Despite the advances made in modelling, translating ‘climate change’ into ‘weather change’ remains a major challenge for Earth System sciences. We cannot build new wind farms if we don’t know where strong, consistent winds will be, nor make informed decisions about new water catchment and storage infrastructure without more accurate data about future rainfall frequency and intensity.

Although economists work to better understand and model the interactions between climate change and the economy, many do not factor in all the latest scientific evidence, disregarding sensitive ‘tipping points’ in the climate system, and overlooking the market impacts of climate-induced hazards such as flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat. We must urgently create bridges between science and finance.

The current rate of temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide increase is almost unprecedented in Earth’s entire 4.5-billion-year geological history. The only other time global temperatures and conditions changed this dramatically was when an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago, famously triggering an age of mass extinction and a rapid increase of 5 °C in global temperatures that lasted for roughly 100,000 years.

September is considered the start of spring by most Australians, but Tim Entwisle thinks we have it all wrong. In the south at least, we should be celebrating an ‘early spring’ in August and September—when the wattles are blooming en masse—and a ‘late spring’ in October and November. Yet most don’t acknowledge that things are different in the great southern land.

Following the United Nations Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report, Professor Brendan Wintle discussed and celebrated the crucial role that ecologists can play (and are playing) in co-designing and implementing solutions to the extinction crisis, in partnership with private land conservation organisations, Indigenous land managers, developers, and governments.