It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, June 05, 2026
Italian Bill On Nuclear Energy Progressing Through Parliament
Italy’s lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, has approved a bill presented by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government paving the way for the country’s return to the use of nuclear energy.
In October last year, Italy’s Council of Ministers, at a meeting chaired by Meloni, approved for final consideration a bill delegating responsibility for the reintroduction of nuclear energy in the country to the government. The bill empowers the government to comprehensively regulate the introduction of ‘sustainable’ nuclear power, within the framework of European decarbonisation policies by 2050 and energy security objectives. The mandate includes, among other things, the development of a National Programme for Sustainable Nuclear Power, the establishment of an independent Nuclear Safety Authority, the strengthening of scientific and industrial research, the development of new skills, and the implementation of information and awareness campaigns.
The bill has now been passed by the Chamber of Deputies with 155 votes in favour, 86 against and eight abstentions.
The bill now goes to the upper house, the Senate, where the government expects the legislation to get final approval before the summer recess at the end of July. The implementing legislative decrees must be adopted within 12 months of the law’s entry into force.
Italy operated a total of four nuclear power plants starting in the early 1960s but decided to phase out nuclear power in a referendum that followed the 1986 Chernobyl accident. It closed its last two operating plants, Caorso and Trino Vercellese, in 1990.
In late March 2011, following the Fukushima Daiichi accident, the Italian government approved a moratorium of at least one year on construction of nuclear power plants in the country, which had been looking to restart its long-abandoned nuclear programme. In a poll held in June of that year, 94% of voters rejected the construction of any new nuclear reactors in Italy.
Since then, public opinion has become more favourable towards nuclear energy in the country and in May 2023, the Italian Parliament approved a motion to urge the government to consider incorporating nuclear power into the country’s energy mix. In September of that year, the first meeting was held of the National Platform for Sustainable Nuclear Power, set up by the government to define a time frame for the possible resumption of nuclear energy in Italy and identify opportunities for the country’s industrial chain already operating in the sector.
Global mangrove forests rebound, offering hopeful sign for climate and coastal resilience
Mangroves are thriving in Ouvéa, a breathtaking crescent-shaped atoll in New Caledonia's Loyalty Islands in the South Pacific. A new study from Tulane University finds that mangrove forests worldwide are no longer in net decline and are now growing overall.
Mangrove forests, once considered one of the world’s most threatened coastal ecosystems, are showing signs of recovery worldwide, according to new research from Tulane University that finds decades of losses largely offset by regrowth and expansion.
The study, based on four decades of satellite data and published in the journal Science, finds that mangrove forests worldwide are no longer in net decline and are now growing overall. After decades of loss driven by deforestation and coastal development, mangroves are expanding in many regions, largely through natural regeneration and expansion into newly formed coastal areas.
The findings suggest a more hopeful trajectory for these ecosystems, which play a critical role in protecting coastlines, supporting fisheries and storing climate-warming carbon.
“After decades of loss, we’re finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves,” said Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar at Tulane University School of Science and Engineering and lead author of the study. “This highlights their strong resilience and their potential as a powerful nature-based solution for climate mitigation and coastal protection.”
Mangrove forests declined through much of the late 20th century, losing nearly 2,900 square kilometers between the 1980s and 2010. During the past 16 years, gains have outpaced losses. By 2023, mangrove areas had rebounded, resulting in only about a 1% net decline over the entire four-decade period – a much smaller loss than previously estimated.
“What we’re seeing now is a real shift. Mangroves are now showing a net increase globally, and the rate of degradation is slowing,” said Daniel Friess, Cochran Family Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane and director of The Mangrove Lab.
“While some mangroves are still being lost, this could make them a rare conservation success story and an important source of optimism for climate action,” said Friess, who also serves as director for the Center for Public Policy Research at the Murphy Institute.
The recovery is being driven by a combination of restoration efforts and natural processes. In many regions, mangroves are recolonizing abandoned aquaculture ponds and expanding into newly formed coastal mudflats, especially in river deltas where sediment creates ideal growing conditions.
Along the U.S. Gulf Coast, mangrove trends reflect a different but related process. In the Mississippi River Delta, mangrove area declined slightly from the 1980s through the late 1990s, then began to increase, with more pronounced expansion after 2012. Researchers attribute this growth primarily to warming temperatures, which allow mangroves typically found in tropical and subtropical climates – to expand into higher-latitude regions.
Louisiana has also seen an overall increase in mangroves over the past four decades, underscoring the broader regional shift.
