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In today’s edition of Climatebase Weekly:

In today's edition of This Week in Climate, we saw coral reefs prove more resilient than feared, a powerful El Niño take shape, and AI reveals how warming is shifting when plants bloom — alongside new scrutiny of France's nuclear toll on marine life and U.S. cuts to ocean monitoring. Keep reading to read the full article.

One of the highlights of Cohort 9 was learning directly from more than 120 climate leaders, practitioners, and entrepreneurs. Among them was Robert Höglund, co-founder of CDR.fyi, who challenged Fellows to think critically about the future of carbon removal and corporate climate action. Read his latest piece below—and if you’d like to hear more directly from experts like Robert, apply to Cohort 10 of the Climatebase Fellowship.

Updates on the Climate Week Network — a philanthropically supported project powered by Climatebase and a global community of partners, helping launch and grow climate weeks in cities around the world.

Recently announced Climate Weeks:

Discover the thousands of climate jobs that have been posted on Climatebase over the past few days—from startups to major employers hiring across climate tech, energy, policy, food, nature, and more.

Quick reminders:

By Julian Moore

New research from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Macquarie University finds that roughly 166,000 square kilometers of coral reefs across 71 countries have the capacity to withstand or recover from climate change, a more hopeful picture than previously thought. About 60% of these resilient reefs are concentrated in Australia, the Bahamas, Cuba, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Resilience varies by location and coral type: some reefs benefit from cooler ocean pockets, others are dominated by hardier coral species or have shown faster recovery from damage.

The findings matter because coral reefs support 25% of all marine life and provide food and livelihoods to over 500 million people. Marine heatwaves have been accelerating bleaching and die-offs globally, and the UN recently warned of a deepening ocean crisis.

One concern: fewer than a third of the identified resilient reefs currently fall within protected areas, leaving the majority vulnerable to fishing pressure and pollution despite their climate potential.

French nuclear plants kill at least 5.9 billion aquatic organisms annually by drawing water into reactor cooling systems, according to a new report by anti-nuclear NGO network Sortir du Nucléaire. The figures come from EDF's own internal documents, spanning 1981 to 2025. Around 100 species are affected, including protected ones like eels and lampreys. Planned new reactors could raise the toll to 7.7 billion per year.

EDF contests the ecological significance of the losses, arguing monitoring has shown no measurable population impact, a view partly supported by French environmental authorities, though they note the pressure is continuous and year after year.

Critics point out France lags behind peers: the US mandates up to 90% reductions in such deaths, the UK requires protective measures including acoustic fish-deterrent systems, and Canada requires habitat restoration. France halted research into reducing these effects in 1994. Sortir du Nucléaire is calling for stricter regulation and public disclosure.

A global AI study of 8 million digitised plant specimens found that flowering times have shifted by an average of 2.5 days per decade due to climate change, threatening relationships between plants and pollinators. This is one finding from Kew Gardens' latest “State of the World's Plants and Fungi” report, which warns that extinction risks are severely underestimated: less than a fifth of plants and under 1% of fungi have been assessed. An estimated 100,000 plant and 2 million fungi species remain undiscovered entirely.

Kew has now digitised its entire collection of 7.4 million specimens, joining a global network of 145 million records freely accessible online. AI and digitisation are accelerating species identification, extinction tracking, and the search for climate-resilient crops and medicinal fungi. Scientists are also extracting high-quality genomes from fungal specimens up to 180 years old, potentially unlocking new foods, medicines, and pollution solutions.

NOAA has officially declared an El Niño, with a 63% chance it develops into one of the strongest on record by November. Seven out of ten major climate models predict it could surpass warming records set in 2015 and 1877.

El Niño begins with anomalous westerly winds pushing warm water eastward across the Pacific, reshaping global weather patterns over months. This event is further amplified by roughly 0.5°C of additional warming attributed to climate change.

Expected impacts include drought across southern Africa, Australia, India and Oceania, heavier rainfall in Southeast Asia, and a wetter Gulf Coast alongside a milder winter in the northern US. Atlantic hurricane activity is likely to be suppressed, while Pacific storm activity increases.

Effects are already visible in Peru, where unseasonable warmth has drawn beachgoers and forced the anchovy fishing industry to suspend operations. Impacts are expected to persist through at least next winter.

Democratic and Republican senators, along with two House committees, are pushing back against the National Science Foundation's plan to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $386 million network of over 900 ocean sensors tracking climate, weather, and marine ecosystems. House Democrats went further, calling the move illegal.

The NSF, facing a proposed 55% budget cut under the Trump administration, ordered removal of most instruments from waters off five states and Greenland by 2027, with no prior scientific review or congressional notification. Federal law requires at least 30 days notice before decommissioning assets worth over $2.5 million. No such notice appears to have been given.

Senators urged a halt and full review, citing particularly bad timing given the developing El Niño. House lawmakers were blunter, calling it wasteful to spend money on research vessels to retrieve still-functioning equipment.

The first buoy was scheduled for removal off Oregon on Tuesday. Senators Merkley and Murkowski also planned to introduce legislation blocking NSF from spending funds on decommissioning until a review is complete.

Cohort 9 of the Climatebase Fellowship just wrapped! Over the course of twelve weeks, more than 120 expert guests shared their expertise with the Fellows.

Among them was Robert Höglund, climate advisor, writer, and co-founder of CDR.fyi, who joined us for a presentation on venture capital in carbon removal and what it takes to move the sector from early innovation to real deployment. His latest Substack piece, “Corporate net zero is not a target,” based on a new paper he wrote with Claire Wigg at the Exponential Roadmap Initiative,  picks up a related question: what should companies do when their climate targets depend on markets, infrastructure, and technologies that do not yet exist at scale?

Read his take on the Marginal Carbon substack here, and if you want to connect with expert guests like Robert, you can apply to Cohort 10 of the Climatebase Fellowship here.

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