The 25-year-old Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act has been repeatedly criticised for failing to stem Australia’s biodiversity decline. These national laws are meant to protect threatened species and scrutinise some developments over the damage done to ecosystems.

But they haven’t worked. Species have kept going extinct, land clearing in Queensland and the Northern Territory has continued at high levels, and threatened species have declined every year since 2000.

The act’s flaws were laid bare in the 2020 Samuel Review. Lead author Graeme Samuel and his technical panel also laid out a reform blueprint.

Labor promised to overhaul these laws in its first term, using this blueprint as a guide, but ran into intractable political challenges.

Today, the government has tried again, tabling a reform package in parliament that includes bills to reform environmental protection and establish a national environmental protection agency.

Environment Minister Murray Watt has pitched the reforms as a win for both the environment and for business, which would benefit from faster approvals. It remains to be seen whether the legislation will get the support it needs to pass into law.

Could these draft laws really stop the steady decline of Australia’s unique species? My assessment is that some good features are included, but signs of compromise are everywhere.

Ministerial discretion wound back, no national standards yet

A key criticism of the existing laws is the almost unfettered discretion given to the environment minister of the day. A project found likely to cause significant environmental harm by the environment department can still be given a green light by the minister.

The Samuel Review recommended this discretion be tightened up by developing National Environmental Standards to help promote the survival of threatened species.

The minister’s decision would need to be consistent with these standards unless, as the review states, there was a “rare exception, justified in the public interest”.

On these grounds, the draft laws aren’t enough. The reforms would let the minister make standards, but not require them to be developed. The standards would be statutory instruments rather than laws, and are under development, according to the government.

This is a glaring absence, given the standards were described by Samuel as the “centrepiece” of his reform proposal.

If standards are created, they will have some effect on decisions. Under the new bill, the minister must not approve an action unless satisfied the approval is “not inconsistent” with them. The same requirement would apply to a state government if a decision is delegated to them.

This seems promising. But the use of the term “satisfied” means the minister still retains more discretion than Samuel intended. Much also depends on the standards themselves.

More positively, the bill addresses the question of unacceptable impacts. For instance, if a developer wants to build a new suburb on grasslands that represent one of the last remaining tracts of habitat for a critically endangered species, this could be considered an unacceptable impact.

Under the bill, the minister must not approve a development unless satisfied it will not have unacceptable impacts. Again, the word “satisfied” makes it a subjective assessment, but the inclusion of unacceptable impacts is an improvement over the current law.

This amendment is already shaping up to be unpopular with the mining lobby, so it’s yet to be seen if it becomes law. Mining company pushback was influential in killing Labor’s reform efforts in its first term.

Finally, all of these slight improvements in discretion can be overridden if the minister deems it to be in the “national interest”, a phrase not defined in the act.

Offsets still too prominent

The existing laws have long been criticised for their overreliance on biodiversity offsets, where a development doing damage to habitat can offset this by buying or restoring equivalent habitat elsewhere.

In his review, Samuel noted offsets had become the default option, rather than a last resort. It’s far better if damage can be avoided in the first place.

Unfortunately, offsets are still front and centre. The reform bill doesn’t require project developers to explore avoiding or reducing damage before moving to offsets under the so-called mitigation hierarchy. The minister must ‘consider’ the hierarchy, but is not obliged to apply it.

The bill tabled today also introduces “restoration contributions”. These essentially allow applicants to pay money into a offset fund rather than doing it themselves. A New South Wales scheme like this has attracted controversy as the fund has amassed money that can’t be spent as there’s no suitable replacement habitat. Without proper safeguards, these contributions are likely to become a payment for doing harm.

Offsets should only be used where habitat is actually replaceable. Despite this, the reform bill doesn’t require consideration of whether offsets are feasible for a project. The minister can’t apply offsets to unacceptable impacts, but again, this is a matter of discretion.

A new national EPA with few teeth

Today’s amendments provide for the creation of a new National Environmental Protection Agency. This seems like an improvement, as there’s no federal watchdog at present.

But at this stage, its proposed powers would extend only to compliance and enforcement, not environmental approvals as originally proposed last year. Giving an independent body power to approve or refuse projects proved highly unpopular with the mining lobby. The amendments do include some strengthened compliance and enforcement powers to be administered by the EPA.

Who will sign off?

The reforms allow the federal minister to delegate environmental decision making to the relevant state or territory government. This greatly concerns environmental groups, as it would avoid the existing extra layer of federal oversight of controversial proposals.

To delegate, the minister must be satisfied the state process is not inconsistent with any national environmental standard, and meets other requirements. The minister must also be sure any actions will be approved in accordance with the planned federal standards and that they will not have unacceptable impacts.

The reforms also allow for planning at a regional scale. This allows governments to zoom out to the landscape scale and zone areas for development and conservation. If done well, regional planning can be a good way to provide certainty for developers, while stemming the trend of habitat being carved up into smaller, disconnected islands. The devil will be in the detail – any new regional plans will need to be scrutinised carefully.

What about climate change?

Environment groups and the Greens have repeatedly called for the reforms to contain a “climate trigger”. This has been roundly rejected by two independent reviews of the act and by government.

A climate trigger would mean proposed projects would have their impact on the climate thoroughly assessed, which would increase scrutiny of coal and gas projects.

As anticipated, the amendments provide only a small concession to climate change considerations. Project developers will be required to provide an estimate of their direct emissions, but the minister doesn’t have to consider these. There’s no mention of the very large Scope 3 emissions caused by the burning of Australian coal or gas overseas.

Some progress amid many compromises

These environmental reforms are unsurprisingly a product of significant compromise due to the intensely political environment and past failures to progress reform. Even so, they face a rocky path to become law.

While the proposed reforms fail to fix some of the most problematic parts of the current laws, creating a federal EPA and legislating unacceptable impacts could lead to some improvement for the environment if other weak spots are addressed.

Justine Bell-James, Professor, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

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

Sussan Ley will survive “the killing season”, as commentators dub the fag end of the political year. But she’s in bad shape.

In an Essential poll published this week, Ley polled just 13% when people were asked who, from a list, would be best to lead the Liberal Party.

On 10% each were Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, with Angus Taylor on only 7%. Tim Wilson (who defeated teal Zoe Daniel to return to parliament) was on 3%, behind teal MP Allegra Spender at 4%. A whopping 42% weren’t sure about anyone.

Ley’s poor judgement and the unwillingness of some colleagues to support her publicly were highlighted again this week, when she called for Anthony Albanese to apologise for wearing a T-shirt celebrating the band Joy Division, as he exited his plane after his trip to the United States.

Joy Division was the name given to brothels in Nazi concentration camps where women were forced into sexual slavery. The shirt had been highlighted on “Sky After Dark” (where Ley has critics she may hope to placate) the night before she took up the matter.

But, as with her call last week for Kevin Rudd to lose his ambassadorship after the incident with Donald Trump, some of Ley’s Coalition colleagues obviously disagreed when they faced the inevitable questions over her latest foray. Once again, the embattled Ley had overreached.

If she is not to go into Christmas in even worse shape than she’s in now, Ley has to meet two immediate challenges. She must have the opposition settle its position on net zero. And she needs it to reach an agreement with the government on proposed changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) act.

Net zero is by far the more fraught of these two challenges, and the internal fractures in the Coalition are dangerous and deep.

The Nationals’ federal council meets this weekend and is set to pass a motion condemning net zero. The Nationals parliamentary Party is moving to an early decision.

More generally, Coalition parliamentarians are in the middle of intense discussions about the way forward, with an opportunity on Friday for all-comers to state their views at a special meeting called by the Coalition’s policy committee for the Australian economy. Some Nationals have complained they can’t attend because of commitments around the federal council.

Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who did the net zero deal with the Nationals in 2021, is now endorsing a reteat. He posted on social media Wednesday,

“It’s common sense to ensure our policy settings are right and practical for the world as it is, not as it was or what you would like to pretend it is. That’s where you find the national interest. Net Zero at any cost on any rigid timetable is not policy, it’s just ideology.”

Despite Dan Tehan, who is leading a review of the Opposition’s energy policy, suggesting time is needed to get it right, it would be a disaster for the Liberals, and the Coalition as a whole, not to have clarity about their position by Christmas.

For his part Environment Minister Murray Watt wants to have a settlement on his proposed changes to the EPBC act by year’s end.

Watt is making it clear he will do a deal with whichever of the opposition or the Greens Party is willing to come closer to what the government wants.

Both have issues with the bill, which the government is introducing on Thursday.

Watt’s plan is to have the bill pass the House of Representatives next week. His aim is then for a short Senate inquiry and, assuming a deal, to pass the bill through the Senate in the final sitting week, which is at the end of November.

The pressure is on Ley to do the deal. Business also has problems with some features of the bill, but wants an agreement reached because the present approvals process for projects seriously hampers development. But business wants the deal done between the “parties of government” – that is, with the Coalition rather than the Greens.

That would give the outcome more certainty into the future – a key consideration for business – as well as being more acceptable in terms of detail than whatever a deal with the Greens would entail.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black told Sky News on Wednesday,

“It is so important that it’s the two parties of government that ultimately make the call and support a position if it is to go ahead. And that is so that you get that longevity in terms of outcomes, you get that balance that comes of knowing that you’ve got those parties of government engaged”.

So far, before the horse-trading has begun in earnest, there have been more than a dozen meetings between Watt and the opposition, Greens and other crossbenchers. Watt is encouraged by his discussions with shadow environment minister Angie Bell and the Greens Sarah Hanson-Young

The government says that approvals times have blown out by 70 weeks in the 25 years since the present laws were introduced. It estimates its proposed reforms to facilitate developments, ranging from housing projects to wind farms, could inject up to $7 billion into the economy.

When she was environment minister Ley commissioned the report from Graeme Samuel, on which the proposed changes are based. She will be marked down by the business community if she can’t now help get these changes (belatedly) done.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Every day, almost 2 million Australians visit the Bureau of Meteorology website for weather information. The data gathered and processed by the government agency’s radars, weather stations and supercomputers are converted into short and medium-term forecasts essential for farmers, rural residents, professional and recreational fishers, pilots, emergency services and more. Farmers make decisions on whether to plant crops based on forecasts, while emergency services may boost response capacity ahead of wild weather.

Unfortunately, a controversial website redesign has brought this essential service under scrutiny. Last Wednesday, the bureau’s website switched to a fresh, modern look as part of a $A4 million program – the first major update since 2013. The former website – which is still accessible – had served Australia well, but was looking dated. Bureau staff, government agencies and key user groups had been calling for improvements for some time.

The problem was, the new website was less accessible. Vital data was hard to find or had changed format as the summer storm season loomed. On social media, the backlash was sudden and severe. Angry callers filled the bureau’s feedback lines. Media articles began appearing. Anger boiled over after severe storms hit Brisbane and Melbourne on Monday.

Many website users felt the bureau’s new design did not show its real severity. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli claimed the timing of the launch placed lives at risk.

Bureau management initially defended the updated site. But the federal government has now asked the bureau to fix the issues. Environment Minister Murray Watt said it was “clear that the new BOM website is not meeting many users’ expectations”.

So what went wrong? And are the criticisms warranted?

Major changes, poorly timed

When a public service makes major changes, regular users have to understand the changes and be able to access what they need.

Here, the bureau erred. Launching a major update at the start of the spring storm season and during a record-breaking heatwave was not ideal. Better public communication and walk-throughs could have helped make these changes easier.

But the problems ran deeper than timing, as the criticism from farmers, emergency services and even some professional meteorologists indicates.

