分类： environment

Australia is facing an unprecedented challenge from the H5N1 bird flu outbreak, which has already claimed the lives of native mammals for the first time in the nation’s recorded history. To address this escalating public and environmental health crisis, the Albanese government has unveiled a new $145 million funding boost to strengthen the country’s bird flu response, but conservation leaders have slammed the allocation for wildlife resilience as woefully insufficient.

Of the total funding package, $125 million will be split equally between the Commonwealth government and state and territory administrations. This portion of the budget is earmarked for immediate national emergency biosecurity operations, including expanded surveillance and early detection systems, enhanced on-the-ground response capacity, and targeted interventions for high-priority threatened species. Conservation groups acknowledge that since the outbreak intensified in June 2024, officials have confirmed the virus cannot be fully eradicated, making these core response activities critical.

An additional $20 million has been dedicated to expanding and extending on-the-ground work to boost the resilience of vulnerable native species, with a focus on ecologically sensitive locations including federally managed national parks. The federal government is requiring state and territory partners to provide matched funding for this specific resilience allocation.

Despite the government’s framing of the package as a robust response, leading conservation leaders have harshly criticized the $20 million wildlife resilience allocation as unfit for the scale of the crisis. Invasive Species Council Chief Executive Jack Gough pointed out that the sum amounts to less than 1% of the bailout the government provided to the Tomago aluminium smelter, calling the commitment “deeply unserious.”

Earlier this month, Gough joined BirdLife Australia Chief Executive Kate Millar in lobbying federal officials in Canberra for a $200 million resilience package – a figure that Gough emphasizes was the absolute minimum baseline investment required to give native wildlife a fighting chance against both the current outbreak and future waves. The requested package would fund long-term protective measures such as invasive pest control, which reduce additional stress on vulnerable populations already impacted by bird flu.

“Surveillance, testing and carcass removal are essential, but they won’t stop vulnerable wildlife populations being pushed towards extinction,” Gough explained. “There’s a deep understanding across government departments of the scale of this crisis and the devastation it will cause, but the funding committed does not match that understanding. We will need far greater, sustained long-term investment to help wildlife populations recover.”

Millar echoed these criticisms, arguing that the insufficient funding shows the government is “asleep at the wheel when it comes to nature.” She noted that many practical, effective conservation programs the government had previously invested in – including pest control initiatives – have already been forced to shut down after their funding expired. She warned that the Albanese government is underestimating the anger and political mobilization of Australia’s large birdwatching community, which spans every electorate and all walks of life, if the government continues to ignore scientific recommendations and its conservation obligations.

Federal officials have pushed back against the criticism, defending the government’s total investment in bird flu preparedness and conservation. Agriculture Minister Julie Collins told ABC News Breakfast that the government, working with state and territory partners, has already invested more than $40 million in preparedness activities for threatened species habitat protection, including biosecurity measures for captive populations of at-risk species held in zoos and wildlife parks across the country.

Collins added that the government has also invested more than $300 million in the federal Saving Native Species Program overseen by Environment Minister Murray Watt, bringing total national spending on bird flu preparedness to more than $270 million. “The amount of funding is certainly there … we’ll continue to work with all of the experts to make sure that as a government, we’re doing everything we can do,” Collins said, noting the government takes the bird flu crisis seriously.

Announcing the new funding package, Watt said the additional investment would put Australia’s most at-risk species “in a better position to withstand and recover from the impacts of this virus.” He noted that close to 70 on-the-ground resilience projects are already underway across the country, and the new funding will extend protection to an additional 31 threatened species – ranging from Kangaroo Island’s Australian sea lions to the Christmas Island frigatebird – through enhanced biosecurity for captive breeding populations.

“This additional funding will support the expansion and extension of bird flu preparedness and response measures for H5 bird flu in wildlife across Australia, including commonwealth-managed national parks,” Watt said. “We will continue to work with all jurisdictions to ensure we’re taking sensible actions to protect our at-risk bird and mammal species, informed by best available evidence.”

As of the announcement, more than 200 confirmed cases of bird flu have been recorded across Australia, with the first confirmed mammal fatalities pushing the crisis into uncharted territory for the nation’s environmental management agencies. Requests for further comment from the offices of Watt and Collins are still pending.

On Wednesday morning, a catastrophic disaster of flash floods and landslides struck the Nepal-Tibet border region, leaving at least 160 people dead and hundreds unaccounted for, as experts work to untangle the causes of the event and unpack what it signals about growing hazard risks in the Himalayan highlands.

