These relationships have been captured in people’s homes, such as with Molly the magpie and Peggy the dog, in zoos, such as with Baloo the bear, Leo the lion and Shere Khan the tiger, and even in the wild, such as one case of a fox and cat living together in Turkey.

A plethora of research on primates, birds, kangaroos, dolphins, horses, cats and dogs has shown many non-human animals can develop deep social bonds with their own kind.

And while inter-species bonding hasn’t been studied to the same extent, videos like those mentioned above show animals from different species displaying the same affection to each other as they would to their own, such as through cuddling, playing and grooming.

Why do we, as people, find these stories so enjoyable? Answering this question requires us to consider some of the nicer aspects of our own nature.

When animals reflect us

Witnessing animals get along well together isn’t just cute, it can also make us feel like we have things in common with other species, and feel more connected with the other life on the planet. Decades of research reveals how feeling connected to nature fosters happiness in humans.

While the mechanisms behind inter-species bonding are not fully understood, one 2022 research review suggests the mechanisms that operate in other animals’ brains during social interactions with their own are similar to those that operate in human brains.

The researchers suggest that, due to the evolution of common brain mechanisms, animals engaged in social interaction may experience similar emotions to humans who engage with their own friends or loved ones.

So while it’s very hard to know what this subjective social experience is like for other animals – after all, they can’t report it on a questionnaire – there’s no reason to think it isn’t similar to our own.

Humans like co-operation and pleasant surprises

Humans have evolved to enjoy co-operation, which might also help explain why we enjoy seeing co-operation between different animal species. Some scholars suggest the human instinct for co-operation is even stronger than our instinct for competition.

Another reason we may be drawn to unlikely animal friendships is that they are, in fact, so unlikely. These interactions are surprising, and research shows humans enjoy being surprised.

Our brain has evolved to be incredibly efficient at categorising, solving problems and learning. Part of the reason we’re so efficient is because we are motivated to seek new knowledge and question what we think we know. In other words, we’re motivated to be curious.

Inter-species friendships are indeed a very curious thing. They contradict the more common assumption and observation that different species stick with their own kind. We might think “cats eat birds, so they must not like each other”. So when we see a cat and a bird getting along like old pals, this challenges our concept of how the natural world works.

Neuroscientists have documented that, when surprised, humans experience a release of brain chemicals responsible for making us more alert and sensitive to reward. It is this neurochemical reaction that produces the “pleasantness” in the feeling of being pleasantly surprised.

A desire for peace and harmony

Perhaps another explanation for why humans are so intrigued by inter-species friendships is because they feed a human desire for peace and harmony.

These connections may be symbolic of what many people yearn for: a world where differences can be put aside in favour of a peaceful co-existence. These friendships might even prompt us to imagine, consciously or subconsciously, a future in which we become more enlightened as a species.

One could argue a key reason behind the success of the TV series Star Trek is its optimistic take on the future of humanity. Inter-species co-operation is a central theme of the show.

Inter-species friendships may serve as a concrete example of breaking free of the “natural” way of being for a more peaceful way of being. And while it might only be a dream, it’s nice to watch cute animal videos that help us feel like this dream might be possible.

Shane Rogers is a Lecturer in Psychology at Edith Cowan University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Unlikely animal friendships appeared first on Australian Geographic.

Members of Aboriginal communities are warned that this story may contain images and names of deceased people.

Thomas Watson had an “awesome childhood” growing up in Katherine, in the Northern Territory, but being away from his ancestral home in Queensland, he always longed to connect with his family’s culture. “I always knew I was Aboriginal and have been proud of it, but there was missing knowledge and a hole that I felt I needed to fill.”

Born in Melbourne, Thomas spent most of his childhood in the NT because his grandmother moved there in her twenties.

“At two-and-a-half-months old, my grandmother and her twin sister were moved to St Joseph’s Home, Neerkol, because their mother was unable to support them. Their mother was a domestic servant, and their father was a stockman, so they were incredibly poor. They were able to see their parents on occasion, but my grandmother has very little memory of her mother, which is really sad,” Thomas said.

“Because of all the policies, restrictions and general treatment of Aboriginal people and our culture and languages at that time, my nan was never taught anything about our culture, and therefore neither were we. My grandmother couldn’t even remember the name of our mobs.”

It wasn’t until he started university that Thomas caught a proper glimpse of his ancestry.

At the start of his Bachelor of Health Science and Bachelor of Applied Science (Osteopathy) at RMIT University, Thomas participated in Gama-dji, an orientation week for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. He took a seat at random, and during an icebreaker activity, the students started talking about their families. Thomas met someone whose last name was White – his grandmother’s maiden name.

“We found out that her great-grandfather is my great-grandfather’s brother,” Thomas said. “And so that is how I discovered that my family is Gangulu. I finally had a mob that I could say I belonged to, which was very special. I had a bit of a cry over that.”

Armed with this new information, Thomas – then 21 years old – prepared for a family reunion, purchasing a GoPro and a notebook to record everything he could learn about his culture when he returned to Country. However, upon arrival, Thomas discovered he couldn’t learn his language as nobody spoke it anymore.

“That experience lit the fire in my belly because I didn’t want to accept that my language wasn’t there anymore,” Thomas said. “I was so excited to learn it, and then it no longer being there didn’t sit right with me.”

Rediscovering what was once lost

At the time of European colonisation, about 250 distinct First Nations languages were spoken across Australia. Approximately 150 languages are still actively spoken, with only 14 considered strong. Around 110 languages are considered severely or critically endangered, according to the National Indigenous Australians Agency.

Languages that no longer have native speakers – that is, no one who learned it as a child – are often described as being “extinct”. Thomas, however, prefers the term “sleeping language”, which has an important distinction – a sleeping language can be reawakened.

Refusing to give up on his language, Thomas started his research where every young adult does – with a Google search on his phone.

“I started by searching for the name of my mob on the internet,” Thomas said. “I clicked on every link and tried to work my way through the menus of all these different websites and resources until I came across a word list or a book.

“Initially, I was trying to find anything, but as I began learning more, I could search for more specific things.”

Related: Speaking up

Throughout his investigation, Thomas repeatedly came across references to the book Linguistic Survey of South-Eastern Queensland. It was written by a Swedish linguist named Nils Holmer, who conducted fieldwork on languages from Queensland, northern New South Wales and the Torres Strait during the 1960s–70s.

Many other linguists critiqued Holmer’s publication, believing it did not provide sufficient evidence to support his observations. “They were effectively saying that they didn’t trust his publication, but this could be solved with the original notes, or what they call a ‘corpus’,” Thomas said. “So, that got me thinking, ‘Where is this guy’s corpus?’”

At this time, Thomas was working with linguist Andrew Tanner from Living Languages, an organisation supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their efforts to preserve and grow their languages. The pair would meet each week to do language revitalisation work, their efforts now set on finding Holmer’s corpus.

One day, while researching, the pair emailed Claire Bowern, an Australian linguist currently working at Yale Linguistics, who knows Nils Holmer’s son, Arthur, a linguistics professor at Lund University in Sweden.

“They had a conversation 20 years ago, and she recalled that he said he had a collection of his father’s work sitting in his attic, but he’d never looked at it before. We thought that maybe if he had all this stuff he had never looked at, the corpus we were after could be there.”

The only problem was this collection was halfway around the world. Thomas and Andrew contacted Arthur and asked if he knew anything about the corpus they sought.

Initially, Arthur said no, but after a week, Thomas received an email with 12 scanned notebooks of Holmer’s original works. A week later, 14 more notebooks and six audio tapes appeared in Thomas’ inbox.

“Each of the 26 manuscripts – the field notebooks – are handwritten, and they contain languages from northern New South Wales, all of Queensland and up to Torres Strait,” Thomas said. “Seven of them were significant to me and my work in my language.”

