This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Polar bears became the poster child for the peril of climate change for obvious reasons: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels warm the planet, the ice where these bears live is melting. For more than three decades, scientists have been warning that climate change could drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming. But as scientists are continuing to learn, the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated. In 2022, scientists published a study showing that polar bears in southeastern Greenland were able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt, sheltering them from some of the impacts of warming. And a study published late last year revealed some changes in polar bear DNA that may help them adapt to hotter weather. > “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the > variability story.” Now, research in the journal Scientific Reports adds yet another wrinkle of hope for the species. The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. “I was surprised,” Aars told Vox from Svalbard. “I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.” The new study makes clear that, in other regions, the loss of sea ice from warming is indeed linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, for example, researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s. Climate change remains the largest threat to these animals. Yet, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them. Perhaps, then, polar bears aren’t the best mascot for the climate crisis—a point some advocates have been making for a while—especially when there are countless other species imperiled by rising temperatures. Polar bears need fat to survive the harsh Arctic cold; that’s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, meanwhile, need ice to rest and birth pups. Without that ice, polar bears have a hard time finding and catching them. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic—the northernmost region of the planet, including parts of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia—has lost more than 27,000 square miles of summer ice. That’s an area larger than the state of West Virginia. Some estimates suggest that the region could be ice-free by the middle of the century, even under optimistic emissions scenarios. That melting ice is what’s harming polar bear populations in Canada’s Hudson Bay; the Beaufort Sea, located north of Alaska and the Yukon; and Baffin Bay in Greenland. And it’s why they’re listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, a global authority on endangered species. But the story in Svalbard—an icy archipelago in the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia—is different. Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard.Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted hundreds of polar bears from helicopters and measured their bodies. Then they compared those measurements to sea ice conditions, such as the number of ice-free days, and other climate variables. Remarkably, the number of days with no ice in the region increased by roughly 100 during that period. And yet, as the authors found, the body condition of both male and female polar bears—i.e., how fat and healthy they are—increased from 2000 onward. Female bears were actually in worse condition when the sea ice lasted longer. Often, the message about polar bears is “100 percent doom,” said Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. “But that’s not true,” Laidre told me. “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.” If polar bears in Svalbard are healthy, that means they’re finding food. So what are they eating? One possibility, said Aars, the lead author, is that there may be higher densities of ringed seals, their primary food source, in years with less ice, so they’re easier to catch. Even if polar bears have less time to catch the seals—because there are fewer days with ice—they can put on loads of weight quickly and rely on that for months. The bears may also be eating other animals on land that don’t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago are increasing, for example, and Aars says he’s seen bears eat them. Walrus populations are increasing, too. Although polar bears can’t easily kill a walrus, they can scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from other causes. “Bears in Svalbard are potentially changing their diet, and that might account for the increase in body condition,” said John Iacozza, a senior instructor and polar bear expert at the University of Manitoba. That’s a luxury that polar bears elsewhere might not have. “You wouldn’t see the same effect happening in Western Hudson Bay, just because the availability of other species is less,” said Iacozza, who was not involved in the new research. While the Svalbard bears might be fine for now, researchers still worry about the long-term impacts of warming in the region. “We do think there’s a threshold,” Aars told me. “The difficult part is that we don’t know what it is.” No other animal has been so closely tied to climate change as the polar bear. It was on the cover of TIME’s 2006 global warming issue. It was featured in Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered the same year. It was used in funding campaigns for environmental groups. (One year, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a friend who went as a melting ice cap.) The bear’s symbolism is rooted in good science. Those early studies were in places like Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, where these Arctic apex predators were clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media outlets amplified the most sensational conclusions—and they stuck. That’s partly because the message is simple, Laidre said: Polar bears need ice, and warming is making it disappear. “The relationship between [climate and] an animal that needs a platform to eat is easy to wrap your brain around,” she said.

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Oregon’s short legislative session convenes in early February, conservation advocates will once again try to convince lawmakers to pass a major funding bill that could provide nearly $30 million annually to protect the state’s biodiversity. The 1% for Wildlife bill, sponsored by state Reps. Ken Helm (D-Beaverton) and Mark Owens (R-Crane), would increase the state’s current hotel and lodging taxes by 1.25 percent, creating a new revenue stream for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to support long-neglected habitat conservation programs. Last session, the bill passed the House, but two Republicans blocked it in the Senate. > “The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states > that are watching closely to see if it’s successful.” Oregon’s federally required State Wildlife Action Plan identifies species at risk of extinction or decline due to habitat loss, climate change, and other threats. In 2025, as the plan was being updated, dozens of species were added, including the Crater Lake newt, the California condor, and the North American porcupine, bringing the total to more than 300. “It’s a blueprint of the most imperiled species and habitats in the state,” said Sristi Kamal, deputy director of the Western Environmental Law Center, which supports the bill. “But a plan is only as good as the funding to implement it.” Though Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife Department receives some state funding, most of its budget comes from hunting and fishing licenses and federal taxes on guns and ammunition via the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937. The majority of Oregon’s federal funds, about $20 million annually, are earmarked for big game species and sport fish. Other federal grants primarily support species already protected by the Endangered Species Act. That means that Fish and Wildlife, like most state wildlife agencies, has little money to prevent species from becoming endangered in the first place. Between 2023 and 2025, it spent just 2 percent of its budget on wildlife conservation programs. Increasing hotel and lodging taxes would leverage the state’s robust eco-tourism industry, which annually attracts tens of thousands of out-of-state and international visitors. If the bill passes, Oregon’s statewide hotel tax rate would be 2.5 percent—the third-lowest rate in the US and less than half of what Washington, Montana, and Idaho charge. The 1% for Wildlife bill could provide a new model for state-level conservation funding, said Mark Humpert, director of conservation initiatives at the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which advocates for state agencies at the federal level. “Ninety-five to 99 percent of species that states are responsible for have no dedicated funding from the federal government. We sometimes joke that state agencies have to offer bake sales to fund this work,” Humpert said. Some states sell specialty license plates; others use a small percentage of sales taxes on outdoor equipment. The “gold standard,” Humpert said, is Missouri, where a state constitutional amendment dedicates one-eighth of 1 percent of its sales tax to its Department of Conservation. According to a 2016 study by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and its partners, fully implementing every State Wildlife Action Plan in the country would cost around $1 billion annually. But for years, Congress has failed to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a bipartisan bill that would bolster states’ conservation funding. Now, as the Trump administration slashes federal conservation and climate funding, advocates say that the 1% for Wildlife bill could provide the stable funding needed to implement Oregon’s wildlife action