Climate & Environment

Firefighter deaths afflict surviving colleagues, research finds

Chloe Fischer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:25:09 +0000

Firefighter deaths afflict surviving colleagues, research finds Chloe Fischer Fri, 09/11/2026 - 13:25

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder sociologist Robert Scott highlights an understudied area of wildfire research: How wildland firefighting fatalities affect the people on the front lines.

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How warming might have caused Nepal's deadly floods

Yvaine Ye — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:11:15 +0000

How warming might have caused Nepal's deadly floods Yvaine Ye Thu, 09/03/2026 - 09:11

The Langtang range in Nepal. (Credit: Sudan Shrestha/Wikimedia)

Yvaine Ye

One week after catastrophic floods swept through towns along the Nepal-China border, more than 1,000 people are dead and 4,500 remain missing.

Satellite and drone images suggest that softening permafrost, or perennially frozen rock, ice and soil, on Langtang Lirung peak likely caused a massive bedrock failure and glacier collapse. An estimated 50 million metric tons of ice, rock and water—roughly 13 billion gallons, or about three times the capacity of Boulder Reservoir—fell 6,500 feet into the valley below, unleashing a slurry of mud and water that inundated bridges, hydropower facilities and villages along the way. According to the United States Geological Survey, the force of the initial debris flow hitting the ground was equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.

“This is by far the most horrific flood I have ever seen,” said Alton Byers, a faculty research scientist and an associate of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. For the past 50 years, Byers has been studying changes in glaciers around the world, including the Himalayas, and the hazards associated with those shifts. He has lived in rural regions of Nepal for a total of eight years in addition to dozens of shorter visits since the 1970s, trekking in the mountains to study glacial lakes and help local people become more prepared for mountain hazards.

Alton Byers and Elizabeth Byers, a retired scientist with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, in Nepal's Kanchenjunga region. (Courtesy of Alton Byers)

“The size of this slide totally dwarfed anything I’ve seen before. Mountains have clearly become more dangerous places to live, work and play in as Earth becomes warmer.”

As rescue teams continue searching for those still missing, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Today spoke with Byers about what may have triggered the disaster, how climate change is reshaping glaciers and mountain hazards around the world, and whether similar events could occur in the United States.

Has melting permafrost led to similar disasters before?

Since the 1850s, changes in high-altitude permafrost have contributed to dozens of these cascading disasters in Nepal and parts of India, in which bedrock and glaciers break off, and trigger massive flash floods and debris flows. For example, in 2012 a slurry flood in central Nepal, similar to what happened in Nepal last week, killed 79 people along the Seti River. In 1970, an earthquake triggered the collapse of a glacier in Peru, creating a massive debris flow that buried more than 20,000 people in minutes in the village of Yungay.

Did climate change play a role in what happened in Nepal last week?

Warming trends certainly played a major role, destabilizing and softening permafrost, often referred to as the “cryospheric glue,” since the 1860s. Permafrost has been holding the mountains together for millennia. But as it melts, masses of rock and glacier are no longer as resistant to gravity as they once were. So the likelihood of breakage is greater.

Are unstable glaciers and permafrost a risk in the United States?

In Colorado, we’ve been losing glaciers for a long time due to warming, so they are generally small and not as dangerous in terms of permafrost-related slope failures. But mountains are just in general less stable now compared to how they used to be.

In places like Alaska, people have expressed concerns about the increase in landslides related to changes in permafrost. Last year, a landslide in Alaska’s Tracy Arm Fjord triggered a massive tsunami with a wave rising some 1,580 feet above sea level.

What other glacier-related hazards are scientists watching?

Scientists have been studying glacial lake outburst floods for decades.

Glacial lakes form when glaciers recede and water fills the area left behind. An avalanche, landslide or flood from an upstream lake can trigger a surge wave that breaches the unstable lake barrier, unleashing a huge amount of water and causing catastrophic downstream flooding.

Could last week’s disaster have been predicted?

Not really. You can’t predict things of that nature. It’s also hard to predict a glacial lake outburst flood. But what we can do is identify areas of high risk ahead of time, such as overhanging ice on a mountain slope with an urban area downstream. We need to monitor them regularly for any obvious changes.

What can we do to reduce the damage from future, similar events?

Besides monitoring, I think we need to discourage this trend of the last 20 years of building in floodplains, because hazards are bound to happen. There are dozens of similar urban areas along other rivers throughout the Himalayas that have glacial landscapes upstream. All of them need an effective and accessible early warning system and evacuation plans.

We live in a changing world and a changing mountain world. So we’ll need to continue to find ways to adapt.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Today regularly publishes Q&As on news topics through the lens of 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.

A �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder mountain geographer explains how rising temperatures are destabilizing mountains and increasing the risk of landslides, glacial floods and other potentially catastrophic hazards around the world.

