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Australia Welcomes Lifting of UNESCO Threat to List Great Barrier Reef as World Heritage in Danger 

A colony of mushroom leather coral grows on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cairns, Australia October 25, 2019. (Reuters)
A colony of mushroom leather coral grows on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cairns, Australia October 25, 2019. (Reuters)
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Australia Welcomes Lifting of UNESCO Threat to List Great Barrier Reef as World Heritage in Danger 

A colony of mushroom leather coral grows on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cairns, Australia October 25, 2019. (Reuters)
A colony of mushroom leather coral grows on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cairns, Australia October 25, 2019. (Reuters)

The Australian government on Tuesday welcomed a draft UNESCO decision to a lift a threat of downgrading the Great Barrier Reef to an endangered World Heritage site.

The UN cultural agency and the International Union for Conservation of Nature recommended in November of last year that the world’s largest coral reef system be added to the List of World Heritage in Danger due to threats including rising ocean temperatures.

But UNESCO issued an updated a report in Paris on Monday that said it would be appropriate to re-evaluate whether the famed tourist attraction off Australia’s northeast coast fitted the World Heritage in-danger criteria.

The report recommended Australia submit a progress report to the World Heritage Committee by February on its commitments to make environmental improvements.

The World Heritage Committee will consider the draft recommendation in September.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took the draft UNESCO decision as a vote of confidence in his center-left Labor Party government that was elected last year.

“This confirms my government is working hard to protect the reef, is acting on climate change and that the rest of the world has taken notice,” Albanese told reporters.

Albanese’s government and the previous conservative government had lobbied against UNESCO downgrading the World Heritage status given to the reef in 1981. There are fears that a World Heritage in-danger listing would damage a tourism industry that revolves around the reef and employs more than 64,000 people.

The Labor government was elected in May last year, two months after a 10-day UN fact-finding mission that visited the reef.

The new government argued that UNESCO’s criticisms of government inaction were outdated.

The new government has committed Australia to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below the 2005 level by 2030.

The previous government only committed to a reduction of 26% to 28% by the end of the decade.

Marine ecologist Lissa Schindler said the UNESCO report found that Australia needed to do more to address climate change and water quality threats to the reef, including more ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

“I think that they’ve started off and done a really good job and there’s more to do,” Schindler told Australian Broadcasting Corp. of the government’s performance.

Global warming is the greatest threat to coral reefs around the world. Heat stress causes coral to bleach and bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016, 2017 and 2020 damaged two-thirds of its coral.

The latest UNESCO report noted data submitted by Australia in September last year showed the highest level of hard coral cover in the northern and central regions of the reef since monitoring began 36 years ago.

It also noted the government had canceled the previous government’s plans to build two major dams in Queensland state that would have affected the reef’s water quality.

In February, Australia for the first time rejected a coal mining application based on environmental law, with the new government citing the open-pit mine’s potential harm to the nearby Great Barrier Reef.

In July 2021, the previous government garnered enough international support to defer an attempt by UNESCO to list the reef as in-danger.

The Great Barrier Reef accounts for around 10% of the world’s coral reef ecosystems. The network of more than 2,500 reefs covers 348,000 square kilometers (134,000 square miles).

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Air Pollution to Rise over Europe in Coming Days

This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)
This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)
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Air Pollution to Rise over Europe in Coming Days

This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)
This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)

Air quality is expected to deteriorate across parts of Europe in the coming days, driven by an increase in microscopic polluting particles, the EU's earth observation program said on Thursday.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) forecast a spike in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and Ireland, among other countries in the region.

Spring is when farmers spread fertilizer, releasing ammonia emissions that react with nitrogen oxides from sources like traffic to form tiny floating aerosols.

This degrades air quality, a situation made worse by colder weather, warmer afternoons and little wind, conditions that mean that instead of dispersing, these fine particles stay close to the ground.

Expected rises in airborne pollen from birch and alder trees is tipped to make matters worse, CAMS said in a briefing note on the developing situation.

"Whilst this situation is not unusual in spring, it is notable and can be intensified by stable and mild meteorological conditions and atmospheric inversions," said CAMS director Laurence Rouil in a statement.