plan. “The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states that are watching closely to see if it’s successful,” Humpert said. In northeast Oregon’s high-desert region, Jamie Dawson, the Greater Hells Canyon Council’s conservation director, hopes the bill can fund wildlife crossings on Highway 82. “This section of the Blue Mountains is an absolutely critical habitat connectivity corridor—of continental importance,” Dawson said. Deer, elk and other species use it to migrate between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades Range in western Oregon and Washington. But the route is a wildlife collision hotspot, with hundreds of animals killed by vehicles over the past few years. Elsewhere, the funding could support studies of migratory bird habitats like eel grass estuaries and wetlands, said Joe Liebezeit, conservation director for the Bird Alliance of Oregon. In spring 2025, local birdwatchers and radar data indicated that half as many birds as usual migrated through the state, though the reasons for this are unclear. > “The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s > something sportsmen can get behind.” As the state’s general fund waxes and wanes, so does the wildlife department’s budget, which is rewritten every two years. The lack of stable conservation funding prevents it from focusing on long-term solutions for species conservation, said Davia Palmeri, the agency’s federal policy director. “We do monitoring for these species when we can—when there’s a grant or short-term funding—to get pulses on species like reptiles or amphibians.” For over a decade, advocates have fought to secure state funding for conservation. “At one point, there was a proposal to put a tax on birdseed,” said Danielle Moser, wildlife program manager at Oregon Wild. “There was the idea of a gear tax—things you buy at REI.” But none of these ideas would have raised enough, and ultimately, they fizzled. Last year, two Republican senators, Daniel Bonham and Cedric Hayden, killed the bill by refusing to allow the final committee vote that would bring it to the governor’s desk. Now, conservation advocates from across the political spectrum are determined to pass it. “You won’t always see all these logos on the same page,” says Amy Patrick, policy director at the Oregon Hunters Association, which is working with conservation groups like Oregon Wild to shape the bill. “The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s something sportsmen can get behind. There’s a real sense that this is an investment that will benefit all of our wildlife and habitats.” The current 1.5 percent tourism tax funds the $45 million annual budget of Travel Oregon, which promotes the state’s tourism industry. Travel Portland, an independent nonprofit that works with Travel Oregon, opposes the bill, arguing that the additional tax would discourage large conferences and events. (Travel Oregon said in a statement that it does not take positions on bills.) The Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association called the bill a “Pandora’s box” of future tax increases. “We don’t see an end in sight, with all the other state agencies that would love a new revenue source,” said Jason Brandt, the association’s president. Brandt and others note that the bill’s original text only provided a 1 percent tax increase for the wildlife agency, but amendments tacked on 0.25 percent for conservation efforts by other departments, including the Department of Agriculture’s invasive species management and anti-poaching efforts at the Department of Justice. The association’s political action committee donated more than $17,000 to Bonham during his time in state office. Bonham, who resigned from the Senate in October when he was nominated to a federal position, did not respond to a request for comment. Kamal and other advocates say the tourism industry’s opposition is ironic, given that revenue from the new tax would be reinvested in some of the state’s most popular attractions. Travel Oregon’s surveys show that scenic beauty is the top draw for 90 percent of out-of-state visitors. “A lot of people come to Portland for business, but then they go to our beaches, or the mountains,” said Kamal. “The tourism industry is standing on the back of these natural resources. If you don’t invest in it, the pressures on these resources will make that legacy crumble.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. “I just got a whiff,” said Peter Harrison, a marine scientist, as he leaned over the edge of the boat and pointed his flashlight into the dark water. “It’s really coming through now.” It was shortly after 10 pm on a cloudy December night, and Harrison, a coral researcher at Australia’s Southern Cross University, was about 25 miles off the coast of northern Queensland. He was with a group of scientists, tourism operators, and Indigenous Australians who had spent the last few nights above the Great Barrier Reef—the largest living structure on the planet—looking for coral spawn. And apparently, it has a smell. Over a few nights in the Australian summer, shortly after the full moon, millions of corals across the Great Barrier Reef start bubbling out pearly bundles of sperm and eggs, known as spawn. It’s as if the reef is snowing upside down. Those bundles float to the surface and break apart. If all goes to plan, the eggs of one coral will encounter the sperm of another and grow into free-swimming coral larvae. Those larvae make their way to the reef, where they find a spot to “settle,” like a seed taking root, and then morph into what we know of as coral. Spawning on the Great Barrier Reef has been called the largest reproductive event on Earth, and, in more colorful terms, “the world’s largest orgasm.” Coral spawn can be so abundant in some areas above the reef that it forms large, veiny slicks—as if there had been a chemical spill. A team of researchers and tourism operators try to collect coral spawn above the Great Barrier Reef near Cairns one night in December.Harriet Spark/Vox This was what the team was looking for out on the reef, and sniffing is one of the only ways to find it, said Harrison, who was among a small group of scientists who first documented the phenomenon of mass coral spawning in the 1980s. Some people say coral spawn smells like watermelon or fresh cow’s milk. To me it was just vaguely fishy. “Here we go,” said Mark Gibbs, another scientist onboard and an engineer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), a government agency. All of a sudden the water around us was full of little orbs, as if hundreds of Beanie Babies had been ripped open. “Nets in the water!” Gibbs said to the crew. A few people onboard began skimming the water’s surface with modified pool nets for spawn and then dumping the contents into a large plastic bin. That night, the team collected hundreds of thousands of coral eggs as part of a Herculean effort to try to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive. Rising global temperatures, together with a raft of other challenges, threaten to destroy this iconic ecosystem—the gem of Australia, a World Heritage site, and one of the main engines of the country’s massive tourism industry. In response to these existential threats, the government launched a project called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). The goal is nothing less than to help the world’s greatest coral reef survive climate change. And with nearly $300 million in funding and hundreds of people involved, RRAP is the largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted to protect a reef. The project involves robots, one of the world’s largest research aquariums, and droves of world-renowned scientists. The scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. But even then, will it be enough? The first thing to know about the Great Barrier Reef is that it’s utterly enormous. It covers about 133,000 square miles, making it significantly larger than the entire country of Italy. And despite the name, it’s not really one reef but a collection of 3,000 or so individual ones that form a reef archipelago. Another important detail is that the reef is still spectacular. Over three days in December, I scuba dived offshore from Port Douglas and Cairns, coastal cities in Queensland that largely run on reef tourism, a whopping $5.3 billion annual industry. Descending onto the reef was like sinking into an alien city. Coral colonies twice my height rose from the seafloor, forming shapes mostly foreign to the terrestrial world. Life burst from every surface. What really struck me was the color. Two decades of scuba diving had led me to believe that you can only find vivid blues, reds, oranges, and pinks in an artist’s imaginings of coral reefs, like in the scenes of Finding Nemo. But coral colonies on the reefs I saw here were just as vibrant. Some of the colonies of the antler-like staghorn coral were so blue it was as if they had been dipped in paint. A pink skunk clownfish encounters the author outside its anemone home.Harriet Spark/Vox It’s easy to see how the reef—built from the bodies of some 450 species of hard coral—provides a foundation for life in the ocean. While cruising around large colonies of branching coral, I would see groups of young fish hiding out among their nubby calciferous fingers. The Great Barrier Reef is home to more than 1,600 fish species, many of which are a source of food for Indigenous Australians and part of a $200 million commercial fishing industry. “The reef is part of our life,” said Cindel Keyes, an Indigenous Australian of the Gunggandji peoples, near Cairns, who was part of the crew collecting coral spawn with Harrison. RRAP partners with First Nations peoples, many of whom have relied on the reef for thousands of years and are eager to help sustain it. “It’s there to provide for us, too,” Keyes, who