New research shows that high-risk wildfire conditions are increasingly affecting countries simultaneously, and compromising international firefighting efforts. The team found that synchronised extreme fire weather - characterised by exceptionally warm, dry, and often windy conditions - has increased strongly worldwide since 1979, becoming more widespread throughout regions, not just more frequent in single locations. They say that this makes the resulting wildfires even more challenging to tackle.

New research shows a single year of warmer-than-average Arctic temperatures can cause malnutrition in Arctic seals, intensifying risks to Inuit food security and northern ecosystems already under pressure from environmental toxins, warn Simon Fraser University researchers.

Due to climate change, extreme weather events such as flooding are expected to increase in Germany in the future. This poses hidden risks to the healthcare system that have hardly been the focus of resilience planning to date: restrictions on access to hospitals and the supply of medical products due to flood-related traffic disruptions. This has been revealed by Germany-wide modelling carried out by Dr. Seth Bryant from the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and partners, which thus closes a significant gap in flood prevention. They used the GFZ's regional flood model and expanded it with algorithms that take into account flood spread at the level of transport routes and can simulate realistic detours and travel time delays. This also allows the impact on hospitals that are not directly affected by flooding to be determined. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) have developed a monitor that tracks how quickly companies are switching to climate-neutral energy – and have applied it in one country. Many firms are making progress; just as many are falling behind. And those firmly entrenched in fossil fuel structures face a particularly steep climb to change course.

Chikungunya virus, a debilitating tropical disease caused by infected mosquito bites, poses a greater health threat in Europe than previously thought because it can be spread when air temperatures are as low as 13 degrees Celsius. That is the finding of researchers at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology who have investigated the ability of the Asian tiger mosquito to spread the virus, which is rarely fatal but can cause long-term chronic joint pain.

How will a warming Arctic affect plant growth on Svalbard? Researchers encased plant plots in a thick layer of ice during the winter and used little greenhouses to heat up those plots in the summer. The surprise? The plants that got the harshest treatment did just fine.

Birds currently inhabiting many territories across Africa, Latin America and Asia are, on average, considerably smaller than those that predominated in 1940. This is the conclusion of an international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which documents—drawing on the collective ecological memory of ten Indigenous Peoples and local communities—a reduction of up to 72% in the mean body mass of the bird species present in their territories between 1940 and 2020.

After nearly five years of collaborative work, the European Horizon 2020 REST-COAST project convened for its final consortium meeting in Barcelona in early February. On the agenda were the main results that demonstrate how nature-based solutions (NbS), operational tools, business plans and policy insights can support evidence-based decision-making across Europe to reduce coastal risks, restore ecosystems and biodiversity, while improving the well-being of citizens.

For more than a century, researchers have suspected that glacier fronts serve as important feeding hotspots for marine predators with no direct evidence. To address this, researchers have examined the stomach contents of ringed seals harvested through Inuit subsistence hunting in Greenland and compared their diet with capture location. The findings show that seals near the glaciers had eaten more than those farther away, highlighting climate-driven glacier retreat may threaten foraging grounds and marine ecosystems.