A young mother remains in hospital after being bitten by a shark at Coogee beach in Sydney on Saturday morning. Leah Stewart, 35, was swimming about 30 metres offshore when the shark – believed to be a three to four metre great white shark – struck.

In the wake of this tragic incident, there have been renewed calls for a shark cull to be launched. Federal Liberal Party president Tony Abbott, for example, said:

It’s so wrong that we don’t cull sharks after attacks. It’s so wrong that we don’t have a commercial shark fishery given the explosion of shark numbers, and it’s so wrong that we don’t put people before sharks.

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has since said his government is actively considering a cull of bull sharks, in response to a surge in bull shark bites over summer.

So is the number of shark bites really increasing and is it because shark numbers are exploding? What does the research say about the effectiveness of culling? And what other measures could keep ocean users safe?

Rising numbers of shark bites

Shark bites have increased in Australia and globally over the past four decades (although they are still very rare).

The exploding number of sharks is often mentioned to explain this trend.

Many species of sharks are threatened globally. But Australia has many protections in place and relatively well-managed fisheries that support the recovery of vulnerable species, such as the great white shark, and which prevent the decline of species which are threatened in other countries, such as the bull shark.

But it’s unlikely that the recovery of the great white shark or reduced fishing pressure can alone explain the rise in shark bites.

Last year colleagues and I published a study on the factors influencing the number of shark bites. We found 40 factors suggested to affect shark-bite risk. These included human population growth, habitat modification and destruction, declining water quality, climate change and anomalous weather patterns, and changes to the distribution and abundance of sharks and their prey.

However, the relatively infrequent occurrence of such events reduces our ability to determine which of these factors explain the increase in shark bites the most. It is likely to be due to a combination of these factors.

Do shark culls work?

There are many ways to reduce the risk of shark bites. Shark culls are the most controversial.

Some research has suggested culling sharks has reduced the rate of interactions with humans in certain locations. However, other studies have highlighted no changes in bite rates after large culling programs were implemented.

The efficacy of culling varies between species and regions, and the number of sharks needed to be culled is unknown but is likely to be high before it starts affecting shark-bite risk.

While you could argue that even culling one shark reduces risk, that shark might never have bitten humans, so culling that shark does not impact the number of shark bites. This problem is best illustrated by the shark control program in Hawaii in the 1960s and 1970s, during which 4,668 tiger sharks were killed but there were no resulting changes in the rate of shark bites.

What about other measures?

Shark nets aim to catch potentially dangerous sharks close to popular swimming areas. However, this method can also kill non-dangerous sharks and a range of other marine animals such as rays, turtles and dolphins. There is also little evidence to show shark nets keep people safe.

There are a range of other area-based mitigation measures that are designed to minimise impact on the marine ecosystem, and for which efficacy has been reviewed. These include using drones to observe sharks, SMART drumlines (which intercept sharks close to shore and allow authorities to tag and then safely relocate them), and shark listening stations that detect the presence of a tagged shark.

Many studies show that early-warning systems using drones can detect sharks and quickly enable the evacuation of beaches, while SMART drumlines intercept sharks with the capture leading to sharks leaving the area upon release.

So, what now?

So, what should we use to reduce shark-bite risk? This question should be considered from both an efficacy and ethical perspective.

Culling might theoretically reduce risk. But we have no idea of how many sharks need to be culled to reduce the number of bites. As the experience of Hawaii shows, culling may see thousands of sharks killed without improvements in public safety. It would also have significant impacts on marine ecosystems.

It makes far more sense to invest more in non-lethal measures such as drone surveillance, as the evidence shows these measures reduce shark-bite risk and are preferred by the public.

But all the measures discussed so far are only part of the arsenal available to reduce the risk of sharks bites. They can be complemented with personal deterrents, which can reduce the risk of shark bites by 60% (even when sharks are motivated and in a predatory mode), bite-resistant materials that can reduce the risk of serious injury, and improved first aid training and education.

There’s no silver bullet in terms of completely eliminating the risk of shark bites (aside from well-maintained swimming enclosures), but as shark numbers recover, so could the number of bites without adequate mitigation measures. A combination of area-based measures, personal deterrents, injury-reduction material, and education would be most efficient at reducing risk and the consequences of shark bites, so people can continue to enjoy that coastal lifestyle that Australia is so famous for.

The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of Laura Ryan and Nathan Hart from Macquarie University to this article

Charlie Huveneers, Professor, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University

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

Whales and dolphins inhabit some of the largest and seemingly most pristine environments on Earth, from tropical coastlines to Antarctic waters. Yet even they cannot escape PFAS – persistent “forever chemicals” that leak from our homes, factories and waterways into the sea.

Forever chemicals are the secret ingredients in our non-stick pans, waterproof jackets and stain-resistant carpets. These chemicals belong to a group of more than 1,400 compounds known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). They enter the environment through manufacturing waste, industrial runoff, wastewater treatment plants and firefighting foams. But once these chemicals escape our homes and factories, they become almost impossible to get rid of. Washed into waterways, they make their way to the sea.

Small organisms absorb them from the water, fish eat those organisms and larger predators eat the fish. At each step, the chemical load increases. As top predators, whales and dolphins can end up with very high levels in their bodies. Not even deep-diving species living and feeding far from humans are safe.

In our new research, we found PFAS concentrations in cetaceans have increased globally since 2000. Animals in the Pacific Ocean were the most contaminated, with humpback dolphins showing the highest PFAS concentrations.

These mammals are sentinels of ocean health. They sit high in the food web, live for many years and are exposed to pollution across large areas of the ocean. When whales and dolphins show signs of chemical exposure, it tells us something is wrong in the wider marine ecosystem.

Why are we worried about forever chemicals?

Many of these chemicals have been in use for decades. Their sheer durability and ability to resist heat, oil and water make them very useful.

Scientists have grown increasingly concerned about them because they persist for decades and build up over time in our own bodies, as well as in wildlife and the broader environment.

The key concern is what these chemicals may be doing to the animals that accumulate them.

Research in humans and laboratory animals links PFAS to immune suppression, hormonal changes, reproductive problems and developmental effects. But we don’t yet have enough research to understand how different PFAS compounds and levels of exposure affect health.

Understanding these impacts in whales and dolphins is harder still. Marine mammals are long-lived, highly mobile and exposed to many human-made problems at once, from climate change to noise pollution to other contaminants.

Even so, there are warning signs. Some dolphin studies have reported changes in immune-related markers associated with PFAS exposure.

How do you test a whale for forever chemicals?

For humans, testing PFAS levels is usually done with a blood test. It is not as simple for whales and dolphins.

It is extremely difficult to take blood samples from large marine mammals in the wild. Scientists often rely on tissue samples from dead animals, particularly from the liver and kidney where many PFAS compounds tend to accumulate. These samples are analysed in specialised laboratories capable of detecting tiny concentrations of individual PFAS compounds.

This way, scientists have been measuring PFAS in whales and dolphins for decades. Each study added another piece to the puzzle, showing these chemicals were present in different species, populations and oceans.

Our study took a step back and looked at the global picture.

We compiled PFAS data from cetaceans worldwide, focusing on liver samples because they are the most commonly available tissue type, allowing us to compare studies across species and regions.

What did we find?

We found PFAS contamination differed substantially across species, location, sex, age and time.

The highest concentrations tended to be found in coastal dolphins and porpoises, suggesting animals living near urban and industrial areas face greater exposure.

Cetaceans in the Pacific had higher levels than other oceans. This is likely due to high industrial activity and the extent of historical PFAS production in coastal regions.

Female whales and dolphins can transfer forever chemicals during pregnancy and nursing. This means their calves can be exposed to concerning levels of PFAS at a very early age.

Males often end up with higher levels than females overall, as they cannot transfer these chemicals to their young.

There are some large gaps in the global dataset we collated, which means we don’t fully know the extent of PFAS contamination in cetaceans off India, Indonesia and parts of Africa.

What should we do?

While important questions remain about the effects of forever chemicals on whales and dolphins, the widespread contamination we observed is a real concern. We need to continue monitoring while strengthening regulations and working to reduce PFAS flows into the environment.

History shows global action on harmful chemicals works. After it became clear Earth’s protective ozone layer was being eaten away, nations agreed to phase out the chemicals responsible. The ozone layer is now recovering.

The European Union moved to ban some PFAS compounds 20 years ago. Our study found lower levels of some legacy PFAS compounds in the Mediterranean Sea, a pattern that may reflect the effects of regulation. This is positive, but not sufficient given overall PFAS levels in whales and dolphins have increased globally over time. The EU is now moving to better regulate this class of forever chemicals.

Forever chemicals are one of the defining pollution challenges of our time. The more we understand how these chemicals accumulate in whales and dolphins, the better equipped we will be to reduce future contamination and protect marine ecosystems.

What ends up in the ocean does not simply disappear. And neither do PFAS.

This article is based on collaborative research that also included Lavinia Stokes (University of Wollongong), Jesuina de Araujo (National Measurement Institute) and Gavin Stevenson (National Measurement Institute).

Katharina J. Peters, Lecturer in Biological Sciences, University of Wollongong; Frédérik Saltré, Senior Lecturer in Ecology and Biogeography, University of Technology Sydney; Australian Museum, and Karen Stockin, Professor of Marine Ecology, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

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

After months of anticipation, the Bureau of Meteorology officially declared an El Niño on June 16.

El Niño is a naturally occurring variation in temperature and winds across the Pacific Ocean that can influence weather around the globe.

During El Niño, sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific warm up and trade winds – which typically blow from east to west along the equator – weaken. As a result, a region of strong storm activity known as the Walker Circulation shifts east over the Pacific Ocean, drawing moisture and clouds away from Australia.

Past El Niño events have coincided with some of the driest and hottest weather in Australian history.

Making El Niño official

El Niño events occur about every three to seven years, and can last anywhere from six months to two years. They typically ramp up in winter and spring, before easing in autumn.

The likelihood of El Niño has been in the news for months, but the Bureau of Meteorology only just officially declared it active. That’s because there is a specific set of criteria that must be met.

Scientists must observe at least three of the following:

1. Sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean must be greater than 0.8°C above average

2. The trade winds that blow east to west across the Pacific have to be weaker than average for the past four months

3. The Southern Oscillation Index, which measures the difference in atmospheric pressure between Tahiti and Darwin, must be lower than -7. This tells us whether the region of strong storm activity is closer to Darwin or Tahiti

4. The majority of global seasonal forecasting models must predict that ocean temperatures in the Pacific will stay warm for at least three months.