All point to significant problems with the website’s usability and navigation, radar functionality and accuracy and wider design and launch issues.

Radar problems

The updated rain radar functionality has come in for particular criticism. On the previous website, users could see the path a storm or weather front had taken and see the time it was likely to arrive. This function was especially useful for emergency services. But this was removed. Other users have noted a lag time for the new radar – a storm could arrive before the bureau website suggested it would.

The new radar site also changed the colour scale used to show the severity of a storm. This revision meant users could underestimate storm severity.

The old Bureau site rain radar used dbz (radar reflectivity units). But the new one has switched to a new unit, mm/h (rainfall rate in millimetres). It’s still possible to switch back to the more familiar dbz, but for many users, it won’t be clear how to do this.

As the bureau moves to fix these issues, it would make sense to make the old and new colour scales the same, as independent meteorologists have suggested. That is, the black colour showing highest intensity rainfall using the old dbz units should be tied to the highest rate for the mm/h units.

That’s not all. Farmers and fishers have been frustrated by the disappearance of the Doppler wind function. On the old site, this function was a vital way to track the intensity of winds associated with supercell storms, cold fronts and tropical cyclones.

In hilly regions such as the area between Cooktown and Townsville, local weather radars are essential as a way to give residents and farmers a better way to see rainfall. But in the new update, some areas appear to have been completely wiped from the radar view. Places such as Cape Tribulation – one of the wettest locations in Australia – can no longer access this crucial information.

It’s essential Australians have a reliable and understandable source of weather information before summer begins. This summer, Australia is likely to experience a La Niña event, which tend to bring cooler, rainier conditions as well as a higher risk of more tropical cyclones in Australian longitudes and a more active monsoon season across the tropics. Both of these will increase the risk of flooding across Australia’s north and east.

To their credit, the bureau’s management have requested constructive feedback on the new website. Giving clear feedback on what works and what doesn’t will be useful in fixing these issues and restoring confidence in Australia’s weather information.

In the interim, users can still access the old version of the website.

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.

Climate change has been on the world’s radar for decades. Predictions made by scientists at oil giant Exxon in the early 1980s are proving accurate. The damage done by a hotter, more chaotic world is worsening and getting more expensive.

Even so, many countries around the world are failing to meet their emissions targets, with major gaps found even this week between the commitments and actions needed to hold global warming to 1.5°C.

This has put Earth on a dangerous path, as our new report on the state of the climate reveals.

Earth’s vital signs ailing

Last year was the hottest on record. It was also likely the hottest in at least 125,000 years.

Every year, we track 34 of the planet’s vital signs. In 2024, 22 of these indicators were at record levels. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and ocean heat both hit new highs, as did losses of trees to fire. Meat consumption kept rising and fossil fuels consumption reached new heights.

The consequences of climate inaction are ever more clear. In 2024, the world’s coral reefs suffered the most widespread bleaching ever recorded, affecting roughly 84% of the world’s coral reef area between January 2023 and May 2025.

Greenland and Antarctic ice mass fell to record lows. Deadly and costly disasters surged, including the flooding in Texas which killed at least 135 people while the Los Angeles wildfires have cost more than A$380 billion. Since 2000, global climate-linked disasters have now caused more than $27 trillion in damages.

Stories and statistics like this are sadly not new. Many other reports and warnings have been published before we started this annual snapshot in 2020. Therefore, our report this year focuses on three high-impact types of climate action, across energy, nature and food.

Energy

Combined solar and wind consumption set a new record in 2024 but is still 31 times lower than fossil fuel (oil, coal, gas) energy consumption. This is despite the fact renewables are now the cheapest choice for new energy almost everywhere. One reason for this are the ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels.

By 2050, solar and wind energy could supply nearly 70% of global electricity. But this transition requires restricting the influence of the fossil fuel industry and a full phase out of fossil fuel production and use, not the expansion we continue to see globally.

As a result of surging fossil fuel consumption, energy-related emissions rose 1.3% in 2024 and reached an all-time high of 40.8 gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide equivalent. In 2024, the greatest fossil fuel greenhouse gas emitters were China (30.7% of total), the United States (12.5%), India (8.0%), the European Union (6.1%), and Russia (5.5%). Together, they accounted for 62.8% of global emissions.

Sadly, much of the rise in fossil fuel electricity generation may be due to hotter temperatures and heat waves.

Although there are concerns over the environmental impacts of renewables, the greater threat to our biodiversity is climate change and biodiversity conservation and mitigation measures can be part of project planning.

Nature

Protecting and restoring ecosystems on land and in the ocean remains one of the most powerful ways to support climate change, and support biodiversity and human well-being.

Protecting and restoring ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, mangroves and peatlands could remove or avoid around 10 Gt of carbon dioxide emissions per year by 2050, which is equivalent to roughly 25% of current annual emissions.

But we must also stop destroying what we have. Global tree cover loss was almost 30 million hectares in 2024, the second highest area on record and a 4.7% increase over 2023. Tropical primary forest losses were particularly large in 2024, with fire-related losses reaching a record high of 3.2 million hectares, up from just 690 thousand hectares in 2023, a 370% increase.

Food

Approximately 30% of food is lost or wasted globally. Reducing food waste could greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions since it accounts for roughly 8–10% of global emissions. Policies supporting plant-rich diets could also help slow climate change, while offering many benefits related to human health, food security, and biodiversity.

The technical mitigation potential associated with switching away from eating meat may be in the order of 0.7–8.0 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year by 2050. This is in part because methane emissions from cows, sheep and other ruminant livestock account for roughly half of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Per capita meat consumption hit all-time highs in 2024, and we currently add 500,000 more ruminants per week.

Creating global change

In our report, we note that social tipping points can trigger climate action. These refer to moments when a small, committed minority triggers a rapid and large-scale shift in social norms, beliefs, or behaviours. Research shows sustained, nonviolent movements and protests involving just a small proportion of a population (about 3.5%) can help trigger transformative change.

Many people underestimate just how much support there is globally for climate action, with most people believing they are in a minority. This arguably fosters disengagement and isolation. But it also suggests that as awareness grows and people see their values reflected in others, the conditions for social tipping points may be strengthened.

Reaching this positive tipping point will require more than facts and policy. It will take connection, courage, and collective resolve. Climate mitigation strategies are available, cost effective and urgently needed, and we can still limit warming if we act boldly and quickly, but the window is closing.

Thomas Newsome, Associate Professor in Global Ecology, University of Sydney and William Ripple, Distinguished Professor and Director, Trophic Cascades Program, Oregon State University

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

The federal government is considering enforcement action against oil and gas company Inpex after it admitted serious reporting errors that significantly underestimated hazardous emissions released from its liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on Darwin Harbour over many years.

The LNG plant is 3 kilometres from residential suburbs and 10km from Darwin city. It is required to report emissions to the National Pollutant Inventory.

Inpex has now released corrections for 2023–24 that more than double the previous estimates of emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air in Darwin, from 1,619 to 3,562 tonnes. The reason for the errors has not been disclosed.

The originally reported levels of very toxic compounds benzene and toluene were just 4–5 tonnes in 2023–24. However, corrected estimates were 136 and 112 times higher, respectively, with emissions exceeding 500 tonnes of both chemicals.

Currently there is no legal limit on the amount of VOCs that Inpex is allowed to emit. These new figures raise questions about the potential harms, given serious toxicity of benzene and toluene, the large amounts released into the atmosphere over several years, the closeness to population centres and the lack of detail in current sampling. As a cancer-causing chemical, there is no known safe threshold for benzene exposures.

When the news broke, NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro responded with public statements of faith in Inpex and the NT Environment Protection Authority. She said the incident illustrated the reliability of industry self-reporting. Inpex said the revised levels raised no health concerns for Darwin.

As a group of leading scientists aware of the complexities involved in measuring these chemicals and their health impacts, we strongly disagree. We view the potential health implications to be significant – they require an urgent, comprehensive and independent investigation.

Given the size of this correction, it’s imperative that corrections across all years are made public immediately. Corrected levels of benzene and toluene for 2021–22 could be particularly high, as Inpex has already reported emitting 11,000 tonnes of volatile organic compounds to the National Pollutant Inventory. That is nearly seven times more than the amount now reported for 2023-24.

Higher volatile organic compound emissions in 2024/25

In the wake of this scrutiny, Inpex has also released corrected data for 2024–25. Compared with 2023–24, Inpex further increased its emissions of total volatile organic compounds by 21%, with a 31-fold increase in xylene emissions and continuing high emissions of benzene and toluene.

This is despite revelations in 2024 that Inpex had emitted many times more volatile organic compounds than the 500 tonnes predicted in their draft Environmental Impact Statement to the NT government in 2008.

This led to detailed questioning of the chairs of Inpex and the NT Environment Protection Authority by senators David Pocock and Sarah Hanson-Young at the Senate Inquiry into federal support to the Middle Arm Industrial Precinct in Darwin in 2024.

In addition, documents provided by Inpex to the inquiry also revealed the facility’s two anti-pollution devices had been out of operation for extended periods of time since 2019. These devices, called acid-gas incinerators, destroy volatile chemicals such as benzene, toluene and hazardous sulphur-containing compounds before they are released. There were no legal consequences for these breakdowns and resulting elevated VOC emissions.

Alarmingly, the Middle Arm Inquiry Report ignored these discussions. Labor and Liberal senators gave full support for a third LNG facility to be built in Darwin with little mention of the extensive health concerns raised in submissions and additional papers.

Why are these emissions so concerning?

Many studies have linked exposure to the toxic family of chemicals known as BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes) to multiple health issues. Short exposures can cause symptoms such as headaches, respiratory symptoms and asthma attacks. Longer exposures can cause neurological damage, pre-term births and impaired liver, kidney, lung, reproductive and immune function.

The World Health Organization classifies benzene as a carcinogen, most strongly associated with leukaemia and other blood cancers.

While most research to date has examined risks associated with BTEX chemicals in workplaces and indoor settings, many recent studies have demonstrated that at least some of these risks extend to outdoor exposures.

Last month, an extensive multi-country study demonstrated a consistent link between benzene, toluene and xylene levels in outdoor air and the risk of death.

Besides these direct risks, BTEX chemicals react readily once in the atmosphere to form ground-level ozone, especially in warm, tropical environments such as Darwin.

We need clean air

Darwin residents are understandably concerned about the levels of highly toxic chemicals emitted by Inpex LNG so close to homes and urban areas of Darwin.

Days before these revelations, the NT EPA reported one of Inpex’s two LNG processing units had released 36,000 litres of hot oil across the plant and into stormwater drains.

These pollution issues follow the ABC investigation of a significant gas leak at the nearby Santos LNG facility, which had not been made public for nearly 20 years.

The federal Department of Climate Change, Energy and the Environment is now reviewing these incidents and considering enforcement action.

Inpex senior vice president Bill Townsend told the ABC workers had been told there was “no cause for health concern”, citing air quality monitoring – both on-site and in the Darwin region – which he said had “consistently” shown emissions were within government limits.

This week, hotly debated new national environment protection laws are expected to enter Parliament. Strong environmental laws aren’t just for wildlife – they are vital in protecting human health too. Improved evidence-based federal laws such as a Clean Air Act would go a long way to protecting Australia’s health and wellbeing.

Melissa Haswell, Professor of Health, Safety and Environment, School of Public Health and Social Work, Queensland University of Technology; Branka Miljevic, Associate Professor, Earth and Atmospheric Science, Queensland University of Technology, and Lidia Morawska, Professor, Science and Engineering Faculty; Director, International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (WHO CC for Air Quality and Health); Director - Australia, Australia – China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management (ACC-AQSM), Queensland University of Technology

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

The global crisis of diminishing biological diversity is challenging our current ability to monitor changes in ecosystems.

