Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Study reveals extreme heat causes sharp drop with knock-on effect for pollination of food crops in following years We know heatwaves have serious health consequences for humans, but what about other species? A study has shown they severely diminish bees’ fertility, with significant implications for the pollination of food crops in the following years. Prof James Gilbert of the University of Hull his and colleagues simulated a three-day UK heatwave in the lab and measured its effect on solitary red mason bees, compared with those kept under control conditions of an ordinary summer. Continue reading...

Nine of the group stage games played in severe heat, analysis finds, as union points to lessons for the whole sport Nine matches in the World Cup group stage were played amid potentially dangerous heat and humidity, a Guardian analysis shows, as the global players’ union Fifpro warned that heat would have to “play a bigger part” in the sport’s future scheduling decisions. The findings come as probably record-breaking heat and humidity will hit the midwest and eastern US this week and could make conditions even more challenging for players and fans at some games. Continue reading...

As the the shocking heatwave continues, our European environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan answered your questions about which countries have responded best, who is being held to account, and why people are surprised after decades of warnings sloth_101 asks: Most reports still talk about this issue in terms of “records”? Technically, that might be correct but it feels like it’s missing the urgency of the matter. “Records” are meant to be broken. These records clearly are not. Isn’t there a better way to describe it? For example, how “climate change” is often replaced with “climate emergency” or “climate breakdown”? Ajit: I had never thought about it like that before but I can see how it can be read that way. It is partly a limitation of the language and partly an issue of accuracy. Ideally, I would spell it out – “Germany has been hit by heat it has never seen before” – but, because we are talking about measurements since records began, rather than over a longer period of history. I prefer to speak of “record-breaking” heat. The urgency can still be conveyed by describing the damage that hot weather does to our bodies and stating the death toll, which comes to tens of thousands of people across Europe in a typical summer. Each year heat kills 10 ten times more people than murderers in Europe. Ajit: So far there has been fairly little evidence of this happening. Far-right parties talk a lot about migrants and climate, but almost exclusively as separate issues. One recent exception is Switzerland, where a referendum this month on capping the country’s population at 10 million people linked the impact of migration on the Alpine nation’s natural resources, but the link here was more about environmental degradation than climate breakdown. Some data suggests migrants tend to pollute about as much as the native-born population – flying more but driving less - so there is no obvious avenue by which they would hold foreigners responsible for increased temperatures. What seems more likely is that, as temperatures rise to intolerable levels in North Africa and the Middle East, increased migration to Europe will force far-right parties to confront the paradox that the migration they want to stop will be exacerbated by the fossil fuel pollution they support. Continue reading...

npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 26 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s44183-026-00195-0 Trustworthy AI for the ocean: bridging the science-policy divide