Climate & Environment

Mortenson Center innovations delivering clean water to more than 16 million worldwide

Megan Maneval — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:36:04 +0000

Mortenson Center innovations delivering clean water to more than 16 million worldwide Megan Maneval Mon, 06/23/2025 - 12:36

College of Engineering and Applied Science

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ's Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience is building a new model for global water access, one that is grounded in a deep understanding of why so many past efforts have fallen short.

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Farm-diversification research wins top international prize

Megan Maneval — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 19:11:14 +0000

Farm-diversification research wins top international prize Megan Maneval Wed, 06/18/2025 - 13:11

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Zia Mehrabi is one of three researchers named international champions of the Frontiers Planet Prize for research that finds environmental and social benefits of agricultural diversification.

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Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 05:47:07 +0000

Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years Daniel William… Tue, 06/17/2025 - 23:47

Daniel Strain

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ researchers follow a storm brewing in south central Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ý�Ļ��Ʒ)

Gray clouds swirl above a dusty highway in eastern Colorado between the towns of Akron and Atwood—what’s left of a thunderstorm that rolled through this stretch of prairie and rangeland just minutes before.

Wind whistles through patches of stubbly grass nearby. Then a hiss and a pop break the silence. A group of researchers release a blast of compressed air to fling a flying drone from a metal scaffold, or “catapult,” sitting on top of a white SUV. The uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) measures more than 6 feet from wingtip to wingtip. It catches the wind, and its rear propeller buzzes to life, lifting the plane dozens of feet into the air in a matter of seconds.

Céu Gómez-Faulk makes adjustments to the RAAVEN drone. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ý�Ļ��Ʒ)

The IRISS team rides out an oncoming storm near Wichita, Kansas. (Patrick Campbell/��ý�Ļ��Ʒ)

The chase is on.

Aerospace engineering sciences Professor Brian Argrow and his team at the University of Colorado Boulder have joined a research project called the In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains, or ICECHIP. For six weeks this summer, scientists from 15 U.S. research institutions and three overseas are criss-crossing the country from Colorado east to Iowa and from Texas to North Dakota.

They’re searching for summer thunderstorms.

The group is exploring the conditions that give rise to hail in this part of the country—peaking in the summer and causing billions of dollars of damage every year. In the United States, hail is most common in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and nearby regions, which are sometimes dubbed “hail alley.” Today, ice the size of grapes and even bigger litter the side of Colorado’s State Highway 63.

The campaign is led by Rebecca Adams-Selin at the company Atmospheric and Environmental Research and is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It’s the largest effort to study hail in the United States in 40 years.

The researchers hope to understand not just how ice forms miles above the ground, but also how homeowners and builders can protect their properties from dangerous weather. They’ll do that by using radar to peer inside hailstorms. They’ll collect and freeze hailstones, and they’ll crush hail in vice-like devices to see how strong it is. Argrow’s team is usings its drone to map the swaths of hail that storms leave behind them in their wake.

“It is about saving lives and saving property,” said Argrow, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and director of the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) research center at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ. “We’re working with meteorologists and atmospheric scientists trying to increase warning times to give people a chance to get to safety and work with engineers and insurance companies to build better infrastructure to withstand these onslaughts.”

His team pilots the plane, known as the RAAVEN, short for Robust Autonomous Airborne Vehicle - Endurant and Nimble, north toward the rear flank of the thunderstorm. Then, they jump into two SUVs and follow the drone as it flies as low as 120 feet above them. A camera in the plane’s belly captures the ice trailing behind the storm. From that vantage point, the landscape, normally brown dotted with green, now also has pearly white patches for hundreds of yards in either direction.

For Céu Gómez-Faulk, who’s piloting the drone today, the sight is a testament to thunderstorms.

“It’s awe-inspiring in a very serious sort of way,” said Gómez-Faulk, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences.