Other contributors to background pollution include the burning of fossil fuels, CAMS said, particularly across parts of eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Long-term exposure to fine airborne particulate matter causes cardiovascular and respiratory disease, cancers and other major health problems.

Air pollution is estimated to cause millions of deaths worldwide every year and a burden of disease on par with smoking and unhealthy diets, the World Health Organization says.

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AlUla Ready for Eid Al-Fitr with Three Days of Cultural and Festive Events

Photo by SPA
Photo by SPA
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AlUla Ready for Eid Al-Fitr with Three Days of Cultural and Festive Events

Photo by SPA
Photo by SPA

The Royal Commission for AlUla has finalized preparations for a three-day Eid Al-Fitr celebration, featuring a comprehensive range of services and events across the governorate’s key heritage and leisure sites, SPA reported.

Dedicated areas for Eid prayers are also fully prepared to welcome residents and visitors, ensuring a festive environment that reflects the region's cultural traditions and enhances the quality of life during the holiday.

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More Than 150,000 Uncounted COVID-19 Deaths Occurred Early in the Pandemic, Study Finds

People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)
People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)
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More Than 150,000 Uncounted COVID-19 Deaths Occurred Early in the Pandemic, Study Finds

People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)
People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)

The COVID-19 pandemic's early death toll was much higher than the official US count, according to a new study that spotlights dramatic disparities in the uncounted deaths.

About 840,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported on death certificates in 2020 and 2021. But a group of researchers — using a form of artificial intelligence — estimate that as many as 155,000 unrecognized additional deaths likely occurred in that time outside of hospitals. That would mean about 16% of COVID-19 deaths went uncounted in those years.

The overall findings, published Wednesday by the journal Science Advances, were close to estimates from other studies of pandemic deaths during that time. But the authors of the new study tried to determine exactly which deaths were more likely to be missing from the official tallies.

The answer: The undiagnosed dead were more likely to be Hispanic people and other people of color, who had died in the first few months of the pandemic, and who had been in certain states in the South and Southwest — including Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

Six years after the coronavirus swept through the US, barriers remain for many of the same people, said Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher not involved in the study.

“People on the margins continue to die at disproportionate rates because they can’t access care,” he said in an email.

Access to care wasn't the only challenge

While hospital patients were routinely tested for COVID-19, many who grew sick and died outside of hospitals were not tested — often because at-home testing was not readily available early in the pandemic, said one of the study's authors, the University of Minnesota's Elizabeth Wrigley-Field.

In some parts of the country, death investigations are handled by elected coroners who don't necessarily have the specialized training that medical examiners do. Some research has suggested partisan opinions could affect whether a sick person or their family members sought COVID-19 testing, and whether coroners pursued postmortem coronavirus testing. Indeed, some coroners said families had pressed them not to list COVID-19 as a cause of death.

“Our antiquated death investigation system is one key reason why we fell short of accurate counts, particularly outside of big metropolitan areas,” said Andrew Stokes of Boston University, the senior author on the paper.

Death counts were swept up in COVID politics

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data count more than 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic erupted in early 2020. More than two-thirds of those reported deaths occurred in 2020 and 2021.

The count has long been debated, as false claims on social media said the number of COVID-19 deaths was inflated. Adding to the rancor was President Donald Trump, who in August 2020 retweeted a post claiming only 6% of reported deaths were actually from COVID-19 — a post Twitter later removed.

To be sure, there were other kinds of pandemic deaths. For example, uninfected people died from other medical conditions because they could not get care at hospitals overloaded with COVID-19 patients. People with drug addictions died of overdoses as a result of social isolation and losing access to treatment. Other studies that have estimated the actual number of pandemic deaths have taken those deaths into account.

But Stokes and his collaborators wanted to focus on the deaths of people infected by the coronavirus. They used machine learning to sift through the death certificates of infected patients who died in hospitals and then used patterns observed in those records to evaluate death certificates of people who died outside hospitals and whose deaths were attributed to things like pneumonia or diabetes.

Scientists' understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of machine learning-reliant research is still evolving, but Woolf called this team's use of it “intriguing.”