Beyond increases in area, the research highlights another encouraging trend: many existing mangrove forests are becoming denser and healthier. Closed-canopy mangrove forests, which store more carbon and provide stronger coastal protection, have expanded globally over the past four decades. Rates of degradation have dropped significantly since the 1980s, reflecting the growing impact of conservation policies and restoration programs worldwide.
That growth suggests that mangroves may be capturing more carbon than previously recognized. At the same time, the study shows how vulnerable these gains can be. In Texas, for example, mangroves have expanded in recent decades but experienced a sharp decline in 2021 due to an extreme freeze event, highlighting how climate extremes can quickly reverse progress.
Still, researchers caution that the recovery is not complete. Newly established mangrove forests are often young and less capable of providing the full ecological benefits of mature systems. And deforestation remains a threat in some regions, particularly where coastal land is converted for agriculture or development.
The study underscores that continued protection is key to sustaining the rebound.
“The most immediate and effective way to protect mangroves is to stop deforestation,” Zhang said. “When mangroves are cleared, large amounts of long-stored carbon are released into the atmosphere. But when deforestation stops, mangroves can continue to accumulate carbon naturally over time, so there’s a major climate benefit in both avoiding emissions now and allowing future carbon storage.”
Protecting the natural processes that support mangrove growth is equally important, he said.
“Much of mangrove expansion happens on newly formed mudflats, which depend on a steady supply of river sediment,” Zhang said. “Maintaining that sediment flow is critical for creating the conditions mangroves need to establish and spread.”
The findings also suggest that conservation strategies should look beyond simply measuring total area.
“As countries invest in nature-based solutions to climate change, mangroves stand out as a rare example of an ecosystem where global trends are beginning to move in the right direction,” Zhang said.
Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades
Article Publication Date
4-Jun-2026
Mangroves are shown sprouting in Pulau Ubin, Singapore. A new study from Tulane University finds that mangrove forests worldwide are no longer in net decline and are now growing overall after decades of loss driven by deforestation and coastal development.
Credit
Daniel Friess/Tulane University
Mangroves and seedlings are seen thriving in the Zhangjiang River Estuary in Fujian Province, China. A new study from Tulane University finds that mangrove forests worldwide are no longer in net decline and are now growing overall after decades of loss driven by deforestation and coastal development.
Aerial view of mangroves and seedlings in the Zhangjiang River Estuary in Fujian Province, China. A new study from Tulane University finds that mangrove forests worldwide are no longer in net decline and are now growing overall after decades of loss driven by deforestation and coastal development.
Credit
Zhen Zhang/Tulane University
Wildfire emissions have reversed more than a decade of steady reductions in ozone
Summary author: Abigail Eisenstadt
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
After more than a decade of steady decreases, surface ozone (O3) trends in North America reversed in 2015 despite policy mitigation efforts, report Weizhi Deng and colleagues. Their research links this reversal to O3 emissions from wildfires and additionally documents a related rise in premature mortality. “Despite regulated reductions in anthropogenic emissions of O3 precursors, observation stations indicate that policy-relevant surface O3 levels have plateaued,” the authors write, tying this phenomenon to an increase in wildfire emissions. They describe the relationship between wildfires and surface O3 trends more closely by using deep learning models to evaluate existing yet sparse EPA, satellite, and meteorological measurements, generating a dataset of daily surface O3 measurements at a 1-kilometer resolution in North America from 2003 to 2024. Doing so revealed that O3 trends flipped from a decrease of 0.65 parts per billion (ppb) per year before 2015 to an increase of 0.13 ppb per year after 2015. Further analyses determined this post-2015 rate would have stayed in decline (−0.25 ppb per year) if not for wildfire emissions. The authors then examined correlations between O3 trends and premature deaths, attributing emissions to an additional 318 deaths per year since 2013. Essentially, after 2013, the mortality rate attributable to wildfire-sourced O3 rose by 46%. Finally, Deng et al. examined O3 emissions from 2022 to 2024, a period marked by extreme fires and smoke in Canada. Results showed wildfire emissions alone exposed 43 million people to unhealthy levels of air pollution, in excess of the United States’ O3 air quality standard of 70 ppb. The authors suggest that these emissions prevented the United States from tightening its O3 air quality standard by 4 ppb. They elaborate: “If the O3 standard were lowered to 65 ppb, 60% of the population (202 million people) would fall into nonattainment, and under a 60-ppb standard, the fraction would increase to 87% (294 million people). These findings demonstrate the challenge in adopting a more stringent O3 standard as growing wildfires contribute to high O3 episodes.”
