) over northern Australia. As the monsoon brings heavy rain and low pressure systems to parts of northern Australia, it pushes high pressure systems, known as heat domes, further south. This directs intense heat thousands of kilometres towards the southern, central and eastern parts of the continent.

Tropical monsoonal low-pressure systems in the north often work in tandem with slow-moving high pressure systems in the Tasman Sea or Great Australian Bight. The result is a weather pattern able to shift hot air masses thousands of kilometres to reach the southern states.

Blocking highs are strong high pressure systems which can sit in place for days or even weeks, blocking other weather systems from moving in. The blocking high pressure system responsible for the current heatwave is staying put in the atmosphere a few kilometres above New South Wales.

As winds blow from areas of high pressure to low pressure in the atmosphere, air is forced to flow down towards the surface. As the air descends, it compresses due to rising atmospheric pressure. Compression heats the air further, which can make heatwaves hotter and longer-lasting.

When conditions like this are in place, hot northerly winds often persist for days, funnelling more and more desert heat towards the coasts. This can cause temperatures to exceed 40°C in states such as South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and southern Queensland.

During this extreme heatwave, maximum temperatures in some southern towns are approaching 50°C – the sort of temperature once restricted to famously hot towns such as Marble Bar in Western Australia.

The official Australian record for the maximum temperature in the shade is 50.7°C, recorded at Oodnadatta (South Australia) in 1960 and Onslow (Western Australia) in 2022. This shared all-time record may be broken at several southeast inland locations this week as atmospheric conditions are amplified by the steady drumbeat of global heating.

During severe, prolonged heatwaves, intense daytime heat is accompanied by hot nights. The humidity can sometimes also increase due to tropical moisture being transported south. The combination of heat and humidity (measured as heat indices) is particularly dangerous to humans, livestock and wildlife.

Should this heatwave be named?

For decades, tropical cyclones hitting Australia have been given names. Should heatwaves similarly be given names to encourage people to take them seriously? Names can make weather hazards more memorable, helping people recall warnings, share information with neighbours and prepare more effectively.

This week’s heatwave would be an excellent candidate for naming. It is severe, breaking all-time records, long-lasting and widespread. It is also threatening major metropolitan centres with high populations, as well as major regional centres and nationally important agricultural districts. To date, there’s no sign authorities plan to name it.

Responding to future heatwaves

Climate scientists now widely agree average global temperatures will permanently rise 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels by the early 2030s. They may reach 2.7°C by the 2090s if global carbon emissions do not fall sharply.

This means future heatwaves are likely to strike more often and hit harder when they arrive.

We need to adapt to the increasing threats posed by more and worse heatwaves even as we work to cut emissions. Extreme heat is a public health issue, to say nothing of the threats it poses to our wildlife and livestock who have no escape.

Correction: this article originally stated 21% of Australia burned over the Black Summer. It has been corrected as it was 21% of forested areas.

Steve Turton, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography, CQUniversity Australia

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

Australia has always had heatwaves. But this week’s heatwave in southeastern Australia is something else. Temperatures in some inland towns in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria were up to 20°C above average for the time of year, which meteorologists described as “incredibly abnormal”. Victoria’s heat record toppled after Walpeup and Hopetoun hit 48.9°C. The heat is set to continue until Saturday in some areas.

As global temperatures inch upwards, summer heatwaves form against a background of higher temperatures. Heatwaves (commonly defined as three or more days of unusual heat) and extreme heat (shorter periods of intense heat) are becoming more common and more intense.

Heatwaves kill more Australians than all other natural hazards combined. In the four years to 2019, more than 1,000 people died due to heatwaves.

Heatwaves emerge from atmospheric processes which largely take place in the upper atmosphere, around 5–10 kilometres above sea level. Perhaps counterintuitively, the southeast’s record-breaking heatwave is linked to masses of moisture-laden air in Western Australia and a tropical cyclone off the northwest coast.

That’s not all. Slow-moving high pressure systems in the southeast and the southern drought have likely also made this heatwave worse. Heatwaves are complex. As Australia gets hotter, understanding these dangerous phenomena is essential.

Meanders in the jetstream

Our research has shown heatwaves hitting Australia’s southeast have a clear link to the atmospheric phenomenon known as Rossby waves. These waves manifest as disturbances in the narrow, fast-flowing jetstream that flows from west to east in the atmosphere kilometres above the surface. The waves play a major role in the weather in the southern half of Australia.

As the jetstream wobbles, it pushes aside winds to the north and south to form regions of alternating high and low pressure. As the undulations grow and deepen, they amplify the weather we experience on the ground.

Air inside a high-pressure system (or ridge) descends towards the surface and is compressed by the increasing atmospheric pressure, heating it. The end result is higher temperatures near the ground. The slower these systems move, the more delayed the welcome cool change from a summertime cold front. If these systems move slowly enough, they can turn one hot day into several, or even a heatwave.

What makes these systems bigger or slower moving?

Several things can intensify or slow down these high pressure systems.

The first is tied to Rossby waves. Cold fronts form on the western edge of high pressure systems embedded in the atmospheric wave. Moist air flows along the cold front, moving humid air polewards and upwards between the two systems. This is known as a warm conveyor belt.

Processes within the conveyor belt of warm, moist air can make high pressure ridges even stronger and more likely to persist.