Environmental DNA, or eDNA, has become a popular method. It involves taking a sample from the environment and extracting the DNA to document the species that are (or were recently) present.

Just like matching barcodes to an item’s price at the supermarket, eDNA data are matched to a corresponding identification record in a reference database.

But most eDNA sampling takes place in water, passing litres of liquid through a filter that retains DNA fragments for analysis. This method works very well for freshwater and marine species, but less so on land.

Enter airborne DNA, or airDNA, an emerging method not yet optimised for widespread commercial applications but with great promise for capturing signals of land-based biodiversity.

Researchers have been exploring the question of whether natural spiderwebs could be used to collect DNA, but our research takes this a step further.

Inspired by a bit of Halloween decoration, we designed artificial spiderwebs to see if they are as good as the real thing in capturing airborne DNA. Our data show artificial spiderwebs performed similarly to real spiderwebs in detecting land-dwelling species.

History of DNA capture

eDNA has been used to monitor changes in biodiversity, detect new species and evaluate the success of restoration or eradication projects. It is easy to use, cheap and non-invasive, and is now being deployed by citizen scientists, community groups and mana whenua.

But species living mostly on land – mammals, birds, bats, reptiles, insects – are less well detected by this method.

One of the first studies to showcase the potential of methods to analyse airborne DNA vacuumed air at a zoological park in Huntingdonshire (United Kingdom). It picked up DNA from 17 of the resident land species, including black and white lemurs, howler monkeys, sloths and tigers, as well as their food items and other mammals and birds.

This stimulated further research, including into the use of cheaper, passive methods of airDNA collection that rely on the settling of air onto inert biofilters. A recent study explored whether natural spiderwebs might provide a new way to capture traces of vertebrate DNA from the environment.

This work sparked excitement among researchers, who immediately saw the potential of spiderwebs to provide aerosol DNA alongside DNA derived from the spiders themselves and their recent prey.

We shared the general excitement of our colleagues but couldn’t help but wonder about the potential negative impacts of this methods’ widespread use on spiders. Spiders are already on the receiving end of bad press, but they have important roles in the ecosystem as nature’s pest and disease control agents. They eat about 800 million tonnes of insects annually across the globe.

Using natural webs is also less robust, as their size and shape, and how long and where they are deployed, are left to chance.

How do artificial webs perform?

In comparison to water eDNA methods, both types of spiderwebs in our research revealed a distinct signature of terrestrial communities. But they were also good biofilters for capturing fungi, possibly by trapping floating fungal spores.

The ecosystem picture drawn from both types of webs compared to water eDNA also shows these methods are likely complementary, capturing a more complete catalogue of species in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

This is great news: artificial spiderwebs are easy and cheap to construct and provide better control over location, frequency and duration of DNA collection – all at a reduced cost to nature.

Where to from here? Further refinements are on the way. Outstanding questions include how many artificial spiderwebs we need to sufficiently capture biodiversity, whether these webs will perform better or worse in windy or wet conditions, and whether other materials besides Halloween decorations could provide an even better artificial web.

As we continue to explore such questions, perhaps nature’s weavers will provide further inspiration that helps us fashion even better biomechanic solutions for measuring biodiversity.

Angela (Ang) McGaughran, Senior Lecturer in Population Genomics, University of Waikato and Manpreet K Dhami, Senior Researcher in Molecular Ecology, Bioeconomy Science Institute

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

One hundred years ago, a catastrophic flood carrying enormous boulders swept through part of Dolgarrog village, north Wales, destroying several homes, a bridge and the local chapel. Ten adults and six children lost their lives. The tragedy was widely reported and King George V sent a message of condolence.

This was not a natural flood. It was caused by the failure of two dams impounding the Eigiau and Coedty reservoirs on the Carneddau plateau, high above Dolgarrog, following a wet October. Overtopped by inflow from the Eigiau breach, the Coedty dam failed catastrophically, unleashing a flood of some 1.7 million cubic metres. There was no time to warn the village.

The Dolgarrog disaster followed a reservoir failure at Skelmorlie, Scotland, in April 1925. Both brought attention to poor dam construction and inadequate maintenance practices, and led directly to the Reservoirs (Safety Provisions) Act of 1930.

The act sought to ensure the structural safety of large reservoirs by introducing legal requirements for regular inspection and certification by qualified engineers. It was the first attempt in the UK to regulate the design, construction, and maintenance of reservoirs through statutory safety measures.

Since Dolgarrog, the UK has had an excellent reservoir safety record. But in late July 2019, the evacuation of more than 1,500 residents from Whaley Bridge downstream of Toddbrook reservoir in Derbyshire, England, was ordered. Toddbrook had received a month’s rain in just two days.

Swollen inflows overtopped the dam’s emergency spillway, undermining its concrete slabs. A large cavity appeared on the spillway, exposing the dam’s core, raising fears of a breach.

A Chinook helicopter dropped 400 tonnes of aggregate on the Toddbrook spillway to reinforce the damaged section, while fire services used high-capacity pumps to lower the water level and reduce pressure on the dam. After several days, engineers declared the Toddbrook dam stable enough to lift the evacuation order.

The Toddbrook incident was one of the most serious near failures of a dam in recent UK history. It showed how extreme rainfall events can threaten dam safety and communities living downstream. Gavin Tomlinson, the fire incident commander, said: “We were in a situation where we had five times as much water going in than we could take out. We absolutely thought it could fail. It was a very, very tense night.”

Following this scare, in April 2021, the UK government commissioned an independent review into reservoir safety. A ministerial direction was issued to owners of all large, raised reservoirs, making the formulation of emergency flood plans a legal requirement to ensure that they are prepared for an eventuality that could result in an uncontrolled release of water.

The threat from climate change

As geomorphologists who work on river processes and landforms, we are researching the landscape-changing effects of such dam breach floods, but also how topography can amplify the hazard to communities.

As the Dolgarrog disaster showed so graphically, reservoirs that drain into steep and narrow upland valleys present a particular hazard, especially where flows increase in speed and pick up destructive boulders. All aspects of the landscape setting should be part of flood emergency planning.

While the Toddbrook reservoir was compliant with existing legislation and had been recently inspected, it suffered “unforeseen and potentially critical damage that could have led to a catastrophe.” Questions were raised by local residents about how well it had been maintained. Repairs were nearing completion in late 2025.

Most reservoirs in upland Britain were constructed in the 19th century under hydrological conditions that no longer hold. Embankment dams and older masonry dams can be especially vulnerable to erosion, seepage, slope instability or overtopping.

The most common cause of dam failures is overtopping where the spillway cannot cope with floodwaters. Reservoir safety may also be challenged by rapid or sustained water level lowering during droughts. As pore pressures change, and soils dry out and crack, embankment stability can be compromised.

Climate change is increasing both storm and drought intensity in many parts of the UK posing a threat to reservoir safety. Climate models tell us that intense rainstorms that cause flash flooding will be five times more likely by 2080. Steep upland catchments in hard impermeable rocks are especially vulnerable to flash flooding, and this is where much of the UK’s water storage infrastructure is located.

The Dolgarrog disaster was the last time anyone was killed in the UK by a dam failure. But if intense storms and prolonged droughts are the new normal for our climate, the risk to ageing upland water storage infrastructure will likely increase.

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Jamie Woodward, Professor of Physical Geography, University of Manchester; Jeff Warburton, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University, and Stephen Tooth, Professor of Physical Geography, Aberystwyth University

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

Food waste has long been reviled as an immoral, largely preventable feature of our consumer society.

An estimated 4.7 million tonnes of edible food is thrown away by households each year in the UK, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme, an environmental charity that runs the Love Food Hate Waste campaign. This wastage seems especially wrong at a time when escalating food prices have driven many British households to become reliant on food banks.

Meanwhile, the single-use plastic packaging used to reduce food wastage poses a more insidious problem. Once discarded, the single-use plastics that cushion, seal, protect and extend the shelf life of our groceries can linger in landfills, beneath the ground, in rivers and on the seabed for centuries.

This mounting plastic waste could disrupt ecosystems, negatively effect food security through declining animal health and cause health issues in people. If binning good-to-eat food has historically been reviled as consumers’ great moral failing, their over-reliance on single-use plastic food packaging could be a longer-lasting sin.

UK households throw away approximately 90 billion pieces of plastic packaging a year. In 2024, the UK achieved a recycling rate of approximately 51%-53.7% for plastic packaging waste.

The rest was incinerated, land-filled, or shipped abroad, typically to countries with weaker waste management systems. There it is buried, burned or haphazardly stored with the risk of leaking into rivers and seas.

Traces of plastic have been detected everywhere from Arctic ice to the hottest deserts, from the bellies of seabirds to human blood, lungs and placentas. Unlike food waste, the damage of plastic waste is cumulative, slowly imparting a toxic legacy throughout ecosystems for future generations.

The scale of the single-use plastics problem is not to diminish the problem of food waste. Throwing out a pack of mackerel fillets or a tub of smashed avocado from the fridge is not only disrespectful to the third of UK children under five living in food insecure homes. It disregards the huge amount of carbon emissions needed to produce, preserve, transport, retail and store those items from producer to consumer.

An estimated 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is produced from UK households’ wasted consumable food and drink. But damaging as it is, food waste has an end point: it decomposes, breaks down, then returns to the soil.

In contrast, plastic packaging persists indefinitely, slowly fragmenting into smaller parts and disintegrating into stubborn chemical constituents that stick around. Each plastic bottle, crisp packet and meat tray that ends up in the natural environment represents a long-term alteration of the material world.

Food waste decays, plastic stays

Why then does binning plastic packaging rarely invite as fervent a reaction as scraping a plate of uneaten dinner into the bin? Our research suggests that part of the answer lies in how each act of wastage is morally framed.

Food is very visible, desirable and morally loaded – it is something held dear in most religions and communities. Several faiths explicitly denounce the wasting of food as sinful or wrong. Secular British history too is replete with memories of food shortages, rationing, rising prices and austerity periods which have led to strong moral attitudes against food waste.

According to the anti-poverty charity Trussell Trust’s research, approximately 14 million people in the UK faced hunger in the past year leading up to September 2025.

By comparison, plastic is more abstract. Plastic food packaging is hidden in plain sight, often serving as a “passenger” rather than a driver of our consumption. After we remove the food, we toss plastic packaging into the trash – ideally the recycling bin – without a further thought.

Where food is deep-seated in moral and even sacred meanings around nourishing the body, sharing and caring, identity and celebration, plastic is devoid of such values. Throwing food away can feel like an affront to the communities we identify with, but binning plastic does not carry the same stigma. We do not view ourselves as “wasting” plastic, we merely “dispose” of it.

Among the members of 27 households we interviewed, many expressed their frustration about good-to-eat food ending up in bins or landfills. Most cited the usefulness of plastic packaging in keeping food fresh and helping to reduce waste.

For them, the consequences of binning plastics are dispersed and delayed. No great cautionary tale from our collective memory exists to warn us of the complex, longer-term challenges that will follow.

To overcome the challenges of tomorrow, we must reassess the hierarchy of things that we, as consumers, feel guilty about. Food waste certainly matters, but so too does plastic packaging. The problem is that plastics have not been a part of our moral economy for very long.

