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As a veterinarian who studies infectious diseases in cats, I’ve been repeatedly asked whether Australia’s outbreak of the H5 bird flu poses a risk to pets. The short answer is yes.

As this lethal virus continues to infect more mammals, poultry farmers and backyard chook owners remain on high alert. But outbreaks overseas suggest pets – particularly cats – can also contract H5 bird flu and develop severe disease.

To date, Australia has not recorded any cases of the deadly H5 bird flu in pets and the risk to most cats and dogs remains very low. But if infection does happen, the consequences can be serious.

As a nation of pet owners – with 7.7 million Australian households sharing their homes with a pet – we must understand how cats and dogs may become infected, what signs to watch for and which practical measures can reduce exposure to H5 bird flu.

Not just birds

Cats and dogs can catch bird flu in four main ways:

• direct contact with infected wildlife

• being in places where infected wildlife have been

• eating or drinking infected animal products

• coming into contact with the virus at home, including via clothing, shoes or equipment.

H5 bird flu outbreaks abroad – including in Poland, South Korea and Belgium – suggest infected cats can deteriorate rapidly and often die within days of exposure. Dogs can also become infected but appear less vulnerable to severe sickness. Many develop only mild symptoms or none at all.

Currently, no vaccinations are available for pets, and there is limited data on whether existing influenza antivirals could be a safe and effective treatment for cats and dogs.

This means prevention is the most effective tool we have.

How would I know if my pet is infected?

The early signs of H5 bird flu infection resemble those of many common animal diseases.

Infected pets may initially look unwell, develop a fever, become lethargic and go off their food. Common respiratory signs include coughing, difficulty breathing and discharge from the eyes or nose.

In cats, H5 bird flu can quickly progress and lead to serious neurological symptoms such as tremors, seizures or sudden blindness.

If your pet develops any of these symptoms, don’t arrive at your veterinary clinic unannounced. Call ahead and discuss your concerns with a vet, telling them if your pet has recently had contact with wild birds, wildlife or raw animal products. This will allow your vet to assess your pet’s level of risk and determine the safest way to examine them.

If your vet suspects your pet may have bird flu, they may conduct an initial assessment outside the hospital and implement additional infection control measures, such as wearing protective clothing and caring for your pet separately from other animals. They may also consult with the government veterinarian coordinating the bird flu response in your area.

If directed to do so by the government veterinarian, your vet may collect samples – most commonly respiratory swabs similar to COVID tests – to determine whether H5 bird flu could be involved. Currently, there is no in-house test that veterinary clinics can perform, so samples must be sent to a dedicated government laboratory for analysis.

What you can do

Here are four practical steps owners can take to help keep their pets safe.

1. Avoid contact with wildlife

Leashing dogs and keeping cats indoors where possible will stop them from touching, scavenging or hunting infected wildlife. This also prevents pets from hunting healthy native wildlife, which need all the help they can get as this virus spreads.

2. Stay away from contaminated environments

H5 bird flu can be present in bird droppings, feathers, carcasses and contaminated water. Depending on environmental conditions, the virus can survive for days or even weeks. To protect your pet, bring food and water bowls inside when not in use and cover outdoor cat enclosures with roofing or tarp to keep contaminated bird droppings out. You can also shift bird baths and feeders from areas your pet frequents or remove them altogether.

3. Steer clear of raw animal products

H5 bird flu is likely to spread into poultry or other farmed animals, making raw animal products a potential source of infection.

Most feline cases overseas occurred when cats ate raw foods – including raw meat, unpasteurised dairy products and improperly processed pet food – later found to be contaminated with the virus. Owners should avoid feeding their pets such products. And it’s worth noting, freezing or freeze-drying food does not reliably kill or inactivate avian influenza viruses.

4. Don’t bring the virus home

To avoid accidentally infecting your pet, it’s important to boost hygiene measures. This is especially true if you work with birds, wildlife or farmed poultry.

Only handle sick or injured wildlife if you are trained to do so. If you do have contact with them, wash your hands thoroughly, disinfect any equipment and change clothing and footwear before returning home.

For most Australian pets, the risk of getting H5 bird flu is extremely low. Taking some simple precautions can help keep it that way.

If you encounter sick or dead wildlife, remember to “avoid, record and report” any sightings to the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline on 1800 675 888. You can stay informed about where H5 bird flu has been detected by regularly checking the Australian government’s bird flu website and detection map.

Sally Coggins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Diseases and Treatment of Cats), University of Sydney

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

Warmer weather has arrived and mosquitoes will be buzzing about before you know it. As El Niño is expected to bring an early start to summer heat, it’s likely mosquitoes will make their presence felt earlier than usual.

The threat of mosquitoes depositing flesh-eating bacteria has been restricted to a few parts of the country. But while rare, research shows it is now showing up in more areas – including in backyards in Melbourne’s inner city.

So what exactly is Buruli ulcer, where is it now found, and how can you prevent it? Here’s what we know so far, and what researchers are currently developing to protect against the bacteria in future.

What are Buruli ulcers?

Buruli ulcer is a skin infection resulting from the bacterium Mycobacterium ulcerans.

It starts as small and often painless inflammation after a mosquito bite, which may not be seen until months after initial infection. It transforms into a disfiguring ulcer after many weeks.

If left untreated, it can continue increasing in size with a loss of skin and muscle.

A buruli ulcer is treated with an eight-week course of antibiotics. Recovery can be much slower than expected for other common skin infections, with healing time highly dependent on the condition of the ulcer when first treated. It may take more than four months for ulcers to heal.

How do people become infected?

Mycobacterium ulcerans can infect urban wildlife, such as possums, which suffer symptoms similar to those in humans.

Recent research has shown mosquitoes pass the bacterium to people.

The mosquito most closely associated with areas at risk of Mycobacterium ulcerans is Aedes notoscriptus. Commonly known as the Australian backyard mosquito, it is widespread in Australia and commonly found in water-holding containers in suburban areas.

There may be other pathways of infection but health authorities have strongly encouraged people to prevent mosquito bites as the best way to avoid Buruli ulcer.

Where is it found?

Buruli ulcer has been reported in more than 30 countries around the world, including in Africa, South America and the Western Pacific.

In Australia, it has been reported in several states, territories and regions, including Victoria, Far North Queensland, the Northern Territory and New South Wales.

Victoria has been hit hardest, with 426 cases reported in the state in 2025 alone.

Victorian cases have mostly been reported from coastal regions but Melbourne’s suburbs have also seen an increase in activity. Inner north-west suburbs such as Essendon, Brunswick West and Moonee Ponds are part of the new cluster.

With the potential for more cases, and in more locations, surveillance beyond known areas of activity is needed.

Since Buluri ulcer became a notifiable disease in NSW, there have been six cases reported from the NSW south coast.

There was concern this was because the Victorian outbreak had spread to the state and could also spread to new regions. But genomic analysis suggests the NSW cases are from a separate outbreak rather than spread from Victoria. This raises questions about how widespread this pathogen may be and what conditions are likely to give rise to human infections in new regions.

How best to stop the flesh-eating bacteria’s spread?

Australian health authorities have recommended insect repellents and reducing exposure to mosquitoes for decades to reduce the risks of mosquito-borne disease.

But while health authorities might ordinarily consider insecticides to control mosquito populations, they’re not likely to be an effective way to reduce numbers of mosquitoes buzzing about the local suburbs in the long term.

New research in Victoria led by two of us (Véronique Paris and Andrew Buultjens) tested a novel approach to mosquito control and found evidence that reducing mosquito numbers can also reduce a person’s risk of contracting Buruli ulcer.

Using mosquitoes as pest-controllers

Special devices, known as autodissemination stations, are designed to offer a breeding site to mosquitoes looking for somewhere to lay their eggs. A stinky mix of water and yeast draws them in.

Once inside, the mosquito is exposed to a gauze strip coated with the control agent pyriproxyfen (an insect growth regulator) and Beauveria bassiana (insect specific fungus).

When the mosquito leaves the station, its days are numbered due to the fungal infection. But before they die, they’ll transfer the mosquito control agent to other water-holding containers as they look for other places to lay their eggs.

The mosquitoes become accidental pest controllers themselves.

How effective was it?

After eight-weeks of station deployment, mosquito egg counts (a measure of mosquito activity) were 70% lower in treatment areas compared with control areas.

Buruli ulcer presents an unusual challenge when trying to measure whether an intervention had impact on human disease because symptoms typically develop almost five months after infection.

To account for this delay, we had to work backwards to estimate when infection likely occurred and use forensic genomic analysis to determine which cases were acquired locally.

At the predicted peak of the mosquito-control effect, Buruli ulcer incidence was estimated to be 83% lower in the treatment areas than in the control areas.

The greater the reduction in mosquitoes, the greater the apparent protection from Buruli ulcer, providing further evidence that mosquito control can reduce disease risk.

The mosquito control stations used in the study are not yet available for purchase in Australia, but regulatory approval for their use is imminent and new products using similar approaches are also being tested.

However, in this study the control stations were deployed in high numbers, so it’s unclear what the impact of their use in a single household would be.

So how can you reduce your risk of Buruli ulcer this summer?

Current predictions are for hot and relatively dry conditions this summer in eastern Australia.

While this may mean there are fewer mosquitoes emerging from wetlands and other bodies of water, the mosquitoes closely associated with Mycobacterium ulcerans spread are found in our backyards.

Water will still be available for mosquitoes around the home in bird baths, rainwater tanks, blocked drains, sump pits and roof gutters, and water left out for wildlife. To prevent mosquitoes breeding in them, make sure you refill bird baths weekly, clear your gutters, cover water tanks, and empty and refill water for wildlife at least once per week.

It’s also a good idea to keep using insect repellents. Mosquito control, whatever form it takes, will never get rid of all the mosquitoes. Covering up with long-sleeve shirts, long pants and enclosed shoes when outdoors will also help stop the bites.

Cameron Webb, Clinical Associate Professor, School of Medical Science & Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute; Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney; Andrew Buultjens, Microbial Bioinformatician & Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, and Veronique Paris, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Medical Entomology, The University of Melbourne

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

Not so long ago, we thought the ocean was an inexhaustible resource. There would always be plenty more fish in the sea.

We now know this isn’t true. A growing proportion of the world’s oceans are overfished. And even though we’re fishing more intensively and using more advanced gear than ever, the total number of fish caught has plateaued. There simply aren’t as many left to catch.

On top of this, climate change and other human-driven pressures are placing even more stress on marine species.

Globally, governments are working to prevent further damage to ocean systems by establishing marine protected areas. However, our new research suggests these aren’t as effective as they seem.

A global goal

Governments and communities are increasingly aware of the various threats our oceans face including fishing, marine heatwaves and overabundant species.

These compounding threats have prompted countries around the world to rapidly expand the coverage of marine protected areas – places where fishing and other destructive activities are restricted – over the past three decades. Protected areas are designed to help fragile ecosystems recover or, in some cases, prevent damage before it begins.

The international push to meet ambitious conservation targets has fuelled this expansion. The “30 by 30” target is one example. In 2022, 196 countries adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and committed to protect at least 30% of the ocean by 2030.

Currently, about 10% of the ocean is officially “protected”. On the surface, this is a major win for ocean life. But an area with this label on paper might not actually be protected in practice.

Beneath the surface

Until now, we’ve judged how well the world’s marine protected areas are working based on data we can collect from the surface. This includes how many square kilometres these areas collectively cover or how strict their rules seem to be.

As a result, we don’t know what is happening underwater at a global scale. That’s where our new research comes in.

To find out whether marine life is actually recovering, we analysed underwater biodiversity data from thousands of shallow coral and rocky reefs worldwide, located both inside and outside marine protected areas. This data enabled us to measure how much fish biomass – the total weight of fish on a reef – has bounced back. This is an indication of true recovery, not an assumption based on whether an area is protected on paper.

Our results suggest less than 2% of the ocean falls inside marine protected areas where ecosystems are actually recovering. That’s an optimistic estimate, which assumes people are following the fishing rules in each area. In reality, many don’t. On a global scale, this low compliance means the share of the ocean that is effectively protected is likely much smaller.

So, what needs to change?

It’s worth noting, marine protected areas can be an effective conservation tool. Research shows they deliver significant and lasting benefits for marine life, such as restoring fish and shark populations.

However, there are various reasons why a marine protected area can fail. Fishing is a major one. If any amount of fishing is still happening, it’s difficult for marine communities to fully recover.

Research shows most of the world’s marine protected areas fail to safeguard marine life in practice. The reasons for this are complex and vary from place to place. What’s worrying is even a low level of non-compliance may put pressure on marine populations and undermine conservation efforts.

To ensure marine protected areas actually work, we need to improve protection on paper and in practice by strengthening fishing rule compliance. We must also ensure stakeholders are both aware of and actively engaged in marine stewardship.

But we can’t manage what we can’t see. We need an ongoing coordinated strategy for monitoring how marine species are faring by tracking them underwater, both inside and outside protected areas.

Otherwise, we risk overestimating how well the world’s protected areas are doing while ocean ecosystems beneath the surface continue to deteriorate.

Ella Clausius, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Reef Ecology, University of Tasmania

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

When you think of conservation in Australia, chances are you’ll think of a national park.

But there’s another fast-growing way of conserving land: Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs). These areas of land or sea Country are voluntarily dedicated by Traditional Owners to protect nature and cultural values and responsibilities.

Once dedicated, an IPA becomes part of Australia’s National Reserve System – our network of protected areas. To protect the area, Indigenous rangers tackle invasive species and undertake cultural burning and many other tasks.

In 2022, the Australian government signed up to an international pledge to protect 30% of lands and waters by 2030. This is one reason why IPAs have grown so rapidly in recent years.

In July, 4.7 million hectares of the Simpson Desert was dedicated as the newest protected area – the Pmere Atherre Antenterreme IPA.

Maintaining the success of Indigenous Protected Areas will require long-term funding, strong Indigenous governance and complementary conservation elsewhere.

How does this work?

While national parks are established and managed by governments, IPAs are Indigenous-led.

After deciding to establish an IPA, Traditional Owners develop a management plan and determine how Country is to be cared for, drawing on Indigenous knowledge and contemporary conservation science.

Caring for Country means looking after plants, animals, water, fire, sacred places and cultural practices as part of an interconnected whole.

Declaring an IPA doesn’t change existing tenure arrangements. For example, an IPA can cover freehold Indigenous land, land granted under land-rights legislation, Indigenous-held leasehold or pastoral land, Crown land and marine areas.

From pilot program to over half of Australia’s reserve system

In 1998, Nantawarrina became Australia’s first Indigenous Protected Area. The former pastoral station in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges was heavily degraded. Over the following decades, the Nipapanha people worked to restore the land and its biodiversity.

There are now 96 IPAs across Australia, spanning 113 million hectares. That’s almost 15% of the continent. Marine IPAs cover a smaller portion of Australian waters – 9.3 million hectares, or about 1.1% of our marine estate.

The growth of IPAs has far outstripped the growth of other types of conservation land. IPAs now make up more than 55% of lands protected in Australia’s National Reserve System.

Across all types of protection – both government and non-government – 25% of Australia’s land is now protected and 24% of seas are highly-protected “no-take” areas where fishing is banned.

The largest IPAs lie in Australia’s deserts, some of the world’s largest uncleared arid ecosystems. They form part of a vast, culturally-connected landscape shaped by Indigenous stewardship over tens of thousands of years.

People who care for Country

At the heart of Indigenous Protected Areas are Indigenous rangers, who combine cultural practice and traditional knowledge with contemporary conservation practices.

Ranger teams began growing in number from 2007, when dedicated federal funding became available. The program is now called the Indigenous Rangers Program.

No two Indigenous ranger programs are alike – each is locally led and grounded in Traditional Owner priorities. The program of work can include burning to prevent large wildfires or maintain cultural practice and care for Country.

Rangers look after cultural sites and culturally important species, and protect threatened species by managing threats, monitoring how populations are faring and undertaking surveys and research to find out more about them.

Rangers and researchers have worked together to combine Indigenous knowledge with new technologies such as drones, satellite imagery and environmental DNA to better understand how Country is changing and inform its care.

Ranger programs also create local jobs, stronger community governance and opportunities for Elders to pass on language, cultural knowledge and practical skills to younger generations. These programs show that caring for Country can deliver environmental, cultural and social benefits.

Many Indigenous Protected Areas welcome visitors, offering cultural and nature-based tourism, walking, camping, fishing and guided experiences. Access rules do vary. Some have restricted access at certain times, or require permission to enter. These arrangements reflect Indigenous ownership and management.

How are these areas funded?

Like many other protected areas, IPAs are publicly funded. The Australian government gives funds to declare and manage new IPAs through protected area and Indigenous ranger programs. Some state governments provide extra support to ranger teams.

However, these funds usually only cover a fraction of the costs of managing Country in this way. IPAs with ranger programs receive just over A$1 per hectare from government funding. By comparison, national park funding varies from around $16 per hectare in Queensland to $58 per hectare in NSW. State governments largely fund national parks.