This week’s heatwave was given an extra boost by Tropical Cyclone Luana, which made landfall on January 24 over the northwest coast near Derby. Luana moved inland and added even more moisture to the warm conveyor belt, bringing some rain to the Nullarbor.

Luana may have influenced the southeastern heatwave in a second way. Anticyclonic outflows from cyclones higher in the atmosphere can disturb the jet stream, amplifying the Rossby waves and strengthening the upper-level ridge, potentially lengthening the heatwave.

2009 redux?

There are clear similarities between this week’s heat and the intense, long-lasting heatwave starting in late January 2009. That heatwave broke records across the southeast of Australia and paved the way for Victoria’s devastating bushfires on February 7, now known as Black Saturday.

Both heatwaves are linked to a large-amplitude Rossby wave moving across the continent, with a persistent slow-moving high pressure ridge situated over the southeast. Both took place as a tropical cyclone hit the northwest and both have active moist airstreams intensifying the ridge.

These cyclone-heatwave events are known as compound events, where several types of extreme weather overlap in time, space or both, and can act to intensify each other. In both 2009 and 2026, ongoing drought might have been yet another compounding factor.

In 2009, southern Australia was still in the grip of the 1996-2010 Millennium Drought, which made the heatwave worse. That’s because when soil is moist, extra heat evaporates moisture in the soil first, slowing heating of the air. But if heat hits dry soil, it quickly boosts air temperatures.

Swathes of southern Australia have had periods of drought for several years. This may have intensified the current heatwave.

What’s next?

Heatwaves are often well forecast using current weather prediction models.

At least a week before the heatwave began, forecasts clearly showed extreme, prolonged heat was likely. The main culprits were visible on the charts: Rossby waves, the warm conveyor belt, the tropical cyclone and the high pressure ridge.

As people in inland towns prepare for more days over 40°C, many will wonder what the future holds.

What we know is that a hotter climate will mean heatwaves hit more often, more intensely and last longer. It will also make extremely hot days more likely. But some of these processes – particularly around how moisture and tropical cyclones affect heatwaves – are less well understood and modelled in climate projections.

In extreme weather, the details are critical. As we grapple with unprecedented heat, there’s much work to do to increase our understanding of extreme heat in the 21st century.

Tess Parker, Research Scientist in Climate Variability and Hazards, CSIRO and Michael Barnes, Research Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Weather of the 21st Century, Monash University

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

The past three years have been the world’s hottest on record. In 2025, Earth was 1.44°C warmer than the long-term average, perilously close to breaching the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5°C.

This warming is fuelling Australia’s current record-breaking heatwave. Other consequences are visible globally, from Iran’s crippling drought to catastrophic wildfires and unprecedented floods in the United States to deadly cyclones hitting southern Asia.

We know what to do to tackle the climate crisis: replace fossil fuels with clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries. We are well on our way. Globally, the power produced by renewables overtook coal last year.

Petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and the US have made trillions from oil and gas. Now they are fighting a rearguard action to prolong fossil fuels. The US is pushing European nations to buy its gas, for instance.

But most countries have seen the writing on the wall. In November, the COP31 climate talks in Turkey are expected to deliver a global roadmap away from fossil fuels. Dozens of countries will meet in Colombia in April to fast-track the transition. The road ahead is bumpy. But the end of fossil fuels may finally be coming into view.

No holding back clean energy

There’s no one trying harder to slow the clean energy transition than US president Donald Trump. During his bid to return to the White House, Trump pressed oil executives for US$1 billion (A$1.4 bn) in campaign finance, promising a windfall in return.

In 2025, he increased subsidies for fossil fuel producers, weakened environmental laws, gutted Biden-era support for clean energy and moved to block clean energy projects, even some near completion. The US is now one of the world’s biggest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and oil.

But clean energy growth has proved difficult to kill. Despite Trump’s efforts, domestic solar generation is still expected to grow 46% in the next two years while electricity output from fossil fuel plants falls.

Trump is betting fossil fuels are the key to future American power. He made no secret of the fact the US military raid on Venezuela earlier this month was aimed at increasing oil production. He has implored US oil companies to invest billions to revive the country’s battered oil infrastructure. The response was lukewarm. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said Venezuela was “uninvestable”.

Developing Venezuela’s oil reserves assumes there will be demand for decades to come. But the world now faces an oversupply of oil, even as sales of electric vehicles grow strongly in many countries. Last month, battery electric vehicles outsold petrol cars for the first time in Europe.

Electrostates rising

While the US doubles down on 20th century fossil fuels, China is betting on an electric 21st century. It is emerging as the first electrostate, dominating production and export of solar, wind, batteries and EVs. China is now the world’s biggest car exporter. Most new Chinese cars are powered by batteries, not oil.

China’s manufacturing might has driven down the price of batteries, the main cost of EVs. As EVs get cheaper, emerging economies are finding they can leapfrog fossil fuels and move straight to solar panels and EVs – even if the national power grid is limited or unreliable.

Commodity price trends show surging global demand for copper, silver and other metals needed for mass electrification. Worldwide, investment in clean energy technologies first overtook fossil fuel investment ten years ago. In 2025, clean investment was more than double the investment in coal, oil and gas. Clean energy is where the world is headed, whether Trump likes it or not.

China, India and Pakistan are rapidly making the shift to renewable power. Developing nations from Nepal to Ethiopia are taking up electric transport to slash the cost of importing fossil fuels.