A new University of Iowa-led study has determined that wildfires since 2015 have led to rises in surface ozone pollution across much of the continental United States, creating unhealthy air and contributing to hundreds additional premature deaths annually. The researchers warn surface ozone pollution could continue to worsen as wildfires become more prevalent.
Ozone pollution has worsened in much of the continental United States over the past decade, fueled by wildfires and the long-distance transport of unhealthy air, according to a new study led by University of Iowa researchers and published in the journal Science.
Exposure to surface ozone pollution stemming from wildfires has contributed to more than 300 additional premature deaths each year in the U.S. since 2013, the researchers conclude, with significant spikes in premature deaths in 2020, 2021, and 2023.
Study authors calculated the concentration of surface ozone, also known as smog, on a kilometer-by-kilometer (0.6 miles) grid for the continental U.S between 2003 and 2024. The researchers report that air quality due to ozone pollutants worsened from 2015 to 2024 across much of the Midwest and large swaths of the Western U.S.
The researchers also found that the increase in wildfire-driven ozone pollution over the past decade has undercut air-quality improvements achieved before 2015, largely through reductions in automobile emissions, which are a main contributor to surface ozone.
The study comes as wildfire activity in the U.S. has reached historic levels this spring, with blazes charring millions of acres from California to Georgia.
Surface ozone is caused by a chemical reaction involving carbon monoxide, an odorless, colorless gas emitted when wildfires don’t fully combust organic matter, such as trees. Surface ozone can form near fires when nitrogen oxide combines with carbon monoxide and sunlight.
But smog also can form far away from wildfires when carbon monoxide rises into Earth’s upper atmosphere and travels long distances before falling to the surface and undergoing chemical reactions involving sunlight and sources such as tailpipe emissions.
“The bottom line is the air is getting worse in these regions, and the reason is pollutants are being transported long distances from wildfires in the western U.S. and Canada,” says Jun Wang, Lichtenberg Family Chair in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering and the study’s corresponding author. “We show in high spatial resolution how a large part of the continental U.S. has been affected by worsened air quality through surface ozone pollution.”
Surface ozone levels in the U.S. have increased by 0.13 parts per billion (ppb) annually between 2015 and 2024, the researchers calculated. That reverses annual decreases in surface ozone levels since 2003, due in part to tightened federal regulations around tailpipe emissions. The study authors report that surface ozone levels would have continued to decrease during the study period “if fire impacts were removed, suggesting that fires are the major driver of the national trend reversal.”
"While U.S. air quality regulations have reduced surface ozone, a pollutant linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, this progress has reversed since around 2015,” says Weizhi Deng, a graduate research assistant in Wang’s group who led the modeling linking wildfires and surface ozone pollution and is the study’s first author. “Wildfire smoke has become a major driver of increasing ozone pollution, especially in the western and midwestern United States."
The Canadian wildfires in 2023 were especially noteworthy for their effects on surface ozone pollution. During that fire season alone, surface ozone levels exceeded federal air quality standards for 148 million Americans — 44% of the continental U.S. population, the authors write. In the Midwest, surface ozone exceeded safe levels for more than one week, and the pollution extended as far as New York, Texas, and Georgia.
The pollutants had discernible effects on human health: The researchers calculated 7,974 smog-induced premature deaths in the U.S. in 2023.
“These results underscore the escalating public health burden of wildfire-driven ozone pollution,” the study authors write.
While the Environmental Protection Agency sets the national standard for surface ozone, it falls largely to states and cities to address unhealthy air in their communities. The problem with that, Wang notes, is those entities have little control over foul air that originates from wildfires far away.
“When air quality is poor — even when the pollution is from elsewhere — the responsibility is on the local or state authority to collect the evidence and then file an ‘exceptional event claim’ to the EPA,” says Wang, who is associate director of the Iowa Technology Institute. “That could be fine, but those exceptional events are not becoming exceptional anymore.”
The researchers derived surface ozone concentrations and premature deaths estimates from satellite data and approximately 1,000 ground-based stations that monitor air quality. The data from surface stations can be extensive, but it does not provide complete spatial coverage and can be lacking in rural areas. So, the researchers employed “deep learning,” which enables computer systems to cluster data and produce accurate predictions, to calculate the surface ozone concentrations. They calculated premature deaths through a formula that incorporated average lifespan, ozone exposure, and population density.
The results in part mirror a 2023 study, led by Wang and published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health, that tabulated wildfires’ effect on air quality and human health in the continental U.S. through the rise in black carbon, a fine-particle air pollutant that has been linked to respiratory and heart disease.