Many Indigenous organisations try to augment funding with income from carbon projects, philanthropic grants, research partnerships and environmental management contracts. This financial uncertainty creates a large administrative workload.

Can we make these areas even stronger?

As this approach to conservation matures, our growing reliance on IPAs as a key conservation approach should be matched by increased funding and capability support.

It also makes sense to invest more in monitoring and reporting to track environmental, cultural and social benefits, and to pinpoint any areas to strengthen. Better data will also help policymakers know how Australia is tracking towards our commitments to the Global Biodiversity Framework.

Indigenous Protected Areas are working well. But they’re not the answer to every conservation challenge. They complement but do not replace other protected areas. The complex land tenures of the more heavily cleared and densely populated areas on Australia’s east coast makes it more challenging to declare new IPAs here, for instance.

As Australia works towards its conservation goals, it will rely more and more on Indigenous Protected Areas. But we believe the success of these areas speaks to something much deeper – the fact that Australia’s oldest systems of caring for Country is still one of the most effective ways to conserve nature.

Sarah Legge, Professor of Wildlife Conservation, Australian National University; Samantha Murray, CEO, Indigenous Desert Alliance, Indigenous Knowledge, and Stan Lui, Director, Five Cubed Environmental, Indigenous Knowledge

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

The world is set to miss the 1.5°C global warming target, and plans are underway for UN climate talks in the Pacific and Turkey.

Climate mitigation – reducing or preventing greenhouse emissions – was once treated as the only legitimate response to global warming. In comparison, climate adaptation – trying to adjust to global warming – was seen as a form of defeatism, or worse, hubris.

But that taboo has long since lifted: our collective failure to prevent climate change means adaptation is now an essential part of climate policy.

Similarly, attitudes to actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere have undergone an evolution. While there are reasons to doubt whether carbon removal can work at scale, Australia’s “net zero emissions” plans rely on these interventions.

Now, the taboo surrounding another controversial form of climate intervention – solar radiation modification (SRM) – appears to be lifting.

What is solar radiation modification?

SRM refers to large-scale technological interventions that reflect a small amount of sunlight back into space, thereby lowering global temperatures. Increasingly called the more benign term “climate stabilisation”, the proposed methods include space mirrors – satellites equipped with large reflective surfaces – and cloud brightening, where microscopic particles are sprayed into clouds to make them more reflective.

The most commonly discussed SRM technique is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) – the release of particles into the upper atmosphere to recreate the cooling effects observed following volcanic eruptions.

SRM is so controversial it’s sometimes called the “Voldemort of climate policy”. While it could reduce global temperatures, it does not limit carbon emissions, and the ecological effects of deployment are uncertain.

Some critics are worried a potential techno-fix will deter mitigation efforts. Others point out the risks of “termination shock”: once implemented, ending SRM would cause abrupt temperature rise. Scientific research suggests the strong warming experienced since 2023 is likely a case of inadvertent termination shock. When new fuel regulations reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from international shipping, the rapid warming that followed revealed this pollution had, incidentally, been cooling the planet.

At present, SRM inhabits an international and domestic policy vacuum. Many scholars advocate for a ban on both research and deployment, saying these technologies “play God” with nature. We argue a ban on research is no longer tenable.

Why challenge the taboo?

The case for taking SRM seriously does not usually rest on enthusiasm for the technologies, but on global warming’s grim reality. We are approaching planetary tipping points such as significant polar sea ice retreat, the death of the Amazon rainforest and widespread coral reef loss. SRM advocates say it should be viewed as a complement, not an alternative, to mitigation: a means of limiting the extent and duration of temperature overshoot while decarbonisation continues.

Government appetite for this approach is limited and patchy. When the UN Environment Assembly discussed a Swiss proposal for SRM research in 2024, countries could not agree even on whether and how to regulate research in this area. Countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia pushed for ongoing research, while vulnerable Pacific and African countries argued against any language that risked endorsing the practice.

Nowhere is the politics of SRM more volatile than the United States. One group of Republicans reject the climate change “hoax” but is so convinced SRM is already happening that many Republican states have criminalised it. Some think tanks advocate SRM as a way to defend “American Weather Sovereignty”. NASA has an exploratory program investigating space-based reflective dust clouds. For now, the Trump administration has not chosen a side, but it’s easy to imagine a future administration unilaterally blocking, or implementing, SRM.

If we don’t challenge the SRM taboo, self-interested actors are poised to fill the policy vacuum. Elon Musk has recently spoken out in favour of SRM, while ventures such as the US-Israeli startup Stardust are pursuing research without public oversight.

What is Australia’s position?

Australia has no policy on SRM research or deployment, but federal government funds have supported related research into local interventions, including the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). This trialled the world’s most respected marine cloud brightening research over the Great Barrier Reef.

Existing environmental and climate law might regulate risks posed by small-scale research, but does not consider the larger risks of eventual deployment. With the exception of some ad hoc efforts, SRM research is not subject to any dedicated ethics framework.

The planetary scale of SRM impacts means we urgently need research to consider the geographic distribution of benefits and harms from any deployment, and the security implications of unilateral deployment by any state or private actor.

What should Australia do?

As a trusted middle power, Australia is well positioned to help lead discussions on the future of SRM. At a minimum, Australia should assess the potential impacts of various options on Australia’s climate, agricultural production and natural environment, and develop a public position on research.

Waiting until a foreign government or well-resourced private actor forces the issue would leave Australia reacting to decisions made elsewhere. Instead, we should prepare for the surprises a fast-moving, under-governed field is likely to produce.

As temperature overshoot becomes an inevitability, SRM is emerging as a new element of international climate policy whether we like it or not. We do not argue anyone should deploy SRM, but that we should break the taboo and enable responsible scientific research and public deliberation.

Jan McDonald, Professor of Environmental Law, University of Tasmania; Jonathan Symons, Director of Research and Innovation, School of International Studies, Macquarie University; Manon Simon, Researcher in Climate Intervention Law and Governance, University of Tasmania; Matt McDonald, Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland, and Rachel Neef, Research fellow, Faculty of Law, University of Tasmania

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

After months of gas industry pushback, the federal government has made sensible changes to its much-vaunted gas reservation policy.

Instead of forcing gas exporters to supply 20% of their export volumes to the domestic market, they will be made to supply “up to” 20%, with the precise amount set each year based on domestic demand. These details are in the newly released draft legislation.

This has been seen as a concession in the face of an intense industry backlash. But it’s not a concession at all – this is how the scheme was originally designed to work.

As I argued in July, the 20% figure was always a ceiling, not a floor. Both supply of and demand for gas will fluctuate over time, and the resources minister needs to be able to respond to that.

The scheme lets the minister decide how much gas to reserve each year, up to the cap, based on the market’s needs. Even Australia’s gas and oil peak body calls that “sensible”.

But there are still big questions over key elements of the design.

A carve-out for one producer?

One especially controversial element of the scheme is the minister’s power to reduce domestic gas obligations for individual companies.

This rule has divided the industry because one of the three east-coast exporters – GLNG – is unique in having signed contracts to export vastly more gas than it plans to produce until at least 2036.

Under the proposed law, the minister can reduce obligations on an individual company if meeting their obligations would require them to break their export contracts and if they are taking “active steps” to try to deliver domestic gas.

How this power is exercised in practice remains to be seen. The minister could use it to effectively exempt GLNG – or another producer – from domestic gas obligations.

An oversupplied market?

The government has not budged on a key element of its design: its supposed aim to push down prices by engineering a “modest oversupply” of gas.

Despite initially supporting the gas reservation, in recent months, domestic-only gas producers have pulled their support for the scheme over this proposal.

Their concern is that forcing an oversupply of gas into the market would force gas companies to sell gas below cost, making production unviable. This concern is not unfounded.

But again, the proposed legislation offers little clarity on what will actually happen in practice.

The minister will have the power to set the “oversupply” percentage each year somewhere between 0% and 10% of demand. In an east coast market using about 450 petajoules, that represents a huge range – anywhere from zero to 45 petajoules.

The government should cap this at 5% and codify how it will be set each year.

A truly national scheme?

The proposed gas reservation will really be two separate schemes – one for the east coast and one for the west. This is because the two systems are not physically connected and because Western Australia has long had its own scheme.

The obligations for each exporter will be set based on the demand in their system, not the nation as a whole. No one will be made to ship gas between coasts.

But in the hours since the draft legislation was released, the resources lobby in WA has rejected the goverment’s push to include the west. This is because the national scheme would be much stricter than the state’s scheme and would likely force WA exporters to deliver more domestic gas, more often.

Whether WA escapes the new tougher rules remains to be seen. Under the proposed rules, the federal resources minister can decide to reduce domestic gas obligations in recognition of existing state policies. This gives the minister carte blanche to exempt WA – or not. No one has any idea which way that decision will go.

A driver of decarbonisation?

The reservation law specifies that extracting gas from the ground is not the only way exporters can meet their domestic gas obligations.

First, they can also produce renewable gases such as biomethane, which can be collected from food waste or wastewater. Biomethane offers a critical way for many manufacturing businesses to decarbonise. Australia produces almost no biomethane at present. If the reservation policy creates demand for biomethane, it could accelerate this critical new industry.

Second, gas exporters can use demand reduction to meet their legal requirements. For example an exporter could fund a manufacturing business to electrify a gas boiler, permanently reducing demand for gas.

Designed right, the reservation could be a driver, not a dampener, on the shift to clean energy.

What problem is this meant to solve, again?

Gas is in structural decline in Australia.

The use of gas to generate electricity in the National Electricity Market has fallen by two-thirds over the past decade. Demand for gas on Australia’s east coast fell 6% last year alone – largely due to big batteries pushing out gas peaking plants. The number of households using gas for cooking and heating is now shrinking.

Despite declining demand and bountiful supplies of gas, Australia still risks running short. The energy market operator is still warning of looming shortfalls on both the east and west coasts.

In part, this is because traditional east coast supplies – the Bass Strait gas fields – are close to empty. But a bigger reason is the fact that 80% of all gas produced in Australia is exported.

East coast gas exports only really began in 2015 when three giant LNG export plants opened on Curtis Island, near Gladstone in Queensland.

Because they can attract much higher prices selling gas to international customers, exporters have strong financial incentives to export gas instead of selling it to domestic customers.

So the goal of the gas reservation is a to deliver enough gas to avoid shortfalls, and keep prices low, without slowing the phase out of gas in Australia.

Is this a good outcome?

The government has framed these laws as sensible. This is largely correct.

They will let the government of the day ensure the domestic market is well supplied without risking heavy-handed intervention that could tank the industry.

Whether it works or not will comes down to how the minister of the day chooses to use it. With the scheme not due to start until 2028, we may still have a long wait to find out.

Hamish McKenzie, Deputy Program Director, Energy and Climate Change, Grattan Institute

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

Gas is now flowing from the Beetaloo Basin, a vast fossil fuel project roughly 500 kilometres southeast of Darwin in the Northern Territory.

The basin is one of Australia’s largest onshore gas reserves, which the NT government estimates is capable of producing 430 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The Beetaloo is producing its first round of gas amid fanfare about the amount of royalties it could bring the NT. Proponents say the basin could generate more than A$17 billion and support 13,000 jobs over the next two decades. Already, there is talk of the economic opportunities that come with cheap energy, including powering energy-hungry data centres with shale gas.

For those who have long hyped the Beetaloo’s economic potential, this is welcome news. For scientists, environmental groups and communities around Australia and the world bearing the brunt of global warming, it represents a “climate bomb”.

Remind me, what is the Beetaloo Basin?

The Beetaloo Basin is a vast, sparsely populated stretch of rolling plains that covers 28,000 square kilometres between Katherine and Tennant Creek.

In terms of gas reserves, the Beetaloo is bigger than Western Australia’s North West Shelf project, the nation’s largest fossil fuel development which accounts for more than 40% of Australia’s oil and gas production.

The Beetaloo Basin is covered with pastoral leases and different forms of Aboriginal tenure. Some of this tenure is the NT’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act land, which provides fairly strong rights for Traditional Owners. But most of the Aboriginal title in the basin is federal native title tenure that does not allow Traditional Owners to veto resource extraction.

Over several years, the developers of the Beetaloo – who now include Beetaloo Energy, Tamboran Resources and Santos – reached agreements with the Traditional Owners to frack their Country. But whether these agreements mean Traditional Owners actually consented to this fracking is hotly contested, given the Native Title Act is notorious for forcing Aboriginal groups into agreement.

Drawing in the dollars

The federal and territory governments have forked out significant money for the Beetaloo project.

At least $220 million has come from the Commonwealth. Meanwhile, the NT government has underwritten a $7.5 million loan to Tamboran Resources, a gas company found by a 2021 Senate inquiry to have then “paid no tax” in Australia. Other gas companies have also benefited from government largesse including Beetaloo Energy Australia, which received $15 million in taxpayer funds in 2024 alone.

The government has backed the Beetaloo for a range of reasons, including its potential to bring much-needed investment and jobs to the region.

However, it is extremely unlikely the project will deliver on these promises. A federal report, released only under freedom of information laws, found the benefits for Traditional Owners are “uncertain and variable”.

Not worth the hype

The climate crisis means the Beetaloo Basin project has two critical drawbacks.

A ‘stranded asset’

In this context, a “stranded asset” is a fossil fuel project – such as a coal mine or gas pipeline – that quickly loses its value because of the global transition away from fossil fuels. Research suggests demand for liquefied natural gas will decline as early as the mid-2030s. This, combined with dubious employment benefits, means the government is highly unlikely to get a good return on its Beetaloo investments.

An unliveable region

Recent research shows fracking in the Beetaloo would produce the equivalent of up to 49 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – about 11% of Australia’s total emissions in 2021. What’s more, Beetaloo gas projects are only required to offset 5% of their emissions with carbon credits. That’s nowhere near enough to compensate for the environmental damage they will cause.

Climate forecasts suggest many parts of the NT will become unliveable within decades, due to the lethal heat caused by climate change. The NT News headline, “NT will be cooking with Beetaloo gas”, sums this dilemma perfectly, if accidentally. The irony of this headline won’t be lost on anyone who is familiar with the science.

No amount of jobs or money can compensate for this devastating future. By turning on the Beetaloo tap, we risk watching the climate crisis worsen before our very eyes.

Lily O'Neill, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Climate Futures, The University of Melbourne

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

From poems to films and books of history, horses feature widely in Australian popular culture.

Feral horses, also known as brumbies, are descendants of domesticated horses that now live and breed independently in the wild. For some people, these horses are a cherished part of Australia’s cultural heritage. For others, they represent a major threat to the environments they inhabit.

Yuraygir National Park, on the coast of northern New South Wales on Yaegl and Gumbaynggirr Country, is a stunning landscape where you can see coastal emus and spot migrating whales from the shore.

It is also home to a small feral horse population that is now at the centre of a legal dispute. The final hearing, taking place on Wednesday, could have repercussions far beyond feral horses.

What is this dispute about?

In late August, feral horse advocates began urgent proceedings in the NSW Land and Environment Court. They argued the National Parks and Wildlife Service does not have the legal authority to kill feral horses in Yuraygir.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service had been using aerial shooting, ground shooting and trapping to manage feral horses, as well as feral pigs, deer and foxes. It has now agreed to suspend activities until the final hearing on September 9.

To date, the court has not ruled the proposed operations are unlawful. Rather, the current suspension gives the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water time to ensure necessary approvals are in place so staff can continue working towards the goals of the Yuraygir management plan. These include controlling feral animals and restoring native vegetation.

A controversial topic

Feral horse control has long been a source of heated debate. For many people, it is more controversial than the management of other invasive species, such as deer and foxes, because horses are more culturally cherished. Lethal control is also associated with animal welfare concerns, including stress during pursuit and the possible risk of non-fatal wounding.

However, there is a strong ecological case for controlling feral horses. As large, hard-hooved, introduced grazing animals, feral horses can inflict significant damage to Australian ecosystems. They trample plants, compact soils, erode stream banks and disturb wetlands. This endangers many native species that rely on these fragile habitats, some of which live nowhere else. So feral horses must be managed with the same planning and urgency as other invasive animals.

Evidence suggests aerial shooting by professionals under strict protocols does not affect the welfare of feral horses. For example, independent veterinary assessments of recent operations in Kosciuszko National Park uncovered no welfare-related incidents.

A park worth protecting

Yuraygir National Park encompasses an extensive network of coastal lagoons, freshwater wetlands, saltmarshes and wet heaths that support an array of threatened animals. This includes the green and golden bell frog (Litoria aurea), the wallum froglet (Crinia tinnula) and the Olongburra frog (Litoria olongburensis).

However, these environments are among those most vulnerable to grazing and trampling. This is because their soft, often waterlogged soils and delicate vegetation are easily damaged by hard hooves. Feral horses can compact and churn up soil, increase erosion and muddy water, while destroying the shallow pools and vegetation that frogs use for shelter and breeding.

