United Nations recognises three conservation projects as new World Restoration Flagships.

The United Nations has recognised three conservation projects as World Restoration Flagships, according to a press release issued by the United Nations Environment Program on 4 December 2025. World Restoration Flagships are projects intended to have large-scale and long-term impacts, held up as examples which embody the 10 Restoration Principles of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030). World Restoration Flagships already cover an area of over 10 million km², an area larger than China.

The first new project recognised is the Shellfish Reef Building Program in Australia. This project, a partnership between the Nature Conservancy and the Australian Government, aims to restore reefs of Oysters and Mussels which were once found around much of the southern coast of Australia but which have been greatly depleted by over-harvesting, sedimentation and pollution.

Globefish amongst Mussels and restored shellfish reef in Dromana, Port Phillip Bay. Jarrod Boord/Streamline Media in Reef Builder (2024).

Since its inception in 2020, the Reef Builder Program has worked with local communities to restore reefs at thirteen locations along the southern coastline of Australia; it aims to restore 30% of Australia's original shellfish reefs by 2030. The project has generated over 425 jobs, and about US$10 million in income for over 50 small and medium sized businesses, as well as helping local communities to reconnect to nature and promote stewardship over the natural environment.

The second project recognised is the Respectful Returns Initiative in Canada, a partnership between Parks Canada and local and Indigenous communities, which aims to restore damaged rivers and streams in seven national parks along Canada’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts. 

Salmon being released into the Bay of Fundy as part of the Respectful Returns Initiative. Parks Canada.

Since its initiation in 2010, the Respectful Returns Initiative has restored over 650 km² of land and 228 km of waterways, created over 100 jobs, supported research projects by three universities, and formed partnerships with 32 local organisations and community groups. The Salmon population has increased at six of the seven locations where the Initiative works. The Initiative aims to both protect Salmon and to strengthen the connection between the population and their environment. 

The third project recognised is the Thicket Restoration Movement in South Africa, a collaboration uniting over 60 initiatives in Eastern and Western Cape provinces, which aims to restore over 8000 km² of indigenous subtropical thicket by 2030.

Replanting a Kuzuko Thicket in South Africa. AfriCarbon. 

These thickets serve as a grazing resource for both wild Mammals and livestock, particularly under drought conditions, which is an important consideration following the drought of 2023/4, which is the worst the region has suffered in over 100 years. It is a particularly important resource for threatened species such as Black Rhinoceros and African Bush Elephant, and is also a significant carbon reserve, with soils covered by thicket retaining notably more carbon than exposed soils. It is estimated that restoring these thickets sequesters around eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. The project is also predicted to directly create over 1000 jobs in rural communities, as well as improving the lives of around two million people.

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Twelve dead in Sicily flooding.

Nine members of an extended family, including three children aged one, three and fifteen, have died after floodwaters swept through the house they were staying in at Casteldaccia in Palermo Province on the northwest of the Italian island of Sicily on Saturday 3 November 2018. Three generations of the same family were staying in the rented property for the All Souls Holiday long weekend, when it was hit by floodwaters from the River Milicia, which had burst its banks amid heavy rains. Only two members of the family survived the incident, away from the property walking the family dogs, and a fourth child who was outside when the floodwaters hit and was able to climb a tree.

The scene of a flood in Palermo District, Sicily, in which nine people died on Saturday 3 November 2018. Alessandro Fucarini/AFP/Getty Images.

The incident is now being investigated by local prosecutors, as the house, which was built without permission from local authorities, has been the subject of a demolition order since 2008 due to its proximity to the river, but had been allowed to stand while this decision was being appealed by the owners, something which the tenants were apparently unaware of.

Elsewhere on Palermo Province, a 44-year-old local councillor was killed when his car was struck by floodwaters from the San Leonardo River, another person is missing following this incident. In Agrigento Province on the southwest of the island a man and a woman are reported to have died in floodwaters from the Akragas River, while two people, one of them a German tourist, have died in flooding on the island of Sardinia.

Floodwaters in the town of Sciacca in Agrigento Province, Sicily, on Saturday 3 November 2018. Giornale di Sicilia.