What does this mean for Australia?

Importantly, an El Niño declaration is not a forecast. Rather, it’s a statement on the current conditions in the Pacific Ocean.

On average, past El Niño events were associated with warmer than normal maximum temperatures across Australia, particularly in winter and spring. They were also linked to drier than average winter and spring conditions, especially in eastern Australia.

Western Australia is not as affected by El Niño because, particularly compared to eastern states, it’s only indirectly influenced by Pacific Ocean conditions. The north of the country, however, tends to experience fewer tropical cyclones on average and a delayed start to the monsoon season during El Niño.

It may seem counterintuitive, but El Niño can lead to colder minimum temperatures and therefore more frost. This is because we tend to see less cloud cover during El Niño, and nighttime clouds act like a blanket that stops heat from escaping to space.

However, global average temperatures tend to be hotter during El Niño. And we often see record breaking years coinciding with El Niño.

It’s worth noting, human-made greenhouse gas emissions are the main driver of rising global average temperatures. However, El Niño can tip these temperatures to record breaking levels.

Why are people talking about a ‘super El Niño’?

You may have seen reports of a potential “Super El Niño”. A “super” or “strong” El Niño refers to events where the sea surface temperatures in the Central Pacific Ocean are about 2°C warmer than normal.

As of June 14, the sea surface temperatures in this region were 0.92°C above average. However, forecasting models suggest temperatures could exceed the 2°C threshold by late winter.

However, a “super El Niño” will not necessarily lead to “super droughts” or “super bushfires”. That’s because, in Australia, the strength of an El Niño event is not related to the severity of its impacts.

The 2002 El Niño event was weak, but was still associated with widespread drought and severe bushfires in some parts of Australia. In contrast, the strong El Niño of 2015 affected rainfall patterns differently across the country.

El Niño is not the whole story

El Niño is just one ingredient in the recipe of Australian weather.

Our weather is influenced by El Niño in the Pacific Ocean as well as the Indian Ocean Dipole, sometimes known as El Niño’s cousin to the west. Australia’s weather is also shaped by shifts in the jet stream to the south – which impacts how many cold fronts reach Australia – and tropical storms in the north.

Now that El Niño has been declared, scientists will keep a close eye on what happens in the Indian Ocean. If waters off Australia’s northwest cool over winter, the rest of the year may be quite dry. But if the waters off northwest Australia get warmer, it’s less likely a drought will develop.

In short, many factors must coincide to cause severe droughts and bushfires in Australia. Currently, this is not happening. So the Bureau’s long-range forecast – which considers all these factors as well as El Niño – offers the most accurate information about Australia’s ever-changing weather.

Kimberley Reid, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

It’s official: El Niño is back. By late fall 2026, forecast models give a 2-in-3 chance of a strong-to-very strong El Niño affecting the weather, climate and ocean temperatures across the planet.

El Niño is the climate system’s biggest player and one side of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s the heads to La Niña’s tails.

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.

I’m a climate scientist who studies the oceans. With an El Niño expected to strengthen through the summer and fall, water temperatures will heat up even more. It’s time to start preparing.

How does El Niño affect the planet?

No two El Niño events are exactly alike, though we’ve seen enough of them that forecasters have a pretty good idea of what’s likely to happen.

People tend to focus on El Niño’s impact on land, justifiably. The warm water affects air currents that leave areas wetter or drier than usual. It can ramp up storms in some areas, like the southern U.S., while tending to tamp down Atlantic hurricane activity.

El Niño can also wreak havoc on the many marine ecosystems that support the world’s fishing industries, including coral reefs and seagrass meadows.

Specifically, El Niño tends to trigger intense and widespread periods of extreme ocean warming known as marine heat waves.

Global ocean temperatures are already near record highs, so El Niño-induced marine heat waves could push many sensitive fisheries to a breaking point.

What is a marine heat wave?

A marine heat wave is just that: a “wave” of extreme heat in the ocean, not dissimilar to an atmospheric heat wave on land.

At their smallest, marine heat waves can inundate local bays and coves with hotter-than-normal water for a few days or weeks. At their largest, marine heat waves like the Northeast Pacific Warm Blob of 2013-2014 can grow to gargantuan proportions, with regions three times the size of Texas experiencing ocean temperatures 4 to 6 F (about 2 to 3 C) above average for months or even years.

Warm water might not seem like a big deal, especially to surfers hoping to leave their wetsuits at home. But for many marine organisms that are highly adapted to specific water temperatures, marine heat waves can make living in the ocean feel like running a marathon.

For example, some fish increase their metabolism in warm waters by so much that they burn energy faster than they can eat, and they can die. Pacific cod declined by 70% in the Gulf of Alaska in response to a marine heat wave. Other impacts include bleached corals, widespread harmful algal blooms, decimated seaweeds and increased marine mammal strandings. All told, billions of U.S. dollars are lost to marine heat waves each year.

Marine heat waves flare up for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, ocean currents shift warm water around. Sometimes, surface winds are weaker than normal, leading to less evaporation over the ocean and warmer waters. Sometimes, cloudy places just aren’t as cloudy for a few months, which lets more sunlight in and heats up the ocean. Sometimes, both weaker winds and fewer clouds happen at the same time, producing record-breaking marine heat waves.

How does El Niño fit in?

In the climate system, El Niño is king. When it dons its fiery crown, the entire planet takes notice, and the oceans are no exception. But the likelihood of increased marine heat wave activity during El Niño depends on where you are.

Along the U.S. West Coast during El Niño, surface winds that normally blow from the north tend to subside. This weakens evaporation and slows upwelling of colder, deeper water. That increases the chances of coastal marine heat waves. California waters are already extremely warm. El Niño could make things even hotter for longer.

Peruvian fishers have for centuries weathered periods of extreme ocean warming that drive fish away. It wasn’t until the 1920s that scientists realized that these South American marine heat waves were related to the Pacific-wide ENSO.

In the Bay of Bengal east of India, interactions between El Niño and a tropical air flow pattern known as the Walker Circulation elevate the risk for marine heat waves.

Seafloor heat waves are another risk

Even if marine heat waves aren’t obvious at the ocean surface, that doesn’t mean all is well down below.

In a 2023 study, my colleagues and I showed that marine heat waves also unfold along the seafloor of coastal regions. In fact, these “bottom marine heat waves” are sometimes more intense than their surface counterparts. They can also persist much longer. For example, a 1997-1998 bottom marine heat wave off the U.S. West Coast lasted an extra four to five months after surface ocean temperatures had already cooled.

Events like this can be related to El Niño and put a lot of stress on bottom-dwelling species. Bering Sea snow crab landings were down 84% in 2018 after a marine heat wave reached the seafloor.

We’re in (for) hot water

With El Niño on the horizon, what can we expect for this year?

The good news is seasonal forecast models can skillfully predict marine heat waves three to six months in advance, depending on the region. And forecasts tend to be most accurate during El Niño years.

The latest forecast predicts several marine heat waves developing as El Niño ramps up, with damaging heat reaching close to half the global ocean by the end of 2026. The California and Mexican coasts in particular have a very high likelihood of strong marine heat waves, and the Indian Ocean and parts of the Southern Ocean are also likely to see damaging heat.

These predictions are far enough out that conditions could change. Time will tell whether they hold (hot) water, but we would do well to prepare.

This article incorporates details from an article originally published April 18, 2023.

Dillon Amaya, Climate Research Scientist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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

There is a more than 60% chance that a “super” El Niño will develop by the end of this year.

This is defined as the strongest El Niño event you can get, and happens when sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean rise by more than 2°C. During a super El Niño, the ocean gives off extra heat into the air, which helps raise global temperatures. Because climate change is already warming the planet, a super El Niño could push global temperatures to the highest levels ever recorded.

El Niño conditions have already begun this year, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While El Niño is a natural phenomenom, climate change means that El Niños are becoming stronger and more frequent.

Hotter sea surface temperatures could spell big problems for marine wildlife and fisheries alike. As the oceans warm, they become more layered, leading to warm, nutrient-poor water sitting on the surface, and cooler, nutrient-rich water trapped below. This layering makes it harder for nutrients to rise to the surface. As a result, there are fewer nutrients available for phytoplankton, the tiny plants that form the base of the marine food chain.

With less phytoplankton in the oceans, there is less food for zooplankton (drifting animals that eat phytoplankton), fish and larger animals including seabirds and marine mammals. This is even more pronounced for the tropical eastern Pacific. The Humboldt current usually brings cold, nutrient-rich water up to the surface, creating one of the most productive marine regions on Earth. But this current is disrupted and overwhelmed during an El Niño. This rich ecosystem supports both wildlife and important fisheries, making it one of the most biologically and economically important ocean regions in the world.

Dramatic effects on fisheries

Strong El Niño events are known to seriously affect Peruvian anchoveta stocks (Engraulis ringens). The super El Niño led a 55% decline in catch in 1972 and 51% on 1973, leading to severe economic hardship. The collapse was driven by El Niño combined with high fishing pressure, as fleets continued trying to maintain catch rates despite rapidly declining stocks. This forced government intervention in the fishery.

The Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens) is the basis of the world’s largest single-species fishing area, worth an estimated US$1-3 billion (£74.5 million-£2 billion) each year. Globally, this fishery accounts for about 20% of all fishmeal production, which in turn provides roughly half of the feed used in global aquaculture. This makes the species not only vital for Peru’s economy, but also essential for supporting fish farming and food production worldwide.

Reduced fishing quotas

These days El Niño conditions lead to reduced quotas and fishery closures. The anchovy fishery is currently closed due to El Niño. This has led to record-high fishmeal prices (US$2,500 per tonne) which will make aquaculture food more expensive and lead to higher fish farming costs globally.

While the Peruvian anchoveta fishery is perhaps one of the most severely effected and well-documented fisheries in response to El Niño, other fisheries across the globe are also affected by these changing ocean conditions. Along the Californian coast, squid landings plummet during El Niño years. Similarly, in the Indian Ocean, tuna catches appear to be at their lowest after a strong El Niño. Not all fish stocks decline, and some have been shown to increase in response to warmer temperatures. Declining and altered fish stocks during El Niño have been shown to lead to increased fish “wars” between countries in the South China Sea, as fishermen follow migrating fish stocks into other countries economic zones.

Dying coral reefs

El Niño can also have a major impact on marine habitats. One of the most widely recognised effects is on coral reefs, with warmer marine temperatures triggering bleaching, causing corals to expel the microscopic algae they rely on for energy, and in some cases die. During El Niño years, widespread bleaching becomes common across the tropical Pacific, Indian Ocean, south-east Asia and north-east Australia, highlighting the ripple effect of El Niño.