Each notebook had around 160 handwritten pages on First Nations languages, meaning Thomas now had around 2660 pages worth of content to sift through.

Putting the pieces together

Thomas shifted from his career as a health professional and applied to become an Industry Fellow for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne, where he currently works part time on a grant for his language studies.

He is working for a platform called Nyingarn, an online database that makes manuscript sources of Australian Indigenous languages available as searchable and reusable text documents to support language revitalisation.

Thomas transcribed all seven Holmer notebooks about the Gangulu language.

“Now, using all the information I have collected over the years, me and a small team are writing the first Gangulu dictionary and learners guide,” Thomas said. “My greater goal is to bring back Gangulu, my language, and I want to speak it fluently.”

The awakened language will inevitably differ slightly from the original one, as Thomas and his team make judgements to the best of their knowledge and take inspiration from other local languages that are part of the same language family as Gangulu.

Because the language stopped being spoken around the 1970s, some words must be ‘invented’ to fill the dictionary with modern phrases. The primary ways of introducing new words to the dictionary is by adapting English words using the Gangulu phonetic system, or using the same process that other languages in Australia use to make words in their own languages that don’t draw any inspiration from English.

“A common one we already use is the word for car,” Thomas said. We say ‘murraga’, which is a phonetic take on ‘motor car’. When said in a sentence, you hardly even realise that it is technically an English word.”

Another word Thomas and his team have created is ‘dibi’ which means television, and is a phonetic play on ‘TV’.

Related: Mapping Indigenous language across Australia

Speaking to the future

Having his language back is extraordinarily special for Thomas, and he hopes that when he has finished the key work on Gangulu, he can start looking into other sleeping languages documented in Nils Holmer’s further 19 notebooks.

“Once this learners’ guide dictionary is complete, we’ll move straight onto making a new, updated version because we’re still coming across and trying to figure out the language as we go,” Thomas said. “Then, when we bring back Gangulu, we can use that to revive other languages from around us.

“When you start to come across language materials and word lists, you realise all the puzzle pieces are here. We just need to put them back together again.”

Thomas also emphasises the need for the current generation to take the initiative to learn about their Indigenous culture before it is too late.

“We are at a critical point where we must be passionate about and willing to uncover this stuff because otherwise when our Elders pass away, that knowledge will be gone forever.”

There is much hope for reawakening sleeping First Nations languages, and Thomas has proven that it is possible.

“I can now string together sentences off the top of my head, and although my grandmother can’t speak the language and doesn’t necessarily understand what I’m saying, I can see that she’s so excited when I talk to her in our language.

“It will take a little while, probably a couple of generations, but hopefully, by the time I have grandkids, they will be speaking Gangulu, too.”

The post Awakening a sleeping language appeared first on Australian Geographic.

Indeed, many people assume Earth is closer to the Sun in summer than in winter. As it happens, this is true during summer in the southern hemisphere, but it can’t also be true for summer in the northern hemisphere.

Related: Running rings around galaxies

In the southern hemisphere, Earth is five million kilometres closer to the Sun in summer than in winter, but it’s the reverse in the northern hemisphere. The average Earth–Sun distance is 150 million kilometres, and the main reason for the seasons is Earth is tilted so each pole is sometimes pointing more toward the Sun and sometimes more away from it.

So Earth’s orbit only has a relatively tiny deviation from perfect circularity. But why is it so often shown as practically an egg shape? And how can we visualise the real situation?

Consider the bike wheel

In order to try to understand myself how circular the orbit of the Earth was and other planets, I decided to compare the shape of Earth’s orbit to an ordinary 26-inch bike wheel by scaling down the real dimensions to fit – and consulting my local bike shop about what the deviations would mean for a real wheel. I was very surprised at the result.

The orbit was far closer to a perfect circle than I had previously thought. If the orbit were a 26-inch (660.4mm) bicycle wheel the deviation from a perfect circle would be less than 0.1mm. That’s comparable to a thin coat of paint – essentially indistinguishable from a perfect circle to the naked eye.

I looked at the other planets, too. The orbits of Venus and Neptune are even closer to perfect circles, with the orbit of Venus deviating only 14μm (a μm or micrometre is a millionth of a metre) and Neptune 31μm.

The planets with the least circular orbits are Mars and Mercury. If the orbit of Mars were a 26-inch bike wheel it would be out by just less than 3mm – hardly noticeable if you were riding a bike with a wheel out of true by this amount.

Mercury has the least circular of the orbits, with a deviation of 14mm, although this is still only 2 per cent.

If you have a bike, chances are its wheels are not even as circular as Mars’s orbit. If you’ve had a decent collision with a curb or rock, your front wheel might even be less circular than the orbit of Mercury.

A tiny deviation

Mathematically minded readers might have a question after reading the above: if Earth is on average 150 million kilometres from the Sun, and this distance varies by five million kilometres over the course of a year, shouldn’t the deviation in its orbit be a little over 3 per cent?

The answer to this question is the Sun is not at the centre of the ellipse but offset to one side as a point called the focus. If during formation, a planet travelled at just the right speed to counteract gravity it would travel in a circle.

However, in the real universe planets rarely go at just the right speed for a circle. Sometimes they travel a bit faster and sometimes slower, which can only be achieved with an elliptical orbit.

Coming full circle

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks believed all celestial objects orbited around the Earth, travelling in perfect circles.

This idea held sway for about 1,500 years, until Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 –1543) realised the planets (including Earth) actually orbited around the Sun.

Copernicus thought the orbits were circular. Later, German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) realised he was wrong and came up with the three laws of planetary motion.

Related: What is a solar eclipse?

The first law is the orbits of the planets are elliptical and not circular. The third law links the size of a planet’s orbit to the amount of time it takes in a way that’s a bit too complicated for us to get into here.

The second law is that, if you draw line from the Sun to any given planet, the line will sweep out equal areas in equal amounts of time as the planet moves. Think of pizza – a narrow wedge of a large pizza can have the same area as a wide wedge of a small pizza. This happens because planets move faster when they are closer to the Sun.

The main reason why orbits are drawn as ellipses in textbooks is to demonstrate Kepler’s second law. If the orbit of the Earth was drawn as shown in the correctly scaled diagram it would be impossible to see any difference in the wedges.

However, this can give the impression the orbit of the Earth is far more elliptical than it actually is. Such diagrams are not actually wrong – they are an exaggeration, a kind of mathematical caricature that emphasises an important feature.

Although the ancient Greeks were wrong about the Earth being at the centre of the solar system they were not far wrong about the orbits of the planets. So, if you’ll excuse the pun, we have come full circle.

Stephen Hughes, Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics and Physics & UQ College, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post What your school textbook didn’t tell you about the Earth’s orbit appeared first on Australian Geographic.

Many cat owners are now voluntarily keeping their cats indoors or in secure runs, and local governments mandate it in some areas. But most pet cats in Australia still roam local streets and gardens.

Broader adoption of keeping cats safe at home would have large benefits for cat welfare, human health, local wildlife and even the economy. So, should pet owners be required to keep their pets contained to their property, as dogs are?

We put that question to thousands of people in a national survey in late 2023, and recently published the results.

We found most people support requiring owners to contain cats. Just one in 12 people (eight per cent) are opposed. The time might be right for nationwide change in how we manage our pet cats.

Local councils are embracing cat containment

From November 1, Geelong City Council will join a fast-growing group of local governments in urban and regional areas that require pet cats to be securely contained 24 hours a day.

More than a third of local councils in Australia now require cats to be contained overnight or 24 hours a day. Most are in the ACT and Victoria.

Given how good cats are at climbing and jumping, containing cats usually requires keeping them indoors or in secure runs.

The main reasons cited by local govenments for these regulations are:

• Improving pet welfare: contained cats live longer and healthier lives with fewer vet bills because they are protected from traumatic injuries from car accidents, dog attacks and cat fights, infections, diseases and other misadventures.