A new roadmap away from fossil fuels

This week, the US formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement. But no other country has followed.

For decades, the COP talks have focused on “cutting emissions” without dealing directly with the use of coal, oil and gas. But at the 2023 talks, nearly 200 countries agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels”.

At last year’s COP30 talks, host nation Brazil proposed a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. More than 80 countries backed the idea, including Australia, but pushback from Saudi Arabia and Russia kept it out of the final outcomes.

In response, Brazil is working to develop a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels. This – or something similar – may be formally adopted at the next climate talks in November.

While COP31 will be held in Turkey, Australian climate minister Chris Bowen will have a key role as “President of Negotiations” and will steer global discussion ahead of the summit.

Bowen plans to lobby petrostates to support a managed shift away from fossil fuels, drawing on Australia’s experience as a major exporter of coal and LNG facing its own transition. Korea – Australia’s third largest market for thermal coal – will retire its entire coal fleet by 2040.

Government modelling suggests Australia’s coal and gas exports could plummet 50% in value in five years as global demand falls. Independent modelling suggests the decline for coal could happen even faster if countries meet their climate targets. Policymakers must plan to manage this transition.

Coalitions of the willing?

Frustrated by slow progress, a coalition of nations is separately discussing how to phase out fossil fuels. The first conference will take place in April in Colombia. Here, delegates will discuss how to wind down fossil fuels while protecting workers and financial systems. Some nations want to negotiate a standalone treaty to manage the phase-out. Conference outcomes will also feed back into the UN climate talks.

Pacific island nations aim to be the world’s first 100% renewable region. Ahead of COP31, Australia and island nations will meet to progress this.

Progress is happening

In an ideal world, nations would rapidly tackle the existential threat of climate change together. We don’t live in that world. But it may not matter.

The shift to clean electric options has its own momentum. The question is whether the shift away from coal, oil and gas will be orderly – or chaotic.

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

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

After the tragic death of Canadian backpacker Piper James on K’gari (Fraser Island) on January 19, a coroner found the 19–year–old had been bitten by dingoes while she was still alive, but the most likely cause of death was drowning.

Days later, the Queensland government announced it would cull the entire pack of ten dingoes seen near where Piper’s body was found. Most of those animals have now been killed.

Authorities justified the targeted cull on “public safety” grounds, while also signalling a strong desire to keep tourism moving. Queensland Tourism Minister Andrew Powell reassured tourism operators “the island is open” and urged people to continue to visit.

The cull took place without the knowledge or approval of the Butchulla people, the Traditional Owners of K'Gari. James’ parents also publicly opposed a cull, saying it was “the last thing” their nature-loving daughter would have wanted. There has been backlash from scientific experts, as well as the public.

So, does killing dingoes actually make K’gari safer for people?

The perfect storm

K’gari’s dingoes (called Wongari by the Butchulla) are a population of high conservation and cultural value on this World Heritage–listed sand island. Estimates put their numbers at between 70 and 200.

Huge visitor numbers (about 450,000 per year) to the roughly  1,600 square kilometre island means dingoes and humans share the same beaches and come into contact in ways they generally don’t on the mainland. Most encounters are harmless, even enjoyable. Less than 1% of visitors experience a negative interaction and many tourists visit the island specifically to see the dingoes.

Of course, risk increases when dingoes and people are in close proximity. Dingoes are often deliberately or carelessly rewarded with food scraps or find rubbish, which encourages loitering.

Most injuries caused by dingoes are minor, such as nips, bites and scratches. Serious attacks by dingoes are rare on K'gari and the mainland. Children are most vulnerable given their smaller size.

The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service has consistently worked to reduce incidents. Their “Be dingo safe” campaign includes education, signs, fenced areas and even “dingo sticks” to deter the animals from approaching. But too often these safety warnings are not heeded. People feed dingoes or leave food in their tents or bags, come too close to dingoes and let kids roam unsupervised.

For an apex predator, dingoes are relatively small and dog-like. To many visitors, they don’t look especially dangerous, and people forget dingoes are wild predators.

Decades of lethal control

Authorities have long relied on lethal control of dingoes on K'gari. Between 2001 and 2013, 110 dingoes were killed. In 2001, after the death of nine-year-old Clinton Gage, 28 were immediately killed. In a typical year, one to two are killed.

Removing up to ten dingoes carries serious costs for a small island population. Genetically, the K’gari population has low diversity and an effective population size of about 25 (meaning only about 25 animals are effectively passing genes on, even though more dingoes exist). Studies have found inbreeding, genetic isolation and declining genetic variation in K'gari dingoes over the past two decades.

High levels of inbreeding may lead to physical deformities, reduced breeding success and an increased risk of local extinction. On an island, there is limited scope for “new” dingoes and their genes to arrive, so every avoidable death is important.

That is why our 2025 population viability analysis was sobering. We found if the number of dingo deaths stays close to natural levels, the population could remain stable. But extra deaths due to mass culls or disease outbreaks expose the animals to higher extinction risk. This makes it more likely the island’s dingoes could die out. In the highest-risk scenarios we modelled (that includes several mass culling events), the risk of extinction becomes substantial in about 50 years. Survival can fall close to zero by 100 years.