Credit: College of Engineering and Applied Science

Dark skies

Five days earlier, Argrow and his team from ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ join the ICECHIP armada at a Phillips 66 gas station in Greensburg, Kansas. The crew includes three graduate students, two IRISS employees and Eric Frew, professor of aerospace engineering sciences. They’re marking the first day of the project’s field season, or what the researchers call Intensive Observation Period 1 (IOP 1).

Judging by the conditions, the team should have plenty to study today. Weathervanes sitting on top of vans whip in circles as gusts blow a misty rain through Greensburg, a town in south central Kansas that is home to just over 700 people.

What makes hail

When conditions are right in states like Kansas and Colorado, winds blowing over the prairie can start to lift upward, forming a powerful column of rising air. These updrafts can push clouds from the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, up to the colder stratosphere, which begins miles above Earth’s surface.

Within those towering, cauliflower-like clouds, tiny drops of water may freeze, then bounce around in the air—a sort of atmospheric game of Plinko.

That’s how hail is born.

“It starts with what we call a hail embryo, or ice,” said Katja Friedrich, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ. “It goes through the cloud, and it accumulates supercooled liquid, which is liquid that is below freezing. The embryos accumulate more and more until they fall.”

But there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about what happens inside the clouds.

To help find out, Friedrich is participating in the ICECHIP campaign through an effort that’s separate from Argrow’s team and its drone. Over the summer, two researchers in her lab, Jack Whiting and Brady Herron, are traveling with the armada in a red pickup truck. They’re using a device called a microwave radiometer to collect measurements of the air that rushes into hailstorms from outside—exploring how environmental conditions can feed a storm to keep it churning, or even cause it to die off.

“It’s my dream to be doing this, to be in the field studying severe weather,” said Whiting, who graduated from ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences in spring 2025. “There’s a good chance that these events are going to become more frequent in the future because of climate change, so it’s really important to understand these dangerous storms.”

“This is relatively typical this time of the year, mid-May for the Great Plains. That’s when the storms really turn up and pass through,” Argrow said. “If you live in this area, you know what this means.”

In Greensburg, they definitely do.

In 2007, a tornado ripped through the heart of this community, damaging or destroying more than 1,400 homes and buildings and killing 10 people. Just hours after the ICECHIP crew departed on May 18 this spring, another tornado touched down south of Greensburg. It traveled 11 miles before dying out, and no injuries were reported.

Argrow is no stranger to the danger storms bring. He grew up in Stroud, Oklahoma, in the heart of Tornado Alley and remembers sheltering in his family’s storm cellar during severe weather warnings.

The engineer and his colleagues previously worked on a project, led by long-time collaborator. Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, called Targeted Observation by Radar and UAS of Supercells (TORUS). Over two seasons, the group flew RAAVEN aircraft into supercell thunderstorms, the phenomena that give rise to dangerous tornadoes.

But while storm-chasers may pay a lot of attention to those kinds of weather events, hail causes more damage than tornadoes every year, said Ian Giammanco. He’s the lead research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a non-profit organization supported by property insurance and reinsurance companies.

Since 2012, hail has caused an estimated $280 billion worth of damage in the United States, according to IBHS estimates. The largest piece of hail ever discovered was about 8 inches wide, the size of a large cantaloupe.

“Our role is to understand how we can design better building materials to withstand hail,” said Giammanco, whose team is joining the ICECHIP expedition on the road. “Whether it’s a lot of small hail, or these really big hailstones, we want to understand what that risk looks like.”

Ellington Smith, a graduate student on Argrow’s team, was an undergrad at Iowa State University in spring 2023 when hailstorms erupted around the state, flattening corn fields.

“Knowing what hail can do to farmland, its’ really important to be able to quantify the damage—figuring out why these hailstorms happen and how to better predict them,” Smith said.

Intrepid aircraft

Adams-Selin and the ICECHIP team are taking what she calls a “holistic” approach to studying those kinds of dangers.