The recent 2023-24 El Niño triggered unprecedented heat stress across the globe, with extensive mortality documented in many countries (for instance Mexico, Australia and Costa Rica).

But it is not just coral reefs that are at risk. In the Galapagos Islands, seaweed and coral habitats have disappeared, or are extremely degraded, due to sensitivity to El Niño. Similarly, mangroves have suffered mortality in Australia, while in California, kelp populations have decreased by 50-70% during El Niño.

Starvation of seals and sea lions

Large marine animals have suffered during strong El Niño. Most notable has been the starvation of a large proportion of fur seals (Arctocephalus galapagoensis) and sea lions (Zalophus californianus wollebaeki) in the Galapagos, and the dramatic reduction in seabird populations in Peru. Many South American fur seals (Arctocephalus australis) and South American sea lions (Otaria byronia) along the southern coast of Peru died. The mother seals remained at sea for longer than ever recorded before, and this is likely to be because they were looking for food.

El Niño can trigger harmful algal blooms, which occur when tiny algae in the water grow really fast and produce toxins that can harm animals and people. These blooms have led widespread deaths of whales when they feed in affected areas near the coast.

It’s hard to determine what the extent of a super El Niño will be on marine life. But with our oceans already struggling under climate change, and little time for marine populations to recover from the last El Niño of 2023-24, it could be the most devastating one yet.

Samantha Garrard, Senior Marine Ecosystem Services Researcher, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

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

The Australian government has agreed to invest almost $53 million in a north Tasmanian company that will upgrade its coal-fired kiln to burn wood “waste” and used tyres for cement manufacturing.

The Federal Minister for Climate Change, Chris Bowen, says this initiative will help decarbonise the Australian economy.

However, the science is clear: burning forest biomass, or so-called forest “waste” – which could include dead trees, understorey vegetation and fallen logs – generates large amounts of carbon emissions. It will likely also accelerate poor forest health.

The empirical evidence shows burning forest biomass to make concrete is poor climate policy, poor environmental and forest policy, and a poor use of taxpayer funds.

Why is this happening?

In line with climate change treaty commitments under the Paris Agreement, governments worldwide are working to decarbonise their economies in an attempt to limit global warming.

This includes finding alternative sources of clean energy to using fossil fuel. This is especially important for carbon-intensive, high-polluting industries, such as concrete production. While about 56% of concrete emissions come from processing clinker (the base material for cement), 39% come from using fossil fuel to generate heat, and 14% from electricity.

Unfortunately, forest biomass is increasingly being promoted as an energy source to replace fossil fuels, for example in the United Kingdom and Europe. Most forest biomass used to generate energy will likely be trees. And what is often referred to as “waste” is actually a critical part of the structure and composition of natural forests. For example, understorey vegetation and logs provide habitat for a wide range of animal species. They play an essential role in nutrient cycling, such as storing substantial amounts of carbon.

Whilst forest biomass is technically a renewable resource, as trees can be regrown after logging, it is not a source of clean energy. This is because about half of tree biomass is carbon (assuming a moisture content of 45%). Therefore, burning a tonne of wood generates roughly a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions. Importantly, up to 30% of carbon dioxide emissions are still in the atmosphere after 1,000 years.

The time lag between release and absorption

Critically, there is a highly significant lag time, of decades to centuries, between carbon being instantaneously released from burning forest biomass and when it is removed from the atmosphere. These removals occur either by plant growth or through carbon making its way to the bottom of the ocean.

The lag time between burning forest biomass and tree regrowth is important because the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations causes even more climate change. This is one of the key reasons why widespread burning of forest biomass in some European countries threatens their ability to meet Paris Agreement greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Furthermore, forest biomass has a far lower calorific content relative to coal. This means large quantities of forest material has to be burned to generate an equivalent amount of energy. This high demand for wood for biomass energy can contribute significantly to poor forest health.

Notably, Australia, along with many other governments, has committed to ending deforestation and degradation by 2030. This recognises the importance of forest carbon sequestration and storage in meeting climate targets and achieving the Paris Agreement goals.

Not an isolated example

The Tasmanian plan, that would see Cement Australia burn forest “waste” to generate energy, is far from an isolated case. There are well-developed plans for Verdant Earth Industries to reopen the former coal-fired Redbank Power Station in the Hunter Valley, in New South Wales, and generate energy by burning hundreds of thousands of tonnes of “wood waste” annually.

Much of this “waste” will likely be trees from forest and woodland regrowth, which are fundamental to the integrity of those ecosystems. This regrowth also provides habitat for a vast array of species, including a range of threatened species.

Biomass burning is frequently supported by native forest logging advocates because of structural issues in the industry. These issues include attempts to extract some financial return from an industry that is largely unprofitable. The native forest sector produces primarily low-value, high-volume commodities such as [woodchips and paper pulp], whereas plantation forest sector dominates high-value sawn wood products.

Similarly, state government forestry agencies have been unable to get market certification for wood products such as woodchips and pulpwood from bodies such as the Forest Stewardship Council. This is partly because the areas logged to produce wood products are often are home to a diverse range of plants and animals that may be threatened by logging.

Decarbonisation matters

We fully acknowledge the efforts being made to explore how emissions-intensive industries can be decarbonised, such as reducing the clinker content in cement.

However, Australian governments must stop using taxpayer money to subsidise projects that entail large-scale burning of forest and woodland biomass for industrial energy.

Alternative forms of energy, including concentrated solar power, will be important in this regard. Unlike forest biomass burning, these are both renewable and clean sources of energy.

A response was sought from Cement Australia.

David Lindenmayer, Distinguished Professor of Ecology, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University and Brendan Mackey, Director, Griffith Climate Action Beacon, Griffith University

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

For months, a flood of mice has engulfed Western Australia’s agricultural regions.

For people living through it, this latest mouse plague is all-consuming. Houses, sheds, paddocks and roads are blanketed with mice. And the smell of mice, both dead and alive, is impossible to escape.

It may well be the worst plague the region has ever seen, with scientists recording up to 8,000 mice in each hectare of land. That’s ten times the number needed to officially declare a mouse plague.

But there are signs the plague could end soon. And that’s promising news for local farmers and communities.

Why so many mice?

In WA’s northern wheatbelt region, the current mouse plague started back in April. That was after a cyclone created the ideal conditions for mice to thrive, including increased rainfall and soil moisture that boosted crop yields. However, scientists were warning of a potential mouse plague back in March, based on modelling and field monitoring.

Research suggests large-scale mouse plagues mainly affect Australia and China, but the reasons for this are not yet understood.

An end in sight

Many people in affected regions are wondering when their living nightmare will end. The good news is, it’s likely to be soon.

There are three main reasons for this.

1. Less food

When it comes to growing crops, Australia is a boom and bust country. While good conditions fuel bumper crops, times of drought reduce crop yields and the growth of native plants.

So in drier years, such as this year, mice populations can drop dramatically as there’s less available food.

2. Less rain

Rainfall is the single strongest predictor of mouse plagues. High rainfall boosts the growth of plants, including agricultural crops, which provides female mice with the food and nutrition needed to rapidly breed.

Research shows plagues generally occur about three months after unusually high rainfall. However, it also suggests mouse plagues do not occur for at least two years after a significant plague event.

3. More heat

With the right conditions, mouse plagues can stretch from early autumn to winter, and even summer of the following year.

However, WA tends to have hot, dry summers that further compact and suck moisture from the region’s already hard soils. Research shows this makes it much harder for mice to burrow and keep breeding.

Concerns for local wildlife

The current mouse plague has wreaked havoc in rural communities across WA. That’s because of its scale and its timing, having coincided with the critical crop sowing period.

This prompted local farmers to lobby for double-strength mice bait to be made available, particularly in large-scale crop farming. This higher-dose bait is made of zinc phosphide, and kills mice more quickly and effectively than existing products. This lobbying proved successful, with Australia’s federal pesticides regulator approving it for use in May.

However, concerns are mounting about the effect of this double-strength bait on native birds. This type of bait has been used during previous mouse plagues, without causing secondary poisoning of native wildlife. This is because this bait does not get concentrated in mice, and therefore can’t be ingested by native predators in large quantities.

However, scientists are worried this higher-dose bait will directly poison native birds, particularly those that eat grain from paddocks. One local wildlife carer reported finding 106 native birds either dead or dying, in the small farming community of Coorow. These included western corellas, little corellas, galahs, Regent parrots and Australian ringnecks.

It is possible to test these birds for exposure to zinc phosphide, but such tests are not routinely used for screening dead wildlife and can take weeks or even months to complete. So the long-term effects of using stronger mice baits, particularly on native birds and wildlife, remain unknown.

Communities across WA have borne the brunt of this latest mouse plague. But as winter sets in and the double-strength baits take effect, relief will hopefully come soon.

Robert Davis, Associate Professor in Wildlife Conservation, Edith Cowan University

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

Energy security is a top priority globally, as governments grapple with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, an accelerating clean energy transition and surging power demand from AI data centres.

The problem is especially acute for Asia and the Pacific, as both regions are highly dependent on imported fuels.

This is where Australia could step up as a regional energy superpower, rich in both renewables and fossil fuels. Australia could form a new energy security alliance to stabilise regional markets for the long-term.

In the short term, this would mean guaranteeing supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG). In the longer term, green exports such as renewable fuels and battery minerals could form the bedrock of Australia’s energy relationship with Asia.

Energy insecurity is rife across Asia

The war between the United States-Israel and Iran triggered a major disruption to fossil fuel supplies.

After Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, Asia lost 80% of its oil supply and 27% of its natural gas supply. Flow-on impacts to Pacific nations were significant, as these island nations rely heavily on diesel and food imports.

The deal to end the Iran war doesn’t mean an end to these challenges. This year has shown the risks of relying on Middle Eastern oil and gas producers in a conflict-prone region.

Asia-Pacific governments are looking for reliable partners to ensure energy security.

The world’s top two powers, the United States and China, are jostling to expand their energy exports in the region but in very different ways.

China’s response to the Iran conflict has been to double down on electrification and build its reserves of oil. Beijing is also aggressively expanding its exports of electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries and other green tech exports to root out any overseas competition.

Meanwhile, the US is pursuing a strategy of “energy dominance”, focused on producing abundant supplies of oil and gas domestically. Washington believes this will deliver affordable energy, win the AI race against China with cheap power and expand energy exports to bind allies closer.