Culling rarely solves safety problems

Records of dingo incidents on K'gari offer little evidence killing dingoes delivers lasting safety. Our analysis of the “highest severity” incidents reported found the island had an average of 10.7 reports a year from 2001 to 2015. There was no clear downward trend in incidents, even though more than 110 dingoes were destroyed in that period.

What we did find was a predictable seasonal pattern. About 40% of serious incidents took place during breeding season (March to May) and 30% during whelping (June to August). These are periods when dingoes are more active and social dynamics intensify. During breeding, dingoes (especially younger males) may range more widely and test boundaries. During whelping, adults can become more vigilant and take greater foraging risks to meet the demands of pups.

The chance of serious incidents rose and fell with dingo life history and behaviour, as well as what people did around them. Incidents are not explained by visitor numbers alone.

When a dingo approaches people or loiters near them, they can be labelled as “problematic” and are more likely to be culled. But these behaviours aren’t abnormal in a wildlife tourism setting. They are predictable responses to people, food and opportunity. Younger males are often the most persistent around people, but become less exploratory as they mature or disperse.

A people problem, not a dingo problem

K’gari’s dingoes are doing what wild predators do, just as sharks and crocodiles do in Australia’s oceans and rivers.

Our safety depends on how we behave in wild places. To reduce risky encounters with wildlife, secure your food and waste, keep your kids close, don’t venture out alone, respect park guidelines and stop giving rewards such as food.

Killing dingoes won’t make K'gari safer. Changing human behaviour and attitudes will.

Bradley P. Smith, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, CQUniversity Australia and Kylie M. Cairns, Research Fellow in Canid and Wildlife Genomics, UNSW Sydney

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

For flowering plants, reproduction is a question of the birds and the bees. Attracting the right pollinator can be a matter of survival – and new research shows how flowers do it is more intriguing than anyone realised, and might even involve a little bit of magic.

In our new paper, published in Current Biology, we discuss how a single “magic” trait of some flowering plants simultaneously camouflages them from bees and makes them stand out brightly to birds.

How animals see

We humans typically have three types of light receptors in our eyes, which enable our rich sense of colours.

These are cells sensitive to blue, green or red light. From the input from these cells, the brain generates many colours including yellow via what is called colour opponent processing.

The way colour opponent processing works is that different sensed colours are processed by the brain in opposition. For example, we see some signals as red and some as green – but never a colour in between.

Many other animals also see colour and show evidence of also using opponent processing.

Bees see their world using cells that sense ultraviolet, blue and green light, while birds have a fourth type sensitive to red light as well.

The problem flowering plants face

So what do these differences in colour vision have to do with plants, genetics and magic?

Flowers need to attract pollinators of the right size, so their pollen ends up on the correct part of an animal’s body so it’s efficiently flown to another flower to enable pollination.

Accordingly, birds tend to visit larger flowers. These flowers in turn need to provide large volumes of nectar for the hungry foragers.

But when large amounts of sweet-tasting nectar are on offer, there’s a risk bees will come along to feast on it – and in the process, collect valuable pollen. And this is a problem because bees are not the right size to efficiently transfer pollen between larger flowers.

Flowers “signal” to pollinators with bright colours and patterns – but these plants need a signal that will attract birds without drawing the attention of bees.

We know bee pollination and flower signalling evolved before bird pollination. So how could plants efficiently make the change to being pollinated by birds, which enables the transfer of pollen over long distances?

Avoiding bees or attracting birds?

A walk through nature lets us see with our own eyes that most red flowers are visited by birds, rather than bees. So bird-pollinated flowers have successfully made the transition. Two different theories have been developed that may explain what we observe.

One theory is the bee avoidance hypotheses where bird pollinated flowers just use a colour that is hard for bees to see.

A second theory is that birds might prefer red.

But neither of these theories seemed complete, as inexperienced birds don’t demonstrate a preference for a stronger red hue. However, bird-pollinated flowers do have a very distinct red hue, which suggests avoiding bees can’t solely explain why consistently salient red flower colours evolved.

A magical solution

In evolutionary science, the term magic trait refers to an evolved solution where one genetic modification may yield fitness benefits in multiple ways.

Earlier this month, a team working on how this might apply to flowering plants showed that a gene that modulates UV-absorbing pigments in flower petals can indeed have multiple benefits. This is because of how bees and birds view colour signals differently.

Bee-pollinated flowers come in a diverse range of colours. Bees even pollinate some plants with red flowers. But these flowers tend to also reflect a lot of UV, which helps bees find them.

The magic gene has the effect of reducing the amount of UV light reflected from the petal, making flowers harder for bees to see. But (and this is where the magic comes in) reducing UV reflection from a petal of a red flower simultaneously makes it look redder for animals – such as birds – which are believed to have a colour opponent system.

Birds that visit these bright red flowers gain rewards – and with experience, they learn to go repeatedly to the red flowers.

One small gene change for colour signalling in the UV yields multiple beneficial outcomes by avoiding bees and displaying enhanced colours to entice multiple visits from birds.

We lucky humans are fortunate that our red perception can also see the result of this clever little trick of nature to produce beautiful red flower colours. So on your next walk on a nice day, take a minute to view one of nature’s great experiments on finding a clever solution to a complex problem.

Adrian Dyer, Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, Monash University and Klaus Lunau, Professor, Institute of Sensory Ecology, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

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

There’s no question that being in nature is good for wellbeing. Research shows that experiencing nature and listening to natural sounds can relax us.

