A new study published in Nature, led by ecologists from the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), finds that intensifying El Niño events, driven by climate change, are disrupting arthropod populations across the tropics. This hidden collapse threatens the stability of entire ecosystems and the essential services they provide to both nature and people.

A new study co-led by Professor Dazhi XI, climatologist from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), and Zheng-Hang FU, a Ph.D. student from Fudan University reveals that over the past decades, clustered tropical cyclone—storms that occur in close succession—are becoming less frequent in the Northwestern Pacific, including Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines, while becoming more common in the North Atlantic, affecting regions such as the U.S. East Coast and the Caribbean. The study, titled “Shifting Hotspot of Tropical Cyclone Clusters in a Warming Climate,” was recently published in Nature Climate Change.

A new study by scientists at Bournemouth University (BU) in collaboration with the Wight Squirrel Project has confirmed that red squirrel populations across Europe are resilient to the effects of climate change.

Glaciers across High Mountain Asia are losing more than 22 gigatons of ice per year. The impact of a warming climate on glacial loss is undisputed—this new study provides the first evidence that seasonal shifts in rainfall and snowfall patterns, particularly of the South Asian monsoons, are also exacerbating glacier melting across the region.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere vary naturally between ice ages and interglacial periods. A new study by researchers at the University of Gothenburg shows that an unexpectedly large proportion of carbon dioxide emissions after the ice age may have come from thawing permafrost.

The Philippines, like other tropical countries, is known more for its balmy climate than for hailstorms. But a new Philippine study—the first of its kind—has found that the country’s hottest days are, in fact, more likely to produce hail.

Some Fourteen thousand years ago, algal blooms in the Southern Ocean helped to massively reduce the global carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere – as has now been revealed by new analyses of ancient DNA published by a team from the Alfred Wegener Institute in the journal Nature Geoscience. In the ocean around the Antarctic continent, these algal blooms had a significant impact on global carbon dynamics. The current and expected future decline in sea ice in this region now poses a serious threat to these algae, which could incur global consequences.