comes from a family of fishers, told me. The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, as many visitors assume from headlines. But in a matter of decades—by the time the children of today grow old—it very well could be. The world’s coral reefs face all kinds of problems, from big storms to runoff from commercial farmland, but only one is proving truly existential: marine heat. Each piece of coral is not one animal but a colony of animals, known as polyps, and polyps are sensitive to heat. They get most of their food from a specific type of algae that lives within their tiny bodies. But when ocean temperatures climb too high, polyps eject or otherwise lose those algae, turn bleach-white, and begin to starve. If a coral colony is “bleached” for too long, it will die. Cindel Keyes, on a boat near Cairns, before spawn collection begins.Harriet Spark/Vox The global prognosis is bleak. The world has already lost about half of its coverage of coral reefs since the 1950s, not including steep losses over the last two decades. And should wealthy countries continue burning fossil fuels—pushing global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline—it will likely lose the rest of it. Projections for the Great Barrier Reef are just as grim. A recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications projected that coral cover across the reef would decline, on average, by more than 50 percent over the next 15 years, under all emissions scenarios—including the most optimistic. The reef would only later recover to anything close to what it looks like today, the authors wrote, if there are immediate, near-impossibly steep emissions cuts. (The study was funded by RRAP.) The reef has already had a taste of this future: In the last decade alone, there have been six mass bleaching events. One of the worst years was 2016, when coral cover across the entire reef declined by an estimated 30 percent. Yet recent years have also been alarming. Surveys by AIMS found that bleaching last year affected a greater portion of the reef than any other year on record, contributing to record annual declines of hard coral in the northern and southern stretches of the reef. “I’ve been suffering,” said Harrison, who’s been diving on the Great Barrier Reef for more than 40 years. “I’ve got chronic ecological grief. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, like when you see another mass bleaching. It can be quite crushing.” The problem isn’t just bleaching but that these events are becoming so frequent that coral doesn’t have time to recover, said Mia Hoogenboom, a coral reef ecologist at Australia’s James Cook University, who’s also involved in RRAP. “The hopeful part is if we can take action now to help the system adapt to the changing environment, then we’ve got a good chance of keeping the resilience in the system,” Hoogenboom said. “But the longer we wait, the less chance we have to maintain the Great Barrier Reef as a functioning ecosystem.” That night in December, after filling two large plastic bins onboard with coral spawn, the crew motored to a nearby spot on the reef where several inflatable pools were floating on the ocean’s surface. The boat slowly approached one of the pools—which looked a bit like a life raft—and two guys onboard dumped spawn into it. The government established RRAP in 2018 with an ambitious goal: to identify tools that might help the reef cope with warming, refine them through research and testing, and then scale them up so they can help the reef at large. It is a massive undertaking. RRAP involves more than 300 scientists, engineers, and other experts across 20-plus institutions, including AIMS, which operates one of the world’s largest research aquariums called the National Sea Simulator. And it has a lot of money. The government committed roughly $135 million to the project, and it has another $154 million from private sources, including companies and foundations. It’s operating on the scale of decades, not years, said Cedric Robillot, RRAP’s executive director. Scientists at RRAP have now honed in on several approaches that they think will work, and a key one is assisted reproduction—essentially, helping corals on the reef have babies. That’s what scientists were doing on the water after dark in December. Normally, when corals spawn, only a fraction of their eggs get fertilized and grow into baby corals. They might get eaten by fish, for example, or swept out to sea, away from the reef, where the larvae can’t settle. That’s simply nature at work in normal conditions. But as the reef loses more and more of its coral, the eggs of one individual have a harder time meeting the sperm of another, leading to a fertility crisis. RRAP is trying to improve those odds through what some have called coral IVF. At sea, scientists skim spawn from the surface and then load them into those protected pools, which are anchored to the reef. Suspended inside the pools are thousands of palm-sized ceramic structures for the larval coral to settle on, like empty pots in a plant nursery. After a week or so, scientists will use those structures—which at that point should be growing baby corals—to reseed damaged parts of the reef. Crew members Paco Mueller-Sheppard and Devante Cavalcante dump a bucket of spawn into one of the floating pools above a reef near Cairns. Harriet Spark/Vox With this approach, scientists can collect spawn from regions that appear more tolerant to warming and reseed areas where the corals have been killed off by heat. Heat tolerance is, to an extent, rooted in a coral’s DNA and passed down from parent to offspring. So those babies may be less likely to bleach and die. While baby corals are growing in those pools, scientists can also introduce specific kinds of algae—the ones that live symbiotically within polyps—that are more adapted to heat. That may make the coral itself more resistant to warming. But what’s even more impressive is that scientists are also breeding corals on land, at the National Sea Simulator, to repopulate the reef. SeaSim, located a few hours south of Cairns on the outskirts of Townsville, is essentially a baby factory for coral. I drove to SeaSim one evening in December with Robillot, a technophile with silver hair and a French accent. He first walked me through a warehouse-like room filled with several deep, rectangular tanks lit by blue light. The light caused bits of coral growing inside them to fluoresce. Other than the sound of running water, it was quiet. The main event—one of the year’s biggest, for coral nerds anyway—was just outside. SeaSim has several open-air tanks designed to breed corals with little human intervention. Those tanks, known as autospawners, mimic the conditions on the wild reef, including water temperature and light. So when scientists put adult corals inside them, the colonies will spawn naturally, as they would in the wild. The tanks collect their spawn automatically and mix it together in another container that creates the optimal density of coral sperm for fertilization. Research technician Elena Pfeffer points out pink bumps on the surface of branching coral in one of the autospawners, a sign it’s about to spawn.Harriet Spark/Vox Observing spawning isn’t easy. It typically happens just once a year for each species, and the timing can be unpredictable. But I got lucky: Colonies of a kind of branching coral known as Acropora kenti were set to spawn later that evening. Through glass panels on the side of the autospawners, I saw their orangish branches, bunched together like the base of a broom. They were covered in pink, acne-like bumps—the bundles of spawn they were getting ready to release—which was a clear sign it would happen soon. As it grew dark, the dozen or so people around the tanks flipped on red headlamps to take a closer look. (White light can disrupt spawning.) Around 7:30 pm, the show started. One colony after another popped out cream-colored balls. They hung for a moment just above the coral branches before floating to the surface and getting sucked into a pipe. It was a reminder that corals, which usually look as inert as rocks, really are alive. “It’s such a beautiful little phenomenon,” Robillot said, as we watched together. “It’s a sign that we still have vitality in the system.” After spawning at SeaSim, scientists move the embryos into larger, indoor tanks, where they develop into larvae. Those larvae then get transferred to yet other tanks, settling on small tabs of concrete. Scientists then insert those tabs into slots on small ceramic structures—those same structures as the ones suspended in the floating pools at sea—which they’ll use to reseed the reef. One clear advantage of spawning corals in a lab is that scientists can breed individual corals that appear, through testing, to be more resistant to heat. Ideally, their babies will then be a bit more resistant, too. Andrea Severati, a researcher at AIMS who designed many of the tanks at SeaSim, releases coral embyros into a large tank, where they’ll develop into larvae. Harriet Spark/Vox During spawning late last year, SeaSim produced roughly 19 million coral embryos across three species. “People often don’t understand the scale that we’re talking about,” said Carly Randall, a biologist at AIMS who works with RRAP. “We have massive numbers of autospawning systems lined up. We have automated image analysis to track survival and growth. It is like an industrial production facility.” Including the spawn collection at sea, RRAP produced more than 35 million coral embryos last year that are now growing across tens of thousands of ceramic structures that will be dropped onto the reef. The goal RRAP is working toward, Robillot says, is to be able to stock the reef with 100 million corals every year that survive until they’re at least 1 year old. (Under the right