Beyond frogs, feral horses trample the nesting grounds of threatened shorebirds, such as the little tern (Sternula albifrons), pied oystercatcher (Haematopus longirostris) and critically endangered beach stone-curlew (Esacus magnirostris). Because these birds nest in shallow scrapes on the ground, horses could crush eggs or chicks and disturb nesting adults. Grazing and trampling may also reduce the dense vegetation relied on by species such as the eastern ground parrot (Pezoporus wallicus wallicus).

The current shooting suspension also delays control of pigs, deer and foxes, other invasive species that damage wetlands and native vegetation or prey on native wildlife. Yuraygir’s management plan identifies fox control as vital to protecting little terns, beach stone-curlews and coastal emu chicks.

So this legal dispute, while focused on feral horses, may have much broader ecological costs.

Early action is key

Control may seem unnecessary given there are relatively few horses in Yuraygir. However, research suggests the opposite is true.

Studies consistently show it’s often easier and cheaper to control small, localised populations of invasive species than larger, widespread populations. Delaying action gives animals time to reproduce, establish new populations and expand their geographical range. Management then becomes more difficult and expensive. It is also more likely to require repeated killing.

Kosciuszko is a case in point. Since late 2023, when aerial shooting was reintroduced to Kosciuszko National Park, thousands of feral horses have been removed. However, population numbers have stayed high and ecological damage remains widespread. This is partly because horses can breed quickly and move into controlled areas from surrounding land, particularly when management pauses.

There is still time to stop this happening at Yuraygir. For now, we await a decision from the NSW Land and Environment Court. But to safeguard this sacred landscape, we must protect it from the hard hooves and hungry mouths of feral horses.

Patrick Finnerty, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Conservation and Wildlife Management, University of Sydney and David M Watson, Professor in Ecology, Charles Sturt University

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

For thousands of years, human urine has had real value.

After our bodies absorb nutrients from our food, they excrete the rest – mainly via urine. An adult produces about 500 litres a year. This liquid gold is very rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, three compounds vital for plant growth.

Ancient civilisations from Greece to China to Rome used it as fertiliser for crops, alongside faeces.

Synthetic fertilisers have largely replaced natural fertilisers such as urine. Half the world’s population now relies on food grown using synthetic fertilisers. Urine is still used as fertiliser by smallholder farmers who cannot afford synthetic fertilisers or want a sustainable alternative.

This year, the Iran war has made synthetic fertilisers more expensive. If the era of cheap fertilisers is ending, urine-based fertilisers could make a comeback. Call it “peecycling”.

Of chamber pots and nightsoil

Before modern toilets, humans were a lot more intimately acquainted with the waste they produced. Peasants and smallholders would store their collective waste in cesspits. In cities, people used privies or chamberpots.

As cities grew, so did the volume of waste. While people slept, nightsoil workers would go door-to-door collecting human waste. Often, it would be transported for use on farms.

In the 19th century, modern central sewage greatly improved sanitation and cut rates of infectious diseases. But it also changed how we thought about pee and poo from resource – to waste.

From guano to synthetic fertilisers

During the 19th century, nations competed to gain access to a new source of fertiliser – guano, the compressed, nitrogen-rich droppings of seabirds. But the resource was limited. Guano islands were progressively mined out.

In the early 20th century, chemists invented synthetic fertilisers as an alternative.

These fertilisers boosted crop yields. But they also created new social and environmental problems.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are produced using the industrial Haber-Bosch process. It uses lots of energy and relies on natural gas, a potent fossil fuel.

Synthetic phosphorus fertilisers are made by treating phosphate rock, a finite resource mined in only a few places. One of the largest reserves is in Western Sahara, a disputed territory long occupied by Morocco.

If synthetic fertilisers are applied at scale without good nutrient management, they can trigger toxic algal blooms and mass fish kills.

Fertiliser shocks

Australian soils are heavily weathered and nutrient-poor in most places.

To produce as much food as it does, Australia has to import 3.5-4 million tonnes of synthetic fertilisers every year. Almost no fertilisers are produced locally.

Relying on global markets works when times are good. But at a time of escalating global shocks, it is a huge vulnerability.

One answer could be to look for sustainable local sources of nutrients for the plants we depend on – such as urine.

Flushing liquid gold?

Urine represents less than 1% of all wastewater, but contains almost all its nitrogen and half its phosphorus.

Once mixed with wastewater, these nutrients are much harder to access.

To get enough urine to make fertiliser would involve using separate plumbing in homes, public toilets and at events. Urinals are an existing source.

When mixed with wastewater, the nitrogen in urine can turn into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, or ammonia. Wastewater plants release the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of the global aviation industry.

If urine is diverted from wastewater, authorities could save on wastewater treatment – and cut emissions.

How do we capture urine?

At a small scale, raw urine can be captured using specialised urine-diverting toilets or urinals. Urine can be applied directly to your home garden, as long as sensible guidelines are followed.

To scale up urine-based fertiliser, we will have to tackle bigger issues such as the chance of pathogens and pharmaceuticals being found in urine, as well as inconsistent plumbing codes.

These can be managed with the right treatments and governance.

Urine nations?

Urine fertilisers have gained popularity in recent years.

In the United States, the Rich Earth Institute has lead community peecycling programs for over a decade. In Europe, Swiss startup VunaNexus uses diverted urine to make a sustainable fertiliser.

Sporting arenas in the United Kingdom, Sweden and South Africa are trialling the approach. And in Australia, researchers are trialling urine fertilisers in Brisbane and Sydney parklands.

One of the biggest barriers to scaling up urine-based fertilisers is the ick factor. Some people find the idea gross.

Fortunately, this can change. Researchers have been testing ways to challenge the stigma around urine. Our new podcast examines how rethinking the humble toilet can turn waste into fertiliser.

For centuries, people saw urine as the vital resource it is. The fact we can help grow crops using something from our bodies is remarkable. In an increasingly uncertain world, it might well be necessary.

Jordan Roods, PhD candidate in Sustainability, University of Technology Sydney and Kerry Tozer, PhD candidate in Sustainability, University of Technology Sydney

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

Imagine you’re halfway through your annual wheat harvest when a global crisis sends diesel and fertiliser prices soaring. All at once, your costs surge and your slender profit margin shrinks.

Are there alternatives? Increasingly, the answer is yes. Putting solar on the shed roof or an unproductive field could help keep the farm running.

In August, the federal government announced it would lift the cap on the long-running small-scale solar subsidy from 100 kilowatts to one megawatt – a size well suited to larger energy users, such as big farms.

If this plan comes into effect, it should reduce installation costs by about 20%, saving an estimated A$68,000 on the installation of a 250 kW system.

This could make larger solar systems more appealing for more farmers, reducing electricity costs and boosting energy self-reliance in the bush. It’s not yet possible to be fully self-reliant, as electric tractors and heavy machinery are still emerging. Anti-renewable sentiment in some communities could also be a challenge.

How far can farms go?

If farmers have the space and funds to build a large solar array, this may make sense as a first measure. The ability to produce low-cost electricity opens up many more options – especially if paired with energy storage such as batteries, so power can be stored and used later.

Some farms are shifting to hybrid models, where solar and batteries are integrated with farm equipment and a backup generator to form the farm’s own microgrid.

What about fuel? Right now, Australian farms are highly reliant on diesel. This energy-dense fuel supplies about 84% of the energy used on Australian farms.

Diesel powers harvesters and tractors. But it also runs water pumps and power generators. Over time, farmers can replace broken pumps with electric options and run their operations on solar power.

Much more can be done. This year, AgriFutures Australia laid out a roadmap for farming and other primary producers to shift from diesel to electric options.

Are farms actually doing this?

These technologies are already in use.

New South Wales almond operation Cadell Orchards has long been off-grid. Until recently, its irrigation pumps were powered by diesel generators. But diesel was getting too expensive and a grid connection wasn’t viable. As Australian Farming Services CEO David Armstrong said:

we couldn’t stay on generators forever … it just wasn’t feasible [and] the variability of costs is too great

Instead, the agribusiness installed a microgrid with over 8,000 solar panels and a battery. The goal is to produce over 85% of its own power.

To avoid the upfront cost, the business didn’t buy the whole system. Instead, an energy company owns and maintains it, while the orchard buys the power.

Some farmers have taken up “agrivoltaics”, which means combining farming and solar panels. Fields can carry more sheep and produce more and better wool, according to some farmers. This is because solar arrays provide shade and can help the ground retain moisture longer.

Tractors, harvesters and speed bumps

Small electric tractors are becoming available for smaller-scale jobs.

But large battery-powered tractors and harvesters aren’t ready for prime time yet, as diesel packs more energy by weight than today’s batteries by a wide margin.

There are other challenges too. Large electric machines would likely have to recharge during the working day, meaning charging infrastructure might have to be located near fields. Farmers often put in long hours to bring the crop in. Stopping for long recharges could interfere with time-sensitive crop harvesting.

The AgriFutures roadmap predicts stationary equipment such as pumps will electrify first, while liquid fuels will remain important longer.

Solar paired with batteries can keep a farm running overnight or during cloudy periods. But if dark, cloudy days drag on, it may be time to bring out the generator.

For some businesses, a battery may not stack up financially.

Even free sunshine can hit a roadblock. After Queensland cotton farmer Ian Brimblecombe installed a large solar system, he began saving about $60,000 a year. But power network rules restricted how much electricity he could export or move between pump stations.

It’s not all or nothing

Over time, more farms will produce more of their own energy. But there’s no silver bullet, and the shift will take place in fits and starts.

Some farmers may find it viable to produce their own biodiesel from oils or waste fats to keep existing machinery working.

For farmers to get the most out of clean energy, they will need dependable equipment, affordable finance, local technicians and guidance from people they trust. These aren’t always easy to access.

Some rural communities are sceptical about large-scale renewable projects and new transmission lines, often due to a perceived city-country divide. Campaigns against new solar, wind or transmission projects often focus on the impact on the landscape and distrust of far-off authorities. False claims are common. This may slow the shift towards energy self-reliance.

Over time, we may see this resistance become more nuanced. Some farmers may keep opposing large-scale projects, while moving to install their own systems.

New incentives may sweeten the deal too. We’re unlikely to see the farm diesel tank disappear any time soon. But we are likely to see many more shed rooftops covered in panels – and new ways to make use of clean, cheap power from the sun.

Md Alamgir Hossain, Senior Lecturer, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Southern Queensland and Shahbaz Mushtaq, Director of the Centre for Applied Climate Sciences, University of Southern Queensland

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

Squinting through my binoculars, I scanned the dense branches of a black spruce, trying my best to catch a glimpse of the thin legs of a small black, white and yellow songbird. I was on the hunt for a yellow-rumped warbler – a bird affectionately called “butter-butt” by bird-watchers after the distinctive buttery yellow patch of feathers above its tail.

Once I spotted a flash of red on one of the bird’s legs, I knew that this individual was special – in fact, it was one that I already knew well. That’s because I had placed identifying bands on it the previous year as part of my Ph.D. research, and it was carrying a very important piece of new technology.

I played the high pitched “warble” of its song through a speaker placed below a mist net of fine, nearly invisible mesh. Thinking another male had intruded on his territory, the bird quickly descended. My tactic worked – he got caught in the net. As I gently removed him, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the Tic Tac-size device sitting on his back.

Over the past year, this warbler carried a multisensor geolocator backpack throughout his migratory journey, recording the long trek from his breeding grounds in Anchorage, Alaska, to a yet unknown winter refuge and back again. Working with my Ph.D. adviser, evolutionary biologist David Toews, I deployed dozens of these cutting-edge tags to illuminate the migratory journeys of these high-latitude breeding warblers at a scale not previously possible for small birds.

Now, after a year of waiting, I finally had the data in hand.

How can scientists track small birds?

Researchers began tracking the movements of migrating birds in the late 1960s using radio telemetry, a technique that requires tagged birds to be physically followed with receiver equipment, sometimes aided by a small aircraft.

Then, as GPS became more widely available in the early 2000s, satellite tags let researchers accurately track birds remotely. However, GPS transmitters are hefty – even just the battery that powers them is too heavy to be carried by the majority of small migratory songbirds, which often weigh less than a spoonful of sugar.

To address this problem, researchers developed ingenious little light-level geolocators. These miniature tags minimize weight by containing only a tiny battery, clock, computer chip and light sensor. They store data internally rather than transmitting it – hence my need to recapture tagged birds a year later. Researchers infer a bird’s locations from the timing of sunrise and sunset, which vary predictably across the globe and throughout the year.

Light-level geolocators have opened new windows into the migrations of small birds, but they also have limitations: Their estimated locations can err by hundreds of miles, and this uncertainty becomes impractically high around the equinoxes, when day length is the same worldwide.

More recently, researchers developed a newer method of geolocation that uses atmospheric pressure to circumvent these limitations. When a bird ascends during a migratory flight, a barometric geolocator records a steep drop in air pressure, capturing the timing of departure and arrival for every stop along a bird’s migration route. In between flights, the pressure the tag records reflects the elevation at the bird’s position.

Knowing the bird’s elevation helps to narrow down possible locations, which researchers can then refine further by comparing the change in pressure over time recorded by the tag to global weather data using the computer program GeoPressureR. The unique pattern of rises and falls in pressure acts as a kind of pressure fingerprint for a specific location. Including light and wind data in the model of the bird’s movements can increase precision even more.

New tech answers an old question

We used these new multisensor backpacks to study the migration patterns of myrtle warblers, the northern subspecies of yellow-rumped warbler, which breed across North America’s boreal forest. Myrtle warblers in the northeast are known to winter along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, but where northwestern populations migrate has been more of a mystery. In 1899, ornithologist Richard McGregor observed myrtle warblers wintering in coastal California, and hypothesized that these birds might breed in Alaska and British Columbia.

Using these new tags allowed us to test whether warblers breeding in Anchorage, Alaska, actually followed the shortest migration route to winter in California. To our surprise – and probably to McGregor’s as well, if he were still alive – we found that all the birds we tracked traveled east across the boreal forest of Canada before shifting south to the Gulf Coast – certainly not the Pacific Coast route we expected.

All told, this 6,800-mile (10,900-kilometer) round-trip journey was much longer than we anticipated for a species commonly considered a short- or medium-distance migrant.

Why take such a circuitous route?

The long, seemingly suboptimal route taken by our Alaskan myrtle warblers is actually mirrored by some other songbird species tracked from northwestern North America, including blackpoll warblers and Swainson’s thrushes.

Part of this pattern may relate back to the glaciations that isolated ancient populations of birds millions of years ago. The thinking goes that as these glaciers spread, they squashed the ranges of formerly northern species into the south. Then, as the glaciers slowly receded, the forests gradually reexpanded.

As more land opened up, birds moved farther north and west into that habitat. Each season some birds went a little farther as the forest available in their northern breeding grounds expanded. For migratory species such as myrtle warblers, the farther north and west their breeding range expanded, the longer the migration to their southern wintering ground became.

Scientists think migration routes are genetically encoded. The birds’ genes may have traced this expansion front, like Hansel and Gretel putting down breadcrumbs as they journeyed deeper and deeper into the forest. Today’s migration routes still trace that incrementally expanded path, even though the glaciers that shaped the original boundaries are long gone.

We’re still not sure exactly where the California-wintering myrtle warblers spotted in the 1800s are breeding. We suspect that a small proportion of the Anchorage-breeding birds may migrate to California, but that most of them travel from more distant, unstudied regions of Alaska or Yukon. Future research, potentially tagging myrtle warblers directly on the California wintering grounds, will shed more light on this population and why certain individuals follow a different migration route.

Barometric geolocation provides new data

Today, this new geolocation approach improves scientists’ ability to study the migrations of small birds and supports more effective conservation actions across the course of the entire year. More precise location estimates help researchers identify key stopover and wintering sites in need of protection and better understand the threats birds face throughout their journeys. These geolocators also reveal the altitude of migratory flights, which is important for understanding the risk of birds colliding with buildings or wind turbines.

Because these new tags capture pressure data for every migratory flight, they’re especially valuable for studying migration timing. Researchers have combined data from over 50 bird species to understand at what time of day or night different birds migrate. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, I am integrating multisensor geolocator data with satellite imagery to investigate how arrival and departure decisions throughout a bird’s migratory journey relate to seasonal changes in plant growth.

Scientists have now tracked dozens of bird species with multisensor geolocators, and that number increases every year. Each mapped migratory journey improves our understanding of how small birds migrate, what factors shape their movements and how best to protect them.

Stephanie Szarmach, James Smithson Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution

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

Saltwater isn’t something most people associate with English farmland. But in parts of eastern England, it’s becoming a growing problem, and not just for crops, but for farm incomes too.

In our new study focusing on Greater Lincolnshire, one of the UK’s most productive agricultural areas, we found that rising sea levels and more frequent flooding are pushing salt onto some of the country’s best farmland.