Plastics arrived as a modern convenience, not as a moral appendage to our sense of identity or community like food has been for millennia. There are no ancient and collective traumas tied to plastics’ wanton consumption, abuse or scarcity, no prayers of gratitude for plastic packaging, and no great piety or moral proverbs condemning its thoughtless disposal.

Our existing moral frameworks are coloured with images of hunger, famine, bread lines and emaciated bodies that provide us with the imagination to condemn the wasting of food.

But we require new stories and perspectives to position plastic waste as an evil that will outlive us, haunt our waterways, crowd the stomachs of wildlife, leach into our food systems, and poison our bodies long after our shopping habits have changed.

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James Cronin, Professor in Marketing and Consumer Culture Studies, Lancaster University; Alexandros Skandalis, Professor in Marketing and Consumer Culture, Lancaster University, and Charlotte Hadley, Research Fellow, Lancaster Medical School, Lancaster University

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

As Earth’s population grows, we will need more food. According to one estimate, we may need to nearly double our crop yields in the next century to keep up.

At the same time, climate change and wild weather events are making it harder than ever to grow food. We are faced with a complex problem, but one thing is certain: we will need to grow better, more productive crops.

Crops have already gone through aeons of evolution and millennia of human selection, so improving their growth even further isn’t easy. That’s where synthetic biology comes in: using engineering principles to build better biological systems.

In a new study published today in Nature Communications, we present a step towards more productive crops: a simple, tiny box made of proteins that can help plants use nitrogen and water more efficiently.

An important but inefficient enzyme

At school, you probably learned about photosynthesis: the solar-powered process where plants take carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and convert it to sugars that they use for energy. They use this energy to grow (and for crops, this means providing food for us).

An enzyme called Rubisco is a crucial player in photosynthesis. It is responsible for the first step of using CO₂ to make sugars.

Rubisco just might be the most important enzyme on Earth. However, it acts slowly and sometimes reacts with oxygen instead of CO₂, wasting valuable resources. These shortcomings mean Rubisco is a significant bottleneck to plant growth.

To compensate, so-called C3 crops (a group which includes wheat, rice, canola and many others) mass-produce Rubisco to help with photosynthesis. This comes at a huge cost, wasting energy, water and nitrogen.

Learning from algae

On the other hand, cyanobacteria (also called blue-green algae) have taken a more elegant approach. They have evolved a “carbon-concentrating mechanism”, increasing the amount of CO₂ surrounding Rubisco to keep it on task.

As part of this system, they house Rubisco in specialised compartments called carboxysomes. This creates an ideal space where the enzyme can function more efficiently – a bit like a microscopic office with no distractions.

If C3 crops had a similar system, it could increase crop yields by up to 60%. Scientists have been trying to engineer such a system into these crops for many years, but it’s complicated.

A simpler container

The carboxysome compartment alone consists of many different proteins which must all cooperate in a precise manner. A simpler compartment that does the same job would be easier to work with.

As synthetic biologists, we often repurpose biological parts to play new roles.

In this case, we looked at encapsulins: these are nanoscale cellular storage boxes typically found in bacteria or archaea. They have one great feature for our purposes, which is that they are simple and easy to make – built from many copies of just a single protein stuck together.

We are engineering encapsulins to make something like a carboxysome that is compatible with C3 crops.

Getting Rubisco to work harder

Our first step was packaging active Rubisco inside an encapsulin compartment. We immediately noticed the timing was critical.

If we tried to produce both Rubisco and encapsulin at the same time, the Rubisco we packaged wasn’t active. However, if we produced the Rubisco first and the encapsulin second, the packaged Rubisco was active.

With the timing sorted, we managed to create encapsulin protein cages that could function with three different types of Rubisco.

There is still a way to go before we have supercharged crops – but our path is clear. We will incorporate other parts of the carboxysome and carbon-concentrating mechanism to build an ideal workspace for Rubisco, and engineer that into crop plants.

Taylor Szyszka, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Synthetic Biology, University of Sydney; Davin Saviro Wijaya, PhD Candidate, Research School of Biology, Australian National University, and Yu Heng Lau, Associate Professor in Chemical Biology, University of Sydney

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

In pockets of highlands across Australia’s east lives a shy and secretive lizard. It’s usually reddish grey in colour, with two pale strips running the length of its spiky back. Growing to a maximum of 20 centimetres, it could easily fit in the palm of an adult’s hand.

But although the mountain dragon (Rankinia diemensis) is small, it can teach us big lessons about the influence of climate change on Australian biodiversity, as our new research, published today in Current Biology, demonstrates.

Tracking change over geological timescales

The predictions about how climate change will impact native species aren’t good. But it is challenging to truly understand how future climate changes will impact how species are distributed. That’s largely because climate change happens at a scale and time frame that is difficult for researchers to directly observe and measure.

This is where the emerging field of conservation paleobiology comes in.

It uses the fossil record to understand how animals and other living organisms responded to past environmental changes over geological timescales – that is, thousands to millions of years.

Conservation paleobiology can also help overcome another challenge: distinguishing the impacts of human-induced environmental threats such as climate change, habitat destruction, introduced disease, pollution or invasive species from “natural” variations in climate.

All of these factors may be acting at the same time and may equally lead to species declines.

From cold and dry to warm and humid

The Quaternary – from roughly 2.5 million years ago until today – is a particularly promising period to study.

During this period the climate in Australia changed drastically and repeatedly from cold and dry glacial periods to warm and more humid interglacial periods. These changes shaped where today’s species are found. They also offer an opportunity to measure influences of climate change in the absence of human impacts.

By studying fossils, often preserved as isolated pieces of bone, it’s possible to find out how species react to these natural climatic changes during the Quaternary. These results then allow predictions of their reactions to the human-induced climate change we experience right now.

Our new research links this historical period with the present by combining analyses of fossils with genetic data from museum specimens. We used a technique called microCT imaging to study fossils. We then combined this information with genomic data to see if current populations of mountain dragons were still healthy.

A shrinking population

The mountain dragon is now found in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania, where it is the only native dragon lizard. An isolated population in the Grampians National Park in western Victoria is currently listed as critically endangered.

We found the range of mountain dragons was much larger roughly 20,000 years ago, during the peak of the last cold and dry glacial period. Isolated upper jaw bones found at two different fossil sites revealed these reptiles were once present in two locations where they’re are absent today: Kangaroo Island and Naracoorte in South Australia.

Our genetic results also revealed the populations of mountain dragons that still exist today are largely disconnected from each other, increasing their vulnerability.

Some populations in lower altitudes are genetically less diverse. This is an indicator of threatened or declining populations.

This species was also more widely distributed at lower altitudes 20,000 years ago compared to today. This suggests it has slowly been pushed up the mountains by changing climate.

This situation is alarming, because under rapid global warming, the species will at some point have nowhere to escape.

A hotspot of endangered reptiles

Mountain dragons don’t seem to be the only species reacting to climate change in this way.

Comparisons with other reptiles living in the same areas indicate the pattern we see in mountain dragons may also cause other reptile species to decline. For example, the blotched blue tongue lizard (Tiliqua nigrolutea) was also found on Kangaroo Island 20,000 years ago.

Other species such the she-oak skink (Cyclodomorphus praealtus), the Blue Mountains water skink (Eulamprus leuraensis) and White’s skink (Liopholis whitii) show similarities in terms of their genetic diversity and population connectivity. They also likely had larger ranges when the climate was more favourable.

Reptiles can’t actively regulate their body temperatures. This makes them less able to adjust to changing temperatures. Previous research shows the temperate southeastern Australian ecosystem, including the southern Alps, is a hotspot of endangered reptiles within Australia.

Now our research on mountain dragons suggests climate change is a likely cause for the high number of threatened reptiles in this area. It also highlights the urgent need for updated conservation strategies that take into account where Australia’s unique native species may move to as the planet continues to warm.

Jane Melville, Senior Curator, Terrestrial Vertebrates, Museums Victoria Research Institute and Till Ramm, Research Associate, Sciences Department, Museums Victoria Research Institute

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

In the middle of the Southern Indian Ocean lies a vast underwater volcanic ridge known as the Kerguelen Plateau. At its centre sits Australia’s most remote territory: Heard Island and McDonald Islands. These icy outposts about 4,100km southwest of Perth are home to Australia’s only active volcanoes.

These isolated islands are a biodiversity hotspot. Seals and penguins abound on rocky beaches. Underwater, seabed fish species have evolved antifreeze-like compounds in their blood to cope with near-freezing temperatures.

Isolation doesn’t mean protection. The discovery of many dead elephant seal pups on Heard Island suggests highly pathogenic avian influenza may have arrived. For years, the rich fisheries around these islands were targeted by illegal fishers hunting for the sought-after Patagonian toothfish.

There is good news. Our new research has found increasing numbers of fish species and wider distributions around Heard and McDonald Islands. While it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact drivers of these increases, we believe it’s a combination of factors: the removal of illegal fishing, changes in fishing practices to reduce bycatch, a long-established marine reserve, and possibly climate-driven increases in ocean productivity.

Fish communities rebounding

The undulating terrain and nutrient-rich waters washing up from 4,000m deep onto the Kergeluen Plateau have helped make this area a hotspot for fish species.

Before Australia established an exclusion zone around the islands, the region was heavily targeted by international trawlers likely causing significant damage to many forms of life on the seafloor.

In the 1990s, illegal fishers using longlines targeted these waters for the high-value toothfish and large catches of species such as marbled rockcod. By the early 2000s, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing was stamped out due to joint surveillance efforts by Australian and French authorities. France controls the Kergeluen Islands 450km away. The waters are now monitored by satellite.

Historically, authorised fishers also relied on trawling to catch toothfish. In 2003, the fishing industry began shifting to longline methods for catching toothfish which has likely benefited seafloor habitats, bycatch species and fish communities. Today, trawling efforts in the region are much reduced outside a small fishery for mackerel icefish.

The toothfish is sought after by top restaurants around the world and the area has a well-managed and lucrative toothfish and mackerel icefish fishery considered sustainable. Only 2,120 tonnes can be taken a year under catch limits set by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority.

A no-take marine reserve was declared over some of the waters around Heard and McDonald Islands in 2002 and expanded in 2014. This is also likely to have contributed to the increase in fish communities. In January 2025, the Australian government significantly expanded the size of the reserve, including no-take, habitat protection and national park zones. This should further boost protection.

The region’s remoteness, harsh conditions and ocean depth make it very difficult to study how fishing and climate change affect fish communities.

The data we used in our research comes from a long-term monitoring program conducted by fishers and managed by the Australian government. Every year since the late 1990s, a fishing vessel undertakes a number of short trawls at different depths. The presence and abundance of different species is recorded.

We used contemporary statistical approaches to model the entire dataset, examining how all seabed fish species respond to factors such as water temperature, depth, climate and marine reserve status.

Our analysis of data from 2003–16 found that despite a warming ocean, bottom-dwelling fish numbers have broadly increased. This includes species more likely to be caught as bycatch in fishing nets, such as Eaton’s skate, grey rockcod and deep-water grenadier species. Strikingly, the number of species in a single sample more than doubled over a 13 year-time period.

What’s next?

This area is a climate change hotspot. Major ocean currents such as the Polar Front are changing and water temperatures are rising. These changes are boosting production of phytoplankton, the microscopic floating plants that underpin food webs. We don’t know yet if this is another reason fish distributions are changing, and we don’t know what rising water temperatures will mean for polar-adapted fish species.

This year, the Australian research vessel RSV Nuyina will visit the Heard and McDonald Islands twice for research such as surveying marine ecosystems to inform fisheries management. For researchers, the next step will be to build broader collaboration with French researchers, fishers and fishery managers to better track changes to ecosystems across the entire Kerguelen Plateau.