conditions, each ceramic structure can produce one coral that lives until 1 year old in the ocean, Robillot told me. That means RRAP would need to release at least a million of those structures on the reef every year.) On that scale, the project could help maintain at least some coral cover across the reef, even in the face of more than 2 degrees C of warming, Robillot said, citing unpublished research. One study, published in 2021 and partially funded by RRAP, suggests that a combination of interventions, including adding heat-tolerant corals, can delay the reef’s decline by several years. “We are not replacing reefs,” Robillot said. “It’s just too big. We’re talking about starting to change the makeup of the population by adapting them to warmer temperatures and helping their recovery. If you systematically introduce corals that are more heat-tolerant over a period of 10 to 20 to 30 years, then over a hundred years, you significantly change the outlook for your population.” The obvious deficiency of RRAP, and many other reef conservation projects, is that it doesn’t tackle the root problem: rising greenhouse gas emissions. While restoration might help maintain some version of coral reefs in the near term, those gains will only be temporary if the world doesn’t immediately rein in carbon emissions. “It all relies on the premise that the world will get its act together on emissions reductions,” Robillot said. “If we don’t do that, then there’s no point, because it’s a runaway train.” Many groups involved in reef conservation have failed to reckon with this reality, even though they’re often on the front lines of climate change. During my trip, I would be on dive boats listening to biologists talk about restoration, while we burned diesel fuel and were served red meat—one of the most emissions-intensive foods. A lot of tour operators, some of whom work with RRAP, don’t talk about climate change much at all. Two of the guides who took me out on the reef even downplayed the threat of climate change to me. Yolanda Waters, founder and CEO of Divers for Climate, a nonprofit network of scuba divers who care about climate change, said this isn’t surprising. “At the industry level, climate change is still very hush-hush,” said Waters, who previously worked in the reef tourism industry. “In most of those boats, climate messaging is just nonexistent.” This makes some sense. Tourism companies don’t want people to think the reef is dying. “When international headlines describe the Reef as ‘dying’ or ‘lost,’ it can create the impression that the visitor experience is no longer worthwhile, even though large parts of the Reef remain vibrant, actively managed, and accessible,” Gareth Phillips, CEO of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a trade group, told me by email. (I asked around, but no one could point me to data that clearly linked negative media stories to a drop in visitors to the Great Barrier Reef.) A dive boat from the company Quicksilver Group above a reef near Port Douglas. Harriet Spark/Vox Yet by failing to talk about the urgent threat of climate change, the tourism industry—a powerful force in Australia, that influences people from all over the world—is squandering an opportunity to educate the public about what is ultimately the only way to save the reef, said Tanya Murphy, a campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, a nonprofit advocacy group. Tourists are ending their vacation with the memory of, say, a shark or manta ray, not a new urge to fight against climate change, Waters said. So the status quo persists: People don’t connect reducing emissions with saving the reef, even though that’s “the only reef conservation action that can really be taken from anywhere,” she added. (Not everyone in the tourism industry is so quiet. Eric Fisher, who works for a large Australian tourism company called Experience Co Limited, says he tells tourists that climate change is the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s what we tell people every day,” Fisher told me. “So as they fall in love with it, they’re more likely to leave with an understanding of that connection.”) Keeping mum on climate change, while speaking loudly about restoration and other conservation efforts, including RRAP, can also take pressure off big polluters to address their carbon footprints, Waters and Murphy said. Polluters who fund reef conservation, including the government and energy companies, are given social license to operate without stricter emissions cuts, because the public thinks they’re doing enough, they said. In reality, the Australian government continues to permit fossil fuel projects. Last year, for example, the Albanese administration, which is politically left of center, approved an extension of a gas project in Western Australia that Murphy and other advocates call “a big carbon bomb.” The extension of the project, known as the North West Shelf, will produce carbon emissions equivalent to about 20 percent of Australia’s current yearly carbon footprint, according to The Guardian. A spokesperson for the Albanese government acknowledged in a statement to Vox that climate change is the biggest threat to coral reefs globally. “It underlines the need for Australia and the world to take urgent action, including reaching net zero emissions,” the statement, sent by Sarah Anderson, said. “The Albanese Government remains committed to action on climate change and our net zero targets.” Anderson highlighted a government policy called the Safeguard Mechanism, which sets emissions limits for the country’s largest polluters, including the North West Shelf Facility. Yet the policy only applies to Scope 1 emissions. That means it doesn’t limit emissions tied to gas that the North West Shelf project exports — the bulk of the project’s carbon footprint. Although Australia has far fewer emissions compared to large economies like the US and China, the country is among the dirtiest on a per-capita basis. If any country can reduce its emissions, it should be Australia, Waters said. “We’re such a wealthy, privileged country,” Waters said. “We’ve got the biggest reef in the world. If we can do better, why wouldn’t we?” On a stormy morning, near the end of my trip, we returned to the reef—this time, visiting another set of floating pools, offshore from Port Douglas. They had been filled with spawn several days earlier. Small corals were now growing on the ceramic structures, and they were ready to be deployed on the reef. After a nauseating two-hour ride out to sea, a group of scientists and tourism operators jumped into small tenders and collected the structures from inside the pools. Then they motored around an area of the reef that had previously been damaged by a cyclone and started dropping coral babies off the side of the boat, one by one. As it started to pour, and I noticed water flooding into the front of the tender, I couldn’t help but think about how absurd all of this was. Custom-made pools and ceramics. Hours and hours on the reef, floating in small boats in a vast ocean. Sniffing out spawn. “You sort of think about the level of effort, that we’re going to try and rescue something that’s been on our planet for so many millions of years,” Harrison told me on the boat a few nights earlier. “It seems a bit ironic that humans now have to intervene to try and rescue corals.” RRAP is making this process far more efficient, Robillot says—machines, not people, will eventually be dropping the ceramic structures off the boats, for example. But still, why not invest the money instead in climate advocacy or clean energy? Isn’t that an easier, perhaps better, way to help? It can’t be either or, Robillot said. And it’s not, he contends. Many donors who fund the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a core RRAP partner and Robillot’s employer, are putting more of their money into climate action relative to reef conservation, he said. The government of Australia, meanwhile, says it’s spending billions on clean energy and green-lit a record number of renewable energy projects in 2025. Plus, while the scale of resources behind RRAP is certainly huge for coral reefs, it’s tiny compared to the cost of fixing the climate crisis. “We need trillions,” Robillot said. Investing that roughly $300 million into fighting climate change could have a small impact on reefs decades from now. Putting it into projects like RRAP helps reefs today. It’s only a waste of money—worse than a waste of money—if that investment undermines climate action. And Robillot doesn’t think it does. A hawksbill turtle on a reef offshore from Cairns. Harriet Spark/Vox The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has been criticized for its ties to mining and energy companies, including Peabody Energy and BHP. The Reef Foundation currently receives money from mining giant Rio Tinto and BHP Foundation (which is funded by BHP) for projects unrelated to RRAP, the organization told Vox. “It is a bit concerning,” Murphy told me. “It’s really important that we get polluters to pay for the damage they’re causing. But that should be done as an obligatory tax and they should not be getting any marketing benefits from that.” Robillot argues that these companies have not influenced RRAP’s work, or restricted what its staff can say about climate change. “If we can still scream that climate change is the main driver of loss of coral reefs, I don’t have an issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic to only take money from people who do not have any impact on climate change. I don’t know anyone.” Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP—for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change—it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.” Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP—for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change—it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In an era of rapid globalization, economic growth has come with trade-offs. To make room for urban development or fossil fuel extraction, countries often clear forests, pollute water and decimate wildlife populations.  However, while nations and businesses build lucrative markets around these activities, destroying nature often comes at a cost—literally. Natural resources underpin the global economy, from pollinators supporting agricultural supply chains to forests ensuring water quality and availability. One estimate suggests that more than half of the world’s gross domestic product is moderately or highly dependent on the environment.   Research shows the services that nature provides are diminishing as we degrade it. Now, a growing number of economists and ecologists around the world are helping decisionmakers understand the full extent of the contributions to local and national economies made by plants, animals, or entire ecosystems—and what’s at risk financially if they are lost.  Since time immemorial, humans have relied on natural resources like clean water, forests, and soil to prop up economies. As Stanford University ecologist Lisa Mandle put it to me bluntly, “if there were no nature, there would be no economy.” But it wasn’t until fairly recently that experts formally started to catalogue the environment’s financial contributions to society through an approach dubbed “natural capital accounting.” In 2005, a report compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world, which was called for by the United Nations, estimated that human activities had driven the decline of two-thirds of ecosystem services on Earth, including freshwater supply, climate-change mitigation, and disease control.  > Pollinators contribute $800 billion in gross economic value annually, > including $34 billion in the United States. Dubbed the “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” the report also revealed how much was not known about the environment’s financial contributions, finding that the costs of degrading nature were rarely tracked in local and national economic accounts. Since then, experts have scrambled to fill these gaps.  Mandle is the co-executive director of Natural Capital Alliance, a Stanford-based collaboration of research institutions and nonprofits such as the Nature Conservancy working to help countries better understand their natural resource availability and how to balance those benefits with development. For example, the group recently worked with the Colombian National Planning Department to calculate the economic value of the country’s Upper Sinú Basin. Using input from locals and complex financial models, they found that ecosystems in the region deliver around $100 million in benefits to hydropower production and the delivery of clean water to households and economic sectors—nearly 2 percent of the region’s GDP.  “In many decisions, nature has been treated as essentially worthless or of negligible value when compared to other kinds of human activities,” said Mandle. “Natural capital accounting is an effort to correct that and to shine a light on the many different ways that nature and biodiversity supports human well-being and the economy.” It’s not just governments using this type of data; businesses around the world are increasingly required to disclose the biodiversity risks of their operations, the Financial Times reports. At the same time, investors have shown more interest in companies that can show they are environmentally friendly, Viorel Popescu, an ecologist at Columbia University, told me.  Large corporations are major contributors to biodiversity loss, but Popescu said they are also at “the forefront of being able to do something about it,” and can often move at a faster pace than governments. With this in mind, Columbia University announced in September the creation of a master’s program focusing on biodiversity data analytics. The idea is to help businesspeople understand the implications of corporate operations on nature.  “We’ve been training ecologists to do ecology forever, and they don’t always get into places where they can actually make decisions, unfortunately,” said Popescu, who is the director of the program. He has been an ecologist for more than two decades and stressed that the new program is “trying to get people that don’t have necessarily an ecology or a conservation background…but are in the position of making a difference.”  Ecosystem accounting has revealed some staggering stats on nature’s financial contributions. Pollinators contribute $800 billion in gross economic value annually, including $34 billion in the United States. A recent federal report found that US birders spent an estimated $108 billion related to their pursuits in 2022 alone, which is almost six times the total revenue generated by the National Football League that year. Mangrove forests prevent more than $65 billion in property damage around the world each year, according to a 2020 study.  Even a single species can bring in the big bucks: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that the endangered North Atlantic right whale generated $2.3 billion in sales for the whale-watching industry and across the broader economy in 2008 alone. Conservation groups often use these analyses to make the case for protection of plants and wildlife.  > “To participate in the commodification and financialization of our Relatives > is an affront to the Natural Laws.” Experts recognize that natural capital accounting has limitations, largely due to the diversity of ecosystems and what values different groups of people put on various services. Additionally, interactions across a single ecosystem can be incredibly complex, and “it can be hard to tease out what the value is of an individual component, because its value is not just [that component], but it’s how it interacts within this system to sustain life,” Mandle said. The UN has a framework to help countries track ecosystem services, though much of these processes are case by case.  In recent years, new markets have emerged to commodify nature-based solutions through the sale of carbon offsets or “biodiversity credits,” which represent a measured unit of biodiversity protection that companies can purchase to support conservation. However, critics say the “financialization of nature” fails to recognize its intrinsic value, and could actually work against its protection.  “Only humans would have the audacity to assign ‘financial value’, in their colonial thought process ways, to the Sources of Life and the living beings that are our relatives,” Casey Camp- Horinek, an elder of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma and chairwoman of the Indigenous Council of the Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature, said in a statement on the group’s website. “We do not own anything that is called Nature, we are Nature, and to participate in the commodification and financialization of our Relatives is an affront to the Natural Laws and quite simply wrong.” Popescu said he’s “conflicted” about assigning financial values to ecosystem services. “But at the same time, I’m well aware that if we don’t try to do that, you’re not going to advance the conversation,” he said. Echoing this sentiment, Mandle said that while it’s crucial to also consider the intangible values of nature, “there are some decisions that get made, you know, comparing numbers, lines on a spreadsheet, or weighing costs and benefits.”  It’s a “head approach and a heart approach,” she said. “I think they work together.”  In any case, it’s clear that environmental degradation and climate change are already taking a heavy toll on the global economy, costing trillions of dollars annually, according to a UN report released in December. “I think [natural capital accounting] has become especially relevant recently as the size of the human enterprise relative to Earth systems has grown,” Mandle said. “Many of these values have only been apparent once they’ve been lost.” 

In 2023, Marlena Arjo adopted a one-eyed kitten with a penchant for destruction. She named him Otto, and over the next eight months, Otto grew into his own little chaotic personality. “ He’s laying on houseplants, he’s tearing books out of the bookshelves, ripping the calendar off the wall…I wasn’t prepared for having a criminal in my home,” Arjo joked. Within months, Otto got sick and stopped eating. Arjo rushed him to a vet and learned he had feline infectious peritonitis, better known as FIP, a disease that kills nearly all cats that contract it.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. The vet said there was nothing the clinic could do. But there was something Arjo could do. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” Arjo recalled the vet telling her. “But by the way, you can get drugs for this if you go to this Facebook group.” This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Hyperfixed podcast, we tell the story of the cat drug black market, why it was even necessary, and how cat lovers fought for big changes to make the black market obsolete.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Changes in polar bear DNA that could help the animals adapt to warmer climates have been detected by researchers, in a study thought to be the first time a statistically significant link has been found between rising temperatures and changing DNA in a wild mammal species. Climate breakdown is threatening the survival of polar bears. Two-thirds of them are expected to have disappeared by 2050 as their icy habitat melts and the weather becomes hotter. Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have found that some genes related to heat stress, ageing, and metabolism are behaving differently in polar bears living in southeast Greenland, suggesting they may be adjusting to warmer conditions. The researchers analysed blood samples taken from polar bears in two regions of Greenland and compared “jumping genes”: small, mobile pieces of the genome that can influence how other genes work. Scientists looked at the genes in relation to temperatures in the two regions and at the associated changes in gene expression. > “We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar > bears are at any less risk of extinction.” “DNA is the instruction book inside every cell, guiding how an organism grows and develops,” said the lead researcher, Dr Alice Godden. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the south-east Greenland bears’ DNA.” As local climates and diets evolve as a result of changes in habitat and prey forced by global heating, the genetics of the bears appear to be adapting, with the group of bears in the warmest part of the country showing more changes than the communities farther north. The authors of the study have said these changes could help us understand how polar bears might survive in a warming world, inform understanding of which populations are most at risk and guide future conservation efforts. This is because the findings, published on Friday in the journal Mobile DNA, suggest the genes that are changing play a crucial role in how different polar bear populations are evolving. Godden said: “This finding is important because it shows, for the first time, that a unique group of polar bears in the warmest part of Greenland are using ‘jumping genes’ to rapidly rewrite their own DNA, which might be a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice.” Temperatures in northeast Greenland are colder and less variable, while in the south-east there is a much warmer and less icy environment, with steep temperature fluctuations. DNA sequences in animals change over time, but this process can be accelerated by environmental stress such as a rapidly heating climate. There were some interesting DNA changes, such as in areas linked to fat processing, that could help polar bears survive when food is scarce. Bears in warmer regions had more rough, plant-based diets compared with the fatty, seal-based diets of northern bears, and the DNA of southeastern bears seemed to be adapting to this. Godden said: “We identified several genetic hotspots where these jumping genes were highly active, with some located in the protein-coding regions of the genome, suggesting that the bears are undergoing rapid, fundamental genetic changes as they adapt to their disappearing sea ice habitat.” The next step will be to look at other polar bear populations, of which there are 20 around the world, to see if similar changes are happening to their DNA. This research could help protect the bears from extinction. But the scientists said it was crucial to stop temperature rises accelerating by reducing the burning of fossil fuels. Godden said: “We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction. We still need to be doing everything we can to reduce global carbon emissions and slow temperature increases.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Shoppers have long sought ways to make more sustainable choices at the supermarket—and for good reason: Our food system is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The vast majority of emissions from agriculture come from raising cows on industrial farms in order to sell burgers, steak, and other beef products. Beef production results in two and a half times as many greenhouse gases as lamb, and almost nine times as many as chicken or fish; its carbon footprint relative to other sources of protein, like cheese, eggs, and tofu, is even higher.  If you want to have a lighter impact on the planet, you could try eating less beef. (Just try it!) Otherwise, a series of recent lawsuits intends make it easier for consumers to discern what’s sustainable and what’s greenwashing by challenging the world’s largest meat processors on their climate messaging. Tyson, which produces 20 percent of beef, chicken, and pork in the United States, has agreed to drop claims that the company has a plan to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050 and to stop referring to beef products as “climate smart” unless verified by an independent expert.  > “Even if you were to reduce [beef’s] emissions by 30 percent, it’s still not > gonna be a climate-smart choice.” Tyson was sued in 2024 by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a nonprofit dedicated to public health and environmental issues. The group alleged that Tyson’s claims were false and misleading to consumers. (Nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice represented EWG in the case.) Tyson denied the allegations and agreed to settle the suit.  “We landed in a place that feels satisfying in terms of what we were able to get from the settlement,” said Carrie Apfel, deputy managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food and Farming program. Apfel was the lead attorney on the case. According to the settlement provided by Earthjustice, over the next five years Tyson cannot repeat previous claims that the company has a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 or make new ones unless they are verified by a third-party source. Similarly, Tyson also cannot market or sell any beef products labeled as “climate smart” or “climate friendly” in the United States. “We think that this provides the consumer protections we were seeking from the lawsuit,” said Apfel.  The settlement is “a critical win for the fight against climate greenwashing by industrial agriculture,” according to Leila Yow, climate program associate at the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, a nonprofit research group focused on sustainable food systems.  In the original complaint, filed in DC Superior Court, EWG alleged that Tyson had never even defined “climate-smart beef,” despite using the term in various marketing materials. Now Tyson and EWG must meet to agree on a third-party expert that would independently verify any of the meat processor’s future “net zero” or “climate smart” claims.  Following the settlement, Apfel went a step further in a conversation with Grist, arguing that the term “climate smart” has no business describing beef that comes from an industrial food system.  “In the context of industrial beef production, it’s an oxymoron,” said the attorney. “You just can’t have climate-smart beef. Beef is the highest-emitting major food type that there is. Even if you were to reduce its emissions by 10 percent or even 30 percent, it’s still not gonna be a climate-smart choice.” A Tyson spokesperson said the company “has a long-held core value to serve as stewards of the land, animals, and resources entrusted to our care” and identifies “opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain.” The spokesperson added: “The decision to settle was made solely to avoid the expense and distraction of ongoing litigation and does not represent any admission of wrongdoing by Tyson Foods.”  The Tyson settlement follows another recent greenwashing complaint—this one against JBS Foods, the world’s largest meat processor. In 2024, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, alleging the company was misleading consumers with claims it would achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.  > Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy.” James reached a $1.1 million settlement with the beef behemoth earlier this month. As a result of the settlement, JBS is required to update its messaging to describe reaching net-zero emissions by 2040 as more of an idea or a goal than a concrete plan or commitment from the company. The two settlements underscore just how difficult it is to hold meat and dairy companies accountable for their climate and environmental impacts.  “Historically, meat and dairy companies have largely been able to fly under the radar of reporting requirements of any kind,” said Yow of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. When these agri-food companies do share their emissions, these disclosures are often voluntary and the processes for measuring and reporting impact are not standardized.  That leads to emissions data that is often “incomplete or incorrect,” said Yow. She recently authored a report ranking 14 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies in terms of their sustainability commitments—including efforts to report methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. Tyson and JBS tied for the lowest score out of all 14 companies. Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy,” said Valerie Baron, a national policy director and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to the Tyson settlement. Baron emphasized that increased transparency from meat and dairy companies is a critical first step to holding them accountable.  Yow agreed. She argued upcoming climate disclosure rules in California and the European Union have the potential to lead the way on policy efforts to measure and rein in emissions in the food system. More and better data can lead to “better collective decision making with policymakers,” she said.  But, she added: “We need to actually know what we’re talking about before we can tackle some of those things.