A key reason for these benefits may be because of the appeal of birds and their pleasant songs that we hear when in nature.

Studies show that people feel better in bird-rich environments. Even life satisfaction may be related to the richness of the bird species in an area.

My colleagues and I wanted to better study the relationship between wellbeing and birdsong. We conducted an experiment in which 233 people walked through a park – specifically the University of Tübingen’s botanical garden. The walk took about half an hour.

Participants filled out questionnaires on their psychological wellbeing both before and after their walk. We also measured blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (in their saliva) to get a better understanding of the physiological effects the walk had on wellbeing. Cortisol is considered an important stress hormone that can change within just a few minutes.

In order to get a good understanding of the effect birdsong had on wellbeing, we also hung loudspeakers in the trees that played the songs of rare species of birds – such as the golden oriole, tree pipit, garden warbler or mistle thrush.

To decide which additional bird songs should be played by the loudspeakers, we looked at the results of a previous study we had conducted. In that study, volunteers listened to more than 100 different bird songs and rated them based on how pleasant they found them to be.

We used the bird songs that had been most liked by participants in that experiment. However, to avoid annoying the birds living in the garden, we only chose bird songs that did not disturb the environment. We also mapped all resident species in the area and avoided broadcasting their songs.

Participants were randomly split into five distinct groups. The first and second groups went for a walk through the garden with birdsong being played on loudspeakers. The second group was also instructed to pay attention to birdsong.

The third and fourth groups also walked through the garden, but this time they only heard natural birdsong – we did not have additional speakers playing birdsong in the area. The fourth group was also instructed to pay attention to the natural birdsong.

The fifth group was the control group. These participants went for a walk through the garden while wearing noise-cancelling headphones.

Benefits of birdsong

In all groups (even the control group), blood pressure and heart rate dropped – indicating that physiological stress was reduced after the walk. Cortisol levels also fell by an average of nearly 33%.

Self-reported mental wellbeing, as measured by the questionnaires, was also higher after the walks.

The groups who focused their attention on the birdsong saw even greater increases in wellbeing. So while a walk in nature had clear, physiological benefits for reducing stress, paying attention to birdsong further boosted these benefits.

However, the groups who went for a walk with the loudspeakers playing birdsong did not see any greater mental and physiological wellbeing improvements compared to the other groups.

This was a surprise, given previous studies have shown birdsong enriches wellbeing. Bird species diversity has also been shown to further improve restoration and relaxation.

One possible explanation for this finding may be that participants recognised the playback sounds as being fake – whether consciously or unconsciously. Another explanation could be that there might be a threshold – and having a higher number of bird species singing in an area does not improve wellbeing any further.

Appreciating birdsong

Our results show that a walk in nature is beneficial in and of itself – but the sounds of natural birdsong can further boost these wellbeing benefits, especially if you make a concerted effort to pay attention it.

You don’t even need to know a lot about birds to get these benefits, as our study showed. The positive effect was seen in everyone from casual birdwatchers through to bird nerds.

Our study’s results are a good message for everyday life. You don’t need a visit to bird-rich environments to make you happy. It seems more important to focus on the birds that are already there, listen to them and enjoy them.

The results also have implications for park design, showing that the sound of birdsong in general – rather than the number of species living there or how rare they are – is of key importance when it comes to wellbeing.

So even just a half hour walk outside while taking the time to notice birdsong could reduce your stress and improve wellbeing.

Christoph Randler, Professor, Department of Biology, University of Tübingen

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

The age of humans is increasingly an age of sameness. Across the planet, distinctive plants and animals are disappearing, replaced by species that are lucky enough to thrive alongside humans and travel with us easily. Some scientists have a word for this reshuffling of life: the Homogenocene.

Evidence for it is found in the world’s museums. Storerooms are full of animals that no longer walk among us, pickled in spirit-filled jars: coiled snakes, bloated fish, frogs, birds. Each extinct species marks the removal of a particular evolutionary path from a particular place – and these absences are increasingly being filled by the same hardy, adaptable species, again and again.

One such absence is embodied by a small bird kept in a glass jar in London’s Natural History Museum: the Fijian Bar-winged rail, not seen in the wild since the 1970s. It seems to be sleeping, its eyes closed, its wings tucked in along its back, its beak resting against the glass.

A flightless bird, it was particularly vulnerable to predators introduced by humans, including mongooses brought to Fiji in the 1800s. Its disappearance was part of a broad pattern in which island species are vanishing and a narrower set of globally successful animals thrive in their place.

It’s a phenomenon that was called the Homogenocene even before a similar term growing in popularity, the Anthropocene, was coined in 2000. If the Anthropocene describes a planet transformed by humans, the Homogenocene is one ecological consequence: fewer places with their own distinctive life.

It goes well beyond charismatic birds and mammals. Freshwater fish, for instance, are becoming more “samey”, as the natural barriers that once kept populations separate – waterfalls, river catchments, temperature limits – are effectively blurred or erased by human activity. Think of common carp deliberately stocked in lakes for anglers, or catfish released from home aquariums that now thrive in rivers thousands of miles from their native habitat.

Meanwhile, many thousands of mollusc species have disappeared over the past 500 years, with snails living on islands also severely affected: many are simply eaten by non-native predatory snails. Some invasive snails have become highly successful and widely distributed, such as the giant African snail that is now found from the Hawaiian Islands to the Americas, or South American golden apple snails rampant through east and south-east Asia since their introduction in the 1980s.