Time for a decisive strategy

Without a clear strategy for energy exports, Australia risks becoming a passive spectator.

The risks are twofold. Our role as a coal and LNG exporter could erode as Asian countries look elsewhere to fill their supply gap and we could miss the window of opportunity to grow our clean energy exports.

What should this strategy look like? In practice, it would involve working with allies like the United States and Japan to build a regional energy security alliance. This would focus on meeting the region’s immediate energy needs and enable Australia to play a central role in the region’s transition to clean energy. The Quad members’ recent joint statement is a strong start.

Any such alliance cannot simply focus on securing fossil fuel supply to the region. The shift to clean energy transition must be factored into its design.

Ideally, this alliance should cover the full energy supply chain. That means critical minerals, natural gas, diesel, hydrogen, batteries, data centres and even emerging products such as low-carbon fertilisers.

Australia is poised to take the lead

Australia is the only reliable high-volume LNG exporter in the Asia-Pacific.

Key competitors face challenges meeting the region’s needs. Russian gas is heavily sanctioned, Qatari exports have been held hostage in the Strait of Hormuz and US gas export terminals are concentrated on the Gulf Coast, adding 10 extra days in transit to reach Asia compared to shipments from Darwin.

Australia also has some of the greatest clean energy resources in the world, including critical minerals vital to batteries and renewables.

The United States and Canada would also play a role as major LNG and oil producers. Japan would provide the financing and shipping infrastructure that many smaller Southeast Asian nations cannot. The United States and Japan could also help produce the EVs, batteries and clean tech to drive the region’s transition.

Despite the Trump administration’s unfavourable views on wind and solar, US battery manufacturing is forecast to increase five-fold.

An alliance like this would give certainty to Indo-Pacific countries such as the Philippines, Thailand and India that Australia and its allies would not prematurely turn off fossil fuel supply.

This is pragmatic. While Australia is aiming for net zero by 2050, many Asian countries are aiming for 2060 or 2070. They may require fossil fuel supply beyond 2050 - would we rather that supply to come from Australia or Russia?

What needs to happen?

Shifting energy policies and sluggish approval timeframes have left Australia close to a gas shortfall in southern states, slowed the renewable transition and contributed to higher energy costs.

These domestic challenges must be balanced with the region’s current need for Australian energy exports.

The Iran war has shown the world is not yet ready to wean itself off fossil fuels. Despite very rapid shifts to renewables and clean transport, there are years ahead where gas and oil will remain vital.

As the region’s most reliable LNG exporter, Australia is well placed to cement its position in the Indo-Pacific’s energy landscape long-term as green exports ramp up. Grabbing this opportunity requires a cohesive strategy, partnering with like-minded allies and fixing domestic challenges.

Robert Monterosso, Research Fellow, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

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

Australia’s big clean energy projects get a lot of attention, from giant solar farms to the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme. So too does the push for rooftop solar and home batteries.

What often gets overlooked are the innovations underway where the power grid ends. It costs power utilities a lot to keep these towns connected to the grid. But the plunging costs of renewables and storage mean it’s increasingly possible to do things differently. It makes sense for towns, remote communities and mine sites to produce more of their own power – and eventually, cut the link to the grid entirely.

Western Australia – a state larger than western Europe – is at the forefront of these changes. Because it’s not connected to the national power grid, it has long gone its own way on power. Now, utilities are rethinking whether the state’s huge grid is necessary. Over 15,000 kilometres of overhead line have been decommissioned in recent years.

Life at the end of the grid isn’t easy

For the residents of small towns in outback Western Australia, remote First Nations communities in the Northern Territory or a mine site in the middle of the WA Goldfields, power isn’t something to take for granted.

For decades, these places have had to make do with an often unreliable trickle of electricity transmitted along very long, ageing wires. These can be battered by storms, coated in salt and sand, and regularly knocked out.

For instance, the small outback Queensland town of Thargomindah had 20 unplanned blackouts in the three months to February 2024 – more than one a week.

This is a common problem for communities at the edge of the grid. Electricity is often less reliable and more expensive. Transmitting power thousands of kilometres from where it is produced means up to 35% is lost along the way.

Many remote communities rely on diesel generators, either as a backup or permanently. Because these rely on expensive fuel trucked in, residents can end up paying much more for electricity than people in cities.

Three ways to power the end of the grid

For a long time, there was no real alternative to generators and unreliable power. Now there are several.

The three most advanced options are standalone power systems, renewable microgrids and community batteries. All represent a shift away from grid dependence, though they differ in the degree. Standalone systems operate without the grid, microgrids can work with or without it and community batteries remain connected to the network.

Standalone power

A standalone power system is a self-contained power supply combining solar panels, batteries or a backup generator to replace long, costly powerlines. These work best for large isolated properties, such as an outback station.

Combining solar with storage or a backup means the power supply is reliable, and can cut costs for both customer and the network.

Microgrids

For small towns, renewable microgrids offer a new alternative. These are essentially power grids in miniature – a local electricity network serving multiple consumers through shared solar and batteries, with diesel generators as a backup. They are overseen by a smart control system making thousands of decisions every day over when to store, use or share power. They can be owned by the community, run by a utility or operated by a third party.

Community batteries

A community battery is exactly what it sounds like: a large battery shared by many homes and businesses in a local area. It stores excess daytime power from rooftop solar and releases it when demand rises in the evening. It’s like a neighbourhood water tank, but for electricity.

These batteries reduce pressure on local networks, make voltage more stable and allow households and businesses to install more rooftop solar without grid issues. Some make it possible for eligible households to access stored power from their solar arrays for around 30% cheaper than a home battery system.

Why is Western Australia leading the way?

WA has two electricity grids – one in the southwest, where most people live, and another in the northwest mining hub. It also has 38 microgrids. Authorities want to have 1,000 standalone power systems dotting the state by 2030.

Here are some examples of what’s being tested at the edge of the grid.

The town of Kalbarri sits at the end of a notoriously unreliable 130km power line from Geraldton, regularly lashed by storms. This is why it was chosen to host the state’s standout example of what’s possible – a 5 megawatt microgrid.

It combines local wind, rooftop solar and batteries and detects faults in milliseconds, switching to island mode so smoothly that residents may not even notice. It’s expected to eliminate 80 per cent of the town’s previous outages.

In towns such as Esperance, Exmouth and Carnarvon, 10 community batteries are being installed, while the gold mining hub of Kalgoorlie will soon host a large 50 MW battery.

Mining companies are looking to these methods to lower operating costs and cut emissions. The Agnew Gold Mine now gets 50-60% of its electricity from wind, solar and batteries with 99.99 per cent reliability, which is essential for a mining operation.

Remote First Nations communities such as Blackstone are also looking to microgrids combining solar, batteries and a diesel backup. Reliable electricity is vital for family homes and healthcare.

From the edge of the grid to cutting edge

The innovation at the edge of the grid isn’t just vital for remote residents.

These real world trials of microgrids, batteries, smart software and standalone power systems will feed into how we manage bigger energy grids and make the best use of renewables and storage.

Asma Aziz, Senior Lecturer in Power Engineering, Edith Cowan University and Yasir Arafat, Senior Research Engineer in Electric Vehicle Batteries and Battery Storage, Edith Cowan University

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

“Love makes fools of all of us,” wrote 19th-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. A moment spent watching the pigeons at your local park suggests he was right: males with puffed-up, shimmering necks hop, pirouette, coo, and bow to capture the attention of unimpressed females.

But why do male pigeons express themselves through the passion of dance? The concept of sexual selection, first proposed by Charles Darwin, suggests that through extravagant displays, males give females information to identify their suitability as a partner. Females who choose the fittest and most well-coordinated dancers should produce fit and well-coordinated offspring.

But this seems to raise a paradox. If females are only interested in the best dancers, then evolution should converge on a single optimal dance. Yet courtship displays, even among closely related species, are extraordinarily diverse.

So, why hasn’t evolution danced itself into a corner? We set out to answer this question in our new study published in the journal Behavioural Ecology.

Australia’s dancing dune flies

We turned to an unlikely subject: flies that dance along beach dunes in eastern Australia (Apotropina ornatipennis). These tiny creatures, with patterned wings and reflective patches, perform courtship displays that rival some of the most complex dances in the animal kingdom.

Our study was the first to characterise their courtship choreography of twists, turns and flicking wings.

These dancing flies gave us an opportunity that many more conspicuous species don’t: distinctly isolated populations. Because they live on discrete stretches of coastline, separated by headlands and estuaries, populations have been evolving independently for generations.

If evolution has room to wiggle through dance, we expect these isolated populations to develop different dance routines, the same way regional dialects emerge in human language and birdsong.

We studied both the genetics and behaviour of these populations, mapping their 41 different dance moves and comparing their dances against their degree of genetic divergence.

The results were surprising. Even when populations were clearly separated, their dance routines stayed consistent. Among all the moves in their repertoire, only a subtle change in the timing of one wing movement hinted at any divergence at all.

Honest signals and the cost of improvising

This consistency suggests that males who try to invent new choreography pay a high cost: females might simply ignore them.

A courtship display works best for females if it reflects the quality of the performer – what biologists call an “honest signal”. A physically demanding routine that requires precise execution should separate high-quality males from poor ones. So females don’t mind stale moves, as long as those moves provide proof of a male’s fitness.

Rearranging the choreography can be risky if it departs from what females consider to be honest indicators of male quality. A male who deviates from the established routine might be performing in a language the female hasn’t learned or signalling that he hasn’t mastered the language everyone else speaks.

This cost of innovation may explain why evolutionary changes to courtship dances are often minor improvisations, and why larger changes may only occur over long evolutionary timescales.

How do dances evolve?

Courtship displays are not frozen in time. Behaviours can emerge or be abandoned under intense evolutionary pressure.

A striking example comes from Hawaii, where a parasitic fly that hunts crickets by eavesdropping on their courtship songs invaded the islands. Within just 20 generations, some male crickets found a new strategy for reproductive success: abandoning their instruments and piggybacking on the efforts of other males that were foolish enough to keep singing.

Often, genetic change is the origin of new behaviours. In many species, courtship behaviours are hardwired in the genome.

In fruit flies, males of one species are born with the desire to vomit up nuptial “gifts” as part of their courtship ritual. Researchers identified the gene responsible for the vomiting behaviour, and when they triggered it in a different species that species also began vomiting up gifts.