Footage captured from the Chinese side of the border captures the devastating force of the surge: a towering, churning wall of mud and debris slammed into a multi-story building, swallowing the structure whole and sweeping away buses and private vehicles as if they were lightweight children’s toys. In Nepal’s Nuwakot district, residents have been forced to navigate streets coated in thick, clinging mud in the disaster’s aftermath.

Initial reports suggested a 4.4-magnitude earthquake had triggered a landslide that blocked a mountain river, with the flood unleashed when the natural dam eventually burst. That account was put forward by Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shishir Khanal, but new analysis from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has revised that narrative. USGS experts found that the seismic activity initially recorded was not caused by an earthquake, but rather by the massive movement of the landslide itself.

Preliminary findings from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental organization based in Kathmandu, have ruled out any unusual activity originating on the Chinese side of the border. According to Sarthak Shrestha, a remote sensing and geo-information analyst at ICIMOD, the most likely sequence is that a rock-ice avalanche occurred on Nepal’s side of the border, which blocked the Lhende River and set off the cascading flood that swept through downstream communities.

One of the most alarming details experts have highlighted is that the disaster struck with almost no warning. Hatim Sharif, a hydrologist at the University of Texas San Antonio, noted that there was no heavy rainfall in the region ahead of the flood — a detail that renders most operational global early warning systems useless for this type of event.

By the time a fast-moving mud surge like this is visible to people in its path, it is already too late to escape by running or even by car, Sharif explained. The mixture of water and rock debris moves at high speed and becomes dense enough to act like “liquid concrete,” making escape along flat ground impossible. Sharif’s guidance is that the only chance of survival is to immediately climb to high ground of at least six meters (20 feet) above the river level.

Looking ahead, Sharif said that one viable long-term adaptation is to install real-time river level monitoring gauges across high-risk Himalayan river systems. While this would not prevent the disaster, it could give vulnerable communities 20 to 30 minutes of advance warning to evacuate to safe ground.

Dorothy Heinrich, a climate and hazard researcher at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, explained the unique geographic factors that make these blockage-induced floods so dangerous in mountain regions. “In these mountain environments, the rivers can be quite narrow in areas,” she noted. When any kind of landslide or avalanche blocks a narrow river channel, water rapidly accumulates behind the natural obstruction, and the eventual breach releases an incredibly fast, powerful surge downstream.

ICIMOD head of climate and environmental risks Qianggong Zhang has warned that the risk is not yet over: an upstream blockage remains in place, raising the possibility of a second destructive flood in the coming days.

While it is too early to draw a direct, definitive link between this disaster and human-caused climate change, scientists say well-documented environmental shifts across the Himalayas — often called the “Roof of the World” — have already increased the likelihood of similar events. Nepal is particularly vulnerable to glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), catastrophic events that occur when glacial melt leads to a sudden breach of a natural glacial lake dam, releasing billions of liters of water downstream. A major GLOF event originating in China’s Gyirong County hit Nepal’s Rasuwa District just last July, though investigators have not yet confirmed a GLOF caused the latest disaster.

In the coming weeks, climate scientists around the world will conduct event attribution studies to examine what role climate change may have played, comparing the probability of such an event occurring in today’s fossil fuel-warmed climate versus the climate of the pre-industrial era. Heinrich noted that researchers already have high confidence that climate change is driving major shifts across the Himalayas: rising temperatures, more frequent heatwaves, widespread glacial retreat, and permafrost thaw, all of which increase the frequency and severity of landslides, avalanches, and outburst floods. Still, she emphasized that a definitive connection to this specific disaster can only be confirmed through formal attribution analysis.

The global battle against climate change has gained an unexpected, tusked contributor: the Arctic narwhal, often nicknamed the “unicorns of the sea.” A groundbreaking study published Wednesday in *Science Advances* outlines how researchers turned these elusive deep-diving whales into citizen scientists of sorts, outfitting six individuals with custom satellite transmitters to collect data in one of the planet’s most inaccessible regions: remote East Greenland fjords.

Between 2017 and 2020, these non-traditional research partners gathered more than 2,000 high-quality measurements of ocean temperature and salinity. The data they collected has filled a critical gap in scientific understanding, revealing how masses of warm Atlantic water are pushing deep into East Greenland’s fjord systems and accelerating the melt of marine-terminating glaciers. This glacial melt does not stay confined to the Arctic: it carries wide-reaching consequences for global ocean circulation and weather patterns that impact communities across the Northern Hemisphere.

“We have used a completely novel technique,” explained Mads Peter Heide-Jorgensen, professor at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and lead author of the study, in an interview with AFP. Unlike traditional research methods that require scientists to brave the region’s harsh conditions, “we can sit at our warm offices and drink coffee while the data comes in,” he added.

