Biodiversité

Les inondations qui frappent depuis une semaine la côte est de l'Australie ont fait 20 morts, ont annoncé mardi les autorités après la découverte des corps d'une femme et d'un homme à Sydney, où de nouvelles fortes précipitations et soudaines crues sont attendues.

When we think about making decisions on how we shape our cities, that deep connection and stewardship of water is really important,” says Briony Rogers, a civil engineer at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and director of MSDI Water, the institute’s water research hub in Melbourne, Australia.

Rogers’ work on ‘water-sensitive’ cities brings together her interest in applying civil engineering to shape the environment humans live in, and her love of the beaches and forests that surround her in Melbourne.

Climate change is impacting ecosystems worldwide. Estuaries are diverse and important aquatic ecosystems; and yet until now we have lacked information on the response of estuaries to climate change. Here we present data from a twelve-year monitoring program, involving 6200 observations of 166 estuaries along >1100 kilometres of the Australian coastline encompassing all estuary morphologies. Estuary temperatures increased by 2.16 °C on average over 12 years, at a rate of 0.2 °C year−1, with waters acidifying at a rate of 0.09 pH units and freshening at 0.086 PSU year−1.