“While there are regional differences, in general the impact of surface ozone is always bigger than black carbon,” Wang says.
The study, “Fires reverse progress toward ozone air quality standards in the USA,” was published online June 4.
The study’s co-corresponding author is Meng Zhou, from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Other authors are Xi Chen, Huanxin Zhang and Xiaodong Wu from Iowa; Jason Cohen, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey; Jing Wei, from the University of Maryland- College Park; Arlindo da Silva, from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Guy Brasseur, from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Germany; Claire Granier, from the Université de Toulouse, in France and the University of Colorado-Boulder and the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory; and Laurence Rouil, from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, in Bonn, Germany.
Water-logged land areas such as marshes, bogs and fens are the world’s largest natural source of methane. Even the smallest of wetlands emit this powerful greenhouse gas. In a new study from The University of Texas at Austin, researchers have identified tens of millions of easily overlooked small wetlands across the globe and found that they have a substantial collective impact, accounting for 24% of the world’s total non-forested wetland emissions of methane.
Using high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning, researchers identified roughly 160 million small wetlands that have been difficult to detect and remain underrepresented in global methane assessments due to their relatively small size.
“Small wetlands are easy to overlook on a map, but they are not small in the methane budget,” said the study’s lead author Fa Li, an assistant professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences.
The small wetlands in this study range in size from as small as an Olympic swimming pool to about 250 acres — almost as large as Austin’s Zilker Park. Although these areas may seem large to a human, they make up only a tiny fraction of a coarse-resolution satellite pixel, making them difficult to capture in traditional wetland maps used for global methane modeling. This has allowed small wetlands to fly under the radar in global assessments for decades. Larger wetlands are typically detected at this scale through coarse resolution satellite data, which uses passive microwave sensors — a method scientists have used for years. These sensors can penetrate dense tree canopies, providing consistent coverage of wetlands regardless of visibility. However, they can miss small wetlands.
In this study, researchers turned to a different data source to find the missing wetlands: years of high-resolution satellite images that can identify smaller wetlands ranging in size from 1,000 square meters (about a quarter of an acre) to one square kilometer. Researchers measured how these small wetlands shrunk or expanded from 2003 to 2022, then combined that data with field-based methane measurements and used machine learning to calculate their emissions. Researchers found that small wetland methane emissions have increased by 9.9% over this time frame.
And the newly identified wetlands are almost certainly an undercount, Li noted. There are other wetlands out there that are even smaller in size, or that are in a forested location, like swamps. Unlike the microwave sensors, the high-resolution satellite data used cannot pick up the presence of a wetland beneath dense tree canopies.
The reason why wetlands produce so much methane is due to microbes. The soils in wetlands, being saturated with water, block the transfer of oxygen from the air into the ground. Particular microbes that thrive in these oxygen-poor environments produce a significant amount of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period after it is released. This microbially produced gas is what makes wetlands the largest natural source of methane worldwide.
About two-thirds of the world’s methane emissions come from a variety of anthropogenic sources, such as fossil fuels, commercial livestock like cows, human waste management, and rice farming. While these sources are ostensibly more directly controllable, it is still important to know how natural sources contribute to total methane emissions, Li said.
“Natural sources respond strongly to climate dynamics, in turn influencing the climate system. For example, as the planet warms, these emissions may increase, further amplifying warming and partially offsetting mitigation efforts,” Li said. “The concerning reality is that atmospheric methane concentrations have increased substantially in recent decades, yet there is still no clear consensus on the dominant causes of this long-term increase.”
Li is also a co-author on a recently-published policy forum in Science, which makes the case that a global methane observation system is needed to track how emissions, from natural sources in particular, impact the climate.
Li is part of the team working on a global flux-tower network called FLUXNET-CH4 that provides frequent direct measurements of methane emissions across an array of ecosystems. Still, he notes that flux towers alone will not completely solve this knowledge gap. To get a holistic picture of methane dynamics across the globe, researchers will need to integrate satellite observations, aircraft measurements, atmospheric concentration towers, and direct flux measurements from sites around the world, he said.
The underappreciated importance of small wetlands in global methane emissions
Flocks of birds soar over wetlands at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA
The top map shows the distribution of small wetlands (less than 1 square kilometer) in non-forested regions, averaged from 2003-2022. The darker the blue, the more of the land area these wetlands take up. The pie-chart inset shows the wetland area contribution by wetland size. The bottom map shows where methane emissions from small wetlands are highest over this 20-year period.