• Saving wildlife: four out of five cats allowed outside will hunt and kill an average of two to three animals per week. With millions of pet cats in Australia, each year this adds up to 6,000–11,000 animals killed in our suburbs per square kilometre and 323 million native animals killed nationally. Night curfews only protect nocturnal species such as possums.

• Reducing nuisance to neighbours: containment results in less disturbance from cat fights and prevents the neighbour’s cat killing the birds and lizards living in your backyard or nearby park, which many community members value.

Related: How you can protect native wildlife from your pet cat

The public health toll of roaming cats

Another major benefit is less talked about. Stopping pet cats from roaming would greatly reduce rates of cat-borne diseases.

Several diseases which could not exist without cats can be passed to humans. These cost Australia more than $6 billion a year based on costs of medical care, lost income and other related expenses.

The most widespread of these diseases is toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be passed to humans but must complete its life cycle in cats. Australian studies have reported human infection rates between 22 per cent and 66 per cent of the community.

Cat-borne diseases cause considerable community harm, with an estimated 8,500 hospitalisations and 550 deaths from acute infections and also from increased rates of car accidents, suicides and mental health issues in infected people.

Pet cats are crucial to the rates of these diseases in the community. In suburbs that do not require containment, you’ll find up to 100 roaming pet cats per square kilometre.

Eliminating stray cats from our suburbs is also important to reduce disease rates – just one of the reasons why people should not feed stray cats.

Related: Feather boas lure feral cats, study finds

Most of us support containment

A policy requiring all cats to be contained has clear benefits. But would it have support? Rules only produce benefits if people follow them.

This is why colleagues at Monash University and I surveyed more than 3,400 people on whether they would support policies that “require cat owners to keep their cat contained to their property”.

We found a clear majority (66 per cent) of people support cat containment. A strikingly small proportion of people, about one in 12 people (eight per cent), are opposed. The remaining 26 per cent were ambivalent, selecting “neither support nor oppose”.

Other surveys have found almost half (42 per cent or 2.2 million) of Australia’s pet cats are already kept contained by their owners.

Some councils can’t legally require cat containment

Our findings suggest communities would broadly support their local councils if they moved to require cats to be contained.

While councils are responsible for pet issues, state and territory laws greatly influence what councils can and can’t do.

Rules are just the start

To boost compliance, councils need to invest in communicating new rules and the reasons for them. After a grace period, council officers will also need to monitor and enforce the rules.

Communities may need support too, especially if there are costs involved. Councils could, for example, offer rebates for flyscreens to stop cats slipping out of open windows.

Working with other colleagues in 2020, we surveyed Australia’s local governments about their approaches to cat management. Most reported tiny budgets for cat management.

Local governments should not be left to shoulder the cost alone. Federal, state and territory governments are also responsible for Australia’s wildlife (and human health). These governments have a range of projects covering both feral and pet cats.

The Australian government collects A$3 billion a year in GST from spending on pets. Diverting a small proportion into responsible pet ownership programs would make an enormous difference.

Containment has wide backing

Our research shows the community is ready for widespread reform of how we manage all these cats.

Requiring pet cats to be contained is a sound policy choice. But to realise the full benefits, we also need to invest in effective communication for communities, provide rebates to help contain cats, and make sure the rules are followed.

This research was a team effort, involving Kim Borg, Melissa Hatty and Emily Gregg for the national survey, and Sarah Legge, John Woinarski and Tida Nou for the research on cat impacts and management.

Jaana Dielenberg, University Fellow, Charles Darwin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Related: “A diabolical problem needing radical answers”: when cats are not so cute

The post Should Australians have to keep pet cats indoors? appeared first on Australian Geographic.

It might seem obvious, but the fact that nature does not, and cannot, align itself with national and international jurisdictions proves a huge challenge for migratory species conservation. A world-first report into the State of the World’s Migratory Species, launched at COP14, reveals the extent of these challenges. 

Populations are declining in close to half (44 per cent) of the almost 1200 species tracked by the convention. The problem is much worse underwater: fish species listed under the convention have declined, on average, 90 per cent since 1970. A further challenge is that not all migratory species are listed. Australia’s regional responsibility should be brought into sharp focus by the finding that unlisted migratory species in Oceania are experiencing the fastest rate of decline of any group, in any region.

Related: Hunters kill migrating birds on their 10,000km journey to Australia

Unfortunately for migratory species, efforts from a single country simply cannot halt their dramatic population declines. Even if, for example, Australia effectively protects albatross breeding colonies on every island in our jurisdiction, populations will keep declining if adults and juveniles continue to die as bycatch in commercial fisheries when the birds migrate around Antarctica. Coordinated threat management is required among all countries whose waters overlap the birds’ migratory range, along with effective management of fisheries in the high seas.

Though it may seem a daunting task, it is possible to reverse population declines. Species such as the humpback whale and Latham’s snipe (a migratory shorebird) have seen population growth after multiple countries agreed to stop hunting. In addition to stopping intentional (and unintentional) killing of migratory animals, we must also ensure that key habitat areas are identified, protected and well connected.

The collaborative agreements required to undertake coordinated protection are well defined in some parts of the globe. For example, the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership (EAAFP) brings together governments, inter-governmental organisations and NGOs to conserve migratory waterbirds throughout our region.

Many key stopover sites in the EAAF are intertidal wetlands, located on or near hubs of human activity such as ports. Although these sites are highly visible, more research is required to understand how they are connected. Do all migratory waterbirds attend all sites? Do some sites support single populations, while others support individuals of different origins? Recovery requires protection of a continuous migratory path, and our efforts will fail if we accidentally protect disconnected habitats.

Related: Flying for their lives

The impact of animal migrations extends far beyond the species themselves. Migratory animals transfer essential nutrients and energy from one place to another. The pulse of mass arrival and departure is a phenomenon not only critical to ecosystem function but also of great cultural significance. National governments, international organisations, NGOs, local communities and First Nations groups all have important roles to play – but no-one can do it alone. While nature knows no borders, humans do. It is our responsibility to see – and then act across – anthropogenic divisions if we wish to preserve great migrations for generations to come.

Dr Lily Bentley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science at The University of Queensland. She attended COP14.

Related: OPINION: Leading by example

The post OPINION: Moving on migration appeared first on Australian Geographic.

PsiQuantum claims it will build the world’s first “useful” quantum computer. Such a device could be enormously helpful for applications like cracking codes, discovering new materials and drugs, modelling climate and weather, and solving other tough computational problems.

Companies around the world — and several national governments — are racing to be the first to solve the quantum computing puzzle. How likely is it Australia’s bet on PsiQuantum will pay off?

Related: Conservation meets machine learning

Quantum 101

Quantum computers are computers that run quantum algorithms. These are step-by-step sets of instructions that change data encoded with quantum information. (Ordinary computers run digital algorithms, step-by-step sets of instructions that change digital information.)

Digital computers represent information as long strings of 1s and 0s. Quantum computers represent information as long lists of numbers. Over the past century, scientists have discovered these numbers are naturally encoded in fine details of energy and matter.

Quantum computing operates fundamentally differently from traditional computing. It uses principles of quantum physics and may be able to perform calculations that are not feasible for digital computers.

We know that quantum algorithms can solve some problems with far fewer steps than digital algorithms. However, to date nobody has built a quantum computer that can run quantum algorithms in a reliable way.

A bet on light

Researchers around the world are trying to build quantum computers using different kinds of technology.

PsiQuantum’s approach uses individual particles of light called photons to process quantum data. Photon-based quantum computers are expected to be less prone to errors than other kinds.

The Australian government has also invested around AUD$40 million in Sydney-based Silicon Quantum Computing. This company aims to encode quantum data in tiny particles trapped in silicon and other familiar materials used in current electronics.