We can’t definitively say these species have fully recovered, as we don’t know the distribution and abundance of these species before human pressure began. But overall, our research is good news. It suggests fish species under pressure can recover strongly and that management methods are working.

Joel Williams, Research Associate in Marine Ecology, University of Tasmania and Nicole Hill, Research Fellow in Marine Ecology, University of Tasmania

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

New Zealand’s first legislated marine reserve, established 50 years ago around Te Hāwere-a-Maki/Goat Island north of Auckland, was also among the very first in the world.

During the decades since then, marine scientists have been monitoring changes and tracking significant transformations in the ecosystem – from bare rocky reefs to thriving kelp forests.

Officially known as the Cape Rodney-Okakari Point Marine Reserve, the 556 hectares of protected waters and seabed became New Zealand’s first no-take zone in 1975.

Back then, very little grew on the shallow rocky reefs. It took almost three decades for kelp forests to reestablish following the slow recovery of crayfish and snapper stocks.

These predators play an essential role in keeping marine reef ecosystems healthy because they eat kina (sea urchins) which otherwise increase in numbers and mow down kelp forests.

Once crayfish and snapper were able to mature and grow, the kelp forests returned. Their recovery in turn provided a nursery for juvenile fish and many species came back.

We now see parrotfish, black angelfish, blue maomao, red moki, silver drummers, leatherjackets, octopus and several species of stingrays. Bottlenose dolphins and orca pass through occasionally.

The reserve features a far higher density of fish and other marine life than outside its boundaries. But despite the protection, fish are not as plentiful within the reserve now as they were in the late 1970s.

The ongoing changes within the protected area are helping us to understand the impact of commercial and recreational fishing.

Pressures from fisheries

In 1964, a decade before the marine reserve was established, the Leigh marine laboratory opened on the cliffs above it. Its first director, Bill Ballantine, was concerned that fish stocks were dwindling and marine ecosystems declining in the Hauraki Gulf and became a key force in pushing for the marine reserve to be set up.

But since 1975, Auckland’s population has exploded and recreational and commercial fishing pressures outside the marine reserve have increased markedly.

While crayfish numbers and sizes began to recover when the marine reserve was established, they have dropped again over the past ten years. And fish stocks in the reserve remain far below the levels that would have been present before commercial fishing began to intensify rapidly in the area during the 1950s.

We think this is because the reserve is too small and continues to be affected by the rise in commercial and recreational fishing in the Hauraki Gulf.

Large snapper and crayfish sometimes move out of the reserve and are caught. The outside areas aren’t replenishing the reserve because they are heavily fished.

Recent research shows people can speed up kelp restoration in some places by removing kina, but large snapper and crayfish are still needed to maintain the balance long-term.

Another key discovery has been that the reserve’s many mature snapper produce about ten times more juvenile snapper than in unprotected areas of the same size.

About 11% of young snapper found up to 40 kilometres away from the reserve are offspring of snapper that live in the reserve. This “spillover effect” means the reserve is actually enhancing fisheries in the Hauraki Gulf.

Safeguarding the ocean

The Hauraki Gulf Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Act, which comes into force this month, makes the Goat Island marine reserve about four times larger, extending the offshore boundary from 800 metres to three kilometres and significantly increasing the diversity of habitats protected.

The marine reserve has demonstrated the value of safeguarding patches of sea, but it has also shown that reserves need to be larger to better protect key species such as crayfish and snapper from fishing pressures.

It is also important to protect different types of habitat, in particular the soft-sediment seafloor ecosystems that comprise the bulk of the Hauraki Gulf. These ecosystems are high in biodiversity, support important fisheries, sequester carbon and process nutrients that maintain productivity. But they are vulnerable to seafloor disturbance.

As the impacts of climate change worsen, the historical records and understanding we have drawn from this marine reserve now act as an important baseline.

We know that restoring kelp forests in the reserve and elsewhere has made the area more resilient to climate change, while also contributing to carbon sequestration.

If kelp forests were restored in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, the plants would be worth about NZ$7.9 million in carbon credits, if they were valued in the same way as land-based forests.

About 350,000 people visit the reserve annually, mostly to snorkel, dive or take a glass-bottom boat trip to explore the abundance of life beneath the waves. A lot more places could look like this marine reserve if we managed our oceans better.

Conrad Pilditch, Professor of Marine Sciences, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau and Simon Francis Thrush, Professor of Marine Science, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

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

Climate change is the biggest issue of our time. 2024 marked both the hottest year on record and the highest levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the past two million years.

Global warming increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, bushfires, floods and droughts. These are already affecting young people, who will experience the challenges for more of their lives than older people.

It will also adversely affect those not yet born, creating a crisis of intergenerational justice.

Caught in the changing climate

In 2025, children and young people comprise a third of Australia’s population.

Given their early stage of physiological and cognitive development, children are more vulnerable to climate disasters such as crop failures, river floods and drought.

They are also less able to protect themselves from the associated trauma than most older people.

Under current emissions trajectories, United Nations research warns every child in Australia could be subject to more than four heatwaves a year. It’s estimated more than two million Australian children could be living in areas where heatwaves will last longer than four days.

A recent report found more than one million children and young people in Australia experience a climate disaster or extreme weather event in an “average year”.

Those in remote areas, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and Indigenous children are more likely to be negatively effected. That’s equivalent to one in six children, and numbers are rising.

Anxiety, frustration and fear

The impact of climate change on young people’s health and wellbeing is also significant. Globally, young people bear the greatest psychological burden associated with the impacts of climate change.

Feelings such as frustration, fear and anxiety related to climate change are compounded by the experience of extreme weather events and associated health impacts.

Intergenerational inequality is the term on the lips of policymakers in Canberra and beyond. In this four-part series, we’ve asked leading experts what’s making younger generations worse off and how policy could help fix it.

For young people who live through climate-related disasters, they may experience challenges with education, displacement, housing insecurity and financial difficulties.

All these come on top of other issues. These include increased socioeconomic inequality, rising child poverty, mounting education debt, precarious employment, and lack of access to affordable housing.

This means this generation of young people is likely to be worse off economically than their parents.

Not walking the walk

Some key policy figures understand how climate change is turbo-charging intergenerational unfairness.

Former treasury secretary Ken Henry described the situation as an “intergenerational tragedy”, referring to the ways Australian policymakers are failing to address the changing climate, among other crucial issues.

Even Treasurer Jim Chalmers acknowledged “intergenerational fairness is one of the defining principles of our country”.

Yet, the current responses to the Climate Risk Assessment Report suggest it’s not the highest priority.

Climate change was barely mentioned in the May 2025 federal election. The major parties largely avoided the subject.

It was also concerning that the first major decision of the newly reelected Albanese government was approving an extension to Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project off Western Australia until 2070.

This leaves a legacy to young people of an additional 87 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent every year for many years to come.

Raising young voices

Australia’s children and young people are not stupid. Many worked out early that they could not trust governments.

Since 2018, young people have mobilised hundreds of thousands of other children in protests calling for climate action.

Youth-led organisations in Australia, such as the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, have long led campaigns and strategies to address climate change. They are joined by an increasing range of older allies, from Parents for Climate to the Knitting Nannas to the Country Women’s Association.

Domestically, many young people have turned to strategic climate litigation and collaboration with members of parliament on legislative change. They argue governments have a legal duty of care to prevent the harms of climate change.

Thwarted attempts

Beyond accelerating implementation of the National Adaptation Plan, other legislative innovations will help.

In 2023, young people worked with independent Senator David Pocock to draft legislation addressing these concerns.

This bill required governments to consider the health and wellbeing of children and future generations when deciding on projects that could exacerbate climate change.

It was sent to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee. While all but one of 403 public submissions to the committee supported the bill, in June 2024 the Labor and Coalition members agreed to reject it. They argued it was difficult to quantify notions such as “wellbeing” or “material risk”.

Adding insult to injury, both major parties claimed Australia already had more than adequate environmental laws in place to protect children.

Turning around the Titanic

The Australian parliament may have another opportunity to embed a legislative duty to protect children and secure intergenerational justice. Independent MP Sophie Scamps introduced the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill in February 2025. As legislation brought before the parliament lapses once an election is called, Scamps is planning to reintroduce the bill in this sitting term.

The bill would introduce a legislative framework to embed the wellbeing of future generations into decision making processes. It would also establish a positive duty and create an independent commissioner for future generations to advocate for Australia’s long-term interests and sustainable practice.

While this bill does not include penalties for breaches of the duty, if passed, it would force the government of the day to consider the rights and interests of current and future generations.

It’s based on similar legislation in Wales, which has worked successfully for a decade.

If nothing else, the Welsh experiment suggests we can take entirely practical steps to promote intergenerational justice, reduce the negative impacts of climate change on young people right now and avert a climate catastrophe threatening our children who are yet to be born.

It may feel like turning around the Titanic, but it must be done.

Philippa Collin, Professor of Political Sociology, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University; Judith Bessant, Distinguished Professor in School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, and Rob Watts, Professor of Social Policy, RMIT University

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

Animals respond to injury in many ways. So far, evidence for animals tending wounds with biologically active materials is rare. Yet, a recent study of an orangutan treating a wound with a medicinal plant provides a promising lead.

Chimpanzees, for example, are known to lick their wounds and sometimes press leaves onto them, but these behaviours are still only partly understood. We still do not know how often these actions occur, whether they are deliberate, or how inventive chimpanzees can be when responding to wounds.

Recent field observations in Uganda, east Africa, are now revealing intriguing insights into how these animals cope with wounds.

As a primatologist, I am fascinated by the cognitive and social lives of chimpanzees, and by what sickness-related behaviours can reveal about the evolutionary origins of care and empathy in people. Chimpanzees are among our closest living relatives, and we can learn so much about ourselves through understanding them.

In our research based in Kibale National Park, Uganda, chimpanzees have been seen applying insects to their own open wounds on five occasions, and in one case to another individual.

Behaviours like insect application show that chimpanzees are not passive when wounded. They experiment with their environment, sometimes alone and occasionally with others. While we should not jump too quickly to call this “medicine”, it does show that they are capable of responding to wounds in inventive and sometimes cooperative ways.

Each new insight adds reveals more about chimpanzees, offering glimpses into the shared evolutionary roots of our own responses to injury and caregiving instincts.

First catch your insect

We saw the insect applications by chance while observing and recording their behaviour in the forest, but paid special attention to chimpanzees with open wounds.

In all observed cases, the sequence of actions seemed deliberate. A chimpanzee caught an unidentified flying insect, immobilised it between lips or fingers, and pressed it directly onto an open wound. The same insect was sometimes reapplied several times, occasionally after being held briefly in the mouth, before being discarded. Other chimpanzees occasionally watched the process closely, seemingly with curiosity.

Most often the behaviour was directed at the chimpanzee’s own open wound. However, in one rare instance, an adolescent female applied an insect to her brother’s wound. A study on the same community has shown that chimpanzees also dab the wounds of unrelated members with leaves, prompting the question of whether insect application of these chimpanzees, too, might extend beyond family members. Acts of care, whether directed towards family or others, can reveal the early foundations of empathy and cooperation.

The observed sequence closely resembles the insect applications seen in Central chimpanzees in Gabon, Africa. The similarity suggests that insect application may represent a more widespread behaviour performed by chimpanzee than previously recognised.

The finding from Kibale National Park broadens our view of how chimpanzees respond to wounds. Rather than leaving wounds unattended, they sometimes act in ways that appear deliberate and targeted.