These incidents come amid storms and flooding that have killed more than 20 people across Italy this week. Most storms form due to heating of air over the sea, in this case the Mediterranean. As the air is heated the the air pressure drops and the air rises, causing new air to rush in from outside the forming storm zone. If this zone is sufficiently large, then it will be influenced by the Coriolis Effect, which loosely speaking means the winds closer to the equator will be faster than those further away, causing the storm to rotate, clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere.

Whilst the high winds associated these storms is extremely dangerous, the real danger from such storms is often the flooding. Each millibar drop in air pressure can lead to a 1 cm rise in sea level, and large storms can be accompanied by storm surges several meters high. This tends to be accompanied by high levels of rainfall, caused by water picked up by the storm while still at sea, which can lead to flooding, swollen rivers and landslides; which occur when waterlogged soils on hill slopes lose their cohesion and slump downwards, over whatever happens to be in their path.

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Cherax warsamsonicus: A new species of Crayfish from West Papua, Indonesia.

Crayfish of the genus Cherax are widely distributed in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia (where they are called 'Yabbies'). They are often large and colourful, and are widely traded in the aquarium trade in Europe, East Asia and North America, where, despite the genus being extensively studied, specimens belonging to no known species are often discovered. Identifying the origin of these specimens is often difficult, as the Crayfish are often pass through several different hands before reaching the retail market, and dealers themselves may not know where specimens come from.

In a paper published in the journal ZooKeys on 13 March 2017, Christian Lukhaup of Hinterweidenthal in Germany, Rury Eprilurahman of the Animal Systematics Laboratory at Universitas Gadjah Mada, and Thomas von Rintelen of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin at the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, describe a new species of Cherax from West Papua, Indonesia.

The new species is named Cherax warsamsonicus, in reference to the Warsamson River of West Papua, where the species was found. The species is described from three male and one female specimens, with the males ranging from 73 mm to 109 mm in length, while the female was 73 mm. They have a green and red colouration, with large blue and white claws.

Cherax warsamsonicus, male from the Warsamson River, South Sorong Regency. Lukhaup et al. (2017).

The species was found on the Kepala Burung Peninsula in the Warsamson River and its tributaries. It favours shallow streams (20-60 cm deep) with clear, slightly acidic water and few plants. The Crayfish excavate burrows in the backs or under large rocks on the bottom.

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Ancient fluvial systems on Arabia Terra, Mars.

Modern Mars has an arid climate combined with an atmosphere to thin to support liquid water and a surface temperature seldom warm enough to allow ice to melt. However much of the surface of Mars shows evidence of a wetter climate in the past, with river systems, lakes and even shallow seas being identified by planetary scientists. This has led to the theory that during the Noachian Period, more than 3.7 billion years ago, Mars had a warmer, wetter climate with extensive precipitation (rainfall) and water dominated environments covering much of the surface of the planet. However some of the ancient terrains predicted by this model as having been likely to have had very wet climates during the Noachian are devoid of any signs of water. This has led to the development of an alternative climate model for ancient Mars, the Icy Highlands model, in which the climate of ancient Mars was still predominantly cold and dry, but with extensive glaciation forming in highland regions, particularly around the equator, and the water-created landforms of Mars being created by rare episodes of warming which melted these ice caps leading to catastrophic but short-lived floods.

In a paper published in the journal Geology on 23 August 2016, Joel Davies of the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London, Matt Balme of the Department of Physical Sciences at the Open University, Peter Grindrod of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute and Sanjeev Gupta of the Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering at Imperial College London describe evidence for a network of fluvial (river) channels covering much of the Arabia Terra, the largest of the 'dry' Noachian Terrains of Mars, and therefore one of the biggest obstacles to the Warm an Wet model of the ancient Martian climate.