Social learning is another way displays might evolve, such as in lyrebirds and songbirds, where juveniles can learn by watching older individuals. In such scenarios, cultural drift can gradually reshape courtship over time. Small novelties creep in, other males copy them, females learn to prefer the new moves, and the dance slowly changes.

Ultimately, when it comes to Dancing with the Flies, the judge’s panel is all female. No matter how fit a male is, a novel dance can only succeed if females find it appealing and if their daughters inherit or copy the preference. Fashionable dance in the animal kingdom is dictated largely by the selective momentum of females.

A waltz over evolutionary timescales

The remarkably diverse dance routines we see in pigeons, peacock spiders, and flies are all snapshots of an ancient and ongoing negotiation between the sexes.

More than 150 years since Darwin introduced the idea of sexual selection, we are just beginning to unravel the complexities of courtship choreography.

What our research adds is a sense of just how stable these routines might be, and how the rigorous aesthetic standards set by females may cause choreography to change far more slowly than previously thought.

Nathan Butterworth, Associate Research Fellow in Insect Ecology, Deakin University and Keith M. Bayless, Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO

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

Bees have many different ways of building their homes.

Many people will be familiar with the hives of European honeybees, often found in tree cavities. But many other bees – including many of Australia’s roughly 2,000 species of native bees – build their nests underground, in plant stems or in wood cavities.

Our new paper published in Nature Communications shows that the extent to which native Australian bees can cope with increasing heat depends on the type of nest they use.

Surprisingly, the species that are the most tolerant to heat are also the most vulnerable to future warming.

An important question

Understanding whether tolerance to heat can evolve is an important question for understanding how species might respond to further climate change.

However, most studies show no relationship between how tolerant land-based species are to heat and the average ambient temperatures across their range (often calculated at a coarse 1 x 1 kilometre resolution). This suggests most animals will have a very limited ability to evolve greater tolerance to heat.

But these studies don’t consider species microclimates – that is, the climates species actually experience depending on their behaviour. Our new study aimed to address this gap.

A four-month field trip

To understand how vulnerable bees are to warming climates, and whether bees can evolve in response to changes in climate, we set out on a four-month field trip catching bees from the north to south of Australia’s mainland and tested their tolerance to heat.

In each location, we waved butterfly nets at flowering plants and sucked the bees we collected into collection tubes using an apparatus called a “pooter”.

A pooter is a long flexible tube that helps us to suck bees into a collection vial with a piece of fine gauze inside so we don’t accidentally inhale bees.

We brought bees back to a transportable lab and tested the heat tolerance of over 95 species of native bee. We tested species tolerance to heat by slowly increasing the temperature bees were exposed to until they lost coordination.

Microclimate temperatures linked to heat tolerance

We found the microclimate temperatures native bees experience in their nests explain their tolerance to heat.

Bee species that live in the hottest nests (stem nests) were the most heat tolerant, followed by the somewhat climate-buffered cavity nesting bees. Ground-nesting bees, which can hide from extreme heat, were the least heat tolerant.

We also found that closely related species shared similar nesting strategies and heat tolerances. This made it a little tricky to figure out what came first – nesting strategy or heat tolerance.

But not all closely related bees shared the same nesting strategy. So we were able to use these bees to assess patterns in heat tolerance and nesting behaviour.

We found both species’ evolutionary history and their nesting ecology drives how tolerance to heat evolves.

This means species can evolve greater tolerance to heat over time, but heat tolerance evolution might be slow. Future research needs to figure out if bees can evolve fast enough to keep pace with climate change in the future.

The most heat tolerant bees are the most vulnerable

We also wanted to determine which bee species are the most vulnerable to climate change. To do this we calculated a metric of vulnerability called a “thermal safety margin”.

This is the difference (in degrees Celsius) between a species’ heat tolerance and the hottest environmental temperature they inhabit. Typically, thermal safety margins are calculated based on the air temperatures where species live.

But because we know bees that use different nests are exposed to different microclimates, we compared how predictions of vulnerability change when microclimate temperatures are used instead.

We found a striking result: vulnerability predictions were completely flipped.

Using air temperatures, ground nesters were found to be the most vulnerable because they have the lowest tolerance to heat.

However, when the microclimates species are exposed to in their nests were considered, stem nesters were shown to be the most vulnerable. This is because they are unable to hide from extreme temperatures, like ground nesters.

We also found a general trend showing that species vulnerability to climate change increases towards tropical latitudes. This means tropical bees that nest above ground are the most vulnerable to climate change.

Working to conserve bees

Tropical Queensland still has one of the fastest land clearing rates on Earth.

To conserve our crucial pollinators of native plants and agricultural crops, we need to stop further land clearing of tropical forests, which provide cooler microclimates in an otherwise very warm environment.

As well as conserving native vegetation, Australia needs to slow its greenhouse gas emissions so we can secure pollination (of both native and agricultural plants) and food security into the future.

Carmen da Silva, Macquarie University Research Fellow, Macquarie University; Rosalyn Gloag, School of Life and Environmental Sciences Research Fellow, University of Sydney, and Vanessa Kellermann, Senior Lecturer, Ecological Plant and Animal Sciences Melbourne, La Trobe University

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

People in parts of Papua New Guinea are facing an unusual problem. Floating volcanic rock is making boat travel difficult, blocking access to fishing grounds and disrupting daily life in coastal communities.

The source of the pumice is the ongoing Titan Ridge eruption from an underwater volcano in the Bismarck Sea. Since May 9, the eruption has produced vast amounts of pumice – a lightweight, porous volcanic rock that floats on the ocean surface.

Reports from Manus Province in the country’s northeast describe chunks of pumice accumulating along coastlines and waterways in enormous “rafts” 2–5 metres thick. In some locations, residents report being able to walk where there was previously open water.

It’s a strange sight, but not an unprecedented one. Submarine eruptions have produced similarly vast pumice rafts before, and the experience from those events suggests the disruption facing Manus communities could persist for months or even years, long after the Titan Ridge eruption itself has ended.

A lifeline cut off

For many Manus communities, small boats are essential for accessing fishing grounds, neighbouring villages, markets, schools and healthcare services. When those transport routes become difficult to use, the consequences extend well beyond inconvenience.

PNG’s Disaster Minister Billy Joseph has described growing concerns regarding food security and access to essential supplies.

The ocean serves as the backbone of Manus livelihoods, providing daily sustenance and the primary source of income through seafood sales. In some villages, residents have begun manually clearing pumice from shorelines and waterways in an effort to restore access to fishing grounds and prevent longer-term damage to local fisheries.

A costly precedent from Japan

Titan Ridge is not the first submarine eruption to generate widespread pumice rafts.

In 2021, the submarine eruption of Fukutoku-Oka-no-Ba south of Japan produced large quantities of floating pumice that drifted to the Nansei islands including Okinawa. There, pumice clogged 71 harbours and marinas, damaged hundreds of vessel engines, disrupted ferry services and affected tourism and fishery industries.

The economic cost in the Okinawa Prefecture alone exceeded 515 million yen.

Japan had extensive transport infrastructure, alternative supply chains and substantial federal resources for clean-up and recovery. The cleanup effort employed heavy machinery on land and sea and removed more than 110,000 cubic metres of pumice from the ports and beaches at an additional cost of more than 1 billion yen.

Despite its scale, the cleanup was only somewhat useful. Most pumice rafts only washed away the following spring with the change in seasonal winds.

Why this could last for years

While pumice from the 2021 Fukutoku-Oka-no-Ba eruption caused major disruption to ports, ferries and tourism in Japan, reports from Manus highlight a different concern: the potential impacts on food security and livelihoods in communities that depend directly on the ocean. These impacts may persist far longer than people expect.

Even after the eruption ends, the pumice already floating on the ocean will continue to move through the region for months to years. To understand why, it helps to understand how pumice behaves.

Pumice forms when gas-rich magma erupts and rapidly cools. The escaping gas leaves behind countless tiny holes, creating a rock that can be porous enough to float.

Individual pieces of pumice lump together to form enormous floating rafts covering hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres.

Many people believe that floating pumice quickly becomes waterlogged and sinks. Research by my colleagues and I shows otherwise.

Previous submarine eruptions show some pumice can remain afloat for years. Ocean currents, winds, and storms can repeatedly redistribute pumice across large areas of the ocean, moving it between coasts and islands long after an eruption ends.

After the 2012 submarine eruption of Havre volcano north of New Zealand, pumice travelled thousands of kilometres across the Pacific, reaching Queensland about eight months later and even Tasmania more than a year afterwards. So even after the Titan Ridge eruption, we can expect the pumice already produced to float around the region for months or years to come.

An ecological toll, too

Humans won’t be the only ones affected. Whole ecosystems may suffer.

Months after the 2021 Fukutoku-Oka-no-Ba eruption in Japan, scientists observed dead farmed fish with stomachs full of pumice, indicating that some species may mistake floating pumice for food. The same researchers also documented pumice rafts passing across fringing coral reefs, temporarily reducing light levels and physically colliding with shallow-water coral colonies.

Research following the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in Tonga suggests another possible ecological impact. Satellite observations showed volcanic particles suspended in seawater reduced light penetration through the water column, potentially affecting coral reefs and other marine ecosystems that depend on sunlight.

Whether similar impacts will occur in Papua New Guinea is not yet known. However, these observations suggest the marine ecological effects may extend beyond the immediate disruptions.

For now, the immediate concern remains the disruption to fishing, water and food security, and boat transport for essential services in Manus Province. But the people of Manus are dealing with only the first stage of the problem.

Pumice rafts are an unusual volcanic hazard because their impacts do not necessarily end when an eruption stops. The experience from Japan is that once the pumice enters coastal waterways, there are few easy solutions.

Rebecca Carey, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences, University of Tasmania

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

Most of my ecology and evolution undergraduates have never held a pair of binoculars or looked at a bug through a magnifying glass. They don’t know how to use a key to identify a plant or insect, let alone why they should bother. They struggle to name common garden birds. They expect to learn about biodiversity from behind the safety of a computer screen. Fieldwork is considered a luxury or an inconvenience, depending on your tolerance to rain.

It’s not the students’ fault. Ecology and evolution offerings in the biology school curriculum are slim pickings: blink and you miss them among a sea of cells and neurons. The education system has done little to nurture a curiosity and understanding of nature in real life.

This is about to change.

Fifteen years ago, environmentalist and author Mary Colwell started campaigning for the government to introduce a GCSE in natural history. It was a bold ambition.