Homogeneity is just one facet of the changes wrought on the Earth’s tapestry of life by humans, a process that started in the last ice age when hunting was likely key to the disappearance of the mammoth, giant sloth and other large mammals. It continued over around 11,700 years of the recent Holocene epoch – the period following the last ice age – as forests were felled and savannahs cleared for agriculture and the growth of farms and cities.

Over the past seven decades changes to life on Earth have intensified dramatically. This is the focus of a major new volume published by the Royal Society of London: The Biosphere in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene has reached the ocean

Life in the oceans was relatively little changed between the last ice age and recent history, even as humans increasingly affected life on land. No longer: a feature of the Anthropocene is the rapid extension of human impacts through the oceans.

This is partly due to simple over-exploitation, as human technology post-second world war enabled more efficient and deeper trawling, and fish stocks became seriously depleted.

Partly this is also due to the increasing effects of fossil-fuelled heat and oxygen depletion spreading through the oceans. Most visibly, this is now devastating coral reefs.

Out of sight, many animals are being displaced northwards and southwards out of the tropics to escape the heat; these conditions are also affecting spawning in fish, creating “bottlenecks” where life cycle development is limited by increasing heat or a lack of oxygen. The effects are reaching through into the deep oceans, where proposals for deep sea mining of minerals threaten to damage marine life that is barely known to science.

And as on land and in rivers, these changes are not just reducing life in the oceans – they’re redistributing species and blurring long-standing biological boundaries.

Local biodiversity, global sameness

Not all the changes to life made by humans are calamitous. In some places, incoming non-native species have blended seamlessly into existing environments to actually enhance local biodiversity.

In other contexts, both historical and contemporary, humans have been decisive in fostering wildlife, increasing the diversity of animals and plants in ecosystems by cutting or burning back the dominant vegetation and thereby allowing a greater range of animals and plants to flourish.

In our near-future world there are opportunities to support wildlife, for instance by changing patterns of agriculture to use less land to grow more food. With such freeing-up of space for nature, coupled with changes to farming and fishing that actively protect biodiversity, there is still a chance that we can avoid the worst predictions of a future biodiversity crash.

But this is by no means certain. Avoiding yet more rows of pickled corpses in museum jars will require a concerted effort to protect nature, one that must aim to help future generations of humans live in a biodiverse world.

Mark Williams, Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester and Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester

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

Ditches and canals are the underdog of the freshwater world. These human-made waterways are often forgotten, devalued and perceived negatively – think “dull as ditchwater”. But these unsung heroes have a hidden potential for climate change mitigation, if they’re managed correctly.

We know that ditches and canals have a large global extent, covering at least 5.3 million hectares — about 22% of the UK’s total land area. However, no one has yet mapped all global ditch and canal networks robustly, so it’s potentially more.

These waterways are also hotspots of greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change. We have previously calculated that ditches emit 333 teragrams of carbon dioxide equivalents (a common unit to express the climate impact of all greenhouse gases), which is nearly comparable to the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.

Ditches often contain stagnant waters and are commonly found running through farmland or cities, where they receive high amounts of nutrients from fertilisers, manure and stormwater run-off. This creates the low-oxygen, high-nutrient conditions that are ideal for the production of potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide – both of which warm the atmosphere considerably more than CO₂.

However, ditches and their surrounding landscape can be managed (by farmers and landowners, for example) in ways that reduce nutrient inputs and therefore lower their greenhouse gas emissions. This makes them an untapped solution for reducing the effects of climate change.

Many nature restoration solutions focus on storing atmospheric carbon – by planting trees or mangroves, for example. But there are also immediate wins to be made simply by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The importance of methane reduction has now been recognised by more than 160 countries, all of which signed the global methane pledge to cut human-caused methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by the end of the decade.

Our new study outlines the steps needed to reduce emissions from global ditches and canals. First, we need to better understand these systems by mapping their global extent. We also need to collect more measurements of greenhouse gas emissions from underrepresented regions like South America and Africa. Emissions from irrigation ditches in these understudied places could be large.

We also need to improve our understanding of how the potent greenhouse gas methane escapes the sediments in bubbles. This involves using sensors that monitor methane concentrations continuously, in order to capture “hot moments” when weather or human activity (such as fertiliser use on farmland) cause sudden pulses of emissions.

All of these strategies will improve estimates of global greenhouse gas emissions from ditches. From that new baseline, any progress in reducing emissions can be more accurately measured.

New directions for ditches

There are several ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ditches and canals. These include reducing fertiliser application rates on farmland, excluding livestock from areas beside ditches to reduce the amount of manure that ends up in waterways (which has already been shown to be effective for ponds), and managing pollution sources like wastewater treatment plants.

In the Netherlands, researchers have tested the effects of dredging agricultural ditches to remove the nutrient- and organic matter-rich sediments that release greenhouse gases.

They found that dredging resulted in a 35% decline in ditch emissions after one year. However, this method isn’t perfect, as the emissions from the removed sediments still need to be accounted for at a later stage, and dredging disturbs aquatic habitats and organisms.