These channels are detected in images produced by the Context Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and take the form of sinuous ridges and branching systems rising up to 60 m above the surrounding terrain and flowing with and around topological features in a way that would be predicted for fluvial channels. Ridges are not an obvious sign of fluvial activity, but can be formed if river channels develop a more robust structure that the surrounding terrain, for example a stony riverbed or even river-bottom carbonate deposit in an area otherwise covered by loess (dusty, easily wind-blown soil), which can lead to the riverbed remaining as a raised, or 'inverted', channel after the surrounding terrain has been eroded away. Such inverted riverbeds are not purely theoretical they are familiar from desert regions on Earth, and are therefore to be expected on Mars if that planet once had a wet climate but has subsequently aridified.

Map showing distribution of inverted channels (black lines) and valley networks (white lines) in Arabia Terra, Mars, study area. Many of the inverted channels (e.g., southwest region of study area) are not associated with valley networks. Background image is Mars OrbitalLaser Altimeter gridded topographic map. Davies et al. (2016).

These channels are not evenly distributed across the Arabia Terra, but rather are concentrated in the southwest, with the northwest and east of the terrain largely devoid of such structures. This is consistent with large-scale water-flows from the north to the south, draining into the Meridiani Planum to the south and southwest of the Arabia Terra, though a number of streams appear to drain into other features, particularly craters that may once have held ancient lakes.

 

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera mosaics of (A) anabranching and sinuous inverted channel system (Aram Dorsum; candidate ExoMars landing site) in southwest Arabia Terra; and (B) branching and sinuous inverted channel system in southwest Arabia Terra, terminating in terraced, sub-circular feature consistent with inverted paleolake deposit. Both inverted channels are unconformably overlain by regional etched units. Davies et al. (2016).

Based upon the relationships of the channels to other geographic features, Davies et al. conclude that the channels were probably active in the Middle-to-Late Noarchian. The presence of the channels on the Arabia Terra, one of the largest areas on Mars on which fluvial structures had not previously been identified, lends considerable support to the warm and wet hypothesis of early Martian climate, a model which predicts a wet climate in the Arabia Terra region, and which was stretched by the absence of such evidence.

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(Relatively) recent volcanic activity in the Southern Highlands of Mars.                                 The planet Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and is thought to have been highly volcanically active in its early history. However due to its smaller size it...

Hydrated silicate minerals in the Mariner Valley, Mars.                                             Hydrated minerals (minerals containing water) are considered to be evidence of the former presence of liquid water on Mars. They have been observed at a...

Interpreting landslide deposits in the Mariner Valley, Mars                                                              Landslides on Mars typically have much greater runout distances than those on Earth, due to the planets lower gravity and thinner atmosphere. This can...

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Liquid-filled canyons detected on Titan.

Saturn's moon Titan is known to have three small seas in its North Polar Region, Kraken, Ligeia, and Punga Mare, in which the Cassini Space Probe has been able to confirm the presence of liquid hydrocarbons by using synthetic aperture radar which produced a reflection from both the surface and floor of the ocean. Much of the surface of Titan is also known to be covered by an extensive network of channels and canyons that resemble similar structures carved by water on Earth, though the Cassini Probe has been unable to detect any liquid in these narrower structures using synthetic aperture radar.

In a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on 9 August 2016,  Valerio Poggiali of the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni at the Sapienza Università di Roma, Marco Mastrogiuseppe and Alexander Hayes of the Cornell Center for Astrophysical Science at Cornell University, Roberto Seu, also of the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni at the Sapienza Università di Roma, Sam Birch, also of the Cornell Center for Astrophysical Science at Cornell University, Ralph Lorenz of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, Cyril Grima of the The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Jason Hofgartner, also of the Cornell Center for Astrophysical Science at Cornell University, describe the discovery of liquid in two canyon systems in the North Polar Region of Titan using Ku band (λ = 2.17 cm) radar altimeter nadir observations.