The study armada is something to behold: At the start of the field season, the ICECHIP campaign included around 100 researchers traveling in more than 20 vehicles—including pickup trucks with mesh canopies overhead to protect them from hail damage and two Doppler on Wheels trucks. These massive vehicles carry portable, swiveling radar dishes that can peer into the heart of hailstorms.

“ICECHIP is 100% NSF funded,” Adams-Selin said. “If you want to know who is responsible for improved hail forecasts, better understanding of hail science and any of these technological advances that we are using, like mobile radar, that is all NSF funding.”

The IRISS team depends on a vehicle that is a little smaller—the RAAVEN.

It’s a tough little drone. The aircraft is based off a kit designed by the company Ritewing RC. This same design inspired a storm-chasing drone that appeared in the 2024 summer blockbuster Twisters. The body of the RAAVEN is made from the same kind of foam that’s in your car bumper. It also carries sensors for measuring wind speeds and air pressure, temperature and humidity.

If the RAAVEN is flying with the wind, it can hit speeds of 75 miles per hour or more, and the aircraft can fly for up to two hours uninterrupted.

“Radar can only tell you so much,” said Frew, who joins Argrow on the ICECHIP campaign. “To really further our understanding of the atmosphere, you have to be in it.”

For ICECHIP, the team also added a 360-degree camera that drops out of the belly of the RAAVEN after it launches.

The IRISS team’s key role on the ICECHIP campaign is to measure the swaths of hail that storms leave in their wake.

A storm builds near Greensburg, Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ý�Ļ��Ʒ)

The team doesn’t fly the RAAVEN directly into storms for ICECHIP. Instead, it stays safely behind the bad weather, soaring in a zig-zag pattern in the wake of hailstorms as they billow across the landscape. Using the drone’s camera in real-time, the researchers view the area below that’s covered in ice. They can then measure the width of these hail swaths, capturing how big a storm’s path of destruction can grow. Argrow likens it to “a snail that leaves a trail.”

Federal Aviation Administration rules require Argrow’s team to stay in sight of the RAAVEN at all times. To do that, the researchers get in their SUVs.

Gómez-Faulk explained that the RAAVEN is semi-autonomous. Pilots like him can control where the aircraft goes, but it’s also programed to follow a sort of digital marker the team refers to as a “carrot.”

“There’s a carrot guide point that we set off some distance from the car, usually in front of the car,” he said. “The aircraft is going to chase that guide point as we drive.”

Heart pounding

Back in Greensburg, Frew emphasizes that safety is the number one priority of the IRISS team. But he acknowledges that central Kansas at the height of storm season may be an odd place to find an aerospace engineer.

Before Frew started working on projects like TORUS and ICECHIP, he didn’t know a lot about weather. His time on these studies, however, has taught him to respect the power of storms—and what engineers can accomplish when they bring their work out of the lab and into the real, windy world.

“The first time I did it, my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to expect,” Frew said. “In order to understand this environment, someone has to go into it and take the measurements, and that’s what we’re here for.”

IRISS snapshots from the road

Tracking a storm near Wichita Falls, Texas

Taking a break in Tucumcari, New Mexico

Seeing hail in northeast Colorado

Posing for a photo in eastern New Mexico

Finding hail near Morton, Texas

For six weeks this summer, scientists from across the country, including researchers at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ, are criss-crossing the Great Plains to investigate how hailstorms form—and how homeowners and builders can protect their properties.

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CUriosity: Are sharks really as scary as their reputation?

Daniel William Strain — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 17:23:21 +0000

CUriosity: Are sharks really as scary as their reputation? Daniel William… Tue, 06/17/2025 - 11:23

Rachel Sauer

In CUriosity, experts across the ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Andrew Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, answers: “Are sharks really as scary as their reputation?”

Credit: Adobe Stock

A 14-foot male white shark, the largest ever tagged, is currently making its way north up the Atlantic coast—last week pinging 22 miles off Cape Hatteras—just in time for the 50th anniversary of “Jaws” Friday.

