Philippa Kaur

Corals are, in many ways, the trees of the seas. They generate oxygen, provide habitats for animals and protect their environments from extreme weather. They also bring many benefits to humans, including creating livelihoods such as tourism.But bleaching and death are widespread as a result of higher ocean temperatures, low oxygen and increased carbon dioxide — all caused by climate change. Rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather speeds up coastal erosion and the flow of minerals and nutrients into sea water, causing algal blooms that harm corals.I was captivated by the beauty of coral reefs when I went scuba diving for the first time on Phuket Island, Thailand, in 2016. In this picture from last year, I was collecting coral samples (which I do several times a year) at Kham Island in southern Thailand, to study how low oxygen levels affect them. Those levels, and the impacts of ocean acidification, are the subject of the PhD I’m doing at Prince of Songkla University. After I graduate, I hope to keep investigating corals so that I can help to better protect them and the marine environment.In a study published this year, my colleagues and I measured the effects of increasing the water temperature by 3 °C, lowering the oxygen content, or both, on the growth rates of three coral species. In most cases, growth slowed (T. Jain et al. J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 11, 403; 2023). Warmer water and low oxygen also mostly reduced the density of symbiotic algae in the coral and their ability to photosynthesize efficiently.Fishing and tourism can also harm corals, but we cannot just ban these pursuits, which provide important livelihoods. In the future, I hope that I and other scientists will be able to supply data on the consequences of various human activities, to be fed into models of coral stress and ocean health.Protecting ocean environments is a crucial job for everyone, not just those who live in coastal areas. More

Download the 29 September Long Read podcastAustralia’s swamp tortoise is one of the most endangered species in the world. This species lives in wetlands that are under threat due to rising temperatures and a reduction in rainfall.In an effort to save the tortoise, researchers are trialling a controversial strategy called assisted migration. This approach has seen captive-bred tortoises released in other wetlands some 330 kilometres south of where they are naturally found. The aim is to see whether the animals can tolerate cooler climates, and whether this new habitat might ensure the species’ future as the planet warms.While many conservation biologists and land managers have long resisted the idea of assisted migration, attitudes are changing and other projects are beginning to test whether it can protect protect animals at risk from climate change.This is an audio version of our Feature: These animals are racing towards extinction. A new home might be their last chanceNever miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for Nature Podcast is available too. More

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Writing on behalf of participants in a workshop on conservation (see go.nature.com/48sfhkh), we are concerned that you overlook the crucial issue of urban biodiversity when making the case for sustainable cities (Nature 620, 697; 2023).
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests. More

World leaders this week vowed to redouble their efforts on an ambitious plan to end poverty and protect the environment, which is woefully behind schedule.None of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), outlined in 2015, will be met by the self-imposed 2030 deadline. Governments and leaders are better at making promises than at keeping them, scientists have told Nature. However, there are signs that the SDG agenda is having an impact, they say.A 12-page “political declaration”, approved during the UN SDG Summit in New York on 18 and 19 September, declares that the goals remain the world’s “overarching roadmap” for the future. “We will act with urgency to realize its vision as a plan of action for people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership, leaving no one behind,” the agreement states.“The SDGs need a global rescue plan,” UN secretary-general António Guterres declared at the opening of the summit. Guterres is proposing to increase funding for sustainable development by at least US$500 billion to help countries to achieve the goals, as well as other financial aid, including debt relief for the poorest nations so they can survive and thrive after economic shocks.The political declaration arrives amid evidence and analysis suggesting that governments are falling well short of the goals.There is hope for the SDGs yetResearchers involved in the four-yearly Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) analysed 36 of the 169 detailed targets that accompany the overarching goals. Of these, the scientists found that the world is on track to achieve only two targets — those aimed at increasing access to the Internet and to mobile-phone networks.Twelve targets showed little or no progress. In some cases, such as food security, vaccine coverage and greenhouse-gas emissions, trends are going in the wrong direction. The research suggests that without further action and resources, the world will be unlikely to achieve the goals even by 2050, two decades late.Paula Caballero, the former Colombian diplomat who was instrumental in creating the SDGs’ framework, says that the world needs to take bold and transformational action now to accomplish the SDG agenda.At the same time, she says that 2030 should not be seen as a final ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ deadline. “Let’s not think that 2030 is an end goal,” says Caballero, who is now responsible for the Latin American activities of The Nature Conservancy, a conservation organization based in the United States. “It’s a milestone.”Sociologist Shirin Malekpour, one of the GSDR authors, agrees. “What needs to change is what we are doing, not the targets and the goals,” says Malekpour, who is at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.Malekpour sees some hope in the political declaration, which says that countries will not only continue to integrate the SDGs into national policies, but also “develop national plans for transformative and accelerated action”.“If, outside of everything else, they just do this one thing, I think we will actually see huge progress,” she says.Focus on integrated actionFor Caballero, the SDG summit is also evidence that the goals are focusing minds on the integrated nature of the challenges facing humanity. But she says that the UN system is still making the mistake of treating sustainable development and climate as separate issues, including by holding separate SDG and climate summits in New York this week.“The only way you’re going to deliver on climate mitigation and adaptation is through the SDGs, and you can’t meet the SDGs unless you deal with climate,” she says.Although the Paris climate agreement and the SDGs were born of separate political processes in 2015, she says, the two agendas are in fact “one and the same”. More