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a sunny morning two years ago, a group of state officials stood in the mountains of northwestern Colorado in front of a handful of large metal crates. With a small crowd watching them, the officials began to unlatch the crate doors one by one. Out of each came a gray wolf—arguably the nation’s most controversial endangered species. This was a massive moment for conservation. While gray wolves once ranged throughout much of the Lower 48, a government-backed extermination campaign wiped most of them out in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1940s, Colorado had lost all of its resident wolves. But, in the fall of 2020, Colorado voters did something unprecedented: They passed a ballot measure to reintroduce gray wolves to the state. This wasn’t just about having wolves on the landscape to admire, but about restoring the ecosystems that we’ve broken and the biodiversity we’ve lost. As apex predators, wolves help keep an entire ecosystem in balance, in part by limiting populations of deer and elk that can damage vegetation, spread disease, and cause car accidents. > “This was not ever going to be easy.” In the winter of 2023, state officials released 10 gray wolves flown in from Oregon onto public land in northwestern Colorado. And in January of this year, they introduced another 15 that were brought in from Canada. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW)—the state wildlife agency leading the reintroduction program—plans to release 30 to 50 wolves over three to five years to establish a permanent breeding population that can eventually survive without intervention. “Today, history was made in Colorado,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said following the release. “For the first time since the 1940s, the howl of wolves will officially return to western Colorado.” Fast forward to today, and that program seems, at least on the surface, like a mess. Ten of the transplanted wolves are already dead, as is one of their offspring. And now, the state is struggling to find new wolves to ship to Colorado for the next phase of reintroduction. Meanwhile, the program has cost millions of dollars more than expected. The takeaway is not that releasing wolves in Colorado was, or is now, a bad idea. Rather, the challenges facing this first-of-its-kind reintroduction just show how extraordinarily difficult it is to restore top predators to a landscape dominated by humans. That’s true in the Western US and everywhere—especially when the animal in question has been vilified for generations. One harsh reality is that a lot of wolves die naturally, such as from disease, killing each other over territory, and other predators, said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Of Colorado’s new population, one of the released wolves was killed by another wolf, whereas two were likely killed by mountain lions, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. The changes that humans have made to the landscape only make it harder for these animals to survive. One of the animals, a male found dead in May, was likely killed by a car, state officials said. Another died after stepping into a coyote foothold trap. Two other wolves, meanwhile, were killed, ironically, by officials. Officials from CPW shot and killed one wolf—the offspring of a released individual—in Colorado, and the US Department of Agriculture killed another that traveled into Wyoming, after linking the wolves to livestock attacks. (An obscure USDA division called Wildlife Services kills hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of wild animals a year that it deems dangerous to humans or industry, as my colleague Kenny Torella has reported.) Yet, another wolf was killed after trekking into Wyoming, a state where it’s largely legal to kill them. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has, to its credit, tried hard to stop wolves from harming farm animals. The agency has hired livestock patrols called “range riders,” for example, to protect herds. But these solutions are imperfect, especially when the landscape is blanketed in ranchland. Wolves still kill sheep and cattle. This same conflict—or the perception of it—is what has complicated other attempts to bring back predators, such as jaguars in Arizona and grizzly bears in Washington. And wolves are arguably even more contentious. “This was not ever going to be easy,” Lambert, who’s also the science adviser to the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, an advocacy organization focused on returning wolves to Colorado, said of the reintroduction program. There’s another problem: Colorado doesn’t have access to more wolves. The state is planning to release another 10 to 15 animals early next year. And initially, those wolves were going to come from Canada. But in October, the Trump administration told CPW that it can only import wolves from certain regions of the United States. Brian Nesvik, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency that oversees endangered species, said that a federal regulation governing Colorado’s gray wolf population doesn’t explicitly allow CPW to source wolves from Canada. (Environmental legal groups disagree with his claim). So Colorado turned to Washington state for wolves instead. > View this post on Instagram But that didn’t work either. Earlier this month, Washington state wildlife officials voted against exporting some of their wolves to Colorado. Washington has more than 200 gray wolves, but the most recent count showed a population decline. That’s one reason why officials were hesitant to support a plan that would further shrink the state’s wolf numbers, especially because there’s a chance they may die in Colorado. Some other states home to gray wolves, such as Montana and Wyoming, have previously said they won’t give Colorado any of their animals for reasons that are not entirely clear. Nonetheless, Colorado is still preparing to release wolves this winter as it looks for alternative sources, according to CPW spokesperson Luke Perkins. Ultimately, Lambert said, it’s going to take years to be able to say with any kind of certainty whether or not the reintroduction program was successful. “This is a long game,” she said. And despite the program’s challenges, there’s at least one reason to suspect it’s working: puppies. Over the summer, CPW shared footage from a trail camera of three wolf puppies stumbling over their giant paws, itching, and play-biting each other. CPW says there are now four litters in Colorado, a sign that the predators are settling in and making a home for themselves. “This reproduction is really key,” Eric Odell, wolf conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said in a public meeting in July. “Despite some things that you may hear, not all aspects of wolf management have been a failure. We’re working towards success.”

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Porcupines are easy to recognize but hard to find—so elusive, in fact, that few people have ever seen one in the wild. Emilio Tripp, a wildlife manager and citizen of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, might have been one of the lucky ones. On a nighttime drive with his father in the late 1990s, a ghostly silhouette flashed by the window. “That was my only time I’ve even thought I’ve seen one,” he recalled decades later. Tripp still can’t say for sure whether it was a kaschiip, the Karuk word for porcupine, but he holds on to the memory like a talisman. The 43-year-old hasn’t seen another porcupine since. Porcupine encounters are rare among his tribe, and the few witnesses seem to fit a pattern: Almost all of them are elders, and they fondly remember an abundance of porcupines until the turn of this century. Now, each new sighting rings like an echo from the past: a carcass on the road; a midnight run-in. The tribe can’t help wondering: Where did all the porcupines go? > “It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of > why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item.” “Everyone’s concerned,” Tripp said. “If there were more (observations), we’d hear about it.” The decline isn’t just in Northern California: Across the West, porcupines are vanishing. Wildlife scientists are racing to find where porcupines are still living, and why they’re disappearing. Others, including the Karuk Tribe, are already thinking ahead, charting ambitious plans to restore porcupines to their forests. Porcupines are walking pincushions. Their permanently unkempt hairdo is actually a protective fortress of some 30,000 quills. But their body armor can be a liability, too—porcupines are known to accidentally quill themselves. “They’re big and dopey and slow,” said Tim Bean, an ecologist at California Polytechnic State University who has collared porcupines as part of his research. They waddle from tree to tree, usually at night, to snack on foliage or the nutrient-rich inner layer of bark. But these large rodents are far from universally beloved. Their tree-gnawing habits damage lumber, and the timber industry has long regarded them as pests. Widespread poisoning and hunting campaigns took place throughout the 1900s in the US Between 1957 and 1959, Vermont alone massacred over 10,800 porcupines. Forest Service officials in California declared open season on porcupines in 1950, claiming that the species would ultimately destroy pine forests. Though state bounty programs had ended by 1979, porcupine numbers have not rebounded. Recent surveys by researchers in British Columbia, Arizona, western Montana and Northern California show that porcupines remain scarce in those regions today. Historically, porcupine populations haven’t been well-monitored, so scientists can’t say for sure whether they are still declining or simply haven’t recovered after decades of persecution. > “We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in.” But anecdotal evidence from those who recall when sightings were common is enough to ring alarm bells. Similar patterns appear to be playing out across the West: Veterinarians are treating fewer quilled pets, for example, and longtime rural homeowners have noticed fewer porcupines lurking in their backyards. Hikers’ accounts note that porcupines are harder to find than ever before. Some forest ecosystems are already showing the effects of losing an entire species from the food chain: In the Sierra Nevada, an endangered member of the weasel family called the fisher is suffering from lack of the protein porcupines once provided. As a result, the fishers are scrawnier and birth smaller litters in the Sierras than they do elsewhere.   