Chimpanzee first aid?

The obvious question is what function this behaviour might serve. We know that chimpanzees deliberately use plants in ways that can improve their health: swallowing rough leaves that help expel intestinal parasites or chewing bitter shoots with possible anti-parasitic effects.

Insects, however, are a different matter. Pressing insects onto wounds has not yet been shown to speed up healing or reduce infection. Many insects do produce antimicrobial or anti-inflammatory substances, so the possibility is there, but scientific testing is still needed.

For now, what we can say is that the behaviour appears to be targeted, patterned and deliberate. The single case of an insect being applied to another individual is especially intriguing. Chimpanzees are highly social animals, but active helping is relatively rare. Alongside well-known behaviours such as grooming, food sharing, and support in fights, applying an insect to a sibling’s wound hints at another form of care, one that goes beyond maintaining relationships to possibly improving the other’s physical condition.

Big questions

This behaviour leaves us with some big questions. If insect application proves medicative, it could explain why chimpanzees do it. This in turn raises the question of how the behaviour arises in the first place: do chimpanzees learn it by observing others, or does it emerge more spontaneously? From there arises the question of selectivity – are they choosing particular flying insects, and if so, do others in the group learn to select the same ones?

In human traditional medicine (entomotherapy), flying insects such as honeybees and blowflies are valued for their antimicrobial or anti-inflammatory effects. Whether the insects applied by chimpanzees provide similar benefits is still to be investigated.

Finally, if chimpanzees are indeed applying insects with medicinal value and sometimes placing them on the wounds of others, this could represent active helping and even prosocial behaviour. (The term is used to describe behaviours that benefit others rather than the individual performing them.)

Watching chimpanzees in Kibale National Park immobilise a flying insect and gently press it onto an open wound reminds us how much there is still to learn about their abilities. It also adds to the growing evidence that the roots of care and healing behaviours extend much further back in evolutionary time.

If insect applications prove to be medicinal, this adds to the importance of safeguarding chimpanzees and their habitats. In turn, these habitats protect the insects that can contribute to chimpanzee well-being.

Kayla Kolff, Postdoctoral researcher, Osnabrück University

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

When the U.S. government shut down in late 2018, it furloughed nearly 600 Environmental Protection Agency pollution inspectors for more than a month. Those workers had to stop their work of monitoring and inspecting industrial sites for pollution, and stopped enforcing environmental-protection laws, including the Clean Air Act.

My colleagues and I analyzed six years’ worth of air quality levels, emissions measurements, power production data and weather reports for more than 200 coal-fired power plants around the country. We found that the coal plants’ operators appeared to take advantage of the lapse in enforcement of environmental regulations.

As soon as the shutdown began, coal-fired power plants started producing about 15% to 20% more particle pollution. And as soon as the government reopened and inspections resumed, pollution levels dropped.

Particulate matter is dangerous

The longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history up until that time began on Dec. 22, 2018, and lasted until Jan. 25, 2019. During that period, about 95% of EPA employees were furloughed, including nearly all the agency’s pollution inspectors, who keep track of whether industrial sites like coal-fired power plants follow rules meant to limit air pollution.

Among those rules are strict limits on a type of pollution called particulate matter, which is sometimes called PM2.5 and PM10. These microscopic particles are smaller than the width of a human hair. When inhaled, they can travel deep into the lungs and even get into the bloodstream. Even short-term exposure to particulates increases the risk of asthma, heart disease and premature death.

To determine whether coal-fired power plants continued to obey the rules even when environmental inspectors were furloughed and not watching, we examined data on emissions of more than 200 coal-fired power plants across the country. We looked at satellite data from NASA that provides a reliable indicator of particulate pollution in the atmosphere. We also looked at the amounts of several types of chemicals recorded directly from smokestacks and sent to the EPA.

We looked at each plant’s daily emissions before, during and after the 2018-2019 shutdown, and compared them with the plants’ emissions on the same calendar days in the five previous years, when EPA inspectors were not furloughed.

Pollution rose and fell with the shutdown

We found that as soon as the EPA furlough began in 2018, particulate emissions within 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) around the coal-fired power plants rose, according to the NASA data.

The data indicated that, on average, particulate matter during the 2018 and 2019 shutdown was 15% to 20% higher than it had been during the same period in the preceding five years.

And once the EPA inspectors returned to work, the plants’ average particulate pollution dropped back to its pre-shutdown level.

We also found that two other common air pollutants from coal-fired power plants, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, did not increase during the furlough period. Those gases, unlike particulate matter, are continuously monitored by sensors inside coal plants’ smokestacks, even when the federal government is not operating. Particulate emissions, however, are not continuously monitored: Enforcement of those emissions standards relies on the manual collection of samples from monitors and on-site inspections, both of which halted during the shutdown.

The pattern was clear: When the EPA stopped watching, coal plants increased pollution. And once inspections resumed, emissions dropped back to normal.

Considering various explanations

To confirm that the increase in particulate pollution during the shutdown was due to the lack of inspections and not because of some other factors such as weather fluctuations, we tested a range of alternative explanations and found that they did not fit the data we had collected.

For example, weather records showed that wind, humidity and temperature at and around the coal plants during the shutdown were all within the same ranges as they had been over the previous five years. So the increased particulate pollution during the shutdown was not due to different weather conditions.

Electricity demand – how much power the plants were generating – was also typical, and did not increase significantly during the shutdown. That means the coal plants weren’t polluting more just because they were being asked to produce more electricity.

Our analysis also revealed that the coal plants didn’t shift which particular boilers were operating to less efficient ones that would have produced more particulates. So the increase in pollution during the shutdown wasn’t due to just using different equipment to generate electricity.

The emissions data we collected also included carbon dioxide emissions, which gave us insight into what the coal plants were burning. With similar weather conditions and amounts of electricity generated, different types of coal emit different amounts of carbon dioxide. So if we had found carbon dioxide emissions changed, it could have signaled that the plants had changed to burning another type of coal, which could emit more particulate matter – but we did not. This showed us that the increase in particulate emissions was not from changing the specific types of coal being burned to generate electricity.

All of these tests helped us determine that the spike in particulate matter pollution was unique to the 2018–2019 EPA furlough.

Spewing particulate matter

All of this analysis led us to one final question: Was it, in fact, possible for coal-fired power plants to quickly increase – and then decrease – the amount of particulate matter they emit? The answer is yes. Emissions-control technology does indeed allow that to happen.

Power plants control their particulate emissions with a device called an electrostatic precipitator, which uses static electricity to collect particles from smoke and exhaust before it exits the smokestack. Those devices use electricity to run, which costs money, even for a power plant. Turning them off when the plants are being monitored risks incurring heavy fines. But when oversight disappeared, the power plants could save money by turning those devices off or reducing their operation, with less risk of being caught and fined.

Our findings indicate that air pollution regulations are only as effective as their enforcement, which had already been decreasing before the 2018 shutdown. Between 2007 and 2018, EPA’s enforcement staff declined by more than 20%, and the number of inspections dropped by one-third.

Since the new administration took office in January 2025, EPA staffing has been reduced significantly. We found that without strong and continuous monitoring and enforcement, environmental laws risk becoming hollow promises.

Ruohao Zhang, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Economics, Penn State; Huan Li, Assistant Professor of Economics, North Carolina A&T State University, and Neha Khanna, Professor of Economics, Binghamton University, State University of New York

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

In early June 2023, the coral reefs in the lower Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas were stunning. We were in diving gear, checking up on hundreds of corals we had transplanted as part of our experiments. The corals’ classic orange-brown colors showed they were thriving.

Just three weeks later, we got a call – a marine heat wave was building, and water temperatures on the reef were dangerously high. Our transplanted corals were bleaching under the heat stress, turning bone white. Some were already dead.

That was the start of a global mass bleaching event. As ocean temperatures rose, rescuers scrambled to relocate surviving corals to land-based tanks, but the heat wave, extending over 2023 and 2024, was lethal.

In a study published Oct. 23, 2025, in the journal Science, we and colleagues from NOAA, the Shedd Aquarium and other institutions found that two of Florida’s most important and iconic reef-building coral species had become functionally extinct across Florida’s coral reef, meaning too few of them remain to serve their previous ecological role.

No chance to recover

In summer 2023, the average sea-surface temperature across Florida’s reef was above 87 degrees Fahrenheit (31 degrees Celsius) for weeks. We found that the accumulated heat stress on the corals was 2.2 to 4 times higher than it had ever been since modern satellite sea-surface temperature recordings began in the 1980s, a time when those two species – branching staghorn and elkhorn corals – were the dominant reef-builders in the region.

The temperatures were so high in the middle and lower Florida Keys that some corals died within days from acute heat shock.

Everywhere on the reef, corals were bleaching. That occurs when temperatures rise high enough that the coral expels its symbiotic algae, turning stark white. The corals rely on these algae for food, a solar-powered energy supply that allows them to build their massive calcium carbonate skeletons, which we know as coral reefs.

These reefs are valuable. They help protect coastal areas during storms, provide safety for young fish and provide habitat for thousands of species. They generate millions of dollars in tourism revenue in places like the Florida Keys. However, the symbiotic relationship between the coral animal and the algae that supports these incredible ecosystems can be disrupted when temperatures rise about 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 2 degrees Celsius) above the normal summer maximum.

By the end of summer 2023, only three of the 200 corals we had transplanted in the Lower Keys to study how corals grow survived.

In the Dry Tortugas, corals’ bone-white skeletons were already being grown over by seaweed. That’s a warning sign of a potential phase shift, where reefs change from coral-dominated to macroalgae-dominated systems.

Our colleagues observed similar patterns across the Florida Keys: Acroporid corals – staghorn and elkhorn – suffered staggering levels of bleaching and death.

Of the more than 50,000 acroporid corals surveyed across nearly 400 individual reefs before and after the heat wave, 97.8% to 100% ultimately died. Those farther north and offshore in cooler water fared somewhat better.

But this pattern of bleaching extended to the rest of the Caribbean and the world, leading NOAA to declare 2023-2024 the fourth global bleaching event. This type of mass bleaching, in which stress and mortality occur almost simultaneously across locations around the world, points to a common environmental driver.

In the summer of 2023, that environmental driver was clearly soaring water temperatures caused by climate change.

Becoming functionally extinct

Even before the 2023 marine heat wave, staghorn and elkhorn numbers had been dwindling, with punctuated declines accelerated by a diverse array of stressors – hurricane damage, loss of supporting herbivore species, disease and repeated bleaching.

The 2023-2024 event was effectively the final nail in the coffin: The data from our new study shows that these species are now functionally extinct on Florida’s coral reef.

Caribbean acroporids have not entirely disappeared in Florida, but those left are not enough to fulfill their ecological role. When populations become too small, they lose their capacity to rebound – in conservation biology this is known as the “extinction vortex.” With so few individuals, it becomes harder to find a mate, and even when one is found, it’s more likely to be a relative, which has negative genetic consequences.

For an ecosystem-builder like coral, many individuals are required to build an effective reef. Even if the remaining corals were the healthiest and most thermally tolerant of the bunch – they did survive, after all – there are simply not enough of them left to recover on their own.

Can the corals be saved?

Florida’s acroporids have joined the ranks of the California condor – they cannot recover without help. But unlike the condor, there are still pockets of healthy corals scattered throughout their broader range that could be used to help restore areas with localized extinctions.

The surviving corals in Florida could be bred with other Caribbean populations to boost their numbers and increase genetic diversity, an approach known as assisted gene flow.