A third approach is “trapped ions” — individually captured electrically charged atomic particles, which have the advantage of being inherently stable and all identical. A company called IonQ is one taking this track.

However, many believe the current leading approach is artificial atoms based on superconducting circuits. These can be customised with different properties. This is the approach taken by Google, IBM, and Rigetti.

There is no clear winning technology. It’s likely that a hybrid approach will eventually prevail.

The timeline set by PsiQuantum and supported by federal endorsements aims for an operational quantum computer by 2029. Some see this projected timeline as overly optimistic, since three years ago PsiQuantum was planning to meet a deadline of 2025.

Progress in quantum technology has been steady since its inception nearly three decades ago. But there are many challenges yet to overcome in creating a device that is both large enough to be useful and not prone to errors.

Politics before progress?

The announcement represents a significant commitment to advancing quantum computing technology both within Australian borders and worldwide. It falls under the Albanese government’s “Future Made in Australia” policy.

However, the investment risks being overshadowed by a debate over transparency and the selection process.

Criticisms have pointed to a lack of detailed public disclosure about why PsiQuantum was chosen over local competitors.

These concerns underscore the need for a more open dialogue about government spending and partnership selections to maintain public trust in such large-scale technological investments.

Public trust is difficult to establish when little to no effort has been made to educate people in quantum technology. Some claim that “quantum literacy” will be a 21st-century skill on par with digital literacy.

An Australian quantum future

Australia has made its quantum hardware bet. But even if the hardware works as planned, it will only be useful if we have people who know how to use it — and that means training in quantum theory and software.

The Australian Quantum Software Network, a collaboration of more than 130 of the nation’s leading researchers in quantum algorithms, software, and theory — including myself — was launched in late 2022 to achieve this.

The government says the PsiQuantum project is expected to create up to 400 specialised jobs, retaining and attracting new highly skilled talent to both the state and country. The media release also contains the dramatic forecast that success could “lead to up to an additional $48 billion in GDP and 240,000 new jobs in Australia by 2040.”

Efforts like the Sydney Quantum Academy, the Australian Centre for Quantum Growth, and my own quantum education startup Eigensystems, which recently launched the Quokka personal quantum computing and quantum literacy platform, will help to meet this goal.

In the coming decade, education and training will be crucial, not only to support this investment but also to expand Australia’s expertise so that it may become a net exporter in the quantum industry and a substantial player in the global race for a quantum computer.

Related: Will AI ever reach human-level intelligence?

Christopher Ferrie, A/Prof, UTS Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research and ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Australia just invested in a near $1b quantum computer — what makes it so special, and is it worth the cost? appeared first on Australian Geographic.

At the COP28 climate conference, held late in 2023 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, the Australian government continued its campaign to host the event in 2026. Among challenges to the bid is one data point that continues to embarrass our nation: at current rates, another Australian species could be extinct by the time we host the conference.

Our country’s record on species extinction is appalling.

We’re driving the largest decline in biodiversity of any developed nation and oversee the world’s worst modern mammal extinction rate. There are 19 Australian ecosystems, including the Great Barrier Reef and alpine forests, showing signs of collapse.

Yet successive federal governments have failed to respond with meaningful action. Ongoing land clearing, underfunded endangered species recovery, and inadequate invasive species control continue to fuel the disaster.

Related: Australia’s emissions policies savaged by experts ahead of COP28 climate summit

Australia on notice

Globally, our lack of action to protect biodiversity has not gone unnoticed.  We have been singled out at the International Union for Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress in 2021 for our recent extinctions and for being a global deforestation hotspot. UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently urged world leaders to end a “senseless and suicidal war against nature”. In his message, Mr Guterres pleaded with governments to reduce deforestation, promote more forest cover, and vastly intensify our efforts to restore ecosystems. He recognises that biodiversity loss exacerbates climate change by releasing carbon and reducing greenhouse gas sequestration – undermining gains made through clean energy initiatives and reduced consumption. Ecosystems are the only viable carbon sink, and they must be protected and restored to achieve global climate goals.

These warnings continue to be ignored in Australia. While the federal government has made a welcome shift to speaking more about the importance of environmental leadership, it hasn’t translated this rhetoric into meaningful action since taking office in 2022. The government has shown a desire to host important global conferences such as COP31 and this year’s Global Nature Positive Summit, but the focus is more on optics than action.

The federal government has prioritised the development of a Nature Repair Market to cost-shift conservation efforts to the private sector at the expense of making rapid and meaningful progress on fixing our nature laws. Asking the private sector to contribute more to nature repair is not a bad idea, but navigating the nature repair market through the Senate was a disappointing distraction from the law reforms and funding initiatives urgently needed to protect and restore nature.

If our government wants to be taken seriously as an environmental leader, we must clean up our own backyard.

An opportunity to lead and restore Australia’s reputation

Fortunately, we know what we need to do to conserve species and ecosystems. We need strong and enforced nature protection laws, a truly independent environment protection agency, and adequate investment species and ecosystem recovery. These actions won’t cost the earth. We could prevent extinction of our 2,003 nationally-listed endangered species and restore threatened ecosystems for about $4 billion per year – less than the GST revenue on pet care.  We can afford it.

Related: State of the Environment report shows ‘shocking’ decline of Australia’s wildlife and natural ecosystems

As a first step, we need to stop further destruction before we can begin to repair the damage. This includes investing in invasive species management. We need to control feral cats, foxes, deer, pigs, goats, buffer grass, and privet weed at the scale required to reduce total numbers and reverse the spread of invasives to new areas. We need to stop expanding farming, mining, forestry, and development incursions into sensitive habitats, especially when these incursions are used to dig up and burn more fossil fuels. We need to ensure that the transition to a clean energy system doesn’t become a driver of extinction through lack of planning to avoid energy development in sensitive habitats. Conservation organisations, scientists, Traditional Owners and environment agencies also need a level of support that matches the scale of the challenge they face in the fight to protect species, ecosystems and Country. Together, these actions will begin to arrest the ongoing destruction of Australia’s biodiversity and provide a stronger foundation from which we can begin to repair the damage we have wrought.

Australia’s federal government has an enormous opportunity to lead, handing down its penultimate budget in May and delivering new nature laws soon after. As the clock ticks towards the election, the 2026 climate summit, and the impending loss of further Australian species, the government is running out of time to demonstrate leadership and begin to repair both our environment and our global reputation. We need a substantial investment in biodiversity in the upcoming budget.

I know members of this government care about protecting the environment, but it’s time for them to walk the walk – after all, words without action are just hot air, and in the words of Secretary-General Guterres: “Hot air is killing us.”

Related: Going, going, gone: can we turn around our wildlife extinction crisis?

The post OPINION: Leading by example appeared first on Australian Geographic.

But even as we accelerate the rate at which we install solar on our rooftops and in grid-scale farms, the world keeps getting hotter and extreme weather arrives more often.

Solar panels have to be outside, exposed to all weather. They’re built to endure heat, snow, rain and wind. But they have limits. Climate change will mean many panels can degrade faster.

Our new research examines which areas of Australia will have the worst conditions for solar degradation out to 2059 – and what it will do to the cost of energy. We found solar in Australia’s hot, humid north will degrade fastest, while solar in the arid interior and more moderate climates down south will fare better.

Related: These megatrends will shape Australia’s future

What makes solar panels degrade?

When you’re looking to install solar on your rooftop, the warranty will likely be a factor in your eventual choice. Most solar manufacturers offer a 25 to 30 year warranty, where they guarantee power output will drop by less than 20 per cent over that time.

The reason the power output drops at all is that solar panels slowly degrade over time. But different climates, different materials and different manufacturing techniques can lead to faster or slower degradation.