We still need a bigger boat: Read more about the 50th anniversary of "Jaws"

Yes, it’s been 50 years since moviegoers were scared out of the water by a film that presented sharks as terrifying monsters of the deep. Now, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction in sharks’ scary reputation.

Andrew Martin, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has studied sharks as a PhD student at the University of Hawaii and throughout his career, which has included working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He addressed some common conceptions—or misconceptions—about sharks to help illuminate whether they’re as scary as they seem.

Fact or fiction: “Jaws” was good for sharks.

Fiction.

“Jaws” was a terrible thing for sharks and a terrible thing for biology. I think it scared people away from the ocean, which was a bummer, and I know Peter Benchley, author of the novel “Jaws,” has come around and realized his mistake. We were easy prey for him, in a way, because we were already a little bit scared of the ocean. I mean, what could be more terrifying? All you want to do is have fun at the beach.

Previously in CUriosity

CUriosity: A 50-year-old Soviet spacecraft will soon crash to Earth. Why, and where will it land?

Or read more CUriosity stories here

However, encounters between humans and great whites are usually with surfers, who look like seals from below. It’s really rare for a shark to go after someone.

Fact or fiction: All sharks will attack humans.

Fiction.

That’s definitely not true. There are hundreds of species of sharks, and I can count the number of species that have a record of attacking humans on one hand.

Fact or fiction: Sharks are apex predators.

Depends.

Great white sharks are pretty much an apex predator because they will feed on things that are also very high in the food chain. I don’t know how useful the term “apex” is, though, because it implies there’s only one thing at the very top, and if that’s the case then it’s humans because we literally eat everything. In general, sharks are high on the food chain but in some cases not super high. In some food chains they’re not even as high as tuna.

Fact or fiction: Sharks can detect a single drop of blood in the water

Depends.

Most things living in water have a very good sensory capacity for molecules. Still, I’ve been on shark boats where they chum—and it’s not a little bit of chum. It’s a lot of gory stuff they’re dumping in the water—and it still took a lot of time for sharks to come.

Fact or fiction: If sharks stop moving, they die.

Fiction.

Andrew Martin

There are a bunch of species that can sit on the ocean bottom. It’s also true that they do need to pass water over their gills, but they don’t have to move all the time. Some of them do have a pretty high activity level, and they’re moving a lot, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to die if they stop. They’re really well designed to move through the water, so it doesn’t cost them much energy. Because they’re probably always hungry, they seem to be in motion all the time, and that’s the life of almost everything on this planet.

Fact or fiction: Sharks haven’t changed since prehistoric times.

Depends.

We don’t have a good fossil record for their bodies, since they have cartilage instead of bones, but their teeth fossilize really well, and we have really good evidence that a lot of shark teeth haven’t changed much over time. However, we do know—mostly from phylogenetic reconstructions—that some sharks have evolved and changed over time. In the group of sharks that great whites are in, named the Lamniformes, there are several divergent groups of species that have evolved the ability to elevate their temperature well above the temperature of their environment. This ability, which involves changes in many different aspects of their biology, has evolved more than once.

A good example of this is thresher sharks that have a really long tail, and they can go through schools of fish, whip that tail around and knock out fish. Their body and brain temperatures are warmer than the water, so they can generate a lot of power—power is proportional to temperature—and keep their nervous system and brain warmer, so they can process information faster. The result is that they are better, more efficient and perhaps scarier predators if you are a small fish.

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the movie "Jaws," which made generations of audiences afraid to go in the water again. It also created a lot of misconceptions about sharks, says ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ biologist Andrew Martin.

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Groundwater levels in the US Southwest more sensitive to climate shifts than in the Pacific Northwest

Megan Maneval — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:45:10 +0000

Groundwater levels in the US Southwest more sensitive to climate shifts than in the Pacific Northwest Megan Maneval Mon, 06/16/2025 - 11:45

CIRES

Scientists used fossil groundwater and model simulations to identify regional differences in aquifer response during the Last Glacial Termination, a period of warming, ice sheet loss and major environmental change that occurred between 20,000 and 11,000 years ago.