### Global Climate Impacts at Stake
Meltwater from East Greenland’s glaciers flows into the coastal shelf and fjords before feeding into two major Arctic ocean currents. One of these, the East Greenland Current, acts as a foundational regulator for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—a vast, planet-scale system of ocean currents that distributes heat across the globe. Climate researchers have warned that a complete collapse of the AMOC, which is increasingly likely as Arctic warming accelerates, could trigger severe winter cooling across Europe, plunging much of the continent into prolonged deep freezes and disrupting agricultural and economic activity.

Despite the urgency of understanding this process, studying the “Atlantification” of East Greenland waters has long been a major challenge. The region’s remote location, frigid temperatures, and thick year-round ice make traditional research dangerous, logistically complex, and prohibitively expensive. For decades, the only data available came from research ship crews that manually sampled water columns as they navigated open waters. In recent years, fixed electronic sensors have been deployed, but these are limited to summer months when ice cover retreats enough to allow installation. Icebreakers, the only vessels capable of navigating year-round ice, are rare and cost prohibitive to operate for extended research missions, and crews face constant risk from glacial calving events that release massive ice chunks capable of damaging or capsizing ships.

Narwhals, however, are perfectly adapted to this harsh environment, making them ideal research partners. These deep-diving mammals regularly descend to more than 1,500 meters below the ocean surface, allowing them to collect continuous data across entire water columns. The transmitters attached to their backs record temperature, salinity, depth, and geographic location, which researchers then use to calculate water density and distinguish between warm Atlantic-origin water and colder polar-origin water.

One of the study’s most striking findings was the detection of Atlantic-origin water deep beneath glaciers in the Scoresby Sound fjord complex, more than 350 kilometers inland from the open coast. This confirms that warm water is penetrating much farther into glacial systems than previously documented, explaining the faster-than-expected melt rates scientists have observed in the region in recent years.

### Reluctant But Invaluable Partners
While researchers have experimented with using other marine mammals including seals, beluga whales, and bowhead whales for data collection, narwhals offer a unique advantage: they exhibit strong site fidelity, returning to the same locations year after year. This allows scientists to collect consistent, repeated measurements over time, a core requirement for tracking long-term changes in ocean conditions.

The research team grew fond of their four-legged (well, flippered) collaborators, even naming individual narwhals after ancient Nordic deities including Freya and Balder—though the whales did not earn co-authorship on the paper. For their part, the narwhals are far from enthusiastic partners. “I wouldn’t say they enjoy interacting with humans,” Heide-Jorgensen noted, adding “they do it under protest.”

Capturing narwhals in nets and fitting the non-invasive tags takes roughly 20 minutes, a short stressful interruption after which the animals quickly return to their normal behavior. The tags are designed to detach from the whales’ skin naturally after several months, leaving the animals unharmed.

The study team emphasized that this successful partnership showcases how creative, unconventional approaches can revolutionize oceanographic research in regions that are nearly inaccessible to human scientists. Even as narwhals help us track the impacts of climate change, however, they are among the species most vulnerable to a warming Arctic. As Heide-Jorgensen pointed out, narwhals are ultimately “losers in the climate game”: rising ocean temperatures are shrinking their cold-water habitat, and climate projections indicate the species will be forced to shift their range hundreds of kilometers further north to survive in the coming decades.

A catastrophic flash flood and subsequent mudslide event along the shared Nepal-China border has left at least eight people dead in Nepal and caused “major casualties” on the Chinese side of the boundary, authorities confirmed Wednesday. The disaster, which unfolded in the Himalayan border region, has destroyed infrastructure, swept away homes and vehicles, and disrupted critical services across both sides of the frontier.

Eyewitness accounts and visual evidence captured the devastating scale of the flood. Images released by Nepal Police show muddy floodwaters surging through river valleys, with only the top floors of submerged homes visible above the silt. Social media videos shared by law enforcement and local residents document torrents of brown water crashing through mountain valleys in Nuwakot, the Nepali district that forms the border with China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.

“I witnessed the flood sweep away eight or nine trucks, along with houses and people,” 34-year-old local teacher Suman Chalise told AFP from Nuwakot. “It was absolutely heart-wrenching. I had not witnessed such devastation before.”

As of Wednesday evening, Nepali police had recovered eight bodies, with search and rescue operations still ongoing across the affected zone. “So far, eight bodies have been found. Rescue operations are underway,” Nepal police spokesman Abi Narayan Kafle told AFP. Early in the response, authorities had already issued evacuation orders for communities located along the region’s riverbanks, as officials initially worked to assess the full extent of the damage.