Planting vegetation alongside ditches helps intercept nutrients and sediments before they reach the ditch. This vegetation also provides shading, which reduces water temperature and rates of greenhouse gas emissions. A study across Denmark, Great Britain and Sweden found that riverside vegetation helped to considerably reduce nutrient inputs to rivers and streams, and improved habitats for stream organisms like bugs and frogs.

Introducing floating vegetation can also trap methane and create the conditions for its removal before it is released into the atmosphere. Current trials in the UK are looking at introducing Sphagnum moss to peatland ditches. Once a floating mat of this moss has been established, it can trap bubbles of methane in an oxygen-rich environment created by the photosynthesising moss.

When methane and oxygen are present together, methane-eating bacteria can convert methane to carbon dioxide, which has a much lower impact on the climate. Initial results showed a decrease in methane of approximately 40% when Sphagnum was present.

Some of these techniques might be too expensive to scale, and many are still at the early stages of research into their use in ditches. Nevertheless, ditches and canals can in future be climate heroes – we just need to give them the chance by managing them in smart and sustainable ways.

Teresa Silverthorn, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Liverpool; Jonathan Ritson, Research Fellow, Geography, University of Manchester, and Mike Peacock, Lecturer in Biogeochemical Cycles, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool

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

No matter where you live in the United States, you have likely seen headlines about PFAS being detected in everything from drinking water to fish to milk to human bodies.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of over 10,000 synthetic chemicals. They have been used for decades to make products waterproof and stain- and heat-resistant – picture food wrappers, stain-resistant carpet, rain jackets and firefighting foam.

These chemicals are a growing concern because some PFAS are toxic even at very low levels and associated with health risks like thyroid issues and cancer. And some of the most common PFAS don’t naturally break down, which is why they are often referred to as “forever chemicals.”

Now, PFAS are posing a threat to the Great Lakes, one of America’s most vital water resources.

The five Great Lakes are massive, with over 10,000 miles of coastline (16,000 kilometers) across two countries and containing 21% of the world’s fresh surface water. They provide drinking water to over 30 million people and are home to a robust commercial and recreational fishing industry.

My colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I study how chemicals like PFAS are affecting water systems. Here’s what we’re learning about how PFAS are getting into the Great Lakes, the risks they’re posing and how to reduce those risks in the future.

PFAS’ many pathways into the Great Lakes

Hundreds of rivers flow into the lakes, and each can be contaminated with PFAS from sources such as industrial sites, military operations and wastewater treatment plants in their watersheds. Some pesticides also contain PFAS, which can wash off farm fields and into creeks, rivers and lakes.

The concentration of PFAS in rivers can vary widely depending on these upstream impacts. For example, we found concentrations of over 1,700 parts-per-trillion in Great Lakes tributaries in Wisconsin near where firefighting foam has regularly been used. That’s more than 400 times higher than federal drinking water regulations for PFOS and PFOA, both 4 parts-per-trillion.

However, concentration alone does not tell the whole story. We also found that large rivers with relatively low amounts of PFAS can put more of these chemicals into the lakes each day compared with smaller rivers with high amounts of PFAS. This means that any effort to limit the amount of PFAS in the Great Lakes should consider both high-concentration hot spots and large rivers.

Groundwater is another key route carrying PFAS into the Great Lakes. Groundwater is a drinking water source for more than one-third of people in the U.S., and it can become contaminated when PFAS in firefighting foam and other PFAS sources seep into soil.

When these contaminated plumes enter the Great Lakes, they carry PFAS with them. We detected PFAS concentrations of over 260 parts-per-trillion in the bay of Green Bay in Lake Michigan. The chemicals we found were associated with firefighting foam, and we were able to trace them back to a contaminated groundwater plume.

PFAS can also enter the Great Lakes in unexpected ways, such as in rain and snowfall. PFAS can get into the atmosphere from industrial processes and waste incineration. The chemicals have been detected in rain across the world, including in states surrounding the Great Lakes.

Although PFAS concentrations in precipitation are typically lower than in rivers or groundwater, this is still an important contamination source. Scientists estimate that precipitation is a major source of PFAS to Lake Superior, which receives about half of its water through precipitation.

Where PFAS end up determines the risk

Much of the PFAS that enter Lake Superior will eventually make their way to the downstream lakes of Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario.

These chemicals’ ability to travel with water is one reason why PFAS are such a concern for drinking water systems. Many communities get their drinking water from the Great Lakes.

PFAS can also contaminate other parts of the environment.

The chemicals have been detected in sediments at the bottom of all the Great Lakes. Contaminated sediment can release PFAS back into the overlying water, where fish and aquatic birds can ingest it. So, future remediation efforts to remove PFAS from the lakes are about more than just the water – they involve the sediment as well.

PFAS can also accumulate in foams that form on lake shorelines during turbulent conditions. Concentrations of PFAS can be up to 7,000 times higher in natural foams compared with the water because PFAS are surfactants and build up where air and water meet, like bubbles in foam. As a result, state agencies recommend washing skin that comes in contact with foam and preventing pets from playing in foam.

Some PFAS bioaccumulate, or build up, within fish and wildlife. Elevated levels of PFAS have been detected in Great Lakes fish, raising concerns for fisheries.

High PFAS concentrations in fish in coastal areas and inland waters have led to advisories recommending people limit how much they fish they eat.

Looking ahead

Water cycles through the Great Lakes, but the process can take many years, from 2.6 years in Lake Erie to nearly 200 years in Lake Superior.