At present, the dominant solar technology is silicon. Silicon modules degrade due to stress from the environment, voltage changes and mechanical stresses, as silicon wafers are quite stiff and brittle. Environmentally, humidity, ultraviolet radiation and temperature are the main causes of damage.

Hotter, more humid conditions can accelerate degradation in several ways. The map below combines four types of degradation we predict will worsen under climate change. These are:

1. delamination: heat and humidity can cause the bonds holding the different layers of the cell together to lose adhesion

2. discoloured encapsulant: intense sunlight and extra moisture can damage or discolour the encapsulant, the polymer used to adhere layers within the solar cell together

3. ribbon corrosion: if it’s more humid more often, it increases the chances moisture can accumulate and begin corroding the internal ribbon connections of the cell

4. internal circuit failure: solar cells experience regular temperature fluctuations, daily and seasonally. These temperature changes can over time cause circuits to fail. A hotter world will add extra stress to internal circuits, leading to a higher chance of failure.

What will climate change do?

Our results predict degradation rates will increase across Australia out to 2059 under both high and low emissions scenarios laid out by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change.

Under a high emissions scenario, solar would degrade twice as fast as it would under a lower emission scenario due to the extra heat. Solar farms would be able to produce less power and might have to replace panels due to failure more often. On average, this would mean losing about eight point five per cent of output due solely to extra degradation by 2059. Under a high emissions scenario, this would mean energy could cost 10 to 12 per cent more.

But the effects wouldn’t be felt equally. Our results show solar built across the hot and humid north of Australia will degrade at especially high rates in the future compared to the arid centre, where conditions are hot but dry.

What should we do?

Heat is the main way solar panels degrade and break in Australia. As the world heats up, it will go from annoyance to very real problem.

At present, very few solar developers are taking climate change into account when they buy their panels. They should, especially those operating in humid areas. They can be more careful while selecting a new solar farm location to ensure their modules have lower chances of failure due to degradation.

To fix the problem, we’ll need to incorporate new ways of cooling panels and improve the materials used. We also need to improve manufacturing processes and materials so we can stop moisture from accumulating inside the panels.

These issues can be fixed. The first step is to understand there is a problem.

Shukla Poddar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Related: Climate change summit ends with deal to move away from fossil fuels

The post Even solar panels can’t handle the increasing heat appeared first on Australian Geographic.

It’s estimated Australia uses more than 70 billion pieces of soft plastic a year. Most of it still ends up in landfill or blows into streets and waterways, polluting our rivers and oceans. So 12 stores won’t cut it in the long term.

But starting small is a good idea. REDcycle collapsed under its own weight, stockpiling recyclable material with nowhere to go. The new scheme will feed new, purpose-built waste processing facilities so it has much better prospects.

What do we know about the new scheme?

Australia’s Soft Plastics Taskforce is behind the new trial. The taskforce is a coalition of the three major supermarkets: Woolworths, Coles and Aldi. It was established in the wake of REDcycle’s demise and is chaired by the federal government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

The taskforce assumed responsibility for roughly 11,000 tonnes of soft plastic, formerly managed by REDcycle, across 44 locations across Australia.

Addressing the lack of soft plastics recycling infrastructure in Australia is a top priority. This is the main reason REDcycle was unable to process the mountains of soft plastics it had stored around the country.

Much like the original REDcycle scheme, the new small-scale trial in Victoria has identified several potential end markets for used soft plastic. After treatment, it could become an additive for asphalt roads, a replacement for aggregate in concrete, or a material for making shopping trolleys and baskets.

To be a successful and lasting solution, the scheme must be cost-effective and suitably located, with established markets for the recycled products.

Why are soft plastics so difficult to recycle?

Recycling soft plastic packaging is particularly challenging, for several reasons.

Plastic packaging is typically made from the petrochemicals polyethylene or polypropylene, and often contains a mix of materials, including various types of plastics and additives for flexibility and durability. This blend of materials makes it difficult to separate and recycle effectively.

To make matters worse, soft plastics readily absorb residues from food, grease and other substances. This causes contamination, reducing the quality of the recycled material.

There’s also less demand for recycled soft plastics, compared to other plastics. Many manufacturers prefer using brand new or “virgin” plastics or recycled rigid plastics instead, such as recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET), leaving limited avenues for recycled soft plastics to find new uses.

Soft plastics can get tangled or stuck in machinery at recycling or waste-processing facilities, causing inefficiencies and disruptions in the process.

Related: Pulling the plug on plastic

Finding local solutions

We need to make it economically viable to recycle low-value plastics such as soft plastic packaging. Placing recycling facilities closer to communities and transport can save money and reduce emissions. So local, decentralised, small-scale recycling or reprocessing infrastructure is the way to go.

Fit-for-purpose facilities can develop the specialised processing and manufacturing techniques needed to handle soft plastics. This takes care of the contamination problem and creates new options for developing recycled products.

Local recycling initiatives also foster community engagement and awareness. We need to encourage individuals to participate actively in recycling efforts, and foster local businesses focused on resource recovery. To this end, we are currently exploring innovative enterprise-based recycling solutions in remote First Nations communities in Queensland.

The high cost of cheap packaging

Soft plastics are lightweight, flexible and inexpensive to produce. This has made them popular choices for packaging. But this ignores the problems of disposal, including harm to nature and people. There has to be a better way.

Recycling soft plastic packaging does face numerous obstacles. These stem from complex composition, contamination risks, sorting and processing challenges, scarce recycling infrastructure and limited demand for the end product.

Tackling these challenges requires collaborative efforts from industry players, policymakers, consumers and researchers. We need to develop innovative local solutions and reduce consumption of single-use plastic.

Holding producers accountable for the end-of-life management of their products is paramount. In the meantime, local, decentralised recycling infrastructure offers a promising solution to improve the efficiency and sustainability of soft plastic recycling, while empowering communities to contribute to a circular economy.

The trial in Victoria raises hopes of a working solution for post-consumer soft plastic. This time they are starting on a small scale. That should make it easier to manage the volume of material available for recycling and avoid secret stockpiles. Ultimately this approach could see “micro-factories” cropping up across the country, turning what was once waste into viable, useful products.

Related: Deepest ever sea dive discovers plastic rubbish

Anya Phelan, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Soft plastic recycling has returned on a small scale: will it work this time? appeared first on Australian Geographic.

In emergency situations, there is a long-held convention that official responders such as firefighters first attempt to save human life, then property and infrastructure, then natural assets.

Our research investigated whether this convention reflects community values. We found the people we surveyed valued one human life more than the extinction of an entire non-human species – a result both fascinating and troubling.

What are we willing to lose?

Catastrophic events force us to make hard choices about what to save and what to abandon. In such emergencies, our choices reveal in stark detail the values we ascribe to different types of “assets”, including plant and animal species.

Our priorities will become even more crucial under climate change, which is bringing worse bushfires and other environmental catastrophes. If nature is always saved last, we can expect recurring biodiversity losses, including extinctions.

Related: OPINION: Recalling the inferno

The unprecedented loss of biodiversity in the Black Summer fires was a taste of what’s to come. The fires burnt the entire known range of more than 500 plant and animal species and at least half the range of more than 100 threatened species. The catastrophe led to at least one extinction – of a mealybug species in Western Australia.

The losses prompted reflection on our priorities. The final report of a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the bushfires, for example, questioned if this hierarchy of protection should always apply.

Our new research investigated community values on this issue. The findings were illuminating.

Making the hard choices

The survey involved 2,139 Australians. Respondents ranked the assets they would save in a hypothetical bushfire, choosing from the following options:

• a person not warned to evacuate
• a person who had ignored advice to evacuate (and so implicitly taken responsibility for their own safety)
• a population of 50 koalas (of which many other populations exist elsewhere)
• one of only two populations of a wallaby species
• the only population of a native snail species (which would become extinct if burnt)
• the only population of a native shrub species (which would become extinct if burnt)
• a flock of 50 sheep
• a house, shed and tractor
• two items of Indigenous cultural significance (a rock art gallery and a tree carving).