The Nepal Army has deployed helicopters and specialized disaster response teams to the hard-hit area to support search and recovery efforts. Critical energy infrastructure has also been heavily impacted: the Nepal Electricity Authority announced that approximately 430 megawatts of power generation capacity from hydropower and solar facilities was damaged by the flood. Floodwaters damaged generation stations, transmission lines and distribution networks, cutting electricity service to large parts of the affected region.

Preliminary geoscientific assessments point to a natural geological trigger for the disaster originating on Nepali territory. Sarthak Shrestha, a remote sensing and geo-information analyst at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), said initial surveys found no unusual activity on the Chinese side of the border. “We believe a rock-ice avalanche occurred in Nepal, blocking the Lhende river and causing the cascading flood event,” Shrestha explained.

On the Chinese side of the border, the disaster triggered a major mudslide at Gyirong Port, a key trade hub connecting Tibet and Nepal. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported Wednesday that the mudslide originating on the Nepali side caused major casualties and multiple missing people at the port. AFP has not yet been able to independently verify the footage released by CCTV, which shows floodwaters carrying debris and tree branches across a submerged road.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered full-scale rescue operations in the affected area of Tibet, according to Chinese state media. “The most urgent task is doing everything possible to search for and rescue the missing people… quickly treat injured people and minimise casualties to the greatest extent possible,” Xi stated, per CCTV. No official figures for deaths or injuries on the Chinese side have been released as of Wednesday. Local traffic authorities in Tibet’s Shigatse City have warned that roads in the area remain at high risk of additional mudslides and are unsafe for travel. This is not the first deadly disaster to strike the region: last July, 17 people went missing following a mudslide near Gyirong Port, according to official Chinese reports.

The disaster comes amid annual monsoon season that spans from June to September across South Asia, a period that regularly brings deadly floods and landslides to the Himalayan region. Climate scientists have warned that human-caused climate change is increasing both the frequency and intensity of these extreme weather events across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region.

Authorities are already warning of a second imminent flood threat. A blocked river channel remains upstream along the border river, and Qianggong Zhang, head of climate and environmental risks at ICIMOD, told AFP that a secondary flood event could occur in the coming days as response efforts continue.

Australia is facing a growing threat from the spread of highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu across its wild animal populations, with a new suspected case in an urban red fox triggering urgent alerts from conservation experts over risks to vulnerable native species. The detection, discovered in Adelaide, marks the second suspected mammal infection recorded in South Australia, coming shortly after the state confirmed its first case of the virus in a seal. It is one of five new suspected cases reported across the state in the latest update, with four other samples collected from different bird species: an Australian raven in Robe, a little penguin in Southend, a Pacific gull on Kangaroo Island, and a crested tern at Coonalpyn. All collected samples are currently en route to Australia’s national animal health testing facility in Geelong for formal confirmation of the virus. While all suspected cases are closely monitored, the fox infection has sparked the most significant alarm among wildlife and conservation specialists, who warn that scavenging mammal species are now at direct risk of exposure.

Rob Brewster, rewilding manager at the Invasive Species Council, emphasized that the detection in a fox serves as a critical wake-up call for Australia’s unique scavenger ecosystem. “Finding bird flu in a fox is a serious warning about what this virus could mean for Australia’s scavenging animals,” Brewster explained. He noted that native scavenger species including quolls and Tasmanian devils that feed on dead wild animals could soon face widespread exposure as bird flu-related bird deaths increase across the country. Unlike introduced predators, these native species already face significant population pressures, as mainland Australia retains only a small fraction of its original native scavenger populations. Brewster warned that invasive generalist predators like red foxes and feral cats are likely to emerge as “superspreaders” of the virus, as they move across large ranges, interact with multiple carcasses, and come into contact with native wildlife. He called on state and federal governments to step up control programs for these invasive species, noting that while it may not be possible to stop the virus from spreading through wild populations, targeted management can reduce additional pressures on vulnerable native wildlife.

The latest warnings come as H5N1 bird flu continues its steady spread across the Australian continent, with infections recorded in both native and migratory bird populations. To date, national authorities have documented more than 300 separate infection events across the country, with South Australia accounting for the vast majority of confirmed cases at 195. In response to the growing crisis, the South Australian government announced this week that it is rolling out the first targeted vaccination program for at-risk native birds, with initial doses administered at Cleland Wildlife Park, located roughly 18 kilometers east of Adelaide. Under the program, around 100 captive native birds at the park – including magpie geese, Australian pelicans, and endangered red-tailed black cockatoos – will receive vaccinations against the virus. Clare Scriven, South Australia’s Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development, said that protecting the state’s one-of-a-kind native wildlife is a top government priority, calling the vaccination program a critical step to shield vulnerable native bird species from the growing threat of H5 bird flu.