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The Langtang range in Nepal. (Credit: Sudan Shrestha/Wikimedia)

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For people behind bars, extreme heat can be deadly and inescapable

Yvaine Ye — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:35:40 +0000

For people behind bars, extreme heat can be deadly and inescapable Yvaine Ye Wed, 09/02/2026 - 16:35

Yvaine Ye

Extreme and prolonged heat waves have engulfed much of the United States this summer, with last month ranking as the warmest July on record for the Lower 48, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

As climate change drives up temperatures and makes heat waves more extreme, conditions are becoming increasingly dangerous for the nearly 2 million people in carceral facilities across the country, said David Ciplet, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Studies. At least 44 states lack universal air conditioning in their prisons.

“There's just a huge amount of need for better living conditions in prisons, and the harms are just so extreme,” said Ciplet, who leads the Climate and Incarceration Research Collaborative, an interdisciplinary team that includes scholars from universities around the country, some of whom are formerly incarcerated.

David Ciplet

The project aims to understand incarcerated people’s experiences inside prisons in relation to climate risks, including extreme temperatures and wildfire smoke, and identify policies that could improve conditions inside these facilities and reduce the number of harmful prisons nationally.

It is unclear how many of the more than 3,500 deaths each year in U.S. state and private prisons are a result of extreme weather, because most facilities don’t properly track or report them, according to The Appeal, a non-profit news organization focusing on criminal justice. But a previous study has found that about 13% of deaths in Texas prisons during warmer months could be a result of heat.

Climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities, who often have the least resources to cope with the impacts, Ciplet said.

“Incarcerated people have the least agency and ability to control their environment, but their experiences tend to be invisible to the general public,” he added.

Heat behind bars

The past July was the second-hottest on record in Colorado, with many parts of the state, including the Denver metro area and northwest Colorado, experiencing their hottest July ever.

While there is no national standard for temperatures inside prisons, the state of Colorado requires indoor temperatures in correctional facilities to remain below 86°F during the warmest months.

That threshold is considerably higher than recommendations from health authorities, including the World Health Organization, which suggests limiting indoor temperatures to below 75°F.

Because prison temperature data are often not publicly available, it remains unclear if facilities enforce the standard, Ciplet said.

“What we’re seeing in Colorado and elsewhere is that we are having more frequent extreme heat that lingers. It’s one thing if you have one really hot day, but if you are exposed to seven or 10 days that are extremely, extremely hot, that’s going to have compounding impacts on health and your body’s ability to process those temperatures,” Ciplet said.

The team is working with 15 participants who were formerly incarcerated at four state prisons throughout Colorado to understand the conditions inside the facilities. Their accounts paint a grim picture behind bars.

While Colorado state prisons have swamp coolers that can keep common areas cooler, the cold air does not always reach the cells, according to the participants. Some south-facing cells at the Fremont Correctional Facility in central Colorado can reportedly reach temperatures above 90°F in the summer.

Trevor Jones had spent two and a half years at Fremont. While he stayed in a north-facing cell, he said the 60-year-old facility wasn’t built to deal with extreme heat or cold.

In addition to the lack of air conditioning, incarcerated people also have very limited options to stay cool. Jones said that people can order a fan if they can afford it, but the item isn’t always in stock, and it usually takes a month for the order to arrive.

“But when it’s really hot, all a fan can do is push the hot air around,” he added.

Participants also mentioned that their showers would only run at very hot temperatures, even during the peak of summer. In women’s prisons, they said, people are required to sleep fully clothed, regardless of how hot it is.

During extreme heat days, incarcerated people may still have to stay in the recreation yard, which often has no shade, or work in areas such as kitchens, where temperatures can be 20 or 30°F hotter than elsewhere in the facility.

Medication can add another layer of danger, Ciplet said. Many incarcerated people take medicine to treat conditions such as depression and anxiety, and those drugs can prevent the body from coping with high temperatures effectively.

The research team met with participants to better understand incarcerated people’s experiences with extreme temperatures inside prisons and identify policies that could improve the conditions. (Courtesy of David Ciplet)

Those risks can become even more severe in solitary confinement, where people have even less access to showers, water and fewer opportunities to leave their cells.

“There are all these ways that the rules that they’re subjected to on a daily basis can take something like 85 degrees, which is still quite hot, and make it much more unsafe,” Ciplet said.

Seeking solutions

The team is working with participants to identify the biggest challenges they faced and develop policy suggestions to push for changes.

For example, they suggest that reducing prison populations could avoid overcrowding, which can make hot environments even hotter. They also hope to advocate for better infrastructure, including regular maintenance of ventilation systems and greater access to cooling devices.

The research, led by formerly incarcerated people, also aims to provide participants with skills that could help them pursue future employment opportunities, Ciplet said. “Some of them are really interested in becoming researchers or advocates to help others,” he added.

The collaborative is also working with advocates in Texas, where policymakers considered a bill last year that would have required prisons to have air conditioning by the end of 2032. The bill died in the state Senate. Colorado has yet to introduce a similar bill.