The northern polar area of Titan and Vid Flumina drainage basin. (left) On top of the image, the Ligeia Mare; in the lower right the North Kraken Mare; the two seas are connected each other by a labyrinth of channels. On the left, near the North pole, the Punga Mare. Red arrows indicate the position of the two flumina significant for this work. At the end of its mission (15 September 2017) the Cassini RADAR in its imaging mode (SAR+ HiSAR) will have covered a total area of 67% of the surface of Titan. (right) Highlighted in yellow are the half-power altimetric footprints within the Vid Flumina drainage basin and the Xanthus Flumen course for which specular reflections occurred. At 1400 km of spacecraft altitude, the Cassini antenna 0.35° central beam produces footprints of about 8.5 km in diameter (diameter of yellow circles). It is easy to note that we do not have a specular reflection at each intersection of the altimetric track with the channels. This is mainly due to the very limited area covered by the Fresnel zone (~250 m) and to the 0.6 s of the Burst Repetition Interval of the radar. The result is that in some cases the Fresnel zone just missed the strong reflection from the liquid coming from nadiral direction. Poggiali et al. (2016).

The Ku band (λ = 2.17 cm) radar altimeter nadir observation has previously been used to detect liquids on Earth, when the probe flew by Earth in 1999, and was able to detect the dammed Paranaiba River in Brazil. The method works by detecting backscatter - the level of smoothness of a surface - which can indicate whether it is a liquid or a solid. The floors of canyons around the equatorial region of Titan were found to have relatively radar bright surfaces, which is likely to indicate dry river beds or similar, with course gravels or cobble-sized rocks. In contrast two areas studied in the North Polar Region, the Vid Flumina and Xanthus Flumen, did not appear to have a refracting bottom to its canyons at all, but instead a smooth surface similar to the nearby Ligeia Mare.

Radargram and results. ( I) Each column of the radargram represents an incoherently averaged echo received during the T91 flyby from the region hosting Ligeia Mare and channels. Pixel intensity indicates the received backscatter as function of time. The surface of Ligeia Mare is dotted because of the peculiar design of the T91 flyby, which consisted in an alternated acquisition of echoes from a nadir and a slight off-nadir antenna pointing geometry. Arrows indicate specular reflections from the main trunk (feature g) of Vid Flumina and from two of its tributary branches (features e and f). (middle, II) Titan’s heights given by the Cassini Processing of Altimetric Data (CPAD) are reported as relative to a 2575 km sphere, centered at Titan’s center of mass. Observations featuring specular reflections from the liquid are indicated with progressive letters from north to south; the position of Ligeia Mare can be recognized by the extremely flat region extending from about 140 to 440 km along track; Vid Flumina hydrographic basin interests an area ranging from about 440 to 680 km along track. The altimetry profile shown here is useful to give an idea of the geomorphologic shape of the area and highlines the relative flatness of the surface, whose greatest elevation difference between higher and lower points is about 630 m. This profile has been produced by means of a centroid tracker, which is a leading edge estimator based on the Offset Centre of Gravity algorithm. In particular, we used the I moment tracker, which sets the altimetric echo two-way travel time by computing the centroid of the observed power distribution, as described by the first moment of the echo with respect to time. For all the echoes relative to channels, the centroid has been computed only on that portion of the signal reflected from the liquid. Poggiali et al. (2016).

Both of these geographical features had canyons with smooth bottoms, which had elevations apparently the same as that of the nearby Ligeia Mare, despite considerable differences in the topology of the surrounding area. This appears to suggest the presence of a liquid in the bottom of the channels at the same level as that in the sea. The studied area of the Xanthus Flumen is close to the Ligeia Mare, flowing into Puget Sinus, an arm of the northern part of the sea, but the studies areas of the Vid Flumina are some distance away. This for of structure, with inciced channels running a considerable distance from the sea but with a similar water level is more consistant with a fjord structure, in which a pre-existing channel eroded by past activity is flooded by an arm of the sea, than with a river, which flows down to the sea from a source at a higher altitude (although some smaller channels around the Vid Flumina did appear to have a liquid surface at a higher level, possibly indicating flow into the lower channels and then the sea).

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Cassini Probe finds 400 km river on Titan.

NASA scientists have released an image of a 400 km long river on Saturn's moon Titan, imaged by the Cassini Space Probe during a flyby on 26 September 2012. The river meanders for some...

New Cassini Images of Titan, Tethys and Methone.

The Cassini Space Probe was launched on 15 October 1997 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and entered orbit around Saturn on 30 June...

 

 

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