Advancements in microfragmentation, a way to speed up coral propagation by cutting them into smaller pieces, and cryopreservation, which involves deep-freezing coral sperm to preserve their genetic diversity, have made it possible to mass produce, archive and exchange genetic diversity at a scale that would not have been possible just 10 years ago.

Restoration isn’t easy, though. From a policy perspective, coordinating international exchange of endangered species is complex. There is still disagreement about the capacity to scale up reef restoration to recover entire ecosystems. And the question remains: Even if we could succeed in restoring these reefs, would we be planting corals just in time for the next heat wave to knock them down again?

This is a real risk, because ocean temperatures are rising. There is broad consensus that the world must curb the carbon emissions contributing to increased ocean temperatures for restoration to succeed.

Climate change poses an existential threat to coral reefs, but these advancements, in concert with effective and timely action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, could give them a fighting chance.

Carly D. Kenkel, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Jenna Dilworth, Ph.D. Candidate in Marine Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Maya Gomez, Ph.D. Student in Marine Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

The village of Khun Samut Chin, 50km southwest of Bangkok, Thailand, is a small, rustic fishing village similar to thousands scattered across Asia – except that it is slowly being swallowed by the sea.

Much of the country’s coastline faces severe erosion, with around 830km eroding each year at rates exceeding one metre. But in this village, the situation is far worse. Erosion occurs at three to five metres annually, the land subsides by one to two centimetres each year, and since the 1990s, around 4,000 rai (6.4km²) has already been lost to the sea.

All that remains of the original site is a Buddhist temple, now standing alone on a small patch of land that juts out into the sea so much so that locals call it “the floating temple”.

The severe erosion is partially due to climate change, but has been compounded by other human-driven factors. Upstream dams, built to provide flood control and irrigation to farmers, have reduced sediment flows in the Chao Phraya River delta, where the village is located.

Excessive groundwater extraction by nearby industries has increased land subsidence. Meanwhile, the construction of artificial ponds for commercially farming shrimp has led to widespread clearing of mangrove forests that once served as a buffer against erosion.

People move away

My new research has found that villagers have been forced to move away from the sea four times, losing both land and livelihoods in the process. The government has not provided compensation for damaged homes or financial assistance to help them relocate.

Many younger villagers, wearying of constant displacement and finding it increasingly difficult to find fish as sediment makes the sea shallower, have left for jobs in Bangkok on construction sites, in factories and other workplaces. Those who remain are mostly older villagers. Today, the local school has only four pupils, making it the smallest in Thailand.

Khun Samut Chin lies at the forefront of climate change. An estimated 410 million people, 59% in tropical Asia, could face inundation by sea level rise by 2100. Without concerted efforts to change our emission levels, many more coastal communities around the world will face similar struggles in the years to come.

In theory, formal adaptation plans are government-led strategies designed to help communities cope with climate change. The theories assume that the state will decide when, where and how people should move, build protective structures like seawalls, and provide funding to affected communities.

In practice, however, as seen in Khun Samut Chin and many other places across Asia, low-income and relatively powerless coastal communities are often left to abandon their homes through forced displacement or try to stay put, with little or no government support, even when they ask for help.

Not giving up

Wisanu, the villager leader, says that Thai politicians have prioritised urban and industrial centres because they hold more voters and economic power. A government official told me that high land costs and limited budgets make relocation unfeasible. Instead, the state has erected bamboo walls as a temporary fix which have slowed down, but not stopped, the erosion.

Villagers are frustrated that the government has yet to implement any large-scale projects and that they are repeatedly asked to take part in consultations and surveys without any tangible results. Nor has the government provided much support to offset reduced incomes from fishing or improved transportation linkages, which remain sparse.

In response, the villagers have taken matters into their own hands. They have initiated a homestay programme. About 10 households, including the leader’s, host tourists who pay 600–700 Baht (£13-£16) per night, with 50 Baht going to a community fund for erosion mitigation efforts, such as purchasing or repairing bamboo dykes.

They market the programme through Facebook and other social media platforms as a place where visitors can experience life at the frontline of climate change, visit the temple, and help by replanting mangroves and buying food from the villagers. Wisanu, whose household manages five homestays, told me that the programme “enables us not to get rich but lets us walk”.

The villagers also believe that the programme helps raise awareness of their plight. They have also lobbied the local government to keep the school open and reconstruct a storm-damaged health centre.

This village offers a glimpse into what many others will likely face in the future. It shows that “managed retreat” is often not managed at all, or at least not by the state. Global frameworks like the Paris agreement and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports assume that governments have the capacity and political will to plan and fund coastal adaptation efforts.

Khun Samut Chin, however, shows how far reality can diverge from these assumptions: the sea encroaches, the state is absent, and villagers are left to mostly fend for themselves.

Yet they refuse to give up. They continue to stay, host tourists, replant mangroves, repair bamboo dykes and resist the demise of their village. They fight not only against erosion but also political neglect. If governments and global institutions fail to help them, this community will be washed away not by the water alone, but also by our inaction.

Danny Marks, Assistant Professor in Environmental Policy and Politics, Dublin City University

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

A woman was recently fined £150 by a council for pouring coffee down a drain before getting on a bus. The fine has now been rescinded by Richmond council in London, but the incident has prompted many discussions about whether coffee discarded like this could cause environmental damage.

About 98 million cups of coffee are consumed every day in the UK and 2 billion per day worldwide. All that liquid has to go somewhere, whether you are at home, at work or running for a bus. While the welcome hit of caffeine is a morning ritual for many, it can be an unwelcome hit for the environment when disposed of.

An individual cup is insignificant, but 98 million daily dregs poured down the drain would create a much bigger problem for our rivers and watercourses, because we are adding to the caffeine levels already present in sewage from households.

Much of the UK has a combined sewage system where a single pipe carries both rainwater from streets and wastewater from households to sewage treatment works. The more caffeine that goes in to these pipes, the more that could evade the treatment and reach rivers.

Cups of coffee contain hundreds of chemical compounds. As well as caffeine (assuming you are not drinking decaf), many will include milk and sugar while some also contain cocoa, spices and other ingredients.

Of these, caffeine has the most impact, environmentally speaking. It does not break down quickly or easily, and is considered an emerging contaminant (scientists have only recently started testing for caffeine levels and it is not always monitored). But even back in 2003, caffeine was found to be polluting Swiss lakes and rivers.

However, don’t think this means it’s fine to pour decaf coffee down the drain. All coffee lowers the pH of water, and coffee also contains organic compounds which rob aquatic systems of oxygen as they decompose.

The nutrients in coffee also encourage algae growth and may lead to additional oxygen depletion in rivers and lakes, which can stress and potentially reduce the lifespan of marine plants and animals.

Why is caffeine such a problem?

Wastewater treatment plants vary in their ability and capacity to treat and remove caffeine – ranging from 60-100% depending on treatment types, plant design, season, temperature and other elements. This means even treated water can contain caffeine when it is returned to rivers and seas.

Heavy rains add to the problem if the capacity of sewage pipes is exceeded. When this happens, untreated wastewater is designed to divert directly into rivers and water courses to prevent sewage flooding of homes, businesses and treatment plants.
Whether from a street drain or toilets, some of the caffeine that we have consumed will eventually make its way into our rivers and aquatic environments.

This is a problem in the UK and in every part of the world, including in Antarctica. One study of 258 rivers in 104 countries found caffeine in over 50% of sites sampled.

Recent studies show that caffeine has an impact on the metabolism, growth and mobility of some freshwater algae, plants and aquatic fly larvae, potentially leading to their death. Caffeine can affect marine and plant life even in small amounts.

What should and shouldn’t you put in a drain?

Street drains are part of our water system. Don’t put anything into a drain that you don’t want to see ending up in a river, lake, on a beach or in the sea.

This means no coffee or coffee grounds, food-based liquids, oils, paint or hot fats, detergents, bleaches, liquids from building work and so on. All these should be disposed of via the appropriate household bins or waste collection centres. Leave the street drains to do their single, simple job: collecting rainwater not wastewater.

And unfortunately, because of the combined sewage system in the UK, there is not much difference between disposing of liquids down your sink or into the street drain. So, what’s good for your street drain is also good for your kitchen sink and good for the environment. If nothing else, be pragmatic: coffee grounds can easily block your kitchen sink.

So, what should you do with your coffee?

If you are constantly throwing away coffee water, perhaps try making less coffee. At home, you can dilute coffee water for use as a plant tonic. Coffee liquid and grounds can also be disposed of on gardens or any plant beds in small amounts with care.

While coffee grounds could add to the organic content of the soil, regularly adding grounds to the same patch of earth can cause a build up of caffeine and solids, which will be harmful to plants and soil function.

Otherwise, the best place for waste coffee is a compost heap or food waste recycling. If you don’t have access to these options, then put liquids or grounds into a container and put them in your bin.

A recent UK government inquiry concluded that improving the poor status of our rivers and coasts requires major reform, policy changes and investment. But we, as individuals, are also part of how the water system works. We can help it by keeping coffee out of drains, out of our rivers and out of our environment.

Kevin Collins, Senior Lecturer, Environment & Systems, The Open University

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

Just 1% of the world’s coastal waters could, in theory, generate enough offshore wind and solar power to provide a third of the world’s electricity by 2050. That’s the promise highlighted in a new study by a team of scientists in Singapore and China, who systematically mapped the global potential of renewables at sea.

But turning that potential into reality is another story. Scaling up offshore renewables fast enough to seriously dent global emissions faces formidable technical, economic and political hurdles.

To reach global climate targets, the world’s electricity systems must be fully decarbonised within a couple of decades if not sooner. Wind and solar power have grown at record-breaking rates, yet further expansion on land is increasingly constrained by a scarcity of good sites and conflicts over land use.

Moving renewables offshore is therefore tempting. The sea is vast, windy and sunny, with few residents around to object. The team behind the new study identified coastal areas with enough wind or sunlight, and water shallower than 200 metres, that are relatively ice-free and within 200 kilometres of population centres.

They estimate that using just 1% of these areas could generate over 6,000 terawatt hours (TWh) of offshore wind power and 14,000TWh of offshore solar power each year. Together that’s roughly one-third of the electricity the world is expected to use in 2050, while avoiding 9 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually.

That sounds impressive as 1% of suitable ocean seems small. Many European countries, such as Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the UK, already allocate between 7% and 16% of their coastal waters for offshore wind farms. Yet what matters for climate mitigation is not only how much low-carbon energy could eventually be produced, but how fast that could happen.

At present, offshore wind generates less than 200TWh per year, less than 1% of global electricity. By 2030, that might rise to around 900TWh. Hitting 6,000TWh by 2050 would require annual installations – each year, for two decades – to be about seven times larger than they were last year.

Offshore solar requires an even steeper climb. The technology is still experimental, producing only negligible amounts of electricity today.

Even if 15TWh a year (an equivalent of some 15GW capacity) can be generated by 2030, to reach the estimated potential of 14,000TWh by 2050 would require sustained annual growth of over 40% for two decades. Such a rate that has never been achieved for any energy technology, not even during the recent record-breaking growth of land solar.

Achieving techno-economic viability

Around 90% of existing offshore wind capacity is located in the shallow, sheltered waters of northwestern Europe and China, where most turbines are directly fixed to the seabed. Yet most of the untapped potential lies in deeper waters, where fixed foundations are impossible.

That means turning to floating turbines, a technology that currently accounts for just 0.3% of global offshore wind capacity. Floating wind power faces serious engineering challenges, from mooring and anchoring, to undersea cabling and maintenance in rougher seas.

