Nature loss brings catastrophic risks – new report
Reports and Proceedings
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 23-Oct-2026 08:17 ET (23-Oct-2026 12:17 GMT/UTC)
A major new report published today warns that nature loss is not just an environmental issue, it is already disrupting our food system, threatening catastrophic impacts on our economy and society. The report has been produced by the UK’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and Anglia Ruskin University.
30 April 2026 / Kiel / Mindelo. Tomorrow, fourteen Master’s students in the West African Master’s programme ‘Climate Change and Marine Sciences’ will begin their two-week training and research voyage aboard the research vessel POLARSTERN. Travelling from Mindelo in Cabo Verde to Bremerhaven, Germany, they will carry out physical, biogeochemical and biological measurements together with ten experienced scientists. This is the fourth time that the Floating University is taking place under the leadership of GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. This initiative significantly contributes to the goals of the UN Decade of Ocean Science and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the WASCAL programme (West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use).
A year-long environmental DNA study of New York City’s East River involving single liter water samples revealed an unexpectedly detailed snapshot of life in and around the city, from weekly and seasonal shifts in fish species and abundance to urban wildlife activity and even New Yorkers’ diets.
The findings suggest that urban waterways anywhere could become continuous biosensors, tracking biodiversity, habitat restoration outcomes, and human impacts in real time.
Most of the microlitter present in the South Atlantic Ocean originates from the West African coast and is particularly concentrated in areas near the equator and off the coast of Brazil. This is demonstrated by a study conducted by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, which has successfully identified in detail the main geographical sources of these microparticles, their large-scale distribution, and the processes that drive their accumulation in the ocean.
28 April 2026 / Kiel. How much of the essential trace element iron remains available for marine life in the ocean depends critically on the diversity of organic molecules in seawater. This is shown by new research published in Nature Communications by an international team led by Dr Martha Gledhill from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. The study demonstrates for the first time that the formation of iron minerals and the distribution of dissolved and particulate iron in the South Pacific can be realistically predicted when the chemical complexity of organic matter is taken into account. These findings provide an important basis for understanding how marine life may respond to a warmer and more acidic future ocean.
A new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution discovers that the endangered Mediterranean fin whale is not completely isolated from Atlantic groups. Both Atlantic and Mediterranean populations have declined for the past 200,000 years. Considering more recent threats to the whales, this finding has important implications for conservation, particularly considering increasing anthropogenic pressures.
The first study to measure the full economic value of bottom trawling in Europe’s waters calculates that the destructive fishing practice imposes up to €16 billion annually in net costs to society. Pooling data from more than 4,900 European-flagged bottom trawlers — together spending more than 5.5 million hours fishing on average each year in the waters of the European Union, the UK, Norway and Iceland — the research demonstrates that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from disturbed seafloor sediments are a major contributor to these costs. The study concludes that the net costs of bottom trawling to society are 90 times greater than the €180 million in profits raked in by the fishing industry each year.