Chaco Seco is the largest subtropical dry forest in South America. It has many trees, such as Prosopis alba, which bears a nutritious fruit, and Aspidosperma quebracho blanco, which produces a hard wood. The forest has cactus species and Bromelia plants, which are traditionally used to make a textile fibre for clothes and crafts.Project Quimilero is a non-profit group, created in 2015, that aims to protect Chacoan peccaries (Catagonus wagneri), a pig-like animal endemic to Chaco. We work with Indigenous and creole communities to preserve the region’s culture and biodiversity. We meet with the Indigenous Wichí people to record places, animals and plants that are important to them.In this picture from last April, I’m standing near the village of Nueva Población, Argentina, holding a map of the area that was drawn with the help of elder Wichí members. This exchange of knowledge was invaluable for our work. We now understand that the Western concept of ‘territory’, with its rigid boundaries, doesn’t make sense to these communities. Changes in seasons, soil-saturation levels and animal movements force these peoples to go beyond those boundaries to hunt and collect water.When I moved to Chaco in 2010, I realized that deforestation is a major threat to the biodiversity of plants and animals, and to the Indigenous communities. Chacoan peccaries cannot tolerate habitat loss. Our research has predicted they could become extinct in less than 30 years (M. Camino et al. Biodivers. Conserv. 31, 413–432; 2022). Deforestation is due to industrial agriculture and logging. Europe now forbids the import of deforestation products, a policy that could decrease this kind of destruction.More such initiatives are needed. I co-authored a study (M. Camino et al. Glob. Environ. Change 81, 102678; 2023) showing that there is less deforestation in the parts of Chaco Seco that Indigenous communities have the rights to than in other areas. More

Observations of birds are relatively scarce in neighbourhoods that were redlined, or designated as risky for mortgage lending, in the 1930s.Credit: George Rose/Getty

Ecologist Diego Ellis-Soto has plenty of local bird data to study. On the university campus where he works, more than half a million bird sightings have been recorded over the past century. But Dixwell, a neighbourhood just down the road, has totalled just a few dozen bird observations in the same period.“I could go there one day and double what’s been collected in the last 100 years,” says Ellis-Soto, who’s at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It might be no coincidence that Yale’s students and faculty are mostly white — in contrast to Dixwell, which has a high proportion of residents who are Black.The disparity in recorded bird sightings doesn’t affect just New Haven. An analysis1 by Ellis-Soto and his colleagues shows that data on bird biodiversity are scarcest in US neighbourhoods, such as Dixwell, that have historically been subjected to certain racially discriminatory policies. This lack of information could affect scientists’ understanding of how birds are distributed in US cities and how species fare over time.Red zones for real estateIn the 1930s, a US-government-led effort graded urban neighbourhoods across the country on whether they were ‘safe’ for real-estate investment. Areas that were judged to be the safest bets for investment were rated ‘green’, and those judged to be highest risk were rated ‘red’. Grades were determined, in part, by a neighbourhood’s racial composition. This categorization, now called redlining, drove investment in wealthier and white neighbourhoods. It also led to a lack of investment in poorer areas and in neighbourhoods of colour.
Landmark Colombian bird study repeated to right colonial-era wrongs
To study how redlining has affected biodiversity assessment, Ellis-Soto and his team studied bird sightings in more than 9,000 neighbourhoods, covering almost 200 US cities. They found that there were many more bird observations per square kilometre in green districts, whose residents are in many cases still predominantly white, than in redlined districts, whose residents are mainly people of colour.“You can better predict where you have data on birds based on systemic racism — redlining maps from 1933 — than climate, tree cover or population density, everything a bird should actually care about,” Ellis-Soto says.From 2000 to 2020, the density of bird observations rose steeply in green neighbourhoods, but more gradually in red ones. The disparity in observations between green and red zones grew by more than 35% in that period, the authors calculate.The study is one of the first direct looks at how “systemic racism can play a role in the ecological process”, says Jin Bai, an urban ornithologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.Missing data, missing fundsData on biodiversity constitute the “first building block” for distributing funds to protect wildlife, says Ellis-Soto. Without data to show their ecological importance, redlined areas could be passed over for funding — widening historical inequalities.“It’s essentially this self-perpetuating negative loop,” says Chris Schell, an urban ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “You have more observations of a native species in an environment that already has a ton of money. Then that same neighbourhood gets more money to conserve a species, which makes it more exclusive, which makes housing more exclusive, which then continues the legacies of segregation.”Ellis-Soto says the gap in data is due, in part, to biases held by scientists and birders, who tend to survey the same areas repeatedly. A lack of resources for teaching birding and for recording observations in historically marginalized areas also contributes.Ellis-Soto would like federal funding for such education efforts. But in the meantime, he takes Black and Hispanic kids from New Haven for nature walks and teaches them how to log the birds they see. “That’s my little solution,” he says. More