“A society is only as healthy as its most marginalized people,” Ciplet said. “If we can design climate policy with those people at the core of it, we have the best chance of moving toward a better society.”

Through the project, the team hopes to draw more attention to the worsening conditions incarcerated people face, an issue that is usually out of public sight.

“Reducing the quality of life for someone who's incarcerated doesn't add to the interest of justice,” Jones said. “What are we as a society if we think the humane way to treat people who need societal help is to throw them into a hot or cold cage?”

As climate change drives more frequent and prolonged heat waves, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and �鶹��Ѱ��Anschutz researchers are working with formerly incarcerated people to understand conditions inside prisons and develop ways to reduce health risks.

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'Like driving off a cliff at 2 mph': A water expert's take on what's coming for the Colorado River

Scott Franz — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

'Like driving off a cliff at 2 mph': A water expert's take on what's coming for the Colorado River Scott Franz Wed, 09/02/2026 - 06:00

The Colorado River flows through southern Utah upstream of Lake Powell in June, 2026. (Credit: Scott Franz/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

Scott Franz

The Colorado River is on the brink of collapse because of climate change and overuse of water.

Reservoirs supplying water to tens of millions of people in the southwest reached record lows this summer. The nation is racing to refill them with conservation measures so they can still generate hydropower and reliably deliver water to users downstream.

Fish are struggling. Rafters are having trouble navigating low water.

Despite all this, the seven states sharing the water supply remain at a yearslong impasse over how to conserve the river.

“The Colorado River is in as bad a shape as it’s ever been,” said Doug Kenney, chairman of the Colorado River Research Group at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Getches-Wilkinson Center.

The Interior Department announced Aug. 21 it will significantly cut back the amount of water that will flow to the lower basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona for at least the next two years.

“To the people who really study this river, everything that’s happening this year has been expected for decades,” Kenney said. “This is a classic, slow-moving crisis. I’ve equated it to driving a car off a cliff at 2 miles an hour. You can look out the windshield and see that cliff coming. And we’re now right at the edge.”

Kenney spoke to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Today about the latest efforts to conserve the river and what he thinks is coming next.

Are these cuts to the lower basin states enough to save the river?

There’s nothing in this plan that will save the river. It hasn’t made it to the ocean since the 1960s. That’s not going to change. What they’re really trying to accomplish is to prevent the reservoirs from going even lower. They’re trying to avoid further disaster. And the cuts they’re anticipating for the next two years—I don’t think are going to get us there.

If we have a good water year or two with heavy snowpack, we can maybe hold where we’re at. But by the time we get to year three and beyond, those cuts will probably have to be about twice as big as they are now.

Nevada is suing the federal government to stop the cuts. What’s at stake?

One of those stakes could be that the Bureau of Reclamation is told to go back and redo its plan to cut water to the lower basin states. That would be chaotic. The last thing water users want is chaos. They want to know how much water they can expect.

Doug Kenney

With lawsuits starting, is there any hope left for states to agree on a plan?

There are two problems on the river. One is stopping the current trajectory of reservoirs dropping. And that’s a heavy lift. But if you manage to do that, then there’s the other problem of rebuilding those reservoirs. Which requires even further conservation and cuts.

We have to rebuild some storage in those reservoirs. At the moment, we’ve decided let’s just deal with what we have to deal with immediately—this short term crisis—and even that’s proving to be a lift that the states can’t do themselves. And the federal government has had to step in.

Their plan doesn’t force water cuts for upper basin states like Colorado. Can we get out of this crisis without mandatory cuts in the upper basin?

The upper basin is tricky here in that it uses significantly less water than it was promised. And people in the upper basin will tell you, this is the deal they made a century ago in the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

So when you talk to the upper basin states about conserving water on any sort of permanent basis, that’s the sticking point that you’re going to get is people saying ‘we were promised this water.’

The scientists will say this is a different river than 100 years ago. So you have that sort of impasse. If the upper basin could just cap what they’re using today, long term, that would be tremendously helpful. And that might very well happen. But I don’t think the upper basin would want to commit to that in any sort of formal way.

Then how do we get out of this crisis?

A truly long-term sustainable solution has to look at the fact that we’re using 75 percent of the water in agriculture. And some of that agriculture I think is going to just have to go away. So the policy decision there is: Which agriculture goes away? And does it just go away through bankruptcies, and let the market do what the market does? Or do we do that in a structured and more humane manner, such as a federal program to buy out large amounts of it?

But when you start talking about retiring a lot of agriculture, that’s not popular. There’s no easy way out of this.

Is the fate of the river heading to the US Supreme Court?

I would guess we end up in interstate litigation. I’m not sure of that, but I think the odds of that happening are greater than 50-50 in my mind. But you have to appreciate that no negotiation and no court fight creates water. The weather systems create water. And as long as the earth continues to heat, this basin figures to get drier and drier.