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Rainy spring may be bad news for fire season. Here’s what you can do about it

Yvaine Ye — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:35:30 +0000

Rainy spring may be bad news for fire season. Here’s what you can do about it Yvaine Ye Mon, 06/16/2025 - 09:35

Yvaine Ye

This May, Denver saw more than 4 inches a rain, doubling the city’s historic average and outpacing famously rainy places like Seattle.

While the additional moisture has painted the Front Range a lush green, to grassland ecologist Katharine Suding, it’s concerning.

“Wet springs mean more plant growth,” said Suding, distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of Arctic and Alphine Research. “That growth would turn into fuel later in the season.”

Without interventions to reduce the amount of dry vegetation in the fall and winter, the region could face intense and fast-spreading wildfire if one breaks out.

Katharine Suding. (Credit: Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado)

To Suding, this spring felt all too familiar. In 2021, a wet spring set the stage for the Marshall Fire later in December. The fast-moving fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder and its surrounding suburbs like Louisville and Superior.

While forest fires tend to receive more attention, grassland fires are becoming a bigger problem nationwide. Research has suggested that in the United States, grassland and shrubland fires are burning more land and destroying more homes than forest fires.

“We should think about grasslands far differently than forests,” said Suding, standing in front of a grassland in Superior that the Marshall Fire swept through. “Knowing how to manage forests for fires does not necessarily mean that we can take that knowledge and apply it to the grassland system at all.”

As out-of-control wildfires rage in places like the Canadian prairies, Suding spoke to ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ Today about these fast-moving grassland fires and potential ways to manage them.

What makes grassland fires so dangerous?

People might think forests are riskier, because there’s more biomass to burn. And that’s absolutely the case. But in grasslands, fires can burn really fast under hot, windy conditions. They can also spread very quickly and even jump barriers we once thought would stop them, like paved roads.

For example, the Marshall Fire crossed the U.S. Interstate 36. Some of the intense, fast-moving fire characteristics that we thought were mostly a forest fire problem are now occurring in grassland fires as well.

For states like Colorado with elevated grassland fire risks, when does the fire season begin?

In grasslands, fires typically start when the green vegetation turns brown at the end of their growing season. That’s usually August, with peak fire danger in October and November. But as the climate warms, we’re now extending the fire season into winter. The Marshall Fire happened in December. Fires are even popping up in early spring, before new green growth has a chance to return.

Where else are grassland wildfires becoming a growing concern?

Many places are starting to realize they face grassland fire risks, with Colorado seeing some of the earliest impacts. But it’s happening in California, Texas, Oklahoma, and throughout the Southwest as well.

How is climate change shifting the fire patterns?

Colorado and many other grasslands regions are getting hotter and drier. That means plants may stop growing, or senesce, earlier when it’s too dry, leaving behind dry, dead material that sits on the landscape for longer. That’s what happened the year of the Marshall fire, and it’s happening more and more often.

We are also seeing increasing wind speed in the fall and winter in areas like Colorado and California. The combination of high wind and dry vegetation is the riskiest situation for grasslands.

What can be done to reduce fire risks in grasslands?

It isn't quite clear what exactly we can do to make these grasslands less risky for the people that live right next to them, because we’re just starting to understand these fires.

At ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ, we’re working with a group of local partners, including Boulder County, the city authorities of Boulder, Superior and Louisville, to try out some techniques. For example, we have tested grazing, which uses cattle or goats to eat down tall grasses. We’re also testing out mowing, as well as prescribed burning to reduce fuel in a controlled way.

Unlike forests, where you might thin trees and not have to return for years, grass regrows quickly. So, all of these interventions have to happen multiple times in a summer.