Survey respondents overwhelmingly gave the highest ranking to the two options involving saving a human life – even if that person had been repeatedly told to evacuate and even if, as a consequence, a snail or shrub species became extinct.

Saving a person who had not received evacuation warnings was rated highest, ahead of saving a person who ignored evacuation advice. Saving the koala population was next preferred, followed by saving the wallaby population.

The remaining options had negative scores, meaning that respondents were more likely to choose them as least important than most important.

Amongst the biodiversity assets, decisions based on conservation consequences would have meant the top priority was preventing the extinction of the snail and shrub populations. Next in line would have been the wallaby population, then a relatively less consequential loss of koalas.

But the results were the opposite: people prioritised the koalas over the wallabies, with less concern for the shrub and the snail. Ranked even lower were the items of Indigenous cultural significance. Saving the house and shed had lowest rankings.

The results are revealing

We take several key messages from the survey results.

First, the conventional hierarchy of protection during fire – prioritising human life, then infrastructure, then biodiversity – does not always reflect societal values. Sometimes, protecting natural assets is more important than protecting at least some infrastructure. In the Black Summer fires, the attempts to save crucial populations of the imperilled Wollemi Pine showed such protection of biodiversity assets is possible.

Second, our society values one human life more than the millions of years of evolution that can be eclipsed almost instantaneously in the extinction of another species.

Third, our regard for nature is far from egalitarian. In this case, the preference for saving koalas is consistent with previous studies that show we care far more for iconic cute mammals than other species.

Related: Our koalas: post-bushfire recovery and future challenges

Fourth, animal welfare issues may trump consideration for conservation consequences. We suspect that the haunting imagery of koalas suffering in the Black Summer wildfires may have contributed to them being prioritised ahead of more imperilled species.

And finally, our results were troubling for the conservation of poorly known species, the extinctions of which are increasing around the world. These losses have been largely disregarded or unmourned by society.

It suggests the case for saving such species needs to be better made. Australia’s invertebrate fauna is highly distinctive, fascinating and vital for the health of our ecosystems. To prevent mass losses of invertebrate species, we must take action now.

Rethinking our priorities?

The world is becoming more perilous. There’s a high risk of losing much of the nature that surrounds us, supports us and helps define us as Australians.

We must think carefully about what future we bequeath to our children and to future generations. This may require reconsidering our priorities – and in some cases, making different choices.

John Woinarski, Professor of Conservation Biology, Charles Darwin University; Kerstin Zander, Professor of Environmental Economics, Charles Darwin University, and Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post What would you do: save a single human or an entire animal species? appeared first on Australian Geographic.

South Australia, where I was director of the Emergency Management Office in the Fire and Emergency Services Commission, faced an unprecedented crisis in November 2019. Since August that year, hundreds of exhausted South Australian firefighters and emergency workers had been supporting other states. As spring came to an end, SA firefighters were faced, on their home ground, with another huge fight that would extend well into summer.

Among the many terrible days of the season, I distinctly remember 3 January 2020. Lightning had ignited fires across Kangaroo Island (KI) in the week before Christmas and these had raged uncontrollably in challenging, hard-to-reach terrain. On 3 January extreme conditions drove a bushfire across KI, burning 2000sq.km, almost half the island, in a single day. That relentless inferno claimed the lives of two Australians and destroyed the homes of 87 families and more than 600 other buildings and vehicles.

Iconic tourist facilities such as the Flinders Chase Visitor Centre, Kangaroo Island Wilderness Retreat, and Southern Ocean Lodge were reduced to ashes. Almost 60,000 livestock were killed, along with tens of thousands of native animals, including an estimated 40,000 koalas. Four years on, it’s still hard to comprehend the scale of loss SA experienced in a single day.

Related: ‘We’ll come back from this’: spirit of Kangaroo Island residents unbroken

The Black Summer bushfires offered our nation a glimpse of just how extreme our weather systems will become if we continue to turn up the temperature of Australia by burning fossil fuels. We have to dramatically reduce emissions this decade – and we need policy in place to ensure that happens. Astonishingly, Australia’s environment laws, created in the late ’90s, still don’t account for the impacts of climate change. How are we to protect the environment when we don’t deal with its greatest threat? 

This law is currently up for review. I hope the federal government does the right thing and heeds the call to consider the devastating climate impacts of fossil-fuel projects. We can’t afford to keep fuelling the climate crisis – there’s just too much at stake.

The devastation I saw on KI in Black Summer makes a clear case for why this must change, why the law must protect the places and species that Australians love.

I felt a sense of déjà vu in spring 2023 as I watched SA crews begin to deploy to assist the Northern Territory, where millions of hectares have burnt since fires ignited in early September. In Queensland, there were more homes lost by 1 November than there were in the entirety of Black Summer, requiring help to be called in from Victoria and New Zealand to battle the blazes.

I can’t overstate the pressure climate change is putting on our first responders. Fire seasons are progressively overlapping and increasing the risks our firies face. Climate change could devastate our emergency workforce if we don’t act with urgency to address it. At the same time, we need to equip communities with the resources they need to better prepare and respond to disasters.

Australians must ask their leaders to protect our nation for generations to come. For the places, species and people we love, we must leave fossil fuels in the ground for good.

Brenton Keen is a member of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action and former director of the Emergency Management Office in the South Australian Fire and Emergency Services Commission.

The post OPINION: Recalling the inferno appeared first on Australian Geographic.

Despite that scathing indictment, almost two decades since the National Water Initiative was signed and more than a decade since the $13 billion Murray–Darling Basin Plan (MDBP) was enacted in 2012, Australia’s largest and most productive river basin has still not received the minimum river flows it needs to stay healthy.

The findings were part of a major study released in September 2023 by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, an independent collection of scientists and professionals. The study assessed minimum water requirements across rivers in the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB), defined by MDB governments based on best available science, such as the river flows needed to reduce risk of blue-green algal blooms, the periodic overbank watering needed to keep red gum forests alive.

Only 26 per cent of the water requirements assessed were achieved in the past decade since the MDBP was adopted. Longer-term declining trend since the 1970s were also observed. Only two of the eight Ramsar wetlands of International Importance (Gwydir Wetlands and Narran Lake) received the overbank flows necessary to stay healthy.

Despite some observed improvements in flows, the study demonstrates that overall progress on water reform in the Murray–Darling Basin has not been sufficient to overcome impacts of overextraction, water mismanagement and climate change, diminishing water in our rivers and contributing to widespread salinity, blue-green algae blooms, mass fish kills, decline of freshwater species and degradation of floodplain ecosystems.

Related: Waterbirds of the Murray-Darling threatened by reduced water flow

Since Federation, successive governments have grappled with the challenge of managing water resources in the MDB. More than a century of growing water use has led to chronic over-extraction of water and significant environmental degradation. In 2010, when the Millennium drought ended, 21 of the 23 catchments in the MDB were in poor or very poor health.

In 2004, a major intergovernmental agreement – the National Water Initiative – was signed by all governments of Australia. It represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore the health of river systems in a way that promoted economic prosperity while using less water and paved the way for the national legislative framework, the Commonwealth Water Act 2007, agreed by parliament on a bipartisan basis and enacted in 2012. These laws required the Commonwealth to determine how much water was needed to be returned to the river system to ensure its health.

Yet the MDBP target did not secure enough to water to achieve the flows that were needed for a healthy river. The 3200gigalitre target fell substantially short of the Murray–Darling Basin Authority’s best estimate that between 3856GL (high uncertainty) and 6983GL (low uncertainty) was required.