Twenty years from now, we’re gonna look back and say, ‘Oh, those were the days when we got healthy snowpack,’ and ‘Oh boy, we had it good back then.’ That’s the trajectory we’re on in terms of the climate part of this.

Is there anything that gives you hope for the river’s future?

Hope comes from the fact that at some point, Mother Nature imposes cuts. At some point, the water just isn’t there and people have to be creative and do more with less or at least try to do the same with less. And there’s a good track record of doing that.

The southwest is a great example. Las Vegas over the last 30 plus years has been the fastest growing big city in America. And during that period, they slashed their water use dramatically. Other cities have been on the same trajectory: Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Tucson have shown that they can use a lot less water. And that’s really encouraging.

It’s tougher to save water in agriculture. But there are some things we can do to adapt. Some of it’s technology. Some of it’s using different systems for irrigating crops. It’s also changing to different crops. There are tools in the toolbox here.

But it’s really hard to get that sort of adaptation going as long as you’re still in the mindset that the other guy is the problem, and what I do is fine. That mindset stops a lot of good innovations from happening.

There are 30 tribal nations with a stake in this river as well. What can we learn from them?

They say, ‘Why is there a table with seven chairs. Why is it only seven states negotiating? There should be at least 37 chairs.’ They should be involved in this process at every level. And by and large they aren’t.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes have dubbed their portion of the river as basically having personhood status. It is a living independent being. It’s important, I think, to challenge the rest of the users in the basin to think about the obligation we have to the river itself. Because that’s just not a viewpoint that comes up in these negotiations, but it really needs to.

The federal government just unveiled an aggressive plan to help conserve the mighty Colorado. Will it work? And if not, what will? Water policy veteran Doug Kenney offers insight.

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The Colorado River flows near the Hite Marina in Utah. (Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk with aerial support from LightHawk)

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The Colorado River flows near Hite Marina in Utah. (Credit: Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk with aerial support from LightHawk)

CUriosity: How special are the Boulder Flatirons, really?

Scott Franz — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:09:21 +0000

CUriosity: How special are the Boulder Flatirons, really? Scott Franz Wed, 08/26/2026 - 13:09

Scott Franz

In CUriosity, experts across the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder campus answer questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

Lon Abbott, who studies how mountains form, explains how Boulder’s iconic Flatirons got their shape and why they’re so special even though they’re not one of a kind.

The Flatirons as seen from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder on Thursday, June 25, 2025. (Photo by Glenn J. Asakawa/University of Colorado)

At their core, the Flatirons are just a bunch of sand and gravel cemented together and shaped over millions of years.

To Boulderites, they’re so much more than sandstone.

They’re an outdoor playground and a rock-climbing mecca. They’re also so iconic, Boulder restricts the height of modern buildings so they don’t block their view.

But these rocks gracing photos and TV commercials from Boulder aren’t one of a kind, geologically speaking. You don’t even have to leave Colorado to find more of them.

“The Flatirons are one example of a type of landform called flatirons, and you see those other places in the world,” said Lon Abbott, an earth science professor at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “If you were to drive I-70 from Denver to Rifle, you would see some kind of similar landforms there. There are rocks there that are tilted in the other direction.”

Abbott has a caveat about these lowercase flatirons on the other side of the Continental Divide.

“They’re not quite as spectacular as ours,” he said.

Together, these tilting rocks are boundaries of the Rocky Mountains, with Boulder’s marking the eastern edge and the ones near Rifle marking the western edge.

The rock formations got their name because they resemble old-school irons that helped get wrinkles out of clothes.

They got this shape from a process that started hundreds of millions of years ago.

Three acts

Three hundred million years ago, the Flatirons wouldn’t have turned any heads. They were just part of a flat plain of sand and gravel that eroded off an old mountain range called the Ancestral Rocky Mountains. They remained that way and sat under a shallow ocean until about 65 million years ago.

In Act 2 of the Formation of the Flatirons, the uplift of the modern Rocky Mountains took these layers of sediment and tilted them about 50 degrees down to the east. If this stage of the Flatiron formation was a TV episode, it would be called the “Laramide Orogeny.” This mountain building event takes its name from the Laramie mountains in Wyoming.

“That’s the event that uplifted the Rockies,” Abbott said. “And as soon as you uplift a mountain range, you get stormier weather up there. You get snowfall that triggers erosion.”

As the Rockies eroded, Boulder and the Great Plains were buried by a lot more sand and gravel. It went all the way up to what is now the top of Flagstaff Mountain and covered the Flatirons.

Then came the finale.

Erosion excavated the Boulder Valley starting about five million years ago. The Flatirons we see today were sculpted by this event.

Previously in CUriosity

CUriosity: Why do mosquitoes like you but not your friends?

Read more CUriosity stories

Abbott doesn’t remember the first time he set eyes on the Flatirons because he grew up in Boulder. But he knows he was instantly impressed. The rocks even tilted him toward his current career at CU.