The term natural history musters images of dusty museums and misshapen taxidermy. But there’s now so much evidence highlighting the benefits of connecting with nature. That includes research that shows how nature-literate kids are likely to be more resilient. Evidence also shows clear trends of a biodiversity crisis and rising concerns about our declining exposure to and experience of nature. This is what ecologists call the “extinction of experience” with the natural world.

After much campaigning and several setbacks, a draft curriculum has just been released for public consultation.

This curriculum serves the field of ecology pretty well. Students will learn to identify native species found in grasslands, woodlands, urban and marine environments. They will learn about the dynamic relationships between species and the implications of human influence (including climate change) for habitats, ecosystems and species. This helps equip the next generation as effective stewards of the natural world, and it complements other subjects such as biology and geography.

But does it promise enough?

Noticing nature is the first step towards understanding it. We have become a nature-blind society: “plant blindness” is a term used to describe how we fail to see the most common wildlife (plants) under our noses. We need to re-learn the innate ability we all had as toddlers to notice the tiny creatures beneath our feet or the fractal patterns emanating through sunlit leaves.

This can only be done by directly experiencing nature. This new GCSE promises 20 hours of fieldwork. “It’s twice as much as geography GCSE,” boasted representatives from the Department of Education in a curriculum consultation I attended recently.

That equates to less than 15% of the total GCSE teaching time (150 hours). For comparison, GCSE PE has a more substantial practical component consisting of 30% teaching time – equivalent to 45 hours.

Twenty hours is an average of 15 minutes a week over a two-year GCSE. Hardly time to step outside, let alone find something that catches your eye, make notes about its appearance and behaviour then find the right identification key to name it. In a time-stressed world, noticing nature – really observing it closely, not just ticking species off a list – offers an excuse to slow down, be mindful and spark your curiosity.

Students need time to contemplate how specific plants, animals and fungi connect together into the tangled web of life. A nature-journal style assessment would help kids engage, remember, reflect and grow a real attachment and personal relationship with the wildlife they are learning about. It would offer cross-curricular links too, with art, biology, geography.

But let’s focus on the pros. There is fieldwork and it’s flexible. Teachers can adapt the curriculum to make the most of their local nature opportunities. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to explore the role of digital tools and monitoring technology (platforms like iNaturalist and Merlin Bird ID app) as ways to help children notice and name nature on their doorstep. That could be in their school grounds, local park or in pavement cracks on their walk to school.

Will urban kids be disadvantaged? With the right resources, hopefully not. Urban ecology is a rapidly growing research area, and green spaces are increasingly valued in cities and towns. With more than 60% of the world’s human population predicted to be living in cities by 2050, being tuned into urban nature is perhaps the most valuable skill of all.

The proposed curriculum focuses exclusively on UK habitats and species. This makes the content relatable. Despite our poor species richness, UK species are also the best described in the world. This is because, ever since the 1600s, we have been a nation of nature lovers obsessed with observing, recording and sharing our findings from nature. At least we used to be.

To understand UK nature, children need to meet Gilbert White – the 17th-century parson whose observations of wildlife in his garden transformed the way we look at (and record) the natural world.

White made people notice what organisms were doing, not just what they were. He popularised UK wildlife, giving rise to centuries of naturalists who shaped aspects of our culture, science and heritage today. A UK-based natural history GCSE that doesn’t capture our rich history of naturalists is not serving our children.

An interdisciplinary opportunity

This move for biodiversity education will certainly help narrow the nature literacy gap my colleagues and I see in ecology students at university.

I hope this qualification will be a success, widely adopted by all types of schools across the country. But will it appeal to prospective pupils and their guardians?

Pitching it as “a GCSE to teach teens to plant wildflower-friendly gardens” sets it up to be niche and middle-class before it even launches. Natural history is about so much more than planting wildflowers.

To widen the appeal, it’s important to emphasise the interdisciplinary relevance of the qualification.

That requires drawing links with health. NHS doctors are now prescribing green therapies such as park walks and gardening for patients. Nature is good for our health because we evolved as part of nature.

For many non-western societies, nature’s value is deeply spiritual. There is an opportunity to integrate learning on diversity, beliefs and multi-culturalism.

And there’s so much potential to integrate art. The original naturalists were artists. In observing nature carefully, they noticed anatomical structures, stages of metamorphosis, mimicry. Sketching nature – without judgment – to record its structure, form, behaviour and interactions, could bridge the age-old division between arts and sciences.

Seirian Sumner, Professor of Behavioural Ecology, UCL

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

The UK government is preparing to water down its electric vehicle sales targets. Under the existing zero emission vehicles (ZEV) mandate, 80% of all new cars sold in Britain needed to be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030.

Following sustained lobbying from car manufacturers and trade unions, that figure could be revised down to somewhere between 50% and 70%.

While this shift may be described as a pragmatic response to market realities, the rationale for altering EV targets deserves closer scrutiny. There are four key reasons EV targets shouldn’t be weakened.

1. Risk of repeating the industry’s past mistakes

Lobbying tends to make immediate, tangible costs (the £10 billion in discounts, potential job losses) feel more urgent than long-term benefits like minimising climate impacts. But the lobby may overstate these costs.

This framing is not always ideal. The US automobile industry lobbied for decades against tightening Corporate Average Fuel Economy (Cafe) standards meant to improve fuel efficiency, successfully keeping them weak through to the 2000s. The industry argued that consumers didn’t want fuel-efficient cars and that tighter standards would cost jobs.

As a result, US car manufacturers, such as GM and Chrysler, became dependent on fuel inefficient trucks and SUVs for profit margins. Those companies were left exposed when oil prices spiked in 2008 during the financial crisis and required government bailouts.

At the same time, Japanese manufacturers who had developed fuel-efficient vehicles under their own domestic constraints (including the 1973 oil crisis and increasing fuel prices) captured a large market share in the US and globally.

While lobbying protected American autoworkers in the short-term, it contributed to the very crisis that subsequently threatened their jobs.

When unions join manufacturers in lobbying, it becomes very difficult for politicians to not listen. The jobs argument could make it hard for the government to hold firm on its targets.

2. Uncertainty can slow investment

If targets keep shifting every few years, uncertainty can slow the transition as businesses and consumers lose confidence in the policy. This can lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy problem, which results in reduced investment in the sector and further stalling.

3. Jobs need long-term protection

The effect of the EV transition on automotive jobs is more nuanced than lobbying might suggest.

The transition will not reduce the overall scale of vehicle manufacturing. Assembly plants, logistics networks, body shops and much of the broader supply chain will continue to exist.

New employment opportunities from battery cell production, charging infrastructure installation and maintenance, grid upgrades and EV software engineering will also increase. Investments in initiatives such as gigafactories that mass produce EV batteries have already created new jobs.

However, workers making specific internal combustion engine components, such as exhausts, gearboxes, fuel injection systems and other parts that EVs do not use, face real displacement risk. That deserves serious attention to ensure a just transition – that is, the process of moving to a low-carbon society that is green, sustainable and socially inclusive.

To protect these jobs, the government and manufacturers need to fund retraining, invest in future skills and support workers through this phase of change. In Germany, unions have negotiated transition funds for workers in legacy auto parts.

Policies aimed at increasing demand for EVs, such as creating a more extensive and reasonably priced charging infrastructure, can give manufacturers economies of scale, bringing prices of EVs down over time. And the positive feedback loop can further accelerate demand and create new employment.

4. Fear of losing UK export edge

Nearly eight of the ten cars produced in the UK are exported to 140 countries. If UK manufacturers and workers fall behind on EV capability because of the slowdown in momentum, they risk losing export markets to competitors.

China now produces highly competitive EVs at scale, and European manufacturers are increasingly producing efficient, long-range EVs. To maintain a competitive advantage, car makers in Britain need to continue investing in skilled workers specialising in technologies such as batteries.

British car manufacturers are asking the government to rethink the ZEV mandate because EV residual values have been volatile. This has made the used market uncertain and dampened enthusiasm for new purchases. Plus, the charging network remains unreliable and EV buyers still suffer from range anxiety (concerns that EVs don’t go far enough on a single charge).

But if paired with solid investment, these are problems that a well-supported mandate could help solve. A target reduction from 80% to 50% or 60% takes pressure off the government and manufacturers to address those issues. And delaying the green transport transition just moves costs from firms and their shareholders to workers and the public.

Jagannadha Pawan Tamvada, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Kingston University and Mili Shrivastava, Principal Academic in Strategy, Bournemouth University

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

Deep in the Atlantic, a vast circulation of water carries heat from the tropics towards Greenland. This is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or Amoc. It does this work largely out of sight, so doesn’t have the public profile of rainforests, polar ice caps or other huge climate-regulating systems.

Recent studies suggest it is weakening. If it slows further, northern Europe could experience much colder winters even as the world warms, while tropical monsoons could shift, and sea levels could suddenly rise along the US east coast.

Yet despite repeated scientific warnings, Amoc rarely remains in the headlines for long. One explanation involves media ownership and editorial constraints, but there is another. Amoc presents a particular problem for modern journalism: it is extraordinarily difficult for many to even imagine, as it exists in a world far below our own – moving slowly, silently through the Atlantic.

Images help shape how people understand climate issues. In journalism, over decades, a visual culture has evolved: burning forests, calving icebergs, oil rigs at sunset, swirling hurricanes, beaches strewn with plastic bottles. These visuals act as stand-ins for systems that are hard or impossible to observe directly. Climate journalism did not create this visual filter, but it has to operate within it.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch illustrates how the filter works. Often imagined as a floating island of waste, in reality it is a diffuse soup of microplastics spread across millions of square kilometres of ocean, largely invisible at sea level.

It circulates in news coverage partly because visual proxies give it a recognisable form – discarded bottles and nets pulled from the ocean, an endurance swimmer collecting data during a long journey. These images allow the garbage patch to continually stay in mainstream news even if it simplifies and distorts what is happening in the ocean.

When systems have no image

Amoc operates on a slow but immense scale. Warm surface waters move north from the tropics toward Greenland, where they cool, become denser, sink to depths of around 5,000 metres, and return south at depth. Hundreds of kilometres wide in places, it redistributes heat and salinity across the Atlantic on a massive scale.

Many dynamic processes shape this ocean current, so we still don’t know exactly how fast the circulation will change or even its future trajectory. Predicted outcomes remain uncertain and some scientists are more hopeful than others, but multiple studies indicate a weakening trend.

Yet Amoc generates few visuals. Researchers can observe its traces: long-dead coral carrying chemical echoes of past waters, layers of sediment slowly accumulating a record of currents, or through instruments timestamping the faintest deep-sea movements. These fragments are assembled into patterns through computer models that reconstruct circulation and can animate it in three dimensions. Satellites offer some surface clues of temperature, height and salinity. But the results of this work are generally designed for scientific analysis, not news coverage or public understanding.