Some preliminary research suggests a combination of grazing and prescribed burning may work better than either alone, but there’s still a lot to learn. With funding from the Joint Fire Science Program, we are just on the cusp of trying to figure out how we can manage fires without removing all the grasses and turn the area into just a dust bowl.

For those living near fire-prone grasslands, is there something they can do to make their home more resilient?

One thing to do is avoid having tall, dead plants, as well as plants that catch on fire quickly, around their homes. The City of Boulder is encouraging people to remove junipers, highly flammable shrubs, from their yards. Planting native wildflower plants instead would be helpful, because they tend to be less flammable. Also, reducing vegetation density around homes can reduce risk.

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and university style guidelines.

Ecologist Katharine Suding shares insights on the increasing risks of grassland fire across the country.

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Large plumes of smoke from the Marshall Fire were visible over Superior, CO. (Credit: Tristantech/Wikimedia)

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Large plumes of smoke from the Marshall Fire were visible over Superior, CO. (Credit: Tristantech/Wikimedia)

Supernovae may have kicked off abrupt climate shifts in the past, and they could again

Megan Maneval — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:46:33 +0000

Supernovae may have kicked off abrupt climate shifts in the past, and they could again Megan Maneval Fri, 06/13/2025 - 08:46

INSTAAR

Robert Brakenridge has spent decades trying to understand how distant exploding stars may have affected Earth's atmosphere in the past. A new analysis indicates the need for continued research in the field.

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'Fall back in love with nature': A climate forum's call to lead with heart

Megan Maneval — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:24:43 +0000

'Fall back in love with nature': A climate forum's call to lead with heart Megan Maneval Tue, 06/10/2025 - 07:24

Yvaine Ye

Left to right: Graduate student Naia Zulueta, moderator and journalist Lakshmi Singh, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, graduate student John Ecklu and Professor Amanda Carrico. Photos by Casey Cass/��ý�Ļ��Ʒ.

When asked what she would do if every government around the world became aligned on climate action, with unlimited resources for one year, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, longtime advocate for the rights of the Arctic’s Inuit peoples and Indigenous groups worldwide, didn’t hesitate.

“I would continue doing what I’ve been doing for 30 years but in much more of a full force,” said Watt-Cloutier. “I would build a team and get the younger generation mobilized in bigger ways than we have. They're the ones who have given me a lot of inspiration, and they're fighting for their future.”

Watt-Cloutier delivered a powerful plenary keynote Thursday in Boulder. She was also a featured speaker at the inaugural Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit held at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ in 2022.

The day’s conversation centered on climate change’s disproportionate burden on women, youth, Indigenous people and communities who are historically unseen—and the need to ensure solutions focus on those most affected. NPR Newscaster Lakshmi Singh moderated the discussions.

Watt-Cloutier said she believes that educating people about the human impacts of climate change can bring the world together, even in times of political uncertainty and conflict.

“We're all in this together as a common humanity,” Watt-Cloutier said.

Joined by three other members of the ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ community, including environmental studies professor Amanda Carrico, environmental human rights graduate student Naia Zulueta and environmental engineering graduate student John Ecklu, Watt-Cloutier and the group outlined three ideas to guide the work toward climate solutions.

“Do things that bring you back to nature, and you will start to protect what you love.”

Turn research data into tools for change

Around the world, about 3.6 billion people are living in areas highly susceptible to climate change. Despite contributing minimally to global emissions, those in low-income and marginalized communities bear most of the impact.

A persistent problem is the lack of data for these communities. Zulueta noted that over a third of countries worldwide still lack routine indoor air quality monitoring.

“No data means no visibility, and no visibility means no accountability,” she said.

At the same time, the panelists emphasized that the world has enough data to understand the scale of the climate crisis and to mobilize action. An important step is making that information accessible and actionable.

Ecklu at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience has been working on water well monitoring in Kenya. Prolonged droughts have forced local people to rely heavily on deep water wells called boreholes. But frequent breakdowns in Kenya’s boreholes are severely threatening water access for the communities.

