Vibrio bacteria are invasive pathogens that thrive in brackish and warmer water. They have been recorded in areas that used to be too cold for their taste, including the northeastern coast of the United States. Vibrio causes an infection called vibriosis, whose symptoms commonly include diarrhea, vomiting and fever. But an aggressive “flesh-eating strain” can be deadly, causing severe infections within days when coming into contact with open wounds.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 3,743 cases of vibriosis were reported in 2024, including 222 cases of the particularly dangerous Vibrio vulnificus. Atlantic Coast states accounted for the largest share of infections. The CDC cautions that these figures likely underestimate the true toll because many infections are never diagnosed or reported. Not to mention that these numbers are only growing as the warming of oceans continues.

Scientists have long warned about the numerous consequences of warming oceans. Water has a remarkable capacity to absorb heat, but that buffering effect comes at a cost.

According to NASA, about 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases over the past century has accumulated in the ocean, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of climate change.

Vibrio bacteria are particularly sensitive to these changing conditions. Naturally found in coastal waters around the world, they multiply rapidly as temperatures rise and salinity levels shift. Researchers have increasingly documented the appearance of Vibrio bacteria in places once considered inhospitable. In a landmark 2012 study published in Nature Climate Change, scientists linked unusually warm conditions in the Baltic Sea to the emergence of Vibrio infections at higher latitudes and warned that continued warming could expand the pathogen’s range even further.

A growing body of research suggests Vibrio may serve as a blueprint for understanding how climate change can reshape the spread of infectious diseases more broadly. A 2024 review in PLOS Pathogens argues that the Vibrio bacteria can be used as a model organism to illustrate the complex ways in which environmental change, ocean warming, pathogens and diseases, as well as human health more broadly, intersect.

The oceans’ ability to absorb humanity’s excess carbon and heat has slowed the pace of atmospheric warming. Yet the same process is transforming marine environments in ways that can have immediate consequences for human health. The appearance of Vibrio bacteria in new waters raises difficult questions for health authorities: how to recognize emerging threats early, communicate risk without causing alarm and protect populations that may no longer be as insulated from these infections as they once were.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights. Alexandre Paquet is a Toronto-based researcher writing about video games and culture industries.

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But climate change has turned this transient phenomenon into a moving target. Tokyo’s sakura peak this year was around March 19, which is up to a week earlier than usual. Early arrivals between 2021 and 2023 in Kyoto smashed 1,200-year-old records. The main culprit is rising temperatures, but erratic winters may also threaten a tree’s ability to bloom at all. Research suggests that under a medium emissions scenario, peak bloom may move up another week by 2100.

“To me, the cherry blossom record really captures how extreme these changes are,” Elizabeth Wolkovich, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who studies plant communities and climate change, told National Geographic.

The study of recurring biological events such as flowering and leaf emergence, known as phenology, has arguably become one of the most powerful tools for understanding climate change. Studies by Wolkovich show that rising temperatures are advancing spring biological events across the globe, with plant phenology shifting by roughly four to six days for every degree Celsius of warming. Her research has also found that experimental studies often underestimate how rapidly plants respond to warming compared with long-term observational records.

For more than 1,200 years, Kyoto’s cherry blossoms have been documented in imperial court diaries, temple records, aristocratic journals and historical chronicles, creating one of the world’s longest continuous phenological datasets. Yasuyuki Aono and Shizuka Saito, two researchers affiliated with Osaka Metropolitan University and Fujicco Co. Ltd., have reconstructed temperatures of medieval Kyoto by “gap-filling” cherry blossom records beginning in 812 CE. Their research suggests that peak bloom dates remained relatively stable around mid-April throughout the medieval period, making the recent string of record-breaking early blooms especially striking against a millennium of historical precedent.

This shift is changing how people experience one of Japan’s most important seasonal traditions. Hanami, the centuries-old practice of gathering under blooming cherry trees, is traditionally timed around the short window of peak cherry blossom, often coordinated through workplace outings, school calendars and travel itineraries. As flowering now arrives earlier and with greater variability, these social rhythms are increasingly strained. Visitors and locals alike rely on increasingly precise forecasts, yet even small temperature fluctuations can shift peak bloom by days, compressing or displacing long-planned gatherings. What emerges is a subtle reordering of seasonal life: a cultural calendar once anchored in predictable natural cycles is now being recalibrated in real time to a climate that is less stable, making hanami not only a ritual of appreciation, but also one of adaptation.