This means that PFAS that enter the lakes will be there for a very long time.

Since it is not possible to clean up the over 6 quadrillion gallons of water in the Great Lakes after they have been contaminated, preventing further contamination is key to protecting the lakes for the future.

That starts with identifying contaminated groundwater and rivers that are adding PFAS to the lakes. The Sea Grant College Program and the National Institutes of Water Resources, including the Wisconsin programs that I direct, have been supporting research to map these sources, as well as helping translate that knowledge into actions that policymakers and resource managers can take.

PFAS contamination is an issue beyond the Great Lakes and is something everyone can work to address.

• Drinking water. If you are one of the millions of people who drink water from the Great Lakes, find out the PFAS concentrations in your drinking water. This data is increasingly available from local drinking water utilities.

• Fish. Eating fish can provide great health benefits, but be aware of health advisories about fish caught in the Great Lakes and in inland waters so you can balance the risks. Other chemicals, such as mercury and PCBs, can also lead to fish advisories.

• Personal choice. Scientists have proposed that PFAS only be used when they have vital functions and there are no alternatives. Consumer demand for PFAS-free products is helping reduce PFAS use in some products. Several states have also introduced legislation to ban PFAS use in some applications.

Decreasing use of PFAS will ultimately prevent downstream contamination in the Great Lakes and around the U.S.

Christy Remucal, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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

Cold spray whipped off the ropes as a diesel engine throbbed in the background. One by one, empty shellfish pots came over the side of the fishing boat, occasionally containing the remnants of crab and lobster claws and carapaces. Something strange was going on.

Then the culprit revealed itself – a squirming orange body surrounded by a writhing tangle of tentacles. A few minutes later, three more of these denizens of the deep came up in a single pot, and then, incredibly, a final pot rose from the water completely rammed full of them, more than a dozen together in a squirming mass.

This was a familiar scene off the south coasts of Devon and Cornwall early last year, as a bloom of the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) emerged, the first time anything like this had been seen for 75 years. In fact, commercial catches of common octopus in 2025 were almost 65 times higher than the recent annual average. A new report now sheds light on these blooms: their history, the causes and the consequences.

The common octopus, despite the name, is not normally common in British waters. Instead, it favours the warmer climes of southern Europe, the Mediterranean and north Africa. But, occasionally, such as in 1900, 1950 and now 2025, numbers explode off the south-west coast of England, changing marine food chains and disrupting the local fishing industry.

Common octopuses take the ultimate “live fast, die young” approach to life. Despite the large size they can attain, they generally only live for less than two years, with females dying after their eggs hatch. The males also die after breeding. This means octopus populations are highly affected by changes in environmental conditions.

Octopus blooms have previously been rare in the UK, but emerging evidence from long-term marine monitoring of the western Channel suggests that these episodes coincide with sustained periods of unusual warmth in both the ocean and atmosphere.

These “marine heatwaves” can stimulate rapid population growth, whether the octopus are locally established or newly arrived from the south. These warm conditions are often accompanied by unusually low salinity in coastal waters, a signal that points to fresher water entering the region. While salinity itself is unlikely to drive the outbreaks, it serves as a valuable tracer of the water’s origin.

The fresher conditions may stem from high river flow from major French Atlantic rivers such as the Loire, or from prolonged easterly winds over the Channel during the cooler months (October to March). These processes could help transport octopus larvae across the Channel from northern France and the Channel Islands.

Taken together, the combination of warmth, altered circulation and low-salinity signatures suggests that climate-driven shifts in ocean and atmospheric dynamics underpin these outbreaks.

From crisis to opportunity?

Those early scenes of octopus consuming catches in crab and lobster pots continued as 2025 rolled on. But they didn’t just stop at crustaceans. Piles of empty scallop shells were found in many pots, sometimes with remnants of flesh still attached.

Scallops don’t normally go into crab and lobster pots (unless they have lights in them, which these ones didn’t), so the only explanation is that octopus were actively putting scallops in pots to stock up their larder, consuming them at leisure later.

However, fishers are nothing if not adaptable. They soon realised that there was a lucrative export market for octopus and began targeting them. One boat fishing out from Newlyn in Cornwall brought home over 20 tonnes of octopus, worth £142,000, from just three days fishing.

Between £6.7 million and £9.4 million worth of common octopus was landed on the south coast of the UK from January to August 2025. However, not all fishers benefited, and for most boats, octopus catches suddenly dropped off in August. With other shellfish fisheries also declining dramatically last year – lobsters by 30% and brown crabs and scallops by over 50% – many fishers worry about a future in which there is nothing left to catch.

So, what does the future hold? Given the link with climate change, the extensive reports of octopus breeding and a recent appearance of juvenile octopuses in UK waters, the continued presence of the common octopus seems likely.

If a bloom the size of last year’s occurs again soon, future fisheries should be guided by sustainable and ethical principles that help diversify opportunities for fishing fleets, while leaving enough octopus in the sea to be enjoyed by the hundreds of divers and snorkellers who loved watching these amazing creatures last year.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 47,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Bryce Stewart, Associate Professor, Marine Ecology and Fisheries Biology, University of Plymouth; Marine Biological Association; Emma Sheehan, Associate Professor of Marine Ecology, University of Plymouth, and Tim Smyth, Head of Group: Marine Processes and Observations, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

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