This isn’t just about crops struggling to grow. The real story is an economic one. Salt in the soil is changing which crops actually make money, and in some cases wiping out profits entirely.

Most studies on salinity look at what happens in the field. For example, how plants respond to increasing salt concentrations, how yields fall and how soils degrade.

We have been researching the problem from a farmer’s perspective. What happens to their income? How does risk change? And crucially, what can farmers grow instead when conditions shift?

To answer these questions, we combined maps of crops, land quality and flood risk with farm-level financial data and simulated what happens when salinity increases. The results were clear. Every major crop loses money as salt levels rise.

Some crops are hit much harder than others. Potatoes take the biggest losses, largely because they are expensive to grow, so when yields fall, profits collapse quickly. Crops like beet and oilseed also see large declines. Even cereals, which are generally more resilient, are not spared.

But the most important shift isn’t just that profits fall. It’s that the whole system changes. Under normal conditions, farming works with a kind of pecking order whereby some crops deliver high returns, others are safer but less profitable.

Salinity flattens that hierarchy. Instead of clear winners and losers, most crops end up clustered together in a lower-return, higher-risk situation.

One crop consistently stands out: winter wheat. It still suffers losses, but it holds up better than the others, making it the most reliable option as conditions deteriorate. In practical terms, that means farmers may increasingly fall back on it as their safest choice.

This matters because the places most exposed to saltwater flooding, especially the low-lying Fenlands, are also some of the most productive farmland in the UK. So this isn’t about marginal land becoming less useful. It’s about some of the country’s agricultural heartland coming under pressure.

There’s another complication. Salinity doesn’t just disappear when the floodwater drains away. Salt builds up in the soil and can linger for years, quietly reducing productivity over time. That makes it a slow-moving problem, but one with long-lasting consequences.

Over time, this could narrow farmers’ choices. Instead of a diverse mix of crops, more land could shift toward a smaller number that can cope with salty conditions. That has implications not just for farm incomes, but for food production and resilience more broadly.

Salty shifts

So what can be done? In the short term, adaptation is likely to mean shifting toward more resilient crops. Barley is already relatively salt-tolerant. Some wheat varieties cope better than others, and farmers are starting to move in that direction where risk is lower.

There is longer-term potential in crops that actually thrive in salty conditions, known as halophytes, edible saltmarsh plants like samphire. These are grown in the UK, but mostly as niche, high-value foods rather than mainstream crops. Scaling them up would require investment, new markets and changes in farming systems.

Our findings show that salinity isn’t just another environmental challenge. It’s a slow, structural pressure that changes how farming works. It affects not only yields, but decisions such as what farmers plant, how they manage risk and how land is used.

We’re not yet at the point where UK farming can switch to salt-proof crops. But the pressure from salinity is growing, and could push both crop choices and agricultural innovation in that direction over time.

Saul Ngarava, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Natural Sciences, University of Lincoln; Daniel Magnone, Associate Professor in Physical Geography, University of Lincoln, and Eric Ruto, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Lincoln, UK, University of Lincoln

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

Archaeopteryx is an icon of evolution and is often called the first bird. Scientists have long debated just how it took off from the ground but a recent study published by my colleagues and I has brought new insights to the mystery.

Our study compared Archaeopteryx with the anatomy of modern birds, and our findings suggest it generated the force needed to take off by taking several jumps forwards.

Archaeopteryx, a fossil uncovered from the Jurassic rocks of Germany, dates back 150 million years. It was covered in feathers and it had wings. But it retained a number of distinctly dinosaur features such as a long bony tail, claws on separate fingers and teeth in a beakless jaw.

Charles Darwin predicted, in the first edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1859, that fossils would later be found linking major groups of animals. A year after publication a feather, and within two years, an entire skeleton of Archaeopteryx had been discovered, showing clear links between birds and the dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx is one of those transitional forms that links one group to another.

The “first bird” was not perfectly developed, as birds have evolved to be today. We would not expect them to be. It had relatively weak flight muscles, with no keeled sternum for strong muscle attachment, and could not have raised its wings above the horizontal.

Rather than call it the first bird, it is better to describe it as the earliest branching species, yet known, on the lineage of birds after the whole bird group split from non-avian dinosaurs some time more than 150 million years ago.

In 2016 my friend Colin Palmer asked a colleague, Markus Heller (professor of biomechanics) and me to join him in exploring a tricky problem: how did early birds slip the bonds of Earth and take to the sky?

Palmer had been working on the flying cousins of dinosaurs, the pterosaurs for over a decade, and also a peculiar (although now one among several known) four-winged, feathered and flying dinosaur called Microraptor. However, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and Microraptor is a dinosaur closer to Velociraptor (small meat-eating dinosaurs) than to birds.

There have been a number of suggested mechanisms for the evolution of flight and takeoff, quite literally from the ground up, or the trees down, to flapping while running to climb a slope. The problem is that these are difficult to test experimentally. So we turned instead to the best example of takeoff there is: birds themselves.

Palmer had already filmed a number of birds, out of curiosity. As some other scientists had observed, but had never followed up, Palmer saw that they all showed the same sort of pre-takeoff behaviour. Two leg jumping. The wings appeared to do little in getting the bird off the ground, and this opened up some possibilities for research into the earliest of birds.

The ancestors of birds, the theropod dinosaurs, had powerful legs. They could definitely jump, and jumping could provide an important evolutionary advantage. Being able to get out of the way of a hunter, and maybe adding in a flap of your feathered arms to extend your leap, might just save your life.

The first bit of this research, which we carried out with then undergraduate student Erik Meilak, was developing a means to see how much force the hindlimbs of birds generate in getting off the ground. We used a force plate (a modified kitchen scale) and a Raspberry Pi computer controlling some high-speed photography, along with CT scanning of the skeleton to see exactly how bones were articulated. We worked out how magpies got off the ground. They used their legs as the primary generator.

This undergraduate summer project became a fully-fledged PhD project, with Meilak looking at several birds such as starlings and crows. We worked with evolutionary biologist Pauline Provini in Paris who had done work with doves and finches, demonstrating how all of these birds used their legs in takeoff.

And with detailed kinematics, all of the forces and moments generated by the muscles around the hindlimb joints, we fitted the model to Archaeopteryx and looked to see if the first bird could get into the air in a similar way to modern birds.

Archaeopteryx is by definition 150 million years behind the “leaps” of modern birds, and couldn’t take off as we had observed modern birds do when startled, explosively, with a single jump and then add flapping into the sky. Archaeopteryx couldn’t do that, and as I said couldn’t rely on its wings for powerful flaps. So we had asked what its legs could do. And like birds today, when taking off more leisurely, we demonstrated that Archaeopteryx could have got into the air with two leg leaps. Archaeopteryx could have used three jumps increasing in velocity, and once airborne its flapping wings could have maintained a flight speed of 7 metres per second.

However, if Archaeopteryx had added in a flap, it would have got to that speed – jump-flap-jump – with just two leaps. And all this without the highly evolved and flight-adapted anatomy of pigeons, crows, hawks and even chickens.

In the future we may find a fossil that is still a bird rather than a non-avian dinosaur, but is less, well, “birdy” than Archaeopteryx, and then that would become the earliest branching taxon. But we haven’t yet. So Archaeopteryx still sits on its perch as the first bird that we know of.

Neil J. Gostling, Associate Professor in Evolution and Palaeobiology, University of Southampton

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

For three years before the Black Summer megafires of 2019–20, cool season rainfall in southeastern Australia was only half that of normal. When fires broke out, intensely dry conditions helped them spread through areas typically resistant to burning, such as wetlands and rainforests.

After the fires came three years of above-average rainfall, and scientific reports charted rapid vegetation regrowth.

It’s easy to think the rains let nature repair itself. But is that the full story? In our new research, we looked at what happened to seven severely burnt plant communities in the Greater Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

We found a mixed picture. Wet sclerophyll forests supporting tall eucalypts skirted by ferns recovered within five years. But Blue Mountains rainforests did not recover from burns of any severity. Nor did grassy woodlands.

How can we track recovery?

To find out how well forests and other communities recovered from the Black Summer fires, we tracked recovery across the million-hectare Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Seven severe fires hit this region over the 2019–20 summer. The biggest was the Gospers Mountain fire, which burned an area seven times the size of Singapore – the largest fire from a single ignition point in Australia’s recorded history.

Five years on, if you had looked out across the Blue Mountains landscape you might have thought recovery was well under way. Thick scrub quickly replaced charred undergrowth in many areas. Across our study sites, many burned regions had denser understoreys – the layer of vegetation between forest floor and canopy – than unburnt areas.

But recovery isn’t just about how much vegetation is there. It’s about whether the layers of shrubs and canopy trees that make up a functioning plant community have returned to their previous state.

After fire moves through, some plant species rapidly regrow, outcompeting their rivals for light and water. But these species are often short-lived, failing to survive beyond a few years. On the other hand, species such as eucalypts and banksia may take years to regrow but then live much longer.

This means depending on when we take our measurements, we might mistake a temporary pulse of growth for real recovery.

To address this issue, our study tracked plant growth using a time-series of satellite images. This way, we could see the full trajectory of recovery, not just a snapshot.

A plant community that has fully recovered from burns will look stable year to year and mirror patterns of growth at unburnt sites. Poorly recovered areas, in contrast, will show distinct fluctuations.

We used this method to track recovery from low- to extreme-severity fire at 760 forest, heath and wetland sites in the Greater Blue Mountains region.

What did we find?

An earlier large-scale synthesis two years after the Black Summer fires found wet forests had suffered greater declines than drier plant communities.

Our findings five years after the fires tell a more complex story.

Some wet forests, such as wet sclerophyll, were able to take advantage of the heavy rains to recover fully within five years.

Others were less fortunate. The Blue Mountains are home to rare remnant rainforest, featuring stands of trees such as coachwood, lilly-pilly and sassafras, whose ancestors date back to Gondwana. We found these had not recovered after fires of any severity.

The region’s grassy woodlands also showed no sign of recovery when burned, despite being dry, open areas.

Why? We suggest the intense rains following Black Summer made it difficult for the community’s characteristic grasses and tussocks – adapted to dry conditions – to successfully re-establish.

What if the big dry hadn’t ended?

The years of heavy rain after the Black Summer fires were unusual. If drought had continued, would we have seen different recovery outcomes?

To tease out this question, we modelled what recovery would have looked like for plant communities under drought stress.

Simply put, all would be worse off. In particular, wet sclerophyll forests and freshwater wetlands showed declines five times greater than other plant communities.

This is likely due to the fact that the plant species in these ecosystems need heavy rainfall to re-establish. For instance, freshwater wetlands often need to be completely flooded for species to return.

These communities may be pushed to the point of collapse if drought persists after the next megafire.

What can we do?

Ferocious fires have swept through Europe in recent months and the southern summer is likely to coincide with a strong El Niño event, bringing a higher risk of intense heatwaves, drought and fire.

As climate change accelerates, these extreme conditions will become more common. To protect our plant communities, we must tailor our fire-management strategies. No two communities respond to fire the same way, and recovery outcomes differ greatly depending on whether post-fire conditions are hot and dry or cool and wet. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work.

During the Black Summer fires, a team of firefighters protected the last wild stand of the ancient, fire-averse Wollemi pine in the Blue Mountains.

To help rainforests and other fire-averse plant communities survive, we will need technologies that help us rapidly detect and suppress new fires – and long-term monitoring programs to let us know when species are at risk.

In other landscapes, we must rethink our reliance on fuel-reduction burns. This is because plants are at higher risk of damage from fire if they have been frequently burnt in the past. When we repeatedly burn an area, we inflate this risk and condemn many plants and animals to staggering losses in future fires.

Of course, all these efforts won’t matter if we fail to tackle the underlying reason why fires are getting more frequent and severe – climate change.

Emily Simpson, Doctoral Candidate in Ecology, University of Sydney; Aaron Greenville, Senior Lecturer in Spatial Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney; Chris Dickman, Professor Emeritus in Terrestrial Ecology, University of Sydney, and Glenda Wardle, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Sydney

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

The lethal H5N1 strain of avian influenza is rapidly spreading along the coast of southern Australia, where it has killed thousands of wild birds and infected at least two long-nosed fur seals.

So where will it travel next, and what damage might it inflict? Much is uncertain, especially because many of Australia’s animals and ecosystems are so unlike those in other parts of the world.

But monitoring is vital if we are to understand the magnitude of this H5N1 outbreak and protect our most vulnerable species, including the threatened Australian sea lion.

What may be coming

It’s difficult to know how Australia’s current H5N1 crisis will unfold. But we can make four predictions, based on existing knowledge.

Waterfowl will carry the virus inland

Infected waterfowl from coastal southern Australia – such as ducks, herons and swans – will soon carry H5N1 to inland wetland systems. The timing is terrible.

In coming months, the hot and dry conditions created by the El Niño climate pattern will cause those wetlands to shrink. This means vast numbers of waterfowl, already debilitated by scarce resources, will congregate at the few remaining water sources. Weak flow and high densities of dead and dying birds will turn this water into a virus-contaminated soup, leading to further losses.

Macquarie Island’s wildlife will suffer major losses

To date, the significant seabird, seal and king penguin colonies on Macquarie Island have escaped the virus. However, H5N1 has devastated similar colonies on many other subantarctic islands, such as Keguelon and Crozet Islands.

Macquarie’s luck will soon run out, leaving its densely packed colonies of penguins, seals and petrels extremely exposed. In response to this threat, the Australian government has evacuated researchers from the island to protect their physical and psychological health.

Shearwaters will be widely infected

Within a few weeks, vast flocks of shearwaters will return from their global migration to nest on islands off southern Australia, such as those in Bass Strait. Bird flu, likely carried by other seabirds, will await them there. Losses may be substantial.

Scavengers will carry the virus beyond the coast and wetlands

Foxes, roaming cats, mynahs and other scavenger animals will bring H5N1 to our cities. This will have far-reaching impacts on urban wildlife, such as magpies and possums, consistent with declines of urban species overseas.

There is hope

However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Bird flu has not yet caused extinction of any species elsewhere in the world. And after the initial outbreak, some affected species have started to recover – in some cases because survivors have stronger immunological responses. This should happen in Australia too.

What is critical now is assessing the conservation impacts of H5N1 on our wildlife.

Counts of dead birds tell us something about the flu’s spread and virulence. But while every death is saddening, corpse tallies alone don’t reflect conservation impact.

For example, thousands of greater crested terns have been killed by H5N1, but these deaths represent a fraction of the global population, estimated to number between 150,000 and 1.1 million. In contrast, there are only about 3,000 Christmas Island frigatebirds in existence, so any losses would be disastrous for that population.

What’s more, counts of deaths can be unreliable as many corpses may never be discovered. Instead, governments should focus on the proportion of a species’ total population that is killed by bird flu. This will allow us to assess the conservation consequences and, over time, the extent of recovery.

Assessing impact is not always straightforward

However, population-level impacts may be challenging to assess.

We have good estimates of population sizes for only a few Australian animal species. Fortunately, this includes some species that are most vulnerable to H5N1, including colonial-breeding seabirds and seals.

Without this data, monitoring can be used to estimate population density at a series of sampled sites or the incidence of certain bird species. Some current monitoring programs, such as the long-running aerial survey of waterfowl across eastern Australia, could provide critical data about the impacts of bird flu.

Interpreting monitoring data can also be complex. In inland Australia, the numbers of many species bounce around, particularly when the weather fluctuates between being wet or dry. With this statistical “noise”, identifying any population declines caused by bird flu is difficult.

There are biases and gaps in monitoring data. Most native mammals are not monitored, so we may have no idea how many die from H5N1. Losses in birds found in remote areas, such as the Heard Island black-faced sheathbill, are also likely to be missed due to lack of regular monitoring.

Where to from here

To understand the nuanced impacts of H5N1 bird flu, monitoring should assess the effectiveness of management actions, changes in breeding success and levels of immunity, mutations and the virulence of the virus itself.

It should also investigate survival rates of infected individuals, the broader environmental risks of losing large numbers of key species and the extent of recovery. Recovery may be harder and take longer for species that have low breeding output and take many years to mature, such as albatrosses.

Without effective monitoring, we will not grasp the true magnitude or significance of the current H5N1 outbreak. It’s what we need to both target emergency responses to the most affected species and measure the extent to which our actions are actually helping.

John Woinarski, Professor of Conservation Biology, Charles Darwin University

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

Australia’s Macquarie Island lies deep in the Southern Ocean, about 1,500 kilometres southeast of Tasmania. This World Heritage-listed sanctuary is a haven for species such as elephant and fur seals, penguins, albatrosses and petrels, and a key site for wildlife researchers.

But it is not safe from H5N1 bird flu. This lethal virus is rapidly spreading across the Australian mainland and Southern Ocean, already hitting other sub-Antarctic islands including Heard Island.