It currently costs far more than fixed-bottom systems, and will need substantial subsidies for at least the next decade. Only if early projects prove successful and drive down costs could floating wind become commercially viable.

Offshore solar is even further behind. The International Energy Agency rates its technology readiness at only level three to five on an 11-point scale — barely beyond prototype stage. The new study refers to research saying offshore solar could become commercially viable in the Netherlands only around 2040-2050, by which time the world’s power system should already be largely decarbonised.

Overcoming growth barriers

Even when low-carbon technologies become commercially competitive, their growth rarely continues exponentially. Our own research shows manufacturing bottlenecks, logistics and grid integration eventually slow expansion. And these challenges are likely to be even tougher for offshore projects.

Social opposition and the need for permits can also slow progress. Moving wind and solar offshore avoids some land-use conflicts, but it does not eliminate them. Coastal space close to populated areas is already crowded with shipping, fishing, leisure and military activities.

In Europe, approval and construction of offshore wind farms can a decade or more. Permits are not guaranteed: Sweden recently rejected 13 proposed wind farms in the Baltic Sea due to national security concerns.

What is realistic?

Offshore renewables will undoubtedly play an important role in the global energy transition. Offshore wind, in particular, could become a major contributor by mid-century if its growth follows the same trajectory as onshore wind has since the early 2000s.

However, that would require floating turbines to quickly become competitive, and for political commitment to be secured in the Americas, Australia, Russia and other areas with lots of growth potential.

Offshore wind (green) is tracking the growth rate of onshore wind (orange):

Offshore solar, by contrast, would need to achieve viability and then grow at an unprecedented rate to reach the potential outlined in the new study. It may be promising for niche uses, but is unlikely to deliver large-scale climate benefits before 2050.

Its real contribution may come later in the century, when we will still need to expand low-carbon energy for industries, transport and heating once the initial decarbonisation of power generation is complete.

For now, the world’s best bet remains to accelerate onshore wind and solar power as well as proven offshore wind technologies, while preparing offshore solar and floating wind power options for the longer run.

Aleh Cherp, Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University; Jessica Jewell, Professor in Technology and Society, Chalmers University of Technology, and Tsimafei Kazlou, PhD Candidate, Center for Climate and Energy Transformations, University of Bergen

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

Renewable energy is often pitched as cheaper to produce than fossil fuel energy. To quantify whether this is true, we have been studying the financial impact of expanding wind energy in the UK. Our results are surprising.

From 2010 to 2023, wind power delivered a benefit of £147.5 billion — £14.2 billion from lower electricity prices and £133.3 billion from reduced natural gas prices. If we offset the £43.2 billion in wind energy subsidies, UK consumers saved £104.3 billion compared with what their energy bills would have been without investment in wind generation.

UK wind energy production has transformed over the past 15 years. In 2010, more than 75% of electricity was generated from fossil fuels. By 2025, coal has ceased and wind is the largest source of power at 30% – more than natural gas at 26%.

This massive expansion of UK offshore wind is partly due to UK government subsidies. The Contracts for Difference scheme provides a guaranteed price for electricity generated, so when the price drops below this level, electricity producers still get the same amount of money.

The expansion is also partly due to how well UK conditions suit offshore wind. The North Sea provides both ample winds and relatively shallow waters that make installation more accessible.

The positive contribution of wind power to reducing the UK’s carbon footprint is well known. According to Christopher Vogel, a professor of engineering who specialises in offshore renewables at the University of Oxford, wind turbines in the UK recoup the energy used in their manufacture, transport and installation within 12-to-24 months, and they can generate electricity for 20-to-25 years. The financial benefits of wind power have largely been overlooked though, until now.

Our study explores the economics of wind in the energy system. We take a long-term modelling approach and consider what would happen if the UK had continued to invest in gas instead of wind generation. In this scenario, the result is a significant increased demand for gas and therefore higher prices. Unlike previous short-term modelling studies, this approach highlights the longer-term financial benefit that wind has delivered to the UK consumer.

Central to this study is the assumption that without the additional wind energy, the UK would have needed new gas capacity. This alternative scenario of gas rather than wind generation in Europe implies an annual, ongoing increase in UK demand for gas larger than the reduction in Russian pipeline gas that caused the energy crisis of 2022.

Given the significant increase in the cost of natural gas, we calculate the UK would have paid an extra £133.3 billion for energy between 2010 and 2023.

There was also a direct financial benefit from wind generation in lower electricity prices – about £14.2 billion. This combined saving is far larger than the total wind subsidies in that period of £43.2 billion, amounting to a net benefit to UK consumers of £104.3 billion.

Wind power is a public good

Wind generators reduce market prices, creating value for others while limiting their own profitability. This is the mirror image of industries with negative environmental consequences, such as tobacco and sugar, where the industry does not pay for the increased associated healthcare costs.

This means that the profitability of wind generators is a flawed measure of the financial value of the sector to the UK. The payments via the UK government are not subsidies creating an industry with excess profits, or one creating a financial drain. They are investments facilitating cheaper energy for UK consumers.

Wind power should be viewed as a public good — like roads or schools — where government support leads to national gains. The current funding model makes electricity users bear the cost while gas users benefit. This huge subsidy to gas consumers raises fairness concerns.

Wind investment has significantly lowered fossil fuel prices, underscoring the need for a strategic, equitable energy policy that aligns with long-term national interests. Reframing UK government support as a high-return national investment rather than a subsidy would be more accurate and effective.

Sustainability, security and affordability do not need to be in conflict. Wind energy is essential for energy security and climate goals – plus it makes over £100 billion of financial sense.

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Colm O'Shea, Researcher, Renewable Energy, Geography Department, UCL and Mark Maslin, UCL Professor of Earth System Science and UNU Lead for Climate, Health and Security, UCL

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

In May 2024, part of the Sun exploded.

The Sun is an immense ball of superheated gas called plasma. Because the plasma is conductive, magnetic fields loop out of the solar surface. Since different parts of the surface rotate at different speeds, the fields get tangled. Eventually, like rubber bands pulled too tight, they can snap – and that is what they did last year.

These titanic plasma explosions, also known as solar flares, each unleashed the energy of a million hydrogen bombs. Parts of the Sun’s magnetic field also broke free as magnetic bubbles loaded with billions of tons of plasma.

These bubbles, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, crashed through space at around 6,000 times the speed of a commercial jetliner. After a few days, they smashed one after another into the magnetic field that envelops Earth. The plasma in each CME surged toward us, creating brilliant auroras and powerful electrical currents that rippled through Earth’s crust.

You might not have noticed. Just like the opposite poles of fridge magnets have to align for them to snap together, the poles of the magnetic field of Earth and the incoming CMEs have to line up just right for the plasma in the CMEs to reach Earth. This time they didn’t, so most of the plasma sailed off into deep space.

Humans have not always been so lucky. I’m an environmental historian and author of the new book “Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System.”

While writing the book, I learned that a series of technological breakthroughs – from telegraphs to satellites – have left modern societies increasingly vulnerable to the influence of solar storms, meaning flares and CMEs.

Since the 19th century, these storms have repeatedly upended life on Earth. Today, there are hints that they threaten the very survival of civilization as we know it.

The telegraph: A first warning

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, two young astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson, became the first humans to see a solar flare. To their astonishment, it was so powerful that, for two minutes, it far outshone the rest of the Sun.

About 18 hours later, brilliant, blood-red auroras flickered across the night sky as far south as the equator, while newly built telegraph lines shorted out across Europe and the Americas.

The Carrington Event, as it was later called, revealed that the Sun’s environment could violently change. It also suggested that emerging technologies, such as the electrical telegraph, were beginning to link modern life to the extraordinary violence of the Sun’s most explosive changes.

For more than a century, these connections amounted to little more than inconveniences, like occasional telegraph outages, partly because no solar storm rivaled the power of the Carrington Event. But another part of the reason was that the world’s economies and militaries were only gradually coming to rely more and more on technologies that turned out to be profoundly vulnerable to the Sun’s changes.

A brush with Armageddon

Then came May 1967.

Soviet and American warships collided in the Sea of Japan, American troops crossed into North Vietnam and the Middle East teetered on the brink of the Six-Day War.

It was only a frightening combination of new technologies that kept the United States and Soviet Union from all-out war; nuclear missiles could now destroy a country within minutes, but radar could detect their approach in time for retaliation. A direct attack on either superpower would be suicidal.

Suddenly, on May 23, a series of violent solar flares blasted the Earth with powerful radio waves, knocking out American radar stations in Alaska, Greenland and England.

Forecasters had warned officers at the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, to expect a solar storm. But the scale of the radar blackout convinced Air Force officers that the Soviets were responsible. It was exactly the sort of thing the USSR would do before launching a nuclear attack.

American bombers, loaded with nuclear weapons, prepared to retaliate. The solar storm had so scrambled their wireless communications that it might have been impossible to call them back once they took off. In the nick of time, forecasters used observations of the Sun to convince NORAD officers that a solar storm had jammed their radar. We may be alive today because they succeeded.

Blackouts, transformers and collapse

With that brush with nuclear war, solar storms had become a source of existential risk, meaning a potential threat to humanity’s existence. Yet the magnitude of that risk only came into focus in March 1989, when 11 powerful flares preceded the arrival of back-to-back coronal mass ejections.

For more than two decades, North American utility companies had constructed a sprawling transmission system that relayed electricity from power plants to consumers. In 1989, this system turned out to be vulnerable to the currents that coronal mass ejections channeled through Earth’s crust.

In Quebec, crystalline bedrock under the city does not easily conduct electricity. Rather than flow through the rock, currents instead surged into the world’s biggest hydroelectric transmission system. It collapsed, leaving millions without power in subzero weather.

Repairs revealed something disturbing: The currents had damaged multiple transformers, which are enormous customized devices that transfer electricity between circuits.

Transformers can take many months to replace. Had the 1989 storm been as powerful as the Carrington Event, hundreds of transformers might have been destroyed. It could have taken years to restore electricity across North America.

Solar storms: An existential risk

But was the Carrington Event really the worst storm that the Sun can unleash?

Scientists assumed that it was until, in 2012, a team of Japanese scientists found evidence of an extraordinary burst of high-energy particles in the growth rings of trees dated to the eighth century CE. The leading explanation for them: huge solar storms dwarfing the Carrington Event. Scientists now estimate that these “Miyake Events” happen once every few centuries.

Astronomers have also discovered that, every century, Sun-like stars can explode in super flares up to 10,000 times more powerful than the strongest solar flares ever observed. Because the Sun is older and rotates more slowly than many of these stars, its super flares may be much rarer, occurring perhaps once every 3,000 years.

Nevertheless, the implications are alarming. Powerful solar storms once influenced humanity only by creating brilliant auroras. Today, civilization depends on electrical networks that allow commodities, information and people to move across our world, from sewer systems to satellite constellations.

What would happen if these systems suddenly collapsed on a continental scale for months, even years? Would millions die? And could a single solar storm bring that about?

Researchers are working on answering these questions. For now, one thing is certain: to protect these networks, scientists must monitor the Sun in real time. That way, operators can reduce or reroute the electricity flowing through grids when a CME approaches. A little preparation may prevent a collapse.

Fortunately, satellites and telescopes on Earth today keep the Sun under constant observation. Yet in the United States, recent efforts to reduce NASA’s science budget have cast doubt on plans to replace aging Sun-monitoring satellites. Even the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s premier solar observatory, may soon shut down.

These potential cuts are a reminder of our tendency to discount existential risks – until it’s too late.

Dagomar Degroot, Associate Professor of Environmental History, Georgetown University

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