Porcupines are culturally important to the Karuk Tribe, whose members weave quills into cultural and ceremonial items, such as baskets. But these days, the tribe imports quills more often than it harvests them. That’s more than just an inconvenience: Not being able to gather quills locally constitutes a form of lost connection between tribal members and their homelands. “It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item,” Tripp said. Erik Beever, an ecologist at the US Geological Survey, worries that the great porcupine vanishing act points to a broader trend. Across the country, biodiversity is declining faster than scientists can track it. The porcupine might just be one example of what Beever calls “this silent erosion of animal abundance.” But no one really knows what’s going on. Beever said, “We’re wondering whether the species is either increasing or declining without anybody even knowing.” Scientists are racing to fill this knowledge gap. Bean and his team combed through a century’s worth of public records to map porcupine distribution patterns in the Pacific Northwest. Roadkill databases, wildlife agency reports and citizen science hits revealed that porcupines are dwindling in conifer forests but popping up in nontraditional habitats, such as deserts and grasslands. Beever is now leading a similar study across the entire Western United States.   Concerned scientists have several theories about why porcupines have not returned to their former stomping grounds. Illegal marijuana farms, which are often tucked away in forests, use rodenticides that kill many animals, including porcupines, while increased protections for apex predators like mountain lions may have inadvertently increased the decline of porcupines. On top of all this, porcupines have low reproduction rates, birthing only a single offspring at a time. > “Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime.” Understanding porcupine distribution isn’t easy. Porcupines are generalists, inhabiting a wide variety of forest types, so it’s challenging for researchers to know where to look. As herbivores, porcupines aren’t that easy to bait, either. Scientists have experimented with using brine-soaked wood blocks, peanut butter and even porcupine urine to coax the cautious critters toward cameras, but with only mixed success. In 34 years of both baited and unbaited camera surveys by the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in the Sierra Nevada, porcupines have only shown up three times. “It’s a mystery,” said John Buckley, the center’s executive director. “We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in where there’s very little disturbance of their habitat, like Yosemite National Park.” The Karuk tribe is eager to bring porcupines back. But first, the tribe needs to figure out where healthy populations may already exist. Years of camera trap surveys have turned up scant evidence of the creature’s presence; one area that Tripp considers a “hotspot” had photographed a single porcupine. “That’s how rare they are,” Tripp said. So Karuk biologists are considering other methods, including using trained dogs to conduct scat surveys. Reintroducing the species would require a delicate balancing act. Porcupines are already scarce, and it’s unclear whether already-small source populations could afford to lose a few members to be reintroduced elsewhere. Still, Tripp feels like it’s time to act, since the ecosystem doesn’t appear to be healing on its own. “Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime,” Tripp said. Yet his actions betray some lingering optimism. Tripp, his wife and daughter still regularly attend basket-weaving events involving quills, doing their part to uphold the Karuk’s age-old traditions that honor the porcupine. It’s a small act of stubborn hope—that, perhaps in a few years, the tribe will be able to welcome the porcupine home.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It’s a known problem that onshore wind turbines kill bats. But it’s unclear whether the same issue applies to offshore wind installations—and the Trump administration just canceled groundbreaking research into the question. Earlier this month, the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) received a letter from the Department of Energy abruptly canceling its $1.6 million grant to study bat behavior in California waters earmarked for offshore wind development. Christian Newman, EPRI’s program manager for the grant, described it as a major hindrance to the research and said that the organization is actively looking for other funding sources. The researchers had been two years into a study of bats in the territory California plans to dot with floating offshore wind turbines over the coming decades. There’s so little information about how North American bats use the ocean environment that, in 2021, Newman and his colleagues determined in a peer-reviewed study that predicting the number of bats potentially killed by US offshore wind development was  “impossible”—at least until more data rolled in. The bat project is one of 351 individual Energy Department awards, totalling nearly $16 billion in funding, that in early October appeared on a leaked list of potential grant terminations. News reports have since verified the cancellations of some awards on that list, including more than $700 million for batteries and manufacturing, according to Politico’s E&E News. The cancellation of EPRI’s bat research grant has not previously been reported. The news comes as the Trump administration defunds other research investigating offshore wind’s impact on wildlife. In recent weeks, the Interior Department scuttled two programs, totalling over $5 million, that were actively monitoring the movement of whales in East Coast waters where five commercial-scale wind projects are currently being built. The West Coast bat study, awarded federal funding in 2022, supported researchers from multiple organizations, including Bat Conservation International. The US-based conservation group has been at the forefront of bat and wind-energy research for over two decades. Until recently, almost all of that work was devoted to onshore wind turbines. “Wind energy is a really important component of our global energy transition. Unfortunately, wind turbines kill millions of bats globally every year,” said Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International. She contributed to a study last year that estimated onshore wind farms killed nearly 800,000 bats every year in just four countries that took annual tallies—Canada, Germany, the UK, and the United States It’s logical to expect fewer bat deaths might result from wind turbines spinning out in the ocean compared to ones operating on land. After all, according to Frick, even scientists like herself assumed that most species simply do not spend much time at sea. But, at least on the West Coast, researchers had never scientifically checked. In fact, EPRI was collecting first-of-its-kind information on how the Mexican free-tailed bat interacts with the ocean, deepening scientists’ understanding of the species overall. The EPRI team detected the bats vocalizing while flying over a dozen miles off the coast of Southern California last year, thanks to an acoustic listening device attached to a small sailing drone they launched. Before this study, no one knew that this common and widespread species spent any time at sea. “One of the things that we’re learning is that there are more bats flying out in the [ocean] environment than we might have otherwise expected,” said Frick. And that means more bat species are potentially threatened by California’s future offshore turbines than previously thought. Frick added that a greater understanding of which species spend time at sea and when can inform the design of solutions that better minimize fatalities from wind farms. One solution is called curtailment. Frick described this approach as changing the  “cut-in speed,” which is the minimum wind speed at which operators allow turbine blades to begin spinning at certain times of day or year. The modification does not typically lead to significant changes in energy generation for onshore wind farms but can make a big difference for bats, she said. For example, preventing turbine blades from spinning until the wind reaches 5 meters per second can reduce fatalities among many species by 62 percent on average, according to a study released last year by Frick and her colleagues. Determining the best curtailment solutions for offshore wind turbines and North American bat species is still a work in progress. Energy Department-funded studies, like the EPRI effort, were seen as critical to determining which bat-saving modifications would work best for California’s unique vision to build floating turbines. Frick called the grant’s termination  “devastating” because the team may not get to finish the study. In the meantime, researchers are retrieving bat listening devices from spots along the West Coast. Bat Conservation International continues its efforts to minimize bat deaths from turbines on land. It received a $2.4 million grant from the Energy Department last year to assess how new technology might help. That award also appeared on the leaked list of 351 DOE projects seemingly slated for cancellation. But, according to Frick, the federal government has yet to cut that research— “it’s not officially terminated”—and she remains optimistic that it might endure.