However, the Australian government has decided to withdraw all 24 expeditioners – including scientists, tradespeople and support staff – from the site. It says this is mainly to protect them from the psychosocial risks – the psychological harms of working in stressful or traumatic conditions – associated with living through a potential H5N1 outbreak and the wildlife casualties it may cause.

Those risks are real. Witnessing mass wildlife deaths could be deeply distressing for any person. But taking everyone off the island means the scientists who work there cannot document an outbreak as it unfolds, or understand what is happening to wildlife populations we have studied for decades.

At Macquarie, monitoring is vital

Scientists have worked at Macquarie Island for more than 70 years, and withdrawing all personnel will disrupt long-term wildlife, climate, atmospheric and geological monitoring, well beyond the bird flu response.

For southern elephant seals, the stakes are particularly high. The species is considered “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List and under Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Decades of monitoring show numbers of breeding females at Macquarie’s major colony have fallen sharply, dropping from 9,400 in 1949 to 2,550 in 2023. The federal recovery plan for this species identifies disease outbreaks as a threat and calls for regular, scientifically robust monitoring.

Bird flu is precisely this type of threat.

At Australia’s Heard Island, more than 13,000 elephant seal pups died during a recent H5N1 outbreak, while the number of breeding females fell by almost half at monitored sites on Britain’s South Georgia. The Australian Antarctic Division itself identified the need for 2026-27 population data to assess the impact of bird flu on Macquarie Island. But the government has now reversed course in withdrawing the island’s staff.

Psychosocial risk is real

Psychosocial or ecological grief – distress associated with the loss of species and places people care about – is well documented among conservation professionals.

But avoiding exposure to loss isn’t the only answer. Guidance from the World Health Organisation emphasises preparation, training and dedicated mental health and psychosocial support for personnel working in difficult emergency environments.

Other nations have already faced this problem. At other sub-Antarctic islands such as South Georgia, Crozet and Kerguelen and the Falklands, authorities boosted biosecurity measures – including providing personal protective equipment and guidance on wildlife sampling – to maintain essential science and disease surveillance. Similarly, the international Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research Action Group on Wildlife Health recommends assessing which activities should continue during outbreaks and outlines appropriate protective measures.

This raises important questions about how Australia reached its decision. Did the government seek advice from other programs that have successfully monitored outbreaks? Could a smaller specialist team remain with additional training, shorter deployments and dedicated psychological support?

The government hasn’t indicated what the long-term plan will be. Bird flu may not arrive this summer. Elsewhere in the Southern Ocean, outbreaks have recurred across multiple years. If the virus arrives next year or stretches over several years, will expeditioners be withdrawn indefinitely?

Can cameras replace scientists?

After Australia’s personnel leave, the government may rely on live cameras, drones and satellites to monitor Macquarie Island. These tools will be useful. At Heard Island, drones were invaluable for measuring the enormous scale of mortality.

But remote monitoring cannot replace biological sampling. A camera cannot swab a freshly dead pup, collect blood from a surviving animal or conduct a postmortem.

Across Crozet, Kerguelen, Heard, South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, scientists sampled dead and apparently healthy wildlife during major outbreaks. These samples confirmed infections, detected antibodies in survivors and enabled viral sequencing. In our recent research, 104 new virus genomes collected across six sub-Antarctic and Antarctic locations allowed us to map transmission over thousands of kilometres and show how the virus continues to evolve, including adapting to mammals.

Without field samples, we lose crucial information about how the virus is evolving and spreading, limiting our ability to anticipate what happens next.

Remote should not mean out of sight and out of mind

Surveillance, testing and reporting have been a top priority in our bird flu response on the Australian mainland. It should be no different on Macquarie Island, even though it is a remote location.

We cannot stop animals from dying if the lethal virus strain arrives. But we can understand which species are affected, which animals survive and where the virus may travel next.

We have monitored Macquarie’s declining elephant seal population for decades. We should not avert our eyes now.

We say this as scientists who have studied bird flu outbreaks and witnessed devastating wildlife losses firsthand. We are prepared for the difficult reality of studying wildlife disease. But what is much harder to accept is being forced to look away when science could still make a difference.

Jane Younger, Senior Lecturer in Southern Ocean Vertebrate Ecology, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania; Amandine Gamble, Assistant Professor, Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, Cornell University, and Augustin Clessin, PhD Candidate, Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, Université de Montpellier

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

Ever found a bare-nosed wombat napping under your house or heard a possum thumping around in your roof?

You’re not alone. Data from Wildlife Victoria reveals that about 2,400 native animals were reported by people as being in, on or under buildings over the past decade.

For our new study, we analysed these reports to find out which animals were taking up residence in buildings, which parts of dwellings they occupied and what they were doing there.

We uncovered 36 native species that either nest, forage or sleep in our homes, ranging from microbats sleeping in curtains to pacific black ducks nesting on balconies. These encounters show buildings have become de facto habitat for many animals with whom we share our cities.

As Australia races to build more houses, we must design them with at-risk animals in mind. Their survival may depend on it.

Unexpected residents

Our new research reveals wildlife use almost every part of buildings.

Building cavities are the most popular option, with 40% of studied species taking up residence between walls. We found 19% of animals in shelters and structures such as garages and 16% in external surfaces such as eaves, balconies and tops of roofs.

About 10% of animals were found living in interior rooms like bedrooms and kitchens, 9% in spaces under houses and 6% in utility services such as heaters and air conditioners.

These building features often serve similar functions to natural habitats. Roof and wall cavities replicate the conditions of tree hollows. Spaces under houses resemble sheltered ground or burrows. Balconies provide elevated ledges that act as cliff edges. Aircon and water heaters can become ideal microclimates for reptiles.

The habitat gap

Buildings are becoming increasingly important for conservation, as natural habitats rapidly disappear from our urban landscapes.

Natural features such as tree hollows – on which more than 300 Australian native species depend – can take centuries to form. Research shows the number of large, hollow-bearing trees in urban areas is declining. And replacement saplings won’t grow and provide habitat for a very long time.

Ecologists are working to address this gap by developing nest boxes, carved hollows, bee hotels and other creative solutions.

Relying on buildings for habitat is precarious. A renovation or repair can erase it overnight. Exclusion – using physical barriers or devices to keep wildlife out of buildings – may be necessary if an animal poses a genuine health, safety or welfare risk. This is best done by an expert wildlife carer.

The problem is not exclusion itself. Rather, it is the act of excluding an animal and removing its shelter without considering other safe alternatives. This approach will only exacerbate Australia’s extinction crisis.

Our research suggests there’s another largely overlooked way to protect our most vulnerable animals: adapting our houses.

Homes as habitat

Australia has a national target to build 1.2 million homes over the next five years.

Constructing a new home involves making many decisions, from where roof cavities will go to whether precious soil is concreted over. Together, these choices shape whole neighbourhoods, including whether they contain vital habitat or force local species to go elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Australia is strengthening standards around the energy efficiency of houses. For example, new builds must be properly sealed to limit air leaks, which account for between 15–25% of heat lost from homes in winter.

However, an energy-efficient home does not need to be a wildlife-free place. Habitat features can be weaved into house designs.

In Scotland, regulations require new buildings to have “swift bricks”, a type of nest box that can be installed in external walls as habitat for the common swift (Apus apus) population.

In Germany’s Brantstrasse building, designers have included swift bricks, bat boxes and hedgehog nest boxes in the actual structure. These approaches show adapting buildings for wildlife can be easy and effective.

Australia currently has no such policy. But several grassroots initiatives are emerging such as wildhouses, where builders fund one standalone bird, bat or glider nest box for every building they construct.

Urban designers and planners are increasingly designing cities with wildlife in mind. This approach, known as biodiversity sensitive urban design, aims to construct urban environments that minimise threats to plants and animals while accommodating their resource needs.

For example, a new suburb may decide to plant flowering meadows instead of lawn in streetscapes and parks. Both Canberra and Adelaide have adopted this approach in policy.

Where to from here?

Adapting buildings for wildlife must be based on robust ecological research. Certain features such as bird spikes, netting and reflective glass are designed to keep wildlife out. This so-called “hostile architecture” can wound and even kill animals.

In some cities, the design of buildings may favour a handful of urban-adapted species. In Melbourne, for example, a lack of suitable habitat for smaller forest birds such as fairy wrens and yellow robins means they are rapidly being pushed out by aggressive noisy miners.

Cities should not be places where concrete simply replaces nature. Research suggests urban areas will become increasingly important to tackling the extinction crisis. Australia urgently needs more homes. But in our rush to build them, we must not neglect the needs of the vulnerable animals that may have nowhere else to go.

Bethany Kiss, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Science, The University of Melbourne and Sarah Bekessy, Professor, Urban Ecology and Biodiversity, The University of Melbourne; RMIT University

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

For over a decade, the world has been trying to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

That’s no longer possible, according to a new United Nations report. We will likely pass 1.5°C in 2030. That’s not good news for anyone, least of all Australia’s Pacific Island neighbours who face rapidly rising seas.

In response to the report, Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr said:

It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement […] calls for greater ambition are no longer enough — we need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate safe future

The small silver lining is that it’s still possible for this to be a temporary overshoot of the target. If nations redouble their efforts to phase out fossil fuels and reduce other sources of emissions, they could limit peak warming to 1.8°C and then use carbon removal methods to bring temperatures back to 1.5°C or below this century.

In 2026, the world is already about 1.4°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, and the damage and death toll from climate-boosted disasters is ramping up. The United Kingdom is warning of possible food shortages amid a historic drought. Wildfires hit new areas in France and Spain, while glaciers are melting rapidly and the oceans are at their hottest level on record. The enormous El Niño event emerging in the Pacific is likely to bring major disruption. Every fraction of a degree makes things worse.

There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5°C. Urgent cuts to emissions and efforts to protect the most vulnerable are our best remaining options. Failure to do so risks irreversible harm.

Why does 1.5°C matter so much?

The 2015 Paris Agreement established a shared goal for the world: keep the rise in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels “well below” 2°C and “pursue efforts” to hold warming to 1.5°C.

This goal was set based on expert scientific assessments that warming of more than 2°C would be dangerous and that limiting warming to 1.5°C was necessary to minimise climate risks.

Pacific nations fought hard to include 1.5°C in the agreement, arguing it was essential for their communities to “stay alive” in the face of rising sea levels and other climate-fuelled threats.

Last year, the world’s top court – the International Court of Justice – ruled that 1.5°C is the primary temperature limit nations have committed to work towards.

This ruling means that if governments fail to act as ambitiously as they can, they could be sued in international courts.

In May this year, a majority of nations voted in the UN General Assembly to endorse the court’s ruling and urge action to keep to 1.5°C.

It’s not time to give up

Warming of 1.5°C will be bad. But 1.6°C will be worse, and 1.7°C worse again. Every increase will bring more extreme weather, more loss of nature, more loss of land to the sea and more harm to humans.

If we stay over 1.5°C, we risk triggering climate tipping points – sudden shifts which cannot be undone on human timescales. These include the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting, the collapse of crucial heat-distributing currents in the Atlantic Ocean or the Amazon rainforest becoming a source of emissions.

Overshooting 1.5°C doesn’t mean it’s time to throw out the Paris Agreement. It’s not working fast enough, but it is working.

Solar power and electric vehicles have boomed and electrification has accelerated. Nations have cut emissions enough to avoid the worst climate futures of a 3°C rise or even higher. According to the Climate Action Tracker, the Paris Agreement has averted the equivalent of 1°C of warming. Rather than hitting 3.6°C by 2100, the world is on track for 2.6°C.

While this is progress, it is not enough. Global emissions are plateauing, but have still not begun to fall in earnest.

As damage from climate change mounts, leaders must do the work and begin rapidly cutting emissions to keep the goal of net-zero by 2050 alive.

To get temperatures back under 1.5°C, we will also need to pull gigatonnes of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere using tree planting and nature restoration. We may also need technological approaches such as rock weathering or ocean alkalinity enhancement, though these are not proven at scale and can come with other risks.

We are all in this together

It may seem as if climate action faces impossible headwinds, as populism surges and the current United States administration doubles down on fossil fuels.

It’s worth looking beyond these headlines. It took almost 70 years for the world to install a terawatt of solar power, but then just two years for the second and another two for the third terawatt. In ten years, that figure will likely have tripled. Developing nations are moving rapidly to take up non-polluting electric transport.

Climate change can no longer be ignored. As damage mounts, nations will have to cooperate to cut emissions as rapidly as possible and figure out how to safely and equitably pull carbon back out of the atmosphere. Action depends on strong political will, inclusive governance, and finance to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt.

In November, Australia will lead negotiations at the next international climate summit, COP31, in Turkey. Leaders and diplomats will work to keep 1.5°C in reach – even after overshoot. Australia can point to its own rapid clean energy transition and urge others to set clear pathways to go electric – and wean themselves off the production and use of fossil fuels.

Climate change has been described as a super wicked problem – big, complex and impossible to solve simply. The solution is to see the urgency of the issue and act cooperatively to tackle it. If we make it a problem for the next generation, there may be no way back to a safe climate.

Jacqueline Peel, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne and Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW

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

Even as unprecedented fires and heatwaves rage across Europe, scientists track the retreat of Antarctic sea ice and a supercharged El Niño system heads our way, Australia’s largest companies are forecasting business-as-usual in a much hotter world.

Last year, Australia introduced mandatory company climate reporting. They must now disclose the climate “risks and opportunities” that may affect their prospects.

Several of Australia’s biggest energy and resource companies have now published new sustainability reports as part of annual financial reporting.

Their disclosures reveal the climate future they are planning for, and whether this is aligned with international science-based targets such as the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C warming threshold.

What we’re seeing is alarming.

Companies planning for an unbearable future

Most of these reports indicate big companies are developing strategies on a climate change “base case” – a representation of what they consider most likely to happen – of more than 2°C of warming. The future temperature rise they’re planning for is one scientists say would deliver an unbearably hot planet.

Some of Australia’s largest miners have followed this approach. Both Rio Tinto and BHP expect global temperature increases of more than 2°C by the end of the century.

Not every company reveals the increase in global temperature they are planning for. But even if they don’t, their disclosures show they’re not expecting temperatures to hold to 1.5°C.

Energy companies AGL and Origin Energy both express confidence their strategies and business models will remain robust, even if temperatures accelerate beyond 2.6°C warming. This increase would put the Australian economy, environment and community at severe risk.

Companies hold power

Companies often argue that governments are responsible for creating policy to address global warming. But this underestimates the power corporate leaders hold to shape Australia’s shared climate future through financial decisions.

For example, mining giant BHP expects demand for steelmaking coal to remain robust for decades, with customers from China, India and Southeast Asia. This underpins the valuation of its major export commodities, and appears to justify the lack of plans to scale down steelmaking coal production. However, this assumption sits uneasily with the fact these same countries have their own net-zero targets.

Similarly, Rio Tinto confirms “no portfolio adjustments” are made to its future production plans. Its central case estimate of 2.1–2.3°C of warming by 2100 assumes developing countries will miss or delay their stated net-zero targets, underwriting business-as-usual production for the company.

Disclosures out of step with science

However, the assumption that business-as-usual will be possible in a hotter world is out of step with the latest science. The Paris Agreement’s temperature goal was set in 2015 based on exhaustive scientific assessments that warming of more than 2°C would be dangerous, and limiting warming to 1.5°C was necessary to minimise climate risks.

Scientific knowledge about how much global warming is “safe” has exponentially increased. It reemphasises the need to keep to 1.5°C with “limited overshoot”. This means we can only exceed 1.5°C temporarily, and simultaneously need to be working to bring temperatures back down. Only then will we minimise irreversible changes such as sea level rise, the disappearance of coral reefs or vast sea ice loss at the poles.

Scientific best estimates find we can’t go over 1.5°C by more than 0.1–0.3°C (a “peak temperature” of 1.6–1.8°C) and still return warming to safe levels. Even then, the longer we stay above 1.5°C and the extent to which we exceed this threshold, the more devastating the outcome.

Is this legal?

Legally, there’s no issue with companies using a base case for planning that exceeds 2°C of warming. But this approach isn’t in line with Australia’s broader international legal obligations. Companies will likely face increased investor scrutiny or reputational blowback when they walk back climate commitments.

In July 2025, the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), confirmed 1.5°C is the temperature limit countries are aiming for. To meet their Paris Agreement promises, governments — including Australia — have to show the most ambitious action the country can realistically take to help keep warming under 1.5°C. Australia’s latest plan for a 62–70% emissions cut from 2005 levels was submitted in September 2025.

The court confirmed the Paris Agreement also requires governments to take action at home to cut emissions in line with the 1.5°C goal — including introducing rules for businesses operating in their countries. To follow international law, the Australian government needs to use every tool available to regulate the emissions of big companies, based on the best available science. Countries that don’t comply could be sued before the ICJ and ordered to pay compensation to other nations.

What about Australia’s climate policy?