To address the issue, Ecklu and team installed sensors that can detect signs of borehole failure and alert local engineers before wells completely collapse.

“We need to be more intentional about how the data we are collecting can better serve local communities,” he said. “Accessible data is helping communities become more resilient.”

Put a human face to the issues

But statistics alone are not enough. More than once during the event, the group returned to the idea that reframing climate change as a human rights issue is essential.

“We can no longer just think our way through these issues of climate change,” Watt-Cloutier said. “We have to feel our way through, and we've got to connect as a common humanity.”

Sheila Watt-Cloutier gives keynote remarks at the 2025 Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit plenary event in Boulder.

She described how melting Arctic sea ice isn’t just an environmental loss. It’s the disappearance of an entire way of life for Indigenous communities. “The ice is our life force. It’s our highway that brings us out to the supermarkets. It’s our organic farms, which bring us highly nutritious food we need.”

For Watt-Cloutier, one solution is leadership rooted not in anger and force but in empathy and connection.

“We can never underestimate the impact when we take a big action toward something that we feel is so important to us. Don’t let the politics of things stop us,” she added.

She will be speaking more about conscious leadership in her upcoming podcast, A Radical Act of Hope.

Embrace nature-based solutions

Finally, speakers urged a shift away from carbon-heavy, industrial responses to climate change to solutions from nature.

Ecklu highlighted a Colorado-based example along the Yampa River, where restoring wetlands is helping to filter water runoff from nearby farms before it reaches the river. Nature-based solutions like this improve water quality while supporting biodiversity and ecological health.

Watt-Cloutier echoed the importance of reconnecting with nature, which holds the wisdom needed to sustain it.

“In the Arctic, we just absolutely love our land, and Indigenous peoples around the world are the same. We love nature because of what it gives us, and the love allows us to be stronger in our fight to defend our way of life,” she said.

She urged city dwellers to rediscover that bond.

“Do things that bring you back to nature, and you will start to protect what you love.”

At a regional plenary of the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit, co-sponsored by ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ, speakers called for action that centers human stories, local wisdom and nature-based solutions to break the cycle of environmental injustice.

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First-ever airborne toxin detected in Western Hemisphere

Megan Maneval — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 18:35:06 +0000

First-ever airborne toxin detected in Western Hemisphere Megan Maneval Mon, 06/09/2025 - 12:35

CIRES

A field campaign on an Oklahoma feedlot that aimed to measure aerosols in the atmosphere yielded surprising results.

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Honeybees are dying in record numbers. This scientist is racing to save them

Yvaine Ye — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 15:35:34 +0000

Honeybees are dying in record numbers. This scientist is racing to save them Yvaine Ye Fri, 06/06/2025 - 09:35

Yvaine Ye

The first sign something was wrong came from the silent beehives.

When Samuel Ramsey visited his family in Maryland this March, he and his father, an avid beekeeper, approached the 10 bee boxes in his grandmother's yard. They were expecting to hear the familiar hum of insects awakening from their winter rest. They pictured the smell of warm, sweet beeswax.

Instead, the Ramseys found thousands of lifeless bees piling up at the bottom of the hives.

As an entomologist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the BioFrontiers Institute, Ramsey studies honeybees and why they haven’t been doing so well lately.

Samual Ramsey co-designed an observation beehive so the team can monitor how the honeybees without opening the box. (Credit: Yvaine Ye)

“When you open the top of the box, and there's a silence of the bees that you're greeted with, it’s a very upsetting scene for beekeepers and bee researchers to see,” said Ramsey.

Ramsey is not alone. Across the United States, beekeepers are reporting the same grim discovery as unprecedented honeybee losses sweep through the nation’s colonies. Researchers predict that beekeepers in the country have lost more than 62% of their colonies over the winter. In some places, the number could reach 70%.

“Since we've started measuring honeybee losses, this is the worst that we have ever seen,” Ramsey said. “We now have net losses of honeybees that will impact everything from honey production to foods that we consume on a regular basis.”