“The Flatirons captivated me forever,” Abbott said. “And so when it was time for me to go to college, I really wanted to understand how those Flatirons came to look the way they do because they’re so iconic. So I went into geology and that passion has stayed with me.”

Mountain building

There are five numbered Flatirons. When they’re viewed from Boulder, the first Flatiron is the large one furthest to the right. The numbers go up as you look right to left.

Abbott said the third Flatiron is the most famous because “it’s the one that looks most similar to your great grandmother’s ironing board.”

He recommends hiking up to the Royal Arch to get up close and personal with the Flatirons. The classic hike is accessed from Chautauqua Park and ends with views of a natural arch and Boulder.

Abbott said there’s not much mystery left as to how the Flatirons formed. But scientists are continuing to try to piece together some lingering mysteries about how exactly the modern day Colorado Rockies came to be.

“Many people are trying to understand when the modern Rockies rose and what triggered it,” Abbott said. “There’s no obvious faults and folds, the things that geologists look for that would tell us that there was some mountain-building episode. So it’s much more cryptic.”

Lon Abbott, who studies how mountains form, explains how Boulder's iconic Flatirons got their shape and why they’re so special even though they're not one of a kind.

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Plants and their fungal partners remain in sync despite changing climate

Yvaine Ye — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:13:26 +0000

Plants and their fungal partners remain in sync despite changing climate Yvaine Ye Tue, 08/18/2026 - 12:13

Treeline in Niwot Ridge. (Credit: C. Forrester/Niwot Ridge LTER)

Yvaine Ye

As warming temperatures shift the timing of snowmelt, a critical water source for high mountain ecosystems, some relationships between organisms, like plants and pollinators, can fall out of sync.

But according to a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder study, published in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, ecologists found that the partnership between underground fungi and plants appeared to be resilient to the changing snowmelt timing.

“It turns out shifting conditions caused by climate change may not always affect ecosystems in simple, direct ways,” said Annie Meeder, a doctoral student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “In this case, rather than the relationship breaking down in the face of changing conditions, these partnerships seem to be able to respond and adapt to changes in plant growth and development.”

Plant roots under the microscope (in blue). Dark lines are arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. (Credit: Annie Meeder and Cliff Bueno de Mesquita/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

Many fungi in soil form symbiotic relationships with plants. They rely on plants for sugar while helping plants extract nutrients from the soil. It is estimated that more than 80% of land plants have fungal partners. In harsh environments like the alpine, plants rely even more heavily on fungi to thrive.

Warming temperatures and snowmelt are vital environmental cues for alpine organisms to emerge from their winter inactive state.

Across the American West, snowpacks have been melting earlier. This past spring, an unprecedented heat wave caused Colorado’s snowpack to melt more than a month early.

Previous studies have shown that rising temperatures and changes in snowmelt patterns are leading to mismatches in when plants flower and when pollinators become active. Meeder and her team wondered if the changes were also affecting the plant-fungi partnership.

Between 2018 and 2023, the researchers spread a layer of dark sand over four plots of land at the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research site just west of Boulder, Colorado, at an elevation of more than 11,000 feet. At the research site, annual maximum temperatures have increased by 0.5°C (0.9°F) per decade since the 1950s, which has advanced snowmelt.

The black sand treatment shifted snowmelt on the plots by an average of 10 days compared with the untreated plots next to them.

The team then collected root samples from 104 plants growing in the plots and tested them for several types of symbiotic fungi, including arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which can help plants acquire nutrients and better tolerate drought, as well as dark septate endophytes and fine root endophytes.

They found that early snowmelt didn’t affect how many fungi partners plants were able to recruit. Instead, plants that produce seed earlier in the season tended to have fewer fungi attached to their roots, while plants that did so later tended to have more fungi, regardless of snowmelt timing.

Seed setting is a highly resource-intensive process for plants. Meeder explained that when snow first starts to melt in the spring, microbes in the soil unleash a burst of nutrients that helps jump-start alpine plants. For plants that can take advantage of the nutrient surge and produce seeds early, fungal support may be less important than it is for plants that produce seeds later in the growing season, when nutrients dry out and plants may rely more on their fungal partners.

While snowmelt timing can affect when plants produce seeds, the finding suggests that fungi are mainly responding to signals from plants instead of the environmental cue itself, allowing them to stay in sync.

But there may be limits to that resilience, Meeder said. If the alpine environment becomes even hotter and drier in the future, organisms could eventually be pushed beyond their ability to maintain the partnership.

“Fungi rule the world,” Meeder said. “They grow our crops, and they’re in our bodies. It’s very encouraging to see this relationship staying resilient to early snowmelt at this point, but it’s something we should continue to pay attention to. We need to understand how much change these relationships can absorb before that resilience begins to break down.”

A �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder study finds that the symbiotic relationship between alpine plants and underground fungi stays robust to earlier snowmelt driven by warming temperatures.