Big companies in Australia contribute more than 30% of our domestic emissions. If we also include emissions from the fossil fuels some of these companies produce, it raises Australia’s global carbon footprint to around 4.5% of global fossil carbon dioxide emissions, second only to Russia. Making sure big companies do their bit to reduce emissions is essential for Australia to meet its climate targets.

This year, Australia is the “President of Negotiations” for COP31. This is an opportunity for Australia to show it’s doing all it can – internationally and in its own backyard – to support compliance with the Paris Agreement and accelerate climate action. From their new disclosures, it doesn’t seem that Australia’s biggest companies have got the memo.

Jacqueline Peel, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne; Nina Araneta-Alana, Research fellow, Laureate Program on Global Corporate Climate Accountability, The University of Melbourne, and Suzanne Varrall, Research Fellow, Laureate Program on Global Corporate Climate Accountability, The University of Melbourne

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

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is in Palau’s capital Koror this week for the annual Pacific Islands Forum, and regional security is expected to top the agenda.

China is testing nuclear-capable missiles in the Pacific, prompting talk of a new regional agreement. The United States-Iran war has exposed a reliance on costly fossil fuels that is undermining Pacific economies.

And as the world comes perilously close to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature goal, a record-breaking El Nino looms in the Pacific Ocean.

But the forum will be missing key leaders – Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale made a shock departure, flying out of Palau just hours after arriving, in order to deal with a looming leadership challenge back home.

And Kiribati President Taneti Maamau, Samoan Prime Minister Laʻauli Leuatea Schmidt, and Vanuatu’s prime minister, Jotham Napat, are also not attending. It is unclear if Fiji’s prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, will be present.

Pacific nations will want Albanese to address the world’s key security threat – climate change. As co-president of the COP31 climate talks in November, Australia can work with the Pacific to keep 1.5°C within reach, and secure much-needed finance for island nations at the climate frontline.

China’s missile test

Since the second world war, the United States has maintained fortified bases in the Pacific and an unrivalled deep-water navy (the US also regularly tests long-range missiles in the region). However, China’s investment in military capabilities has challenged the status quo.

In July, China launched a nuclear-capable test missile that flew over multiple Pacific nations and hit waters close to Tuvalu’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

This sparked calls for a new regional security agreement: Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale said China’s missile test was “not the act of a friend”.

Ironically, it was Solomons Islands that signed a security deal with China in 2022. This changed the security dynamics of a region long aligned with the US and Australia (notwithstanding concerns about nuclear testing and decolonisation).

Since then, Canberra has pursued a web of bilateral deals to shore up Australia’s place as Pacific security partner – first with Tuvalu (2023), then Naoero (formerly Nauru) (2024), Papua New Guinea (2025) and Vanuatu (2026). Discussions are ongoing with Tonga and Solomon Islands. The most recent agreement, an “Ocean of Peace Alliance” signed with Fiji in July, is a mutual defence pact that is open to other Pacific nations to join.

Canberra was already pursuing a treaty allowing for coordinated regional responses to disasters and other crises. China’s missile test may have opened the door for something more.

Renewables the solution to fuel crisis

The Middle East conflict has pushed the Pacific toward an energy crisis. Around 80% of the region’s energy relies on imported oil products, much of which would normally transit the Strait of Hormuz. Even before the US-Iran war, Pacific island countries spent an eye watering percentage of GDP (between 10-25% buying fossil fuels to run power plants, generators, boats and vehicles. This compares to a regional average of 8% spent on education and 6% on health.

The Middle East conflict has only added to the bill. According to a new report, Fiji’s annual refined fuel import costs could rise by US$375 million (A$520 million) if high oil prices persist. This is more than Fiji’s entire healthcare budget.

Renewable energy offers a clear solution. Replacing diesel generators with grid-scale solar and battery storage could save Pacific countries around US$700 million (A$520 million) each year in avoided fuel costs.

The incoming chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Palau president Surangel Whipps Jr, wants the region to become the first in the world 100% powered by renewables. He says investment of US$120 million (A$ 166 million) is needed for Palau to add 60MW of solar and battery storage, which would enable 90% of its power needs to be met by renewables.

Climate change remains greatest Pacific threat

When climate change was first debated at the UN Security Council in 2007, Pacific countries argued the impacts of a warming planet were “no less serious than those faced by nations and peoples threatened by guns and bombs”.

Since then, Pacific Islands Forum leaders have explicitly reaffirmed climate change is “the single greatest threat” to Pacific security.

In 2025, Earth was 1.44°C warmer than the long-term average. Pacific countries are reeling from stronger cyclones, dying reefs and ocean acidification. Without urgent action to shift away from coal, oil and gas impacts will get much worse. Just this week, the world’s oceans are the warmest on record, fueled by climate change and a rapidly intensifying El Niño event.

It is now almost certain the world will warm past 1.5°C. Yet it remains possible, following a temporary “overshoot”, that countries can limit warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century. This will require deep and immediate emissions reductions and some carbon dioxide removal to achieve “net-negative” emissions.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C is a line in the sand for low-lying Pacific nations – “1.5 to stay alive” is the slogan. Pacific negotiators helped secure this temperature goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Pacific nations expect Australia, as co-president of COP31 climate talks in November, to reaffirm global commitment to 1.5°C. Australia is helping Fiji and Tuvalu host a pre-COP summit in October that will remind world leaders the survival of island nations is at stake.

Pacific countries will also seek new finance for a Pacific-owned climate fund to invest in community-scale adaptation projects.

Some argue collaboration with the Pacific in the lead-up to COP31 is an expensive exercise. But climate action is crucial to Australian strategy in the region. Investing in renewables and adaptation in the Pacific is an investment in shared security, even as geopolitical competition sharpens between China and the United States.

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

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

In July 2026, more than 200 community members gathered at Mandoon Bilya (Helena River) in Perth’s eastern suburbs. They planted more than 3,000 native flora as part of a wetland restoration project. The hopeful scene was a stark contrast to what the river might have become.

Until recently, Mandoon Bilya was the proposed site of a hyperscale artificial intelligence (AI) data centre. It was scheduled to be one of Australia’s biggest. Aboriginal groups, environmental activists and local community groups successfully opposed the development.

Instead of a 120-megawatt AI facility, the area is now focused on ecological restoration and protecting Country. Community groups are working to realise new visions of the river’s future.

Yet the Mandoon Bilya opposition is about more than one defeated development proposal. As AI drives demand for new facilities, data centres are expected to proliferate across Australia.

The campaign highlights an urgent policy challenge. Policymakers have focused on regulating AI technologies. Yet Aboriginal communities have had little say in AI infrastructure planning.

This includes participating in decisions about the resources and infrastructure on which AI technologies depend. Decisions made now could shape Indigenous relations with the government around AI for years to come.

The case of Mandoon Bilya

Restoration work at Mandoon Bilya follows a hard-fought campaign. It was led by the Bibbul Ngarma Aboriginal Association and supported by environmental and community groups.

Developers planned the project on land containing Aboriginal heritage sites. Opponents argued the proposed data centre threatened a river system with cultural connections for local Aboriginal groups. The river also supports Perth’s drinking water and local ecosystems during warmer months.

All this raised concerns about adequate free, prior and informed consent and impacts on Country.

In May 2026, the proposal was cancelled before being considered by Western Australia’s Development Assessment Panel. Campaigners widely praised the decision. They have since shifted their focus towards broader ecological restoration plans.

The need for Indigenous leadership

Mandoon Bilya isn’t an isolated case; similar debates are emerging elsewhere in Australia. In Victoria, opposition to a proposed AI Hub has raised concerns about cultural heritage and environmental impacts.

AI is often talked about as something virtual. Yet it depends heavily on physical resources: land, water and energy. Data centres use large amounts of all three, creating environmental pressures familiar to many Aboriginal communities.

Internationally, on Turtle Island (what some local First Nations peoples call North America), Indigenous communities are also challenging proposed data centres. They argue such infrastructures compromise Indigenous rights, culturally significant sites and water systems. Such challenges underscore principles echoed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

More people now recognise the importance of Indigenous leadership in data and digital technologies. We see this, for example, in commitments to Indigenous data sovereignty. This means Indigenous people get to own and control access to their data.

Indigenous leadership should also be central to decisions about the physical systems that make AI possible.

Towards working together

Some projects have begun to incorporate Indigenous participation and ownership. Western Australia’s largest data centre is pursued through an Indigenous Land Use Agreement with the Karajarri People. They are also co-owners of the project.

In the Northern Territory, Energy North has stated it is engaging with Traditional Owners. This consultation is part of the assessment process for its proposed hyperscale data centre.

Yet such examples remain the exception. While Australia is regulating AI infrastructure, few policies require Aboriginal leadership in decision-making.

Kaley Nicholson, chief executive of the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations, confirms this. She argues current government expectations for data centres represent “an investment failure”. Such efforts don’t reference collaboration with Traditional Owner groups, despite lasting impacts on Country.

This raises an ongoing and crucial question. Who gets to decide about digital systems that directly impact Indigenous lands, rights and livelihoods?

Not just AI

Conflicts over AI infrastructure echo longstanding debates about resource extraction in Australia. Aboriginal peoples have long been excluded from decisions about such developments on or near their Country. However, they often bear the environmental, cultural, social and personal impacts.

Our own research with Aboriginal communities examines their experiences of agreements with the resource industry. It suggests consultation processes don’t always translate into meaningful influence. Communities often shoulder the work of engagement, negotiation and compliance, while key decisions are made elsewhere.

Agreements don’t always lead to better outcomes given the costs and challenges of culturally sensitive, meaningful participation. Participating in agreements requires a lot of time and unpaid work. This includes coordinating community members to translate complex legal documents.

This work often falls on Elders and leaders, who bear logistical and administrative burdens. As AI systems expand, the challenge is ensuring that partnership isn’t burdensome and is more than box-ticking.

The time to act is now

Right now is the time to shape how Australia involves Indigenous peoples into AI development policies – before detrimental practices are locked in.

Consultation alone is not enough. Aboriginal people must have a seat at the table and be included before concept design to inform better outcomes for all. Aboriginal communities should have formal and resourced roles in decisions about land access, approvals and ownership.

It’s not too late to embed meaningful Indigenous leadership and governance in our AI development policies, but we must act now.

Jenna Imad Harb, Research Fellow, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University and Shanine Ryan, Ngarluma Traditional Owner, Director of the Ngarluma Yindjibarndi Foundation Limited, Indigenous Knowledge

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

On the morning of August 26, a section of mountain near Langtang Lirung peak in Nepal suddenly collapsed.

A huge mass of rock, ice and debris plunged roughly 1,200 metres into the valley below, producing a hugely destructive flood on the Lhende Khola river. The flow travelled almost 100 kilometres downstream, washing villages and bridges away. Almost 1,000 people died and thousands more are still missing across the Nepal-China border.

What caused it? At first, it looked like a glacier collapse. But emerging satellite and photographic evidence suggests a more complex picture – an avalanche of rock and ice, rather than a simple glacier collapse.

The mountain face now has a sharply defined scar after the collapse, clearly marking the boundary between the remaining slope and the section which failed.

This isn’t the first rock-ice avalanche in the Himalayas, but it is by far the most devastating. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be the last. Rising temperatures due to climate change mean the permanently frozen slopes of mountains in the region may begin to melt and destabilise.

How did a mountain collapse?

The steep mountain face was topped by a glacier – a heavy river of ice. It’s likely that the steep slope of bedrock collapsed first, followed by the overhang of ice.

As this enormous mass fell into the valley, it created a tremendous amount of energy. This would likely have melted the ice in the avalanche and any in the valley, adding large volumes of faster-moving water to the flow and intensifying the debris flood.

The rugged Himalayan terrain made the disaster even worse by providing a steep, confined pathway, accelerating the mass of water, rock, dirt and ice as it flowed into the river.

A landslide followed the first collapse and a small lake has formed within the newly created depression in the valley. The site will remain unstable for some time.

Now that we know more about how the Langtang collapse became a cascading disaster, we can find parallels.

The closest example is the February 2021 rock-ice avalanche in Chamoli, India, which began when a huge landslide down Ronti Peak triggered an avalanche carrying an estimated 27 million cubic metres of rock and ice. This became a fast-moving debris flowing down a river valley. Over 200 people were killed or left missing.

The high mountains are changing

The Himalayas are the best known feature of the High Mountain Asia region – a large area with an average elevation of 4,000 metres which includes mountain ranges and the Tibetan plateau.

Despite its height, the region is not safe from climate change. In fact, change is happening faster here.

As air temperatures warm past 0°C more often, glaciers are beginning to melt. Snow and rainfall patterns are changing.

Permafrost – long-frozen earth and rock – is also becoming vulnerable. This matters most for steep mountain slopes, where fractured rock can be held together by ice.

When the ice melts, these ice-rock bonds can break. Water can begin to move down through long-frozen mountain slopes and bedrock. That means long-stable slopes can suddenly fail.

It’s common to picture glaciers as a slow-moving river of ice in a valley. But this high region is home to many hanging glaciers and smaller ice masses perched on steep mountain slopes.

These are at particular risk because they often sit high above valleys. If their rock support collapses, they can too. If they take rock, sediment and water with them, a simple glacial collapse can become a much larger avalanche or debris flow.

As the climate heats up, warmer air can lead to faster melting of the glacier and change how tightly it is coupled to its rocky bed. A small change in conditions at the glacier’s base can make it unstable.

Which areas are at highest risk?

Predicting the next big mountain or glacier collapse is a very complex task.

But we can improve our understanding of the landscapes and environmental conditions associated with such failures. Recent analysis of large rock and ice avalanches across the High Mountain Asia region gives us important insight.

Of the 60 avalanches analysed, 86% began on slopes steeper than 30° and at elevations above 3,000 metres. Almost two-thirds (65%) began in areas where permafrost was probable.

Earthquakes, underlying rock types and structures, and changes to rainfall can also make these avalanches more likely.

Across this region, rock–ice avalanches have been documented to occur more often in the Western Himalayas, including the Karakoram and Pamir Ranges, and across southern and eastern Tibet.

We will need to treat these rock-ice avalanches as a cascading hazard separate to isolated glacier collapses or landslides.

Could we be forewarned?

Footage from the disaster shows many people were caught unaware. If we could predict which glaciers or mountain faces are at highest risk, we could potentially save lives.

It is not an easy task. Signs a collapse is imminent such as rock deformation or fractures can often be subtle.

One approach could be combining field observations and seismic monitoring with data from satellites equipped with sensors able to observe changes in mountain faces and make optical and thermal infrared observations. New techniques such as the use of drones to monitor inaccessible or dangerous terrain are also worth exploring.

Observations must feed into early-warning systems capable of rapidly communicating the danger to communities downstream.

Because many Himalayan rivers cross national boundaries, nations will have to work together to strengthen data sharing, joint monitoring and coordinated early-warning systems.

The task is increasingly urgent. Climate change is loading the dice for more disasters in this high, cold region.

Tirthankar Ghosh, Doctoral Student, School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University and Levan Tielidze, Research Fellow in Glacial Geomorphology, Monash University

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

Australia’s energy transition has never been more urgent.

Aging coal-fired power stations are retiring and energy bills are rising sharply. To address this, the obvious solution is to build more renewable energy projects and the transmission infrastructure to connect them at scale.

But a major hurdle remains: community opposition. In regional areas, where most of the renewable infrastructure must go, locals are protesting against new transmission lines and are locking farm gates to keep developers off their property.

However, regional communities should not be forced to choose between supporting the national energy transition and protecting their land and livelihoods.

Our new research suggests we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of querying “if” communities support renewable energy, we should be asking “under what conditions” will they back such projects.

Not simply for or against

Our new study took a closer look at how three regional Western Australian communities – Busselton, Kojonup and Albany – view renewable energy infrastructure.

To do this, we analysed online discussions about solar and wind projects slated for their communities, each at different stages of development. The online discussions took place from January 2024 to May 2025 across a range of platforms, including Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), as well as relevant local and regional media websites, newspapers, community forums and online noticeboards.

Our results challenge the assumption that communities can simply be divided into those who are “for” clean energy and those who are adamantly “against” it.

In Busselton on WA’s south-west tip, renewable projects are still in the planning stage. There, local residents were most concerned about land use, property values and the visual appeal of landscapes. Many residents raised consultation as a key issue, with some expressing the view consultation came too late or did not give residents any opportunity to influence the outcome.

In the inland town of Kojonup, south-east of Perth, the Kojonup wind farm is currently being rolled out. This community’s concerns were decidedly practical: who actually gets the jobs? Who receives the financial benefits? Who bears any disruptions, such as visual disruption and lower property values? Financial fairness was a major concern for locals, with some landowners receiving benefits such as local investment opportunities while their neighbours got nothing except interrupted views.