Losing over half of the colonies passes a critical threshold where beekeepers can no longer divide the surviving colonies and wait for each new group to repopulate, a strategy that has worked when losses hovered below 50%.

Scientists say that a range of factors, including climate change, pesticides and, particularly, parasites are likely contributing to the massive die-off. Ramsey is racing to identify the causes and find solutions. He thinks bees on the other side of the world might hold clues to prevent the tragic decline from happening again next year.

Collapsed colonies

Honeybees are among the most efficient pollinators in nature, contributing to about $18 billion worth of crops in the United States. A decline in honeybee populations could threaten the yields of crops like apples, peaches and almonds. It would also affect livestock production, because the plants that make animal feed also rely on pollination.

Normally, about 10% of bees die as they brave the winter months due to natural causes like cold weather.

In 2006, U.S. beekeepers began noticing their bees dying off or vanishing in much larger numbers, resulting in colony losses of about 30% to 50% in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. But around 2011, the disorder mysteriously disappeared, so quickly that scientists never identified a cause.

Strangely, U.S. honeybee colonies continue to suffer even after the disorder disappeared.

A bee colony in an observation beehive in Samuel Ramsey's lab. (Credit: Yvaine Ye)

“The bees never bounced back, and it’s incumbent on us as scientists to figure out what’s holding them back from returning to their healthiest state,” Ramsey said. He added that many factors are stressing out honeybees, but at the center of the crisis is a parasitic mite, Varroa destructor.

These tiny mites attack a honeybee’s fat body, an important organ that manages the insect’s metabolism, immune system, body temperature and its ability to break down pesticides.

Scientists have found that more than 98% of colonies in the United States already have varroa mites.

The parasite also makes all the other problems bees are dealing with worse. For example, the mites damage the honeybee’s ability to handle extreme temperatures. They also weaken the bee’s ability to fend off other bacterial or viral infections.

At the same time, a changing climate is causing wildflowers to bloom earlier than usual, often before bees emerge from winter to collect food. Infected bees are even less likely to survive when resources are scarce.

“These mites were already present last year and the year before and the year before and the year before, going all the way back to 1987. The reason why mites may be a greater issue now is because they compound everything else happening around them,” Ramsey said.

Natural immunity

Traditional methods of mite control often involve pesticides, but varroa mites have developed resistances to these chemicals and are becoming more virulent over time.

Ramsey and his team are searching for a solution. In recent years, they have traveled around the world to collect genetic data from every existing species of honeybee and to observe how they interact with their native parasites.

He has previously discovered that some honeybees in Southeast Asia, where varroa originated, are resistant to mites. The secret could lie in genes.

“Nature has done a spectacular job of solving problems that we are still trying to figure out how to solve. So instead of reinventing the wheel, it would be a much better idea for us to better conserve the organisms that have already figured out how to solve life's problems and study them,” Ramsey said.

He added that if scientists could transfer these genes to honeybees in the United States, it might help them develop immunity against varroa.

This summer, Ramsey had planned to travel to Vietnam, Borneo and Thailand where he hasn’t yet collected DNA from honeybees. But because of funding issues, he had to postpone the trips.

“In order for us to do what we can to make sure that this level of die-off never happens again, we need better funding for research. This is the worst possible time for us to be reducing funding for agricultural and bee research,” Ramsey said.

There are also some actions people can take, he said. For example, planting native wildflowers around homes could provide much-needed food for bees.

“It’s endearing to think that these little insects have increased the carrying capacity of our country so we can thrive. I’m determined to figure out how to make them thrive too,” Ramsey said.

American honeybee colonies have declined by more than 60% this year. A ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ entomologist is racing to find a solution.

Traditional

Honeybees fly into beehive. (Credit: Kai Wenzel/Unsplash)

White

Honeybees fly into beehive. (Credit: Kai Wenzel/Unsplash)

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