How to illustrate the invisible

So is the answer to find more dramatic images – and do any actually exist? The UK’s Met Office and Nasa often fall back on red-and-blue diagrams of arrows looping around the Atlantic. For some people it works: Vicky Allan, a Scottish-based environmental journalist who has reported on Amoc in detail, told me that what finally hit home was a lecture slide showing a cold “blue blob” over Scotland, a collapse scenario projecting winters of -30°C.

But images do not carry universal meaning. We interpret the world through direct experience, knowledge, and cultural memory. Allan lives in the region depicted. For others, the same image may not have the same impact.

Beyond these diagrams, Amoc offers almost no visual proxies. It’s sometimes illustrated with “frozen Europe” visuals, but most scientists say such a doomsday scenario is unlikely. If journalists lean into frozen Europe too much, the science itself risks being adapted to fit an engagement-friendly visual convention.

When complex, invisible systems appear in mainstream news, dramatic images often travel further than the story itself. I found this with my own work on satellites burning up in the atmosphere: striking visuals draw attention and help readers imagine how spacecraft end their working lives. But my core message about the still-uncertain effect of microscopic particles on ozone-depleting polar clouds was much harder to convey.

From the deep ocean to the upper atmosphere, some of the most consequential environmental processes unfold beyond human perception, across timescales from decades to millennia. They belong to a planet far more complex than we can fully grasp, where uncertainty is not a failure, but part of how we learn about the climate system.

Yet climate journalism relies on a narrow visual filter: images that are urgent, dramatic and human-centred, reducing vast slow environmental processes into events that can be seen and felt. In doing so, we risk mistaking attention for understanding. Amoc and similar critical systems reveal the gap between what matters and what becomes visible. The challenge is not scientific complexity, but the limits of the visual conventions through which we tell environmental stories.

Fionagh Thomson, Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University

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

As the race to build data centers across the United States accelerates, local governments worry that the tech industry mantra of “move fast and break things” means their communities are at risk of being broken.

I’m a Harvard researcher studying the relationship between data centers and energy. I’ve closely monitored how local governments respond to proposals or even just concerns about the potential for data centers in their communities. What I’ve found is a complex story of community needs, political tensions and corporate power – all interacting with local, state and national democratic processes.

Promises and potential

Technology companies stay competitive by being ready to provide data and communications services even before customer demand rises. Data centers already power online communications, shopping and banking systems. Now, expanding demand for artificial intelligence has led to over 1,000 pending data center proposals across the country.

Federal actions also drive development. The Trump administration has identified data center build-out as a strategic priority. The administration has promoted data center capacity as a measure of American strength and signaled that federal regulations on data centers may be eased.

At the community level, technology companies claim that data centers bring jobs, economic revitalization, digital connectivity and economic growth to local communities.

Not great neighbors

So far, however, data centers’ benefits are overshadowed by more visible harms.

Nearby residents experience higher air pollution and excess noise. Data processing also uses a lot of water to cool the buildings and their equipment.

Simultaneously, electricity prices continue to outpace inflation, burdening families across the country. These trends reflect, in part, the costly infrastructure investments needed to power data centers.

The local movement

My research has found that local governments across the U.S. are trying to avoid or reduce these harms.

Some counties and cities that don’t have specific zoning rules and regulations for data center development are using short-term moratoriums. These pauses in data center permitting and construction give communities time to consider how to define new laws and regulations about the facilities’ location, electricity use, water conservation and noise buffering.

Speaking about his town’s decision to impose a one-year data center moratorium, Rick Bella, the town council president in Merrillville, Indiana, about 40 miles southeast of Chicago, stressed a desire to “evaluate real-world impacts and learn from a project developing right next door before determining what may or may not be appropriate for Merrillville.”

Other places want to block data centers altogether. In April 2026, for example, the Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority near Detroit, Michigan, passed a yearlong halt to the “delivery, commitment, reservation, extension, or approval of water and sewer services” for data centers. The move blocks data centers, including one under development by the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory, from getting the water they need to operate.

Separately, towns across Ohio, Wisconsin, Maryland, Nevada and California have put questions related to data centers on their local ballots. Through these referendums, voters can weigh in on construction bans, tax incentives and zoning ordinances.

Power struggles

While public attitudes around data centers have remained largely nonpartisan, local and state officials don’t always see eye to eye.

Officials in Hood County, Texas, for example, rejected a proposal for a six-month moratorium after a state senator urged the Texas attorney general to intervene and prevent the measure.

In 2025, West Virginia passed a bill that reduces local governments’ zoning and regulatory powers in relation to data centers and microgrids. A similar bill in New Hampshire’s legislature was defeated in May 2026.

Tech companies are also flexing their legal and financial muscles. For example, data center developers sued Saline Township, Michigan, and Chatham County, North Carolina, seeking to overturn their local zoning decisions, to be able to proceed with data center construction.

Changing tides

Local pushback comes at a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence technology itself.

As seen in objections to the internet’s expanding AI “slop,” backlash over AI-generated Super Bowl ads, worries about an AI-related financial bubble and complaints about Google’s pivot to AI-directed search, Americans are reckoning with AI’s role in society.

Further, many people are questioning the role of technology broadly. Increasing numbers of teens and adults are addicted to their smartphones, emotionally and psychologically dependent on their availability. Parents and teachers are questioning the usefulness of various types of digital technologies in classrooms. Even the pope has warned that technology must serve humanity – and not the other way around.

Americans are responding to this moment through the power of their voices and votes.

Technology companies may view moratoriums and new regulations as delays in project development. But the town hall discussions, community coalitions, public petitions and even farmers’ unions reflect American democracy at work.

In Sunbury, Ohio, local officials considered a moratorium only after witnessing the scope of public protest over a proposed data center.

In April 2026, voters in Festus, Missouri, removed several City Council members after they supported a new data center despite resident pushback.

The question of whether a community wants or should have a data center does not have a universal answer. I believe it’s a question that deserves deliberate processes, transparency and consideration.

To me, these local-level actions reflect a desire to slow down. There is little question that data centers and AI will be part of our collective future. Today, communities are asking for a fair say in what their futures will be.

Rachel Mural, Senior Research Associate in Environment and Natural Resources and Science, Technology, and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

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

When heat waves hit the Western United States, the risk of wildfires quickly rises. The prolonged heat dries out vegetation, but that’s only part of the cause – heat waves also play other roles in spreading wildfires.

In a new study, our team of fire and climate scientists looked at two decades of wildfire activity in the West, from 2001 to 2024, and for the first time quantified the effect of heat waves on those fires.

We expected a big impact, but the numbers still surprised us: While heat waves, which we defined as three or more consecutive days with temperatures in the top tenth of hottest days, accounted for only 12% to 15% of warm-season days, we found that 42% of all the area burned by fires had occurred during or right after a heat wave.

Moreover, the amount of the area that burned each day was more than 50% larger during heat waves than during the cooler days right before the heat wave began in many parts of the West. In some regions, the difference was much larger – up to 300%.

How heat waves worsen fire risk

Heat waves create conditions that favor wildfire ignition and spread in a few ways.

First, hot temperatures increase the atmosphere’s demand for moisture, meaning the rate at which the air can evaporate moisture from the land and vegetation. As a result, these fuels rapidly dry out, making them easier to ignite.

Heat waves also limit nighttime humidity. The drier air allows fires to remain active for longer periods and burn through more hours of the night.

Making matters worse, heat waves can create conditions favorable for lightning because of the hot, unstable atmosphere. We found increases in cloud-to-ground lightning, including “dry” lightning, during and after heat waves across many parts of the West.

Dry lightning can occur when the precipitation in a storm system evaporates before it reaches the ground. This type of lightning is particularly dangerous because it can ignite vegetation without producing enough rainfall to douse the flames.

These factors combine to heighten the risk of wildfires. That risk often persists even after the heat wave ends, as dry vegetation and dead material on the ground tend to remain unusually dry for days after temperatures return closer to normal – allowing fires to continue growing.

Trends in heat and fires

The connection between heat waves and wildfire activity is becoming increasingly important because heat waves are becoming more common as global temperatures rise, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions.

Since 2001, the number of heat wave days across Western U.S. forests has nearly doubled. During the same period, the amount of forest area burned increased by 2.5 times. Strikingly, without the increase in heat wave days since 2001, we found that the cumulative are of burned forest would have been 37% smaller.

However, not all ecosystems respond the same way.

While we found a strong long-term relationship between increasing heat waves and increasing burned area in forests, this was not the case in grasslands and shrublands, where the total burned area has not increased. In grasslands and shrublands, the amount of land that burns in a given year is influenced more strongly by the amount of available vegetation than by heat alone.

A future with even drier heat waves

Climate change is causing Western U.S. summers to trend hotter and drier. Consequently, relative humidity during heat waves has also declined in recent decades, especially in forested regions of California, Oregon and Washington.

These drier heat waves appear particularly effective at increasing wildfire activity. Alongside long-standing fire deficits, which resulted from the practice of quickly extinguishing fires rather than allowing low-level fires to burn away forest debris, these factors have escalated the potential for large fires in the West.

Wildfire forecasts already account for factors such as wind, humidity and fuel dryness, but they typically have not included heat waves. Our research suggests that heat waves deserve greater attention, as they are not just periods of uncomfortable and sometimes deadly weather, but are also increasingly important drivers of wildfire risk.

Dmitri Kalashnikov, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of California, Merced; Cong Yin, Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate and Hydrology, University of California, Merced; Madhulika Gurazada, Ph.D. Student in Management of Complex Systems, University of California, Merced, and Mukesh Kumar, Postdoctoral Researcher in Wildfires and Complex Systems, University of California, Merced

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

Pause for a moment and listen. What do you hear? Chances are, somewhere in the background, is the ever-present hum of a road.

More than 4.2 million miles of public roads crisscross the lower 48 states – enough to reach the Moon and back almost nine times. This vast network of roads spiderwebs its way across the contiguous U.S., leaving only about 5% as an inventoried roadless area or wilderness.

Now, some of those last remaining lands free of roads are under threat from the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule. That includes southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where eagles, bears, salmon and many other species thrive in old-growth coastal forest along the Inside Passage.

In announcing its plan, the administration said rescinding the rule would remove prohibitions on road construction and logging on nearly 59 million acres of national forest, arguing that the rule slowed economic development.