Since the Water Act was agreed, there has been some progress, with two thirds of the water recovered (2107GL) and with more than two thirds of the funding spent. While no overall general improvement in the condition of river systems has been observed, there have been local improvements in river flows, salinity, water quality, and the condition of freshwater species in river reaches receiving additional water.

A series of institutional changes since 2012 have eroded regulatory oversight of the national water reforms: in 2013, the Murray–Darling Basin Ministerial Council abolished the Sustainable Rivers Audit, a program that was established to measure the condition of the river systems in the MDB; in 2014, the federal government abolished the National Water Commission; and in 2017, revelations of possible water theft and meter tampering exposed inadequate monitoring and compliance regimes.

Related: Life on the floodplains

After a decade of stalling and unwinding of water reform, decisive steps are being taken to get the ailing $13 billion MDBP back on track. In September, the federal government introduced legislative amendments to the Water Act to extend timelines and recommence voluntary water purchase. It followed a recent announcement by Minister for Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek of a new agreement to implement the MDBP in partnership with MDB states other than Victoria. Importantly, this signifies the Commonwealth’s willingness to assume its constitutional powers to progress the MDBP, with or without state support.

Yet one important fact remains: The Water Act requires governments to ensure water extraction does not compromise ecosystems that depend on freshwater flows in the MDB, but this is still clearly not occurring. If the proposed legislation fails to rectify this, the consequences will be far-reaching, not just for the health of the river, but for the 2.3 million people who live and work in the MDB and a further 1 million who depend on its water.
If we want to secure drought supply for towns like Walgett and Wilcannia, if we want First Nations to thrive, if we want the irrigation industry to access clean water, if we want our favourite camping and fishing spots to have healthy trees and Murray cod, we must improve our national water laws. There is no better a time: Major floods of 2022 have recharged the MDB with water, breathing life back into vast areas of desiccated landscapes and demonstrating many parts of the ecosystem can still bounce back.

The Wentworth Group has proposed practical solutions that would give public confidence that the river is receiving the flows it needs, while supporting regional industries and communities to transition to a future with less water. These include greater accountability and transparency in water recovery programs, maximising benefits of water recovered by releasing water from storages in pulses to re-connect rivers to their floodplains, ensuring water management rules prioritise essential river flows for communities and river health above major upstream extractions, establishing a transition fund to support regional communities, and embedding climate change and Indigenous interests in all aspects of water management and planning.

The MDB is still over-allocated, and the future will be harder than the past. The spotlight is now on the Australian Parliament to ensure that reforms to our national water laws prioritise the health of Australia’s important but imperilled MDB and give its communities confidence in their long-term future.

Dr Celine Steinfeld is a geographer specialising in natural resource policy and management in Australia. She has been Director of the Wentworth Group since 2019.

Related: Defining Moments in Australian History: Large scale irrigation begins

The post OPINION: Getting the Murray–Darling Basin Plan back on track appeared first on Australian Geographic.

The people who describe new species and create lists of them are taxonomists. A few years ago, a headline in the journal Nature accused the taxonomic community of anarchy for not coordinating a common view of species, leading to confusion about our knowledge of life on earth.

Many in the taxonomic community took umbrage at this. Taxonomists were concerned that the ideas proposed would limit their freedom of expression and they would be tied to a bureaucracy before they could publish new species descriptions.

Taxonomists certainly argue – disputation is essential to the practice of taxonomy, as it is to science in general. Ultimately, however, a taxonomist’s life is spent trying to discern order in the extraordinarily diverse tree of life.

The results of a new survey published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, show just how much taxonomists really do like order.

Hardly a group of anarchists

The argument was about how to solve disagreements between taxonomists. Eventually, the two sides came together to produce principles on the creation of a single authoritative list of species.

This group then went to the taxonomic community to survey their views on whether a global species list is needed and how it should be run.

The newly published results show that a large majority (77%) of respondents – which included over 1,100 taxonomists and users of taxonomy across 74 countries – have expressed support for having a single list of all life on Earth.

They also agreed there should be a governance system that supports the list’s creation and maintenance. Just what that governance system would entail is not yet specified. Deciding that will be the next step in the process.

Related: Earth’s biodiversity could be much greater than we thought

Taxonomists propose hypotheses, not facts

Why is this important? Many may not realise that when a taxonomist names a new species description, they are proposing a scientific hypothesis, not presenting an objective scientific fact.

Other taxonomists then look at the evidence provided in the description and decide whether they agree. If people making species lists judge that there is agreement about a hypothesis, the new species goes on their list.

Only after a species is listed can it be protected, studied, eradicated, ignored or whatever else governments decide is appropriate. Scientists and conservation advocates also need species to be listed before they can include them in their work. Until listed, the species remains, for all practical purposes, invisible.

However, not all lists are equally trusted. Very rarely taxonomists do go rogue. One notorious taxonomist has been blacklisted for “taxonomic vandalism”. He published all sorts of new names – some even commemorated his dog – with little justification. If accepted, his field (herpetology) would have been thrown into chaos.

The work of rogue taxonomists wastes everyone’s time and money. In one instance, poor taxonomy has even killed people – an antivenom labelled with the wrong name for a snake was distributed in Africa and Papua New Guinea with disastrous results.

Even without rogue taxonomists, there is an enormous problem with so-called synonyms – different people giving different names for the same species. Some species have tens of scientific names, not to mention misspellings.

This leaves users uncertain what name to use. Sometimes they use different names but mean the same species; sometimes the same names but mean different species. The only way to clarify this confusion is by having a working master list of species names linked to the scientific literature.

Now what?

The newly released survey shows taxonomists and users of taxonomy have achieved an agreement that good lists need good governance. Species lists need to reflect the best science, independent of outside influence. They need dispute resolution processes. And they need involvement and agreement from the taxonomic community on their contents.

Governance of science does not work unless a large majority of scientists agree with the rules, because participation is voluntary. There’s no such thing as science police.

Agreement and compliance is best achieved if scientists themselves are involved in the creation of the rules. This helps to increase buy-in among the community of peers to make sure rules are kept.

Based on the survey results, the Catalogue of Life – the group that has the most comprehensive global species list to date, and the one we’re involved in – is piloting ways of measuring the quality of the lists that make up their catalogue.

These are being trialled first with the creators of lists, everything from viruses to mammals. Then, they will be tested with the taxonomic community at large for further feedback.

Good taxonomy is far more valuable than people realise. One recent study in Australia found that, for every dollar spent on taxonomy, the economy gained A$35. The value of taxonomy globally is likely to be colossal.

But the value will be higher still if everyone the world over is able to use the same list of species.

Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University and Aaron M. Lien, Assistant Professor of Ecology, Management and Restoration of Rangelands, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Related: Why we need to start naming as many species as possible

The post Taxonomists agree on how to create a single list of all life on Earth appeared first on Australian Geographic.

Morganna says she uses AI to supplement what wildlife photographers are already doing to celebrate the wonder of the natural world. She manipulates images to heighten our emotional response – never intending that the viewer think the work is real. In this image, for example, she purposely misplaces an eye and merges a human arm with that of a kangaroo. The background is imperfectly rendered to emphasise the scene’s fabrication.

“I’ve always believed in the power of photography to change things, but its getting harder as we move along as a society,” Morganna says. “Maybe AI is a tool that can help with that. With the flood of citizen photography, wildlife tourism and the rapid way in which we consume imagery, we’ve become a bit sanitised to what we’re seeing. It’s an echo chamber, and different imagery is needed to reach beyond it.” Morganna considers AI to be another visual culture tool, hoping its ability to draw emotions from an audience and heighten our empathy for animals such as kangaroos can only be a good thing.