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Treeline in Niwot Ridge. (Credit: C. Forrester/Niwot Ridge LTER)

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Treeline in Niwot Ridge. (Credit: C. Forrester/Niwot Ridge LTER)

Drought is reshaping the spread of infectious diseases

Yvaine Ye — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:31:07 +0000

Drought is reshaping the spread of infectious diseases Yvaine Ye Tue, 08/11/2026 - 13:31

A pond in Shanahan Ridge in Boulder. It has gone dry for the first time in many years this summer. (Credit: Pieter Johnson/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

Yvaine Ye

From the American West to Europe, droughts are drying up rivers, fueling destructive fires and reshaping ecosystems. They are also changing the spread of infectious diseases, leading to surges in illnesses like cholera and West Nile virus around the world.

In a review paper published Aug. 12 in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder ecologist Pieter Johnson and his collaborator Tara Stewart Merrill, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, reveal how drier conditions could make humans and wildlife more vulnerable to certain infectious diseases, even though many parasites and disease-carrying organisms depend heavily on water to survive.

“Climate change isn't simply making Earth warmer or drier,” said Johnson, distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “It is making droughts more variable and less predictable. That unpredictability is becoming one of the defining challenges for understanding and managing disease in natural ecosystems.”

Over the past few decades, more than 77% of Earth’s land experienced drier conditions, according to a United Nations report. In the western United States, the worst megadrought in 1,200 years has drained crucial reservoirs like Lake Mead to only a third of their capacity. Rising temperatures driven by climate change are making droughts more frequent, more intense and more widespread.

While many infectious diseases are transmitted in water or through hosts like mosquitoes that rely on water to reproduce, drought doesn’t simply make those diseases disappear. For example, previous studies have found that periodic droughts in Florida increased the spread of St. Louis encephalitis virus, which is transmitted to people through infected mosquitoes.

Johnson first noticed these shifts in disease patterns while studying waterborne parasites in California that cause infected frogs to develop additional limbs, which in turn make them more vulnerable to predators. When a severe drought hit the state in 2014, Johnson and his team noticed that shrinking ponds forced amphibians to concentrate in remaining water bodies, resulting in more severe infections among frogs and higher infection rates.

A shrinking wetland at Sawhill Ponds in Boulder. Drying conditions can concentrate animals around shrinking water sources, creating hotspots for disease transmission. (Credit: Pieter Johnson/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

“That got us curious about why the loss of water sometimes kills off pathogens, but in other cases actually amplifies them. It seemed that the effects of drought on disease patterns are not linear,” Johnson said.

To better understand how drought affects disease transmission, Johnson and Stewart Merrill synthesized nearly 100 previous studies and identified the main mechanisms through which infectious diseases may respond to drought.

One key pathway is that as drought dries up rivers and ponds, animals have to congregate around the remaining watering holes and habitats. These places can become hotspots for parasite transmission, as happened with the frogs in California.

Droughts can also make certain parasites and disease carriers that are adapted to harsh conditions more successful. In North America, mosquito-borne diseases like West Nile virus and St. Louis encephalitis virus have become more prevalent, in part because dwindling water levels have reduced the aquatic organisms like dragonfly larvae that prey on mosquito larvae. Valley fever, a fungal disease, infects people and other animals through contaminated dust, which is more abundant in drier times.

Not every pathogen benefits from drought, Johnson said. Chytrid fungus, a deadly pathogen partially responsible for global amphibian declines, tends to spread poorly under dry conditions.

“We are expecting to see shifts in the types of parasites and diseases that predominate in a drying world. Some infections will disappear in certain places, but under different conditions, transmission can become so intense that it offsets the loss of infection elsewhere," he added.

To predict which pathogens might become winners or losers as drought intensifies, Johnson identified characteristics that may determine their success. Pathogens that can infect a variety of hosts, like avian flu, are likely to fare better than specialists that infect only a single species, such as measles. Those that can survive outside aquatic environments and make their way to terrestrial animals will have an edge over those confined to aquatic species.

“As climate change brings more frequent and extreme droughts, we want to anticipate how disease transmission will change so we can better forecast outbreaks and prepare for them," Johnson said.

As climate change drives more intense droughts, new research shows shrinking water supplies can give pathogens such as West Nile virus an edge.

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A pond in Shanahan Ridge in Boulder. It has gone dry for the first time in many years this summer. (Credit: Pieter Johnson/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

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A pond in Shanahan Ridge in Boulder. It has gone dry for the first time in many years this summer. (Credit: Pieter Johnson/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

For reporters, the water beat is on fire

Megan M Rogers — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:35:53 +0000

For reporters, the water beat is on fire Megan M Rogers Tue, 08/11/2026 - 10:35

A woeful winter and searing spring have thrust a spotlight on climate journalism. The Water Desk, an initiative of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder's College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, helps reporters throughout the West cover complex water issues.