The port city of Albany has been home to working wind farms for more than two decades. Here, the picture is very different. Albany’s wind farm supplies the equivalent of 80% of the city’s annual electricity needs and attracts an estimated 200,000 visitors a year. Community sentiment was largely positive, associating the wind farm with various environmental benefits including reduced reliance on coal and gas, as well as tourism and regional identity.

It’s worth noting not every host community will embrace renewable energy in such a linear pattern. However, our findings suggest community support is not necessarily fixed and can change over time as a project progresses.

Lessons from abroad

Overseas, other countries are already trialling ways of giving host communities a more tangible stake in the renewable energy shift.

Since 2014, the Scottish government recommends wind developers pay a minimum of £5,000 (roughly A$9500) annually for each megawatt of power a renewable project generates.

These payments are channelled into community funds, where a local committee decides how the funds are spent. If a project stretches across multiple regions, the funds are split based on how many megawatts of power each community hosts. However, these payments are not mandatory so not all renewable companies are contributing to community funds.

In Denmark, a global leader in wind energy development, several communities have established energy cooperatives. While each has a slightly different model, these cooperatives allow residents to own a share of renewable energy projects and, as a result, actively engage in the green transition.

Where to from here

These international examples underscore the need to engage with host communities in innovative and thoughtful ways.

Our research suggests these three strategies could help:

1. recognising that if people resist local solar and wind projects, they are not simply “anti-renewables”

2. engaging communities early, listening to their concerns about proposed renewable projects, involving them in decision-making processes and providing clear, transparent information about how any risks will be managed and benefits will be shared

3. monitoring online discussions, particularly to identify emerging concerns before they become entrenched as opposition and potentially fracture trust between communities, government and renewables companies.

Australia, like many countries, is racing to shore up its renewable sector and shift away from fossil fuels. We must build more wind turbines and solar farms. But to ensure our energy transition works, building trust with local communities is just as crucial.

Mingming Cheng, Professor, School of Management and Marketing, Curtin University and Peta Ashworth, Professor and Director, Curtin Institute for Energy Transition, Curtin University

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

The color of penguin poop, as seen from space, is offering a new window into how the ecology and the environment of Antarctica are changing over time.

Adélie penguins are one of the most abundant predators in the Southern Ocean. They rely on food sources in the ocean, but nest on rocky outcrops all around the Antarctic continent.

Penguin colonies often have hundreds of thousands of nesting birds, which generate a lot of guano – so much so that it can be readily identified from space, using NASA’s Landsat satellites.

A multidisciplinary group of scholars that I led has used thousands of satellite images dating as far back as the 1980s to examine these patches of penguin guano, to reveal what these birds are eating and how changes in the environment are affecting their diets – which also affect their survival.

In particular, we found that when there is an abundance of sea ice at a colony, Adélie penguins there tend to rely more on small fish. When there is less sea ice, they depend more on krill, which are small shrimplike crustaceans.

The color of food

Krill have a pink exoskeleton that penguins don’t fully digest, which contributes a rosy shade of pink to their guano. It is the color of guano that we can use to determine what penguins are eating.

This approach relies on a quantitative approach we developed that examines guano color and links that to the share of a penguin’s diet that is krill.

To develop the linkage, we collected penguin guano at several locations. With a spectrometer, we determined the color of each sample as a satellite would see it. This was done in a small makeshift lab on a ship in the Antarctic, which likely smells of penguin guano to this day. We analyzed what was in this guano, using tools from environmental chemistry, to determine the diet that had generated that color of guano.

That information, along with some statistical modeling, allowed us to determine what penguins are eating based on the color of their guano as observed from satellites. More broadly, it provides a window into what is happening in the larger Antarctic marine food web – information typically hidden under the surface of the Southern Ocean. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to directly monitor what animals are eating from space.

Using information from around 4,000 satellite images, we looked at how penguins’ diets varied over both time and space. We found that penguins do eat different things across the Antarctic continent, and that what they eat varies both across the year as well as from one year to the next.

Links between sea ice, food webs and penguin populations

Our data reveals how climate change is shifting penguins’ diets and how the Antarctic food web as a whole is changing.

Since the 2010s, sea ice has declined precipitously around the continent, with several years setting new historical sea ice minimums. Less sea ice means fewer fish, which is bad news for penguins: Adélie penguin chicks are typically heavier when fed fish as opposed to krill, and heavier chicks are more likely to survive into adulthood.

Our findings indicate that in locations where penguins eat less fish, the number of penguins has declined over the past few decades across the species’ entire range. By contrast, penguin colonies that eat more fish are more likely to be stable or increasing.

Unfortunately, large-scale declines in sea ice are projected to continue into the future. Adélie penguins are also now facing increased competition for fish and krill from other marine life and from humans.

For example, in the Antarctic Peninsula region, the area directly below South America, baleen whale populations, which feed largely on krill, have rebounded substantially since the end of commercial whaling decades ago. Gentoo penguins are shifting their range from the sub-Antarctic southward to the Antarctic as the climate warms, adding to the numbers of predators hunting in those waters.

Fishing trawlers are also now harvesting large quantities of krill to be used in fish feed and human dietary supplements, which may put additional pressures on Adélie penguins in these regions.

The power of big data

Only by using thousands of satellite images could our research team understand how Adélie penguins’ diets vary across the range of the species, how it shifts over the seasons, and how it is responding to a changing environment over the past several decades.

Information from satellites is particularly valuable for remote and hard-to-reach areas like Antarctica’s penguin colonies, as other methods of collecting this data would take massive amounts of personnel, planning and travel and survival logistics.

As satellite technologies continue to improve, with increasing resolution, shorter intervals between images and new sensors for collecting information, there are opportunities to fundamentally change how we monitor some wildlife, providing critical information about how the world is changing and how humanity might respond to these changes.

Casey Youngflesh, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Clemson University

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

When a wildfire threatens a community, most people don’t think to ask whether the firefighters coming to help slept enough the night before, recovered from the previous day’s shift or have enough energy left for another day on the fire line. They simply expect firefighters to show up.

But that workforce is increasingly being stretched to its limits.

The U.S. national fire preparedness level has been at 5 for weeks in summer 2026, its highest level, suggesting firefighting resources are fully committed and some regions may need emergency staffing measures to meet the demand. Crews were battling more than 90 large fires in late August, and firefighters in the Southwest and Texas faced daytime temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celius) at times.

In conditions like this, the unrelenting heat, stress and smoke take a toll on firefighters’ bodies.

Training, fitness and protective equipment allow firefighters to work in these extraordinary environments. But as a nurse practitioner, firefighter and founder of Purdue University’s FIRE Lab, I know too well that none of that makes the human body’s capabilities limitless.

Heat hits firefighters from 3 directions

Wildland firefighters face heat from the environment, the fire and their own bodies.

Hiking steep terrain with heavy equipment, clearing brush and cutting fire line to stop fires from spreading creates internal metabolic heat. Sun and high air temperatures add environmental heat, while flames and smoldering fuels contribute radiant heat.

The body responds by sending more blood toward the skin to release that heat while continuing to supply oxygen to working muscles. The heart works harder to support both jobs.

As fluid losses increase, the volume of blood circulating through the body can fall, the heart rate rises, and the work of fighting fires feels harder.

Field studies show how this strain can become severe. In one study of 221 wildland firefighters on the job, 61% reached a core temperature of at least 100 F (38 C). About 50% reached a physiological strain index of 6 or greater on a 0-to-10 scale that combines heart rate and core temperature to measure how hard the body is working to cope with heat. Among those whose body temperatures crossed 100 F, the majority remained above that temperature for more than 30 minutes.

A core temperature of 100 F does not by itself mean heat stroke, but it signals substantial physiological strain. Staying hydrated helps the body sweat and keep blood circulating, but even a fully hydrated firefighter can overheat when the body gains and produces heat faster than it can release it.

Immediate consequences can develop quickly

Heat strain may begin with fatigue, headache, dizziness, weakness or nausea and progress to heat exhaustion or heat stroke. Severe hyperthermia can affect the brain, heart, kidneys and liver.

Wildland firefighters can also face rhabdomyolysis, a breakdown of skeletal muscle that can contribute to kidney injury. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported 62 severe cases among wildland firefighters from 2010 to 2020 and cautioned that the true number was probably higher.

Heat adds to fatigue when firefighters must anticipate fire behavior and make rapid decisions.

A 2025 field study found that wildland firefighters averaged 13.8-hour shifts on days when they were fighting fires and got around 6.7 hours of sleep. Poorer sleep and longer shifts were associated with reduced cognitive function, which can affect a firefighter’s ability to make split-second calls, such as when to retreat from an escalating fire.

Effects stay with bodies beyond one shift

The effects of heat and exhaustion can also add up. A firefighter can finish a shift hot, smoke-exposed and physically depleted, sleep in a warm camp and return to the line before fully recovering. Repeating that pattern across days and fire seasons may place ongoing strain on the heart, lungs and kidneys.

Smoke adds another health risk. Wildland firefighters commonly work in smoke without the kind of protection that firefighters use when fighting blazes inside buildings.

A 2019 exposure-modeling study estimated that, depending on the number of fire days worked over a career, cumulative smoke exposure could increase a wildland firefighter’s risk of dying from lung cancer by 8% to 43% and dying from cardiovascular disease by 16% to 30%. These are estimates, but they show why career-long exposure deserves attention.

Kidney health is another emerging concern. A 2025 study of 39 wildland firefighters found temporary decreases in kidney function and changes in kidney-injury biomarkers during one midseason fire incident. More research is needed to determine whether firefighting over seasons and years can lead to persistent kidney damage.

These findings raise an important occupational health question: What happens when heat, dehydration, smoke, sleep disruption and extreme physical exertion accumulate not only across one incident but across an entire career?

How to lower the risk

The heat isn’t going away, but there are ways wildfire management agencies can reduce the risk to firefighters.

First, firefighter health should be an important part of national wildfire readiness policies. Having adequate staffing so firefighters aren’t overworked and have meaningful enough recovery time to rehydrate, cool down and sleep between shifts are important. So are conditions that allow real sleep between shifts.

Monitoring firefighters’ health can also help catch early warning signs, such as kidney stress or burnout.

The public can also help by reducing the likelihood of high-stress fire situations.

The National Interagency Fire Center estimates that about 85% of U.S. wildfires are caused by human activities. Some of those can be avoided by fully extinguishing campfires, checking local fire restrictions, avoiding spark-producing activities on dry, windy days when fire risk is high, and maintaining vehicles and trailers so metal does not drag and ignite vegetation.

If you live in wildfire-prone country, creating defensible space and reducing combustible material around your home can reduce the fuel for fires. Evacuating promptly in an emergency also reduces the likelihood firefighters will have to put themselves in high-stress situations to rescue you.

We all expect firefighters to be there when the worst happens. Making sure they can do their jobs and stay healthy will allow them to continue to show up.

Julian L. Gallegos, Assistant Professor of Nursing, Purdue University

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

Temperatures have warmed dramatically across the equatorial Pacific Ocean in 2026, signaling the onset of a strong and potentially historic El Niño. These events can affect weather around the world, and the intensity of recent El Niño events is raising alarm that, as global temperatures rise, they are becoming stronger and more destructive.

To understand how these climate patterns are changing, we need to understand what happened during El Niño events in the past, but observations go back only a few decades. So, my colleagues and I went to the Galápagos Islands – at the heart of the El Niño pattern – to find answers from some of nature’s best record keepers: corals.

In records preserved by living and ancient fossil corals, we found that, on average, El Niño events have been stronger in the past 40 years than at any time in the past millennium, with higher temperatures that lead to more powerful effects on weather.

That intensification also coincides with human-caused global warming.

Our results, just published in the journal Science, suggest that the 1982-83 and 1997-98 El Niños – two of the strongest in recent memory – may be harbingers of more extreme events to come as the planet warms.

El Niño comes for the Galapagos

One of the strongest El Niños hit in 1982, with devastating consequences for the Galápagos Islands. It triggered a marine heat wave that reverberated through one of the most distinctive and unspoiled ecosystems on the planet.

Exceptionally warm surface water blocked the usual upwelling of cool, nutrient-rich water that fuels the food chain for marine life. The result ravaged communities that rely on the ocean – fish, birds, marine mammals, and people who fish for their livelihoods throughout the eastern tropical Pacific. In the extraordinary heat, more than 95% of Galápagos corals died.

The heat wave was caused by an exceptionally strong El Niño event, part of a climate pattern that begins in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, around the Galápagos Islands, as the trade winds shift. El Niño’s warm ocean water alters the atmospheric circulation above, diverting storm tracks and changing patterns of floods, droughts and tropical storms around the globe.

The 1982-83 El Niño contributed to climate extremes worldwide, from flooding in Kenya and Peru to drought in Indonesia and Brazil, costing the global economy as much as US$4 trillion by some estimates. A similarly strong El Niño in 1997-98 resulted in 23,000 deaths from disease and climate disasters.

But we wanted to know: Are such powerful El Niño events unusual in the context of history?

Even in 1983, scientists were surprised to find that such a strong event had been underway. Historical records of El Niño are sparse before the era of satellite observations. Fortunately, long-lived corals growing in the tropical Pacific can provide a history of El Niño that extends our view into the past.

How corals record history

As corals grow, they preserve a record of local ocean temperatures over time. In the Galápagos, because of their location, that record reveals the history of El Niño events and of their cooler counterpart, La Niña.

Like trees that produce annual growth rings, corals add skeletal layers of calcium carbonate year after year. The alternating bands of higher and lower density reveal changes in the coral’s growth rate during each year and can serve as a timekeeper. The history of the ocean temperature is embedded in the chemical composition of the skeleton itself.

To track the history of water temperatures, we measured two chemical parameters – the ratio of heavy to light oxygen isotopes and the ratio of strontium to calcium – both of which reflect the seawater temperature in which the coral grew.

In the Galápagos, because of the islands’ location, the sea surface temperature swings between warm El Niño years and colder La Niña years, when upwelling of nutrients is stronger.

The largest living corals in the Galápagos grow in the northern islands of Wolf and Darwin, in water 20 to 50 feet deep. To study their history, we dived down and took core samples from long-lived corals, some 8 to 10 feet tall.

Every core we drilled from a living coral showed evidence in its calcified skeleton that the coral had suffered during the 1982-83 El Niño event. We saw obvious “death horizons” – dense layers of calcified material produced by other reef organisms such as algae, gastropods and barnacles interrupting the lattice of the skeleton.

We also took samples of fossil corals around the archipelago – mostly dead coral boulders found along the islands’ shorelines. Radiometric dating told us that these fossil corals were up to 4,500 years old. Those samples provide an even deeper view of El Niño’s history.

Back in the lab, we sliced the coral cores lengthwise into slabs and used a drill to extract powdered samples, each representing about one month’s growth, along a path from youngest to oldest. We analyzed the geochemistry of each sample. In the chemical ratios from thousands of samples, we found seasonal cycles spanning many decades and exceptional warm and cold years that revealed a unique history of El Niño and La Niña events.

A history of ENSO through time emerges

Our data show clearly that the strength of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation has intensified as global temperatures have warmed.

The chemistry of the corals revealed that El Niño events from the past 40 years were stronger than at any other time sampled in the past millennium.

The coral data aligns with ocean temperatures measured from thermometers over the past century. But the coral records extend much further back in time, providing long-term context to show that modern El Niño events are more extreme than before the industrial era began.

The El Niño intensification we observed, starting in the mid- to late 20th century, is also greater than what nearly all climate models suggest would result from natural causes. It appears to be closely connected to human-caused global warming – a conclusion in line with expectations from most climate models.

Not all models anticipate El Niños strengthening as the climate warms, but our data shows that unusual strengthening has accompanied recent warming – an association that may allow scientists to identify models that most closely track observations.

Looking ahead

A stronger El Niño-Southern Oscillation means more intense and damaging climate extremes across the globe. If humanity can anticipate those hazards, we can prepare and perhaps avoid the worst damage.

Fortunately, scientists understand enough about El Niño and La Niña events today to be able to forecast them up to a year in advance. But such predictions depend on continuous, careful climate measurements from satellites and buoys across the remote tropical Pacific, coupled with continuous improvements in climate modeling and forecasting capabilities.

Those capabilities are now more important than ever as global warming accelerates.

Julia Cole, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Michigan

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

The massive January 2022 eruption of Hunga volcano in the Kingdom of Tonga took the world by surprise.

It blasted a plume more than 50km into the atmosphere, sent pressure waves around the globe and generated a series of tsunamis, devastating parts of Tonga and killing at least three people.

But one of the most important things we’ve learned since this historic event is that these tsunamis did not all stem from the same cause.

The first were generated by enormous explosions during the opening stages of the eruption. On nearby Tongatapu, waves with run-ups of one to four metres began arriving within minutes.

Then, more than an hour later, something much more destructive happened. A tsunami with run-ups reaching 18 to 40 metres struck islands within 100km of Hunga, destroying resorts and villages across southern and central Tonga.

