New recommendations show how aligning EU policies can scale up sponge restoration to reduce flood and drought risks, improve water quality, support biodiversity and build climate resilience.

A warming pool of tropical ocean acted like a “regulator,” dialing up snowstorms over East Antarctica and contributing to a brief net ice-sheet mass gain of 695 billion tons, according to a new study published in Nature on August 19.

Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air, and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth’s atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate. Scientists have asked if rock weathering could be accelerated to pull excess CO₂ out of the atmosphere. However, current efforts to achieve this are still too slow to affect the global carbon balance or to be economically viable at industrial scale.

Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School (HMS)’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, engineered a solution to this problem. They showed in customized bioreactors with a continuous flow of seawater that an engineered marine bacterium sped up the weathering of a silicate mineral, boosting the amount of CO₂that was removed from air. Their findings are published in Nature Biotechnology.

 Scientists at the University of Plymouth and the British Antarctic Survey investigated how shifts in ocean salinity could affect marine species in the Antarctic