As record-breaking drought parches much of Europe, the shrinking waters of the Danube, the continent’s second-longest river, have exposed long-submerged lands along its banks – creating an unexpected opportunity for fossil hunters and historians to uncover artifacts hidden for thousands of years. In northern Bulgaria, just a short distance from where a massive mammoth skeleton was uncovered last month, around 20 volunteer enthusiasts gathered for a guided fossil-hunting expedition organized by the Ruse Regional History Museum, hunting for more prehistoric remains exposed by the retreating river.

Among the participants was Aleksandar Denkov, a 30-year-old amateur photographer, who excitedly called out his discovery: a small yellowish fossil tooth protruding from the dry river sand. While the group did not locate additional full mammoth remains to match last month’s find, their day of searching yielded a range of significant discoveries. Museum experts identified the recovered artifacts as the remains of an ancient large mammal likely to be an aurochs or ancient European bison, a partially preserved subfossil horse jawbone, and a cluster of fossilized oysters dating back an estimated 60 to 65 million years.

Climate scientists have repeatedly confirmed that the ongoing extreme drought gripping Europe has been intensified by human-caused climate change, bringing widespread disruption to communities across the continent. Low river levels have crippled commercial cargo shipping operations and forced output cuts at nuclear power plants that rely on river water for cooling. But alongside these serious negative impacts, the dropping water levels have unlocked a trove of historical and prehistoric remains that have remained hidden for decades, even millennia.

Recent weeks have seen a steady stream of discoveries along the full length of the Danube. Beyond the Bulgarian fossil finds, receding waters have revealed World War II-era shipwrecks in Austria and Serbia, as well as the remains of two German World War II soldiers and a preserved military motorbike in the heart of Budapest, Hungary.

Krasimir Kirov, a curator at the Ruse Regional History Museum, explained that the museum launched the guided expedition to introduce the public to fossil identification, share guidance for safe exploration, and foster public interest in local history. After the initial mammoth discovery was announced last month, Kirov says he received dozens of calls from local residents reporting potential finds of their own. That initial discovery was made by a local resident from the nearby village of Ryahovo, located roughly 30 kilometers from Ruse, who spotted a massive mammoth jawbone, tusk fragments, shoulder blade remains, and a femur by chance while walking the newly exposed banks.

News of the guided search spread quickly on social media, drawing a flood of interested participants and already generating requests for a follow-up expedition. Before the search began, organizers shared simple ground rules: volunteers would move forward in a coordinated line, stop the entire group when a find was spotted by raising a hand, and strictly avoid touching any unknown metal objects that could be leftover unexploded ammunition. But enthusiasm quickly overtook discipline, and the organized line dissolved within minutes as participants scattered to explore the exposed banks on their own.

For many participants, the expedition offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to connect directly with ancient history. “It’s a very rare opportunity to feel this close to history,” explained Ekaterina Yordanova, a 34-year-old psychologist who joined the hunt. She acknowledged the concern over the Danube’s record-low levels: “Seeing the Danube in this state is worrying, but it also gives us the chance to discover new things that we would never have access to otherwise.” Vladimir Tsvyatkov, a 44-year-old local business owner who attended the expedition with his wife and two children, said the family came primarily “for the adventure.” Having grown up along the Danube’s banks, he noted he had “never seen the Danube so dried up” in his lifetime.

The discoveries stretch far beyond the Bulgarian stretch of the river. Further upstream in Bulgaria, the low water levels have allowed archaeologists to fully document the foundations of a 2-kilometer Roman bridge first inaugurated under Emperor Constantine I in 328 AD, a structure that has remained largely submerged for centuries. Along other parts of the river, dozens of World War II military remnants have been exposed. In central Austria, two sunken German warships that were damaged during 1945 fighting with American tanks and scuttled by their own crews now jut clearly from the water. In Serbia, near the town of Prahovo, the receding river has exposed dozens of additional German warships scuttled in 1945 by retreating German forces to block the river and slow the advance of the Soviet Red Army. In Budapest, the German War Graves Commission has confirmed the discovery of two German soldiers’ remains and a preserved military motorbike.

Data from the European climate observatory Copernicus confirms that these record-low water levels are unprecedented for the month of July across most of Europe’s major river basins, highlighting the severity of the ongoing climate-driven drought.