American photographer Philip Toledano creates deliberately absurd scenes in his series Another America and has become the ‘whipping boy’ for AI. I had showcased Toledano’s incredibly moving personal project documenting his father’s final days while I was working in a previous picture-editor role. Intimately photographing a loved one’s death is as visceral and real as it gets. Fast forward 15 years, and Toledano is creating fictional worlds set in 1940s and ’50s America where apes are sentient beings living amongst us. He uses Midjourney, an AI generator, that Toledano says is like working “with a very talented but very drunk person, and you have to kind of bludgeon it into giving you what you’re asking for”. Toledano explores a post-truth world, deliberately setting his work in the golden era of 1950s photojournalism when truth, he says, was “biblical in its veracity”.

Although he doesn’t regard his creations as photography any more, referring to it as ‘photography adjacent’, the work looks enough like photography to make him the subject of hot debates in photo forums. Toledano sees Midjourney as working in the same way as a photographer works, in that any image that is created is a unique image that is the sum of every other image it has been exposed to, or – in the case of a photographer – of everything they have seen in their life.

In April this year the whole highly charged debate around AI and documentary photography intensified when respected photojournalist and long-time National Geographic Explorer Michael C. Brown published some images of Cuban refugees crossing the 90 miles of ocean separating Havana from Florida.

Although Brown was very clear that he used AI and presented the imagery as photo illustration, his background as a photojournalist led many people to question his integrity. His response was, “This is not journalism, this is storytelling”.

For the past few decades, working as a photo editor on magazines and newspapers, I have seen a distinction, like Michael C. Brown, between journalistic stories and conceptual storytelling. For straightforward reporting, documentary and news stories, there are strict ethical parameters around any assignment. Removing or inserting elements in the image are regarded as violating the industry standards of truth and accuracy in photojournalism. Images are not modified once they are made, except for colour correction, contrast, removal of dust and cropping.

The nature of published photography as a real-world documentary record, with all those layers between what is seen in front of the lens and how a photo is eventually realised on the page, is incredibly complex.

There is always the perspective perceived by the photographer, the style, the approach and the interpretation. Lens choice, what to show and what to exclude in the framing, editing, toning and sequence – all are inherently manipulative. Photo editors choose photographers for a look or feel, and that has inevitably a point of view.

How to keep photography honest has long been a question, well before the advent of Photoshop. National Geographic ignited a fiery debate on the topic after their controversial 1982 cover, where they moved two pyramids closer together to fit the constraints of the cover.

The history of doctoring photos dates back to the earliest days of the photograph. Stalin routinely air-brushed his enemies out of photos, Mussolini had a horse handler removed from a heroic portrait of himself, and China’s ‘Gang of Four’ disappeared from a photo of a memorial ceremony for Mao Zedong.

Life magazine removed a fence to give a 1970 Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of student deaths in the Kent State University protest more impact, and photographer Steve McCurry, best known for his photo of the Afghan girl on the 1985 cover of National Geographic, was accused of breaching photojournalism ethics. McCurry heavily edited his images, even removing people, later leading him to define his practice as ‘storytelling’ rather than ‘photojournalism’.

Wildlife photographer Art Wolfe came under criticism for cloning animals to fill spaces and it was revealed that he had altered a third of his images in his celebrated 1994 book Migrations.

Last year a stunning, and – in hindsight – implausible photo of an elusive snow leopard near Mount Everest proved too good to be true.

Proliferating ‘photography game farms’ further muddy the field for truth telling in nature photography; they enable photographers to stage a photograph, with handlers moving the animal around to look as if they were photographing in the wild.

World Press Photo winner and Australian photojournalist Matthew Abbott says, “Our great asset as documentary photographers is our integrity. This cannot be replaced by AI.” Abbott acknowledges that, “Reality and truth have a complicated relationship with photography…stories with integrity, and photos with integrity, might be a better way to put it.” The types of photography Abbott is referring to are photojournalism, street photography, sport photography – all loosely described as ‘documentary photography’.

We have an expectation that photographs represent the truth, but all images have an agent. “Photography is an incredibly subjective craft. I’ve never met two people with the same truth, nor seen true objectivity ever demonstrably applied to anything,” writes Peter Von Agtmael, a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos agency. “We shouldn’t mistake something factual for something truthful, and we should always question which facts are employed, and how.”

This month a mammoth exhibition on photography opened at the National Gallery of Victoria investigating this very topic, of real versus imagined.

Senior curator of photography, Susan Van Wyk, reflects that, while we have an expectation that photographs represent the truth, she doesn’t know if there is anything that “categorically, hands down, tells you the entire truth of this moment, this event, this person”. The exhibition features works by past photographic greats that call our attention to the artifice of the medium. One of the more famous of these in the show is Robert Capa’s photo, The Falling Soldier, notorious after allegations that the photo was faked.

In magazines, staged photography has also long held a place and been showcased. For opinion pieces and commentary content, photographs often engage people in a different way via stylised set-up photos or sourced through a stock agency, sometimes producing a fictional scene to realise conceptual ideas.

The work of conservation photographer Nick Brandt bears little relation to traditional wildlife documentary. He uses highly conceptual approaches to surprise and reach audiences. “You have to work harder now to create something different. I only embark on a new project if I feel it’s never been done before,” he says. Brandt constructs elaborate, often composite scenes to portray people and animals that have been impacted by climate change. In his ongoing global series The Day May Break, he even concocted a non-toxic fog, especially for the shoots, to symbolise the rapidly disappearing natural world.

Like this kind of conceptually driven, post-documentary photography, perhaps AI imagery may offer a fresh way to address old themes and generate interest in the cultures of indifference and compassion fatigue. Amber Terranova argues that “artists have an opportunity to reach new audiences by showing them something they have never seen before, by creating more and more attention around a particular subject matter through embracing a new technology”.

Michael Christopher Brown argues that AI can help us report on inaccessible places and is a form of photorealistic exploration of stories that are impossible to tell. For him, collaborating with AI allowed him to tell the story of real Cuban refugees without jeopardizing their safety and trust. Earlier this year AI images, generated from eyewitness testimony collected by lawyers from the firm Maurice Blackburn, were used to show the horrors of offshore detention on Nauru and Manus islands. The law firm’s creative agency worked closely with survivors to fine-tune the images to make sure they reflected their experiences, and used Australian photojournalist Mridula Amin to consult on the project. “If we had just generated these images and not engaged with the survivors, this campaign would have felt very thin and would have felt less ethical,” the campaign’s creative director Gavin Chimes says.

From Australian Geographic’s perspective, does AI-generated imagery give our readers the opportunity of imagining something that is impossible to witness, because of either inaccessibility or risk to the subject? AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC has long used hyper-realistic illustrations to help us imagine long-lost worlds or vulnerable species. In 2022 our photographer Max Mason-Hughes visited a dry rock paddock, outside Gulgong in NSW, as part of an archaeological dig team, and discovered the remains of a 15-million-year-old billabong. Our illustrator Franz Antony was able to bring the ancient billabong to life, showing how the site was once a tropical rainforest full of flora and fauna.

Perhaps photo realistic ‘reportage illustration’ via AI may allow us to showcase vulnerable species that are difficult to access, or would place the animal under stress to be traditionally photographed. With such large swathes of Australia under pastoral lease, many of Australia’s threatened species are out of sight on private property or in areas restricted for their protection. A prime example are the remaining 315 northern hairy-nosed wombats protected in two rural Queensland properties run by Australian Wildlife Conservancy. Australian Geographic recently shared Brad Leue’s remotely captured photos of this critically endangered species on large digital screens around Australia; the animals were impossible for the photographer to access in person.

Like Morganna, I can see that AI, or synthetic image making – perhaps we shouldn’t call it photography – has value as an add-on to traditional documentary. If AI imagery can be used as a tool leading to positive change by drawing attention to the pressing issues of our day, then embracing AI is surely worth it, but rest assured, we won’t be using it to replace our talented photographers in the field any time soon.

Related: Photographing Australia’s underground town – Coober Pedy

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