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But is it natural? How our affinity for 'naturalness' can save or sink new climate solutions

Lisa Marshall — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:20:46 +0000

But is it natural? How our affinity for 'naturalness' can save or sink new climate solutions Lisa Marshall Mon, 08/10/2026 - 15:20

Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant near Chattanooga Tennessee. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Lisa Marshall

From nuclear energy to lab-grown meat, the list of effective but unpopular climate solutions is long.

A new �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder study sheds light on why people reject or accept some proposed sustainability technologies: If it doesn’t seem natural, they won’t go for it.

“We found that naturalness predicts support over and above a lot of other things you might think matter, like risk and benefit perceptions or how much people understand the technology,” said first author Sarah Gonzalez-Coffin, who earned her doctorate in social psychology from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder in May.

The study also found that a simple shift in framing, comparing technologies to things in nature, can prompt people to trust and accept even engineered solutions, such as nuclear energy, more.

The findings appear in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

“We sometimes assume that if we can just develop solutions to address climate change, the public will say, ‘OK. Let’s use them,” said senior author and psychology Professor Leaf Van Boven. “Our study shows that often it is not the technology itself, but the way we communicate about it that shapes public response.”

Sarah Gonzalez-Coffin

Leaf Van Boven

What is natural?

Research in the health and wellness space has long shown that merely framing something as natural prompts consumers to make positive assumptions.

When fruits are adorned with an “organic” label, people say they taste better even though studies show no major flavor differences. People view vaccines as safer if they are described as made from ingredients “found in nature.”

Gonzalez-Coffin’s previous research has shown that despite its potential environmental benefits, beef grown in a bioreactor is generally considered too unnatural to support.

While there is no strict legal definition, people tend to view things as natural if they have minimal human intervention, are made from things in the natural environment and are culturally familiar, the authors found.

“We ask ourselves all the time: Is this natural? And we have a deep aversion to things that are artificial,” said Van Boven, noting that this has been shown to hold true across genders and among urban and rural populations. “It’s part of being human.”

To see if it also applies to climate solutions, the researchers surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults about 10 methods for reducing or removing carbon from the atmosphere. They ranged from afforestation (tree planting) to direct-air carbon capture (using chemical filters to draw carbon out of the air and pump it into the ground) to nuclear energy, wind and solar power.

Participants were asked if they would support using tax dollars to deploy the technology on a broad scale.

Above and beyond perceived risks, benefits, fears and familiarity, how “natural” people thought the technology was predicted whether they’d support it. This held true across a diverse sample of the U.S. public and, surprisingly, political parties.

“That is a rare point of convergence, especially in the realm of climate change, where support for solutions can be incredibly polarized,” said Gonzalez-Coffin, now a postdoctoral research associate at University of Arizona’s Lovejoy Center for Bridging Biodiversity, Conservation Science & Policy.

In a second study, the authors manipulated their descriptions to frame technologies in a natural light. For instance, direct-air carbon capture was described as a technology “that mimics natural processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, similar to the way that plants pull carbon from the atmosphere through their leaves.”

This simple wording change led to higher levels of support across the board.

The promise and peril of naturalness

Van Boven notes that humans’ affinity for naturalness can have a dark side.

Tobacco companies leveraged it to sell cigarettes as far back as the early 1900s, billing them as natural, organic or additive-free. Today, companies often conjure nature-based imagery to paint everything from single-use coffee pods to bottled water as sustainable, regardless of the true environmental impact.

An allegiance to naturalness may also lead people to outright dismiss potentially beneficial climate solutions, like nuclear energy, geoengineering or artificial meat, he said.

“If we want to solve climate change, we are going to have to figure out how to accept a broad range of technology solutions,” Van Boven said. “And right now, we are resistant to anything that seems remotely artificial.”

Gonzalez-Coffin stresses that she is not advocating for greenwashing climate solutions.

But she does believe communicators could lean into the genuine, natural elements of technologies. For instance, she notes humpback whale fins helped inspire the design of wind turbine blades.

She also hopes her research will inform design and investment in sustainability technologies, demonstrating that more natural options might garner easier public buy-in.

“We have incredible engineers and others working on developing technological solutions to climate change; the gridlock that we're running into is largely social,” she said. “Our work brings that missing social component to illuminate the underlying psychology behind this gridlock.”

Other collaborators on the study included: �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Associate Professor Amanda Carrico; Shahzeen Z. Attari (Indiana University Bloomington); Holly Buck (University at Buffalo); Yoel Inbar (University of Toronto Scarborough); Ezra Markowitz (University of Massachusetts Amherst); Kaitlin T. Raimi (University of Michigan); Jonathon P. Schuldt (Cornell University); and Trisha Shrum (University of Vermont).

Across political ideologies, people in the U.S. overwhelmingly gravitate toward technologies presented as natural and reject those that seem unnatural. The findings offer insight on why some proposed climate solutions fail.