If current warming trends continue, the timing of cherry blossoms may keep shifting beyond familiar seasonal boundaries, leaving a tradition once anchored in predictability to unfold within an increasingly uncertain climate future.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights. Alexandre Paquet is a Toronto-based researcher writing about video games and culture industries.

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Research shows that the global cloud-gaming user base reached more than 395 million in 2024, with forecasts projecting this number to creep toward 500 million by 2027.

Cloud gaming now represents around 38% of the global online video game market. According to the latest Cloud Gaming Report, 51% of 22,665 players surveyed used cloud gaming daily in 2025, and more than 75% at least weekly.

The dematerialization of video games is raising other questions around how to quantify carbon footprints, and what to do about it. From arcade cabinets to physical cartridge to digital downloads and now cloud gaming, video games are progressively shedding their physicality and relocating into data centres. And while this process of detaching from hardware does mean fewer plastic cartridges, it still doesn’t do away with the industry’s environmental impact.

Climate technology company Greenly reported last October that the electricity usage for consoles in the United States totalled 3.9 terawatt-hours in 2025, resulting in 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. This figure doesn’t include the electricity consumption of televisions, which are often used for gaming. The report further quantifies the emissions created as a result of one hour of cloud-based gaming, totalling 0.44 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent.

These numbers are in line with previous findings. A 2023 report by Playing for the Planet, an alliance supporting the video game industry to take action on the environment, found that the total carbon impact per hour of gameplay was roughly 50 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent across different forms of play. Among these options, cloud-gaming devices (such as Logitech G Cloud, Nvidia Shield TV, PS TV, etc.) produced the fewest emissions, while cloud gaming on a console or PC (such as desktop computer, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, etc.) connected to a TV produced the most.

Reducing emissions from video games

A big challenge when determining the carbon footprint of the video game industry is the lack of proper reporting by companies and the need to piece estimated data from many different places. Matt Anderson, decarbonization lead at Playing for the Planet, emphasizes that “the simplest way to reduce emissions is to have renewable electricity.” When considering the life cycle of video games, electricity consumption is key at every step, from development, production, to that act of playing the games.

Findings from an extensive 2019 research project by Joshua Aslan, now senior manager of environment and climate strategy at Sony Interactive Entertainment, corroborates these numbers. The results showed that cloud gaming produced more carbon emissions than downloading games in 2019. However, using a dedicated cloud-gaming device created fewer emissions per hour of gameplay than playing disc-based games on a console.

But these numbers tell only part of the story, says Michael Iantorno, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo. The whole life cycle of games is much more difficult to quantify, he says. Players might download the same game across different devices, while physical games might change hands multiple times, allowing many different people to play the same game across decades. “It’s very hard to quantify, because we can’t just do a one-to-one comparison.”

“The lion’s share of [the energy consumption] is happening somewhere else,” says artist Alex Custodio, a researcher at Concordia University. “It’s completely invisible to the user.” Whether it is the game makers using high-end computers to run energy-intensive programs like Unity, or the player who downloads a 100-gigabyte game over high-speed internet, the environmental cost is obfuscated.

A huge infrastructure problem

But the difficulty of clarifying gaming’s impact hasn’t stopped indie game makers in particular, as well as fans and enthusiasts of games, from engaging in a variety of practices and experiments that support green gaming: climate-sensitive mods (or user-created modifications to a game’s content) for existing games, solar-powered gaming devices, and perma-computing focused on long-lasting, repairable and sustainable digital systems, to name a few.

Initiatives like Playing for the Planet bring together small and large studios under an umbrella, providing working groups to develop a climate strategy, tools that help developers measure the carbon footprint of their games from the developmental stages to the use phase. “There’s just so much changing now with digital technology,” Anderson says, “so we really need to think about future scenarios and trajectories to make sure we don’t get caught off guard.”

Still, Custodio is skeptical of initiatives that make vague promises or put the responsibility on players. “Those are important, those need to exist, but they need to exist with a note saying, hey, this is a huge infrastructural problem.” The change cannot be implemented simply on the consumer’s end; it must transform how video game companies operate, from the manufacturing of the hardware to the design of the software they produce throughout the whole life cycle of video games.

Alexandre Paquet is a Toronto-based researcher writing about video games and culture industries.

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