Our newly published research shows this largest tsunami was generated not by another explosion, but by the sudden collapse of the volcano’s caldera – and that the collapse produced an underwater sound detectable thousands of kilometres away.

That finding could point to a new way of warning communities about some of the most unpredictable types of tsunamis on Earth.

Listening to an underwater volcano

Monitoring submarine volcanoes is notoriously difficult. There are hundreds scattered around the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, yet we know relatively little about their state of activity – and even less about how to respond when they erupt.

Satellites can detect changes in heat and gas emissions, along with eruption plumes when clouds don’t obscure the view. These observations can provide timely warnings of eruptions and help protect aircraft.

But satellites cannot tell us whether a deadly tsunami is on its way. Nor are conventional seismometers necessarily much help.

The closest seismometer to Hunga during the 2022 eruption was in Fiji, about 750km away. At that distance, many of the seismic signals produced by volcanic processes are poorly transmitted through the Earth.

So instead, we listened to what Hunga was doing in the ocean.

Underwater sound travels extremely efficiently over long distances as hydro-acoustic signals known as tertiary waves, or T-waves. An isolated volcano rising from the ocean floor can effectively act like a bell, radiating the sounds of violent underwater processes through the surrounding ocean.

We re-analysed records from 14 seismic stations around the southwest Pacific, some as far as 2,600km from Hunga.

During the first hour of the eruption, we could “hear” submarine landslide flows racing down the volcano’s flanks. These flows were powerful enough to destroy submarine communications cables and their acoustic signals could be detected hundreds of kilometres away.

But the loudest underwater signal was still to come.

The sound of a volcano collapsing

At about 6.28pm Tonga time, the centre of Hunga began collapsing in on itself.

The collapse ultimately produced a caldera about 4km wide and more than 850 metres deep. Moving such an enormous volume of rock and seawater generated the largest local tsunami of the eruption.

Yet remarkably, the collapse was only weakly detected through conventional seismic monitoring.

Underwater, it was a different story. The collapse generated an enormous T-wave that radiated across the Pacific. We detected it at 14 stations, including sites more than 2,000km away.

The strongest part of the signal lasted about five minutes, giving us an indication of just how rapidly the main collapse occurred.

But to establish that this collapse had generated the devastating tsunami, we needed to know precisely when that wave reached Tonga. That required a rather different kind of evidence.

The tower that stopped transmitting

At Kanokupolu, on the western side of Tongatapu, a telecommunications tower stood 180 metres inland and about 13 metres above sea level.

The earlier tsunami had already swept ashore and residents had evacuated, but the tower remained standing. A weather station attached to it sent its last scheduled data transmission at 6pm.

Eventually, the much larger tsunami arrived. It flattened the tower and tore it apart, with pieces later found hundreds of metres further inland.

But exactly when had that happened?

Our team worked with Tonga Communications Corporation to examine data traffic through the tower. The answer was remarkably precise: communications stopped at 6:45:24pm.

That timestamp provided another piece of the puzzle. The huge underwater acoustic signal indicated Hunga’s caldera had begun collapsing at about 6.28pm.

The destruction of the tower roughly 17 minutes later was consistent with the time needed for the resulting tsunami to develop and travel across the roughly 60km separating Hunga from western Tongatapu.

Eyewitness accounts provided another check. People had experienced the earlier, smaller waves and had time to evacuate before the catastrophic tsunami arrived.

All of this evidence enabled us to reconstruct something that conventional seismic monitoring had largely missed: a sudden submarine caldera collapse that generated the eruption’s most destructive local tsunami.

Sound waves travel through the ocean at around 1.5km per second – more than seven times faster than a tsunami.

If monitoring systems can automatically recognise and locate these signals, they could provide early warning of volcanic tsunamis – much as existing systems do for those triggered by earthquakes.

Shane Cronin, Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau and Jose Carlos Borrero, Adjunct Assistant Research Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Southern California

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

Heatwaves claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in Europe’s capital cities this summer, as they experienced record temperatures.

In London, emergency wards filled with elderly patients injured after fainting in the heat. Meanwhile, the dry weather created subsidence and left homes with cracks.

In Paris temperatures exceeded 40°C in late June and people struggled to carry on their lives, and in Madrid, heatwaves burned thousands of hectares on the outskirts of the city.

How trees can help

Thami carried out preliminary research on the results of extreme heat on European cities this summer. The study looked into how many buildings have adequate shade from trees. The results were striking.

In London, Paris and Madrid over 90% of buildings did not have enough shade around them to prevent urban heat island effects. These were among the worst results in cities we studied, but even the best performers had a majority of residents without adequate heat protection – cities like Hamburg (56% unprotected) and Barcelona (70% unprotected).

This builds on past research that shows how major cities around the world – including in Europe – tend to struggle to reach useful levels of tree canopies to create shade close to homes and workplaces. It suggests that that homes should have a view of three trees and be within a 300 m walk of a park.

Early results for my research suggests that huge portions of European cities are exposed to avoidable heat island effects.

How urban heat islands work

On many days during summer 2026 it didn’t get much cooler in the evening. This is because of what is known as the urban heat island effect. Cities typically lack shade, due to high rates of tree removal, sparse planting, and poor tree health and there are vast amounts of asphalt, clay and concrete. These are almost the perfect materials to soak up and hold heat from all that direct sunshine. Unshaded asphalt can reach over 70°C on heatwave days.

Even after sunset, cities stay hot because roads, buildings and footpaths begin to radiate their absorbed heat back at us as they cool. The urban heat island effect can add significantly to ambient temperatures, making a day that is already very hot (perhaps 35°C) even more dangerous in high-asphalt, low shade locations (over 40°C).

What could help?

Tree shading is an effective strategy to address this urban heat, with a range of other mental and physical health benefits to local residents. Trees prevent solar radiation reaching heat-absorbing materials such as asphalt, and also keep the sun off our bodies. Tree shade has been shown to reduce the heat absorbed by pedestrians by up to 18°C.

Healthy trees also push water out of their leaves as they photosynthesise, which soaks up heat as it evaporates. This evaporative cooling effect adds an extra few degrees of cooling, in addition to shading people and preventing heat island effects, even during heatwaves as long as trees still have access to water.

Where trees are needed

Planting more trees in cities in the wake of this summer’s heatwaves is going to help cool urban areas down. The thinktank, the Create Streets Foundation, found the temperature on an exposed paved area in London during one heatwave was 55°C but was 25-30°C in a shaded area metres away.

Looking at a city such as London, you might argue that it already has plenty of trees: around 8 million.

But trees are only effective tools against urban heat when they’re close to homes. A lush shady park 800m away isn’t going to prevent dangerous localised heat island effects for you and your neighbours.

The other crucial factor is that there are thresholds of shade cover that have to be reached for trees to actually offer substantial cooling. A few isolated trees creating small islands of shade aren’t enough. Adding more tree canopy has been shown to be effective at preventing urban heat islands when it reaches 30-40% overall shade cover, within 60m of homes and workplaces.

It will also be important to plant trees that are best able to cope with increasingly hot temperatures in Europe.

Adding just a few degrees to an already hot day sharply ramps up the danger that heat poses. In locations where heat islands bump up the ambient air temperature from 33°C to 37°C, or 35°C to 41°C, there’s an increase in patients attending hospital admissions’ rooms due to heat related illness. When air temperature increases above 35°C the human body’s ability to manage the heat is greatly reduced; cardiovascular strain, dehydration, potentially leading to heatstroke and the need for medical intervention.

When it makes nights hotter there are other ramifications. It is during the cooler night hours that the body loses heat to reset for the following day. If the body is still trying to cope with warm temperatures, 24°C and above, this impacts recovery and impairs sleep quality. This means we start the next day in deficit, both physiologically and cognitively, to cope with another hot day. Repeated exposure to days of high heat mean that the deficit builds over time.

Adding more trees works

Medellin in Colombia is an example of what happens when more plants are added to urban streets.

In just a few years, millions of plants and over 12,500 trees were added to form a network of lush greenways across Colombia’s second largest city.

This project has resulted in significant drops in temperature (of 4.5°C in some areas, and 2°C citywide).

There are signs that Paris and London are aware they need to make changes. The recently announced Heat Ready London plan includes a focus on urban greening.

Paris is already starting to add more green space. The city’s school streets programme not only creates safe, car-free areas close to local schools, but also has added more trees. Evidence already suggests that surfaces in school streets are 5°C cooler than their traffic-heavy counterparts, with fewer trees.

As Europe prepares for more hot summers, planting trees close to homes needs to be high on the agenda to help people cope.

Thami Croeser, Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University and Simon Hodder, Professor in Environmental Ergonomics, Loughborough University

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

Freely available satellite radar imaging is being used for the first time to help track colonies of endangered emperor penguins in Antarctica throughout the winter months.

Typically satellite images need sunlight to be useful, and Antarctica is dark in the winter. This has meant that colonies have been hidden at a critical time in the emperor penguin breeding cycle, when eggs are laid, chicks hatch and adults take part in those iconic huddles.

Almost 70 colonies of emperor penguins, many of which have never been visited by humans, occupy the sea ice that is fastened to the coastline surrounding Antarctica.

Now using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), an instrument operating on satellites that sends microwave pulses down to Earth, and measures how those pulses return, our research team has been able to track what the penguins do during these months.

Unlike other forms of satellite imagery, SAR is not reliant on sunlight, or affected by cloud, and therefore provides radar imagery of Antarctica through the dark polar winter.

SAR’s signal is sensitive to the properties of what it interacts with, and has been used for years in the poles to research things like the properties of sea ice and melt on glaciers.

When looking at SAR images from the free European Space Agency satellite, Sentinel-1, showing the location of an emperor penguin colony during winter, my team started to notice a bright white splodge of pixels moving around against a backdrop of dark, smooth sea ice.

Features like icebergs or rough sea ice can look bright in SAR imagery, but it didn’t make sense for those to be moving around at that time of year, when the sea ice was fixed and stable. Could it be the emperor penguin colony?

We soon found the same thing at the locations of other colonies – clusters of bright moving pixels on stable ice. We were then able to obtain optical images from September when the sunlight first starts returning, and compare them with the SAR, and confirmed it was indeed the colonies we were observing.

Tracking through the whole year

This finding opened up an exciting opportunity to track colonies throughout the whole breeding cycle, by combining SAR images in winter with optical images in spring/summer, and all using freely available data that has been routinely collected for years.

We went back through eight years, from 2017 to 2024, and followed three of the largest colonies year-round. We were able to follow their movement, sometimes even daily from early in the winter until chicks grow their first feathers in December and January.

We observed that colonies were typically less mobile in the winter, before spreading out and moving greater distances in the spring and summer. Interestingly, we found that the Atka Bay colony moved up from the sea ice onto the glacier ice that flows from the continent in seven of the eight years in the early spring. The colony did this despite the sea ice – the typically preferred habitat for the species – being stable. We need more research to understand why this is.

Satellite remote sensing has been a crucial tool for observing the emperor penguins in the summer months since 2009. It was discovered then that colonies could be found in satellite images because of the dark guano stains they leave on the snow and ice. Overall, these observations have revolutionised our understanding of the species and have led to the discovery of many more colonies.

After a period of stability, Antarctic sea ice has declined markedly since 2016 and likely entered a new state, characterised by lower extent and increased instability. Earlier this year, emperor penguins were added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list and classified as endangered, predominantly due to projected declines in sea ice.

This makes better understanding and monitoring of emperor penguins more important than ever. The ability to observe colonies throughout the breeding cycle using freely available, routinely collected satellite data creates opportunities to better understand their response to changing environmental conditions.

Grant Macdonald, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Geography, Durham University

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

Some 90 years after the death of the last documented thylacine – better known as the Tasmanian tiger – the species remains a global symbol of human-made extinction.

The carnivorous marsupial fell victim to 19th-century colonists’ perception that unfamiliar creatures were primitive, vermin-like imitations of more familiar European animals. The species was later exterminated due to sensationalist claims that it was a ferocious, wolf-like predator of sheep.

However, our new study, published in Nature Communications, suggests the thylacine defied the colonialists’ assumptions in every way. It was unique among modern predatory mammals by subduing its prey with high-impact snaps of slender, oversized jaws.

Our focus was on one of the most widely cited cases of evolutionary convergence – the dog-shaped skull of the thylacine, which inspired its species epithet cynocephalus (“dog-head”). This is a striking similarity as thylacines are separated from dogs by more than 120 million years of evolution.

So we set out to understand how deep the similarity really goes.

A massive head with a flimsy face

We used 3D shape analysis to compare scanned thylacine skulls from museums around the world with those of other predatory mammals. This revealed that different regions of the thylacine’s skull resemble those of several other animals.

The thylacine’s long and thin snout looks pretty fragile, most like that of small foxes and jackals. By contrast, the back of the thylacine’s skull resembles that of wolves, dingos and dholes (also known as the Asiatic wild dog).

But the standout feature of this odd patchwork was the thylacine’s enormous head. Its relatively puny 17 kilogram body carried a skull as large as that of wolves, which are more than twice the thylacine’s weight.

So why this skinny jaw on an outsized head?

We suspect this combination allowed thylacines to subdue their prey with powerful snapping bites. Thylacine jaws are clearly built for speed: the longer a jaw is, the faster its tip moves during biting.

Combined with the animal’s famously large gape, this should increase the impact of the strike. Long jaws like this are usually quite weak, but the huge size of the thylacine’s skull would have added enough substance to withstand lethal snaps into potentially unsuspecting bandicoots.

The mammalian answer to crocodiles?

But it is the features that are not found in other predatory mammals that may have taken the thylacine’s snaps to a new deadly level.

The thylacine’s upper jaw is exceptionally tall, with a distinctive “pinched” hourglass shape at the tip. This combination is perfect for resisting the stress of high-impact, upwards-directed bites. It also matches earlier results that thylacine canine teeth seem most suited to puncturing, crushing bites (rather than pulling, tearing, or holding).

Thylacines were probably the last modern predatory mammals to sport such a tall, mace-like snout. But similar jaw types are found across other vertebrates, such as crocodiles, and are usually interpreted as adaptations for hunting fast-moving prey.

But some extinct mammals also had thylacine-like snouts, most notably in the gigantic extinct predator Andrewsarchus.

Our results are particularly tantalising in view of earlier genomic work which suggested that natural selection acted on regulatory genes in some shared developmental pathways of wolves and thylacines.

It is possible these genomic similarities are behind some of the shared aspects of skull shape between wolves and thylacines. However, as we know wolves and thylacines did not fill the same ecological niche, we might ask how these genomic convergences produced such a uniquely specialised marsupial predator.

A lesson for urgent and thoughtful future science

Our results highlight – yet again – that the thylacine’s eradication targeted an animal that only existed in the early colonial imagination. But they are also a timely reminder we cannot afford to repeat this mistake through negligence.

Australia has the worst mammal extinction rate in the world. Its wildlife faces escalating threats from environmental degradation and climate change, as well as new threats such as bird flu.

Museum-based research like ours is needed to illustrate how these statistics reflect irreplaceable biodiversity lost with every extinction.

But we also need to remember Western science is only part of the story – respectfully requesting knowledge from Indigenous custodians about the unique Australian wildlife should be key to our future research.

After all, the people who lived alongside thylacines for tens of thousands of years knew exactly what kind of animal it was.

Vera Weisbecker, Professor in Evolutionary Biology, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University; Andrew Pask, Professor, School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne, and Douglass S Rovinsky, Associate Research Scientist, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clear communication must start early

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government should be transparent

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

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

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

Slow start to vaccination, and not for mammals

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

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

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

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

Funding is piecemeal

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

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

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

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

Not too late

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not just a hobby

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

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

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

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

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

Stopping the spread

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

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

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

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

Offer less food

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

Avoid hand-feeding

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

Keep everything clean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We know how bad this can get

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

The devastation followed the virus into the Southern Ocean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are seals so vulnerable?

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

But the biology of the virus matters too.

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

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

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

Australia needs a seal plan now

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

But there is promising overseas work.

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

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

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

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

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

The Beachport seal is one animal – for now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to dispense a vaccine

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

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

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

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

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

Which species could this help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better vaccines urgently needed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birds and people in ancient Greece and Rome

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

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

The people of Delos began the practice of fattening hens.

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

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

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

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

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

Did ancient Greeks and Romans observe bird health?

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

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

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

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

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

Did ancient Greeks and Romans know about avian influenza?

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

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

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

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

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

Farmers, he advised, should

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

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

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

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

Is there an ancient lesson?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transboundary waters in the 21st century

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

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

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

Data centres

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

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

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

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

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

Democratic decline and illiberalism

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

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

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

Deep uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desperate for data

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

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

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

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

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

No national standard

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

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

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

Enforcement is key

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ensuring communities benefit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Very serious’ public concerns

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

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

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

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

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

On AI and productivity

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

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

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

On managing AI risks

Charlton flagged further reform to come on AI safety:

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

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

On Australia’s inflation challenge

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

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

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

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

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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