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Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant near Chattanooga Tennessee. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant near Chattanooga Tennessee. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Heat is the world's deadliest climate hazard. Are cities ready?

Yvaine Ye — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:05:37 +0000

Heat is the world's deadliest climate hazard. Are cities ready? Yvaine Ye Wed, 08/05/2026 - 15:05

Los Angeles is one of the U.S. cities that has been experiencing extreme heat this summer. (Credit: Josh Rose/Wikimedia)

Yvaine Ye

Out of 31 days in July, Denver temperatures hit 90°F or higher during 28 of them. So far this summer, the city has seen six days with temperatures above 100°F, making it the second-hottest July in recorded history.

Extreme heat is no longer just a problem for places like Phoenix. As climate change drives up temperatures around the world, communities are experiencing more frequent and more intense heat waves.

In Europe, places that historically experience just a handful of hot days every year, a relentless heat wave has gripped the continent, fueling droughts and destructive wildfires. It is estimated that the extreme heat in Europe this summer has caused as many as 10,000 deaths.

“Heat is the deadliest climate-related hazard, causing more fatalities in the United States than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined,” said Sara Meerow, a new associate professor in the Department of Geography. “While we’ve only seen close to a 1.5°C (2.7°F) increase in global average temperatures, it translates to a very big shift in the number of extreme heat days that we’re seeing everywhere.”

Sara Meerow

According to the most recent United Nations climate science report, an extreme heat event that previously occurred once every 50 years is now happening once every decade.

A computer model has shown that the city of Boulder, Colorado, historically experienced about five days each year above 95°F, but the city could see nearly 30 such days by 2030.

“Now heat is really sort of a chronic threat, and so communities everywhere really do need to be planning for heat resilience,” said Meerow, who is also joining �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder as a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the Institute of Behavioral Science.

With more hot days on the horizon, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Today sat down with Meerow to discuss why heat remains an "invisible hazard," why many communities are still unprepared and what can be done to protect the people most at risk.

Are US cities prepared for the level of heat we're experiencing today?

It's really getting hotter everywhere due to a combination of global climate change and local development patterns, as well as weather patterns.

Our planning and proactive management of heat is still underdeveloped. Part of the reason is that heat is an invisible hazard. It doesn't have the dramatic images of flooding or wildfires that make front pages.

But I do think that's starting to change. We're in a ‘heatshed’ moment, a turning point where increasing heat waves are making people more aware of the risks and leading to calls for more action.

Who faces the greatest risks from extreme heat?

Heat risks are highly inequitable.

Some neighborhoods are simply hotter than others. Research has shown that areas that were historically redlined, or subject to discriminatory lending practices largely because residents were poor or people of color, often have less vegetation and are hotter today. At the same time, some populations are much more susceptible to heat-related illness and death, such as older adults, people with pre-existing medical conditions, children and unhoused people.

We also tend to think of heat as an urban problem, but rural communities face significant risks as well. Research has shown that rural residents often arrive at hospitals sicker from heat-related illnesses, in part because they have less access to healthcare. Rural areas also have many outdoor and agricultural workers who face prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures. That’s why some colleagues and I recently wrote a report for the American Planning Association providing specific guidance on how to plan for rural heat resilience.

How do we build a heat-resilient city?

We generally think about three categories of strategies: heat mitigation, heat management and heat governance.

Heat mitigation strategies are things that actually cool communities by reducing temperatures. That includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also reducing the excess heat produced by buildings, pavement and automobiles through measures like planting more trees and installing reflective roofs.

Heat management protects people from the heat we can't eliminate. These include public health campaigns, early warning systems and creating cooling centers to ensure people have access to indoor cooling.

Finally, heat governance is about building institutions that can better coordinate these efforts. Historically, heat has been a problem that no single agency was responsible for. Some cities are now appointing chief heat officers to help fill that gap.

It can be hard for cities to know where to start, so we’ve developed a Building Heat Resilient Communities Toolkit that offers step-by-step guidance for heat action.

What can individuals do to better protect themselves?

One of the most important things is simply being aware of heat risks and understanding your own health. Certain pre-existing conditions or medications, for example, can increase the risk of heat-related illness.

When excessive heat warnings are issued, consider changing your routine to avoid strenuous activities, like going for a run, during the hottest parts of the day.

People can also make their homes more heat-resilient by using energy-efficient appliances, adding vegetation or shade around the home and using blinds effectively.

Individuals can also advocate for more proactive heat planning in their communities.

There's no single silver bullet. We need to think about which combination of strategies will be most effective for each community based on the heat risks it faces.

Extreme heat is no longer a rare event, and protecting communities will require coordinated efforts, says geography professor Sara Meerow.

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Los Angeles is one of the U.S. cities that has been experiencing extreme heat this summer. (Credit: Josh Rose/Wikimedia)

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Los Angeles is one of the U.S. cities that has been experiencing extreme heat this summer. (Credit: Josh Rose/Wikimedia)

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