In Congress, another effort is underway to try to change the law through an amendment to the Wildfire Prevention Act. That change, if approved, would both remove the Roadless Rule and prevent the U.S. Forest Service from reinstituting it in the future, despite overwhelming public support for the rule.

As ecologists who have spent decades studying wilderness and the animals and ecological functions that depend on undisturbed habitats, we believe it’s important to understand that preserving roadless areas has value for environmental health, clean water, wildlife survival and people’s own well-being.

What is the Roadless Rule?

The National Forest Roadless Area Conservation Policy, better known as the Roadless Rule, was issued in January 2001 by President Bill Clinton. It has had overwhelming public support and received more public comments than any other rule in history.

The rule prohibits road construction, maintenance and commercial timber harvest in inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System. It applies to over 58 million acres across the country, excluding Idaho and Colorado, which have their own state-specific roadless rules. While most of these roadless areas are in the western states and Alaska, 38 total states as well as Puerto Rico host roadless areas.

The primary goal of the Roadless Rule is to maintain forest health and productivity for future generations. It also helps avoid exacerbating the U.S. Forest Service’s road maintenance backlog by not making new roads.

The Roadless Rule prohibits new road construction, with very limited exceptions, as well as commercial logging in designated roadless areas. It does not restrict other uses that are compatible with the management plan, such as hiking and mountain biking, or resource uses such as grazing livestock and working existing mining claims.

Beyond providing vital habitat for species and enabling healthy forests, the rule protects drinking water for the millions of Americans whose water flows from national forests. It also preserves high-quality recreation opportunities – hiking, camping, hunting and fishing – that Americans cherish.

The problem with roads in national forests

While roads can provide benefits, such as access to forests, they can also do ecological harm.

Roads enable invasive weeds to spread by being carried on vehicle tires and deposited in exposed soils, erode sediments into streams and fragment habitat that wildlife rely on. Vehicles directly kill and injure animals through collisions. They occasionally start fires, too. A recent study found that fires are more likely to start in areas with roads than in areas without.

Studies show that road noise displaces wildlife, increases stress and can affect wildlife behavior patterns at distances of over a mile from the road.

And roads don’t just cause problems for species on land. Most roads cross streams and rivers, which requires building a way for those waters to keep flowing under the road (structures called culverts). While culverts can be designed to allow fish to pass through and maintain ecological connections, they are rarely built to do so. This leads to declines in the health of fish populations and can leave some species locally extinct.

The benefits of roadless areas

Inventoried roadless areas are among the most ecologically intact and wildest places left in the United States, yet – unlike Wilderness Areas and National Parks – there are no signs acknowledging their boundaries when you enter one.

Most are part of larger ecosystems, directly adjacent or ecologically connected to better known national parks and wilderness areas. Removing Roadless Rule protections would erode ecological buffers to these more famous protected lands.

For some species, roadless areas protect critical core habitat. For instance, over half the suitable habitat for relictual slender salamander, a critically imperiled species native to the Sierra Mountains of California, occurs in a roadless area. Nearly 40% of Mount Pinos, lodgepole chipmunk, an imperiled subspecies of the lodgepole chipmunk, also live in roadless areas in California.

Research shows that every formal roadless area provides habitat for at least two wildlife species of conservation concern – those facing risks to their long-term survival – with the median roadless area supporting 10 of these imperiled species. Some Arizona roadless areas contain habitat for up to 62 of these species.

Roadless areas also protect watersheds that supply drinking water to 47 million Americans.

Without this protection, these watersheds would still provide water, but their long-term health and hydrological sustainability could be compromised if roads block stream flow and increase sediments flowing into waterways. The result can be higher costs for water purification.

The Forest Service’s own watershed health assessment, known as the Watershed Condition Framework, uses road density as a key indicator of conditions that can disrupt water quantity and quality.

What is at risk in rescinding the Roadless Rule?

The Trump administration’s proposed rollback, expected to be formalized in 2026, would open these last wild places to development, fragmenting habitats that can never be restored.

The American public spoke loudly in 2001 when they supported the Roadless Rule. Two decades later, the public comments submitted on the recission notice overwhelming opposed rolling back the rules, a Center for Western Priorities review found, reaffirming that U.S. roadless forests remain as vital and valued as ever.

Protecting these areas is about promoting healthy ecosystems on public lands so they can provide hiking, hunting and fishing opportunities for generations to come to enjoy the tranquility of being in nature.

Mariah Meek, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, Michigan State University and Travis Belote, Assistant Professor of Landscape Ecology, Montana State University

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

During the first Trump administration, states and cities, tired of waiting for the federal government to deal with energy and climate challenges, started writing their own laws.

New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in 2019, setting mandatory renewable energy and emissions reduction targets. Virginia passed the Clean Economy Act in 2020, setting a schedule to retire fossil fuel power plants. Colorado set greenhouse gas reduction targets. Boston and Seattle revised their building codes to make buildings more energy efficient and their public transportation fleets cleaner.

In fact, close to half of all Americans live somewhere that made a legally binding commitment to cleaner energy in the early 2020s.

Those laws were written at the start of the energy transition, with the information available at the time. Six years later, several governments are backing away from their commitments.

New York became the first state in the country to roll back its signature climate law in May 2026, trading a binding 2030 target to reduce emissions by 40% for a fuzzier 2040 goal. Gov. Kathy Hochul blamed high energy costs, though the move also conveniently killed a lawsuit she had just lost, in which a judge ruled her administration had ignored the law’s deadline. She admitted the rollback wouldn’t lower anyone’s bills right away.

In Virginia, where I live and work, the largest utility says it can’t both meet demand and retire its gas power plants on the law’s schedule, so it wants a new gas peaker plant – a plant that runs only when needed to meet high demand – to keep the state’s booming data centers running.

Hawaii’s governor signed a tax cut package for low-income workers in May that also phased out a renewable energy tax credit that has fueled the state’s adoption of rooftop solar power.

Even California, long the global pacesetter in addressing climate change, in 2026 handed oil refineries and other big polluters billions of dollars worth of pollution permits they would otherwise have had to buy. The state caps emissions and makes polluters pay for them to push industry to clean up over time. The Air Resources Board said the giveaway would ease gas prices that had spiked during the war in Iran. However, the result is pollution in the neighborhoods near those refineries and lost revenue that would have supported public transit.

Energy costs, vanishing federal subsidies and an administration in Washington hostile to clean energy are giving officials reasons to retreat from efforts to deal with climate change and the political cover to do so.

I understand the pressure these officials are under. I spent time working on energy policy in the Biden White House. But even though the politics have changed, the world’s climate problems aren’t going away. If states want to protect their citizens from energy price inflation, abandoning the energy transition is not the answer, but they do need an updated playbook.

Why meeting climate goals feels tougher today

Every state starts with different resources and a different mix of industries and emissions sources. A sunny state, a state with offshore wind, a state covered in forest and farmland, and a state full of steel and cement factories all have very different paths to reducing emissions. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. When my colleagues and I modeled the cheapest paths to zero emissions for all 50 of them, some states had an easier path, and all took different routes.

But all states are also running into what some researchers call the “mid-transition,” the awkward stretch where both the clean energy system and the fossil energy system are needed to meet power demand. A gas power plant might run only when demand spikes, but residents are still paying for it. Transmission lines can take a long time to build. Utilities keep paying to patch up plants that would have been retired and replaced with much cheaper and cleaner renewables.

Despite the friction of the mid-transition, wind, solar and batteries remain the cheapest ways to generate electricity, and they will continue to capture the market for new power capacity simply because they make the most financial sense. In 2025, wind and solar technologies produced a record 17% of America’s electricity. In 2026 almost all of the new capacity planned for the grid is solar, wind or batteries.

Energy-saving technologies at home help reduce emissions as well. Trade an old electric-resistance heater for a heat pump and a typical home keeps about $1,530 a year while lowering emissions. These retrofits have upfront costs, but many governments have been subsidizing them because they save money for everyone in the long run.

Historically, federal subsidies smoothed over these adoption costs. But Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act took an eraser to the 2022 U.S. Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for electric-vehicle tax credits, rebates for heat pumps, and money for interstate transmission improvements.

How to keep cutting emissions

States can still take steps to navigate this moment and continue cutting emissions. Here are four ways:

Use data centers and AI to accelerate electrification: All the new power demand from growing numbers of data centers is the best reason in a generation to finally build the energy transmission and storage the U.S. will need in an electrified future powered by renewable energy. Ensuring that companies pay their share for the power supply build-out could speed up electrification for residents, shifting homes and vehicles away from fossil fuels and saving people money.

The artificial intelligence boom can also be used to track energy use and find excess emissions. AI can turn satellite images, utility data and building records into near-real-time maps of emissions, block by block, making emissions cuts easier to target.

Embrace industrial policy: Much about the energy transition remains unresolved, including how it will affect manufacturing, freight, aviation and construction. During periods of technological change, governments often rely on industrial policy to tilt the market toward industries that matter for security and competitiveness: the last administration used grants; this administration is using tariffs. China has played this game the hardest, growing a breathtaking number of companies that now dominate the supply chains for EVs, batteries, solar panels and rare earth metals.

At the state level, industrial policy usually boils down to luring industries that can bring jobs. I believe state agencies can also do more by tapping into public university expertise to solve problems related to the energy transition and train the next generation of workers these industries will need.

Build more urban housing: The country is short millions of homes, which is a reason rent and mortgages are so high. Buildings are also one of the largest sources of climate-changing pollution. Building the right size housing in the right places – close to where residents work or near transit – can be the cheapest way to cut a household’s overall energy needs and their costs. Smaller places are cheaper to heat, and homes close to transit mean occupants have to drive a lot less. California, Oregon and Montana have all overridden local objections to expand urban housing.

Support carbon removal techniques that boost rural areas: Carbon removal projects can have multiple benefits. For example, restoring a coastal marsh stores carbon and rebuilds the storm buffer fishing towns depend on. Biochar or crushed silicate worked into the right farm soils helps retain water and improve yields. Better forest management cuts fire risk. Done right, this is rural development that also cleans up pollution.

The world has shifted its energy foundation before: from wood and biomass to coal in the 1800s, from coal to oil and gas in the last century, and now to a fully electrified, affordable and clean economy. Each time, the nation came out better off.

As an engineering professor, I am a technology optimist. The fossil-fueled past that some leaders say they miss was never as cheap as they remember it. What’s coming is better, and state and local officials can help the U.S. get there.

Andres Clarens, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Virginia

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