Along some 70 miles of Southern California coastline, usually curious and playful sea lions are attacking humans in the water.
The animals are being poisoned by the ocean they live in, experts say, citing reports of sick sea lions at unprecedented levels. And many are dying.
Pheobe Beltran, a 15-year-old girl in Long Beach, was swimming on March 30, when a sea lion attacked her right arm.
"I was just so scared, so shocked, but I still felt the immense pain on my arms, like, over and over again," Beltran, who was finishing up a 1,000-yard swim during tryouts to become a junior lifeguard, told CNN affiliate KCAL.
Up the coast in Ventura County on March 21, a surfer near Oxnard, was bitten by a sea lion in open water. The attack left him "shaken" to his core, he said.
The cause is less demonic and more likely domoic acid toxicosis caused by toxic algal bloom, often referred to as red tide, experts say.
"The sea lions are coming in almost comatose by the time they're stranding. Something is happening in this particular bloom that seems worse on multiple levels," John Warner, CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center in Los Angeles, told CNN.
"But volume-wise, it's definitely the worst we've ever seen."
📸: Mario Tama/Getty Images
The sustainable construction agenda is shifting from headline innovation to measurable delivery across buildings, infrastructure and finance. The World Green Building Council’s Advancing Net Zero work, set against IRENA’s warning that electrification and renewables remain too slow, reinforces the need for net zero carbon buildings backed by cleaner grids, heat electrification and stable policy.
Certification alone will not deliver net zero whole life carbon. The sector needs whole life carbon assessment, lifecycle assessment and life cycle thinking in construction to guide sustainable building design, low carbon design and credible decarbonising the built environment.
The UK debate over the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is therefore material to environmental sustainability in construction. Any reduction in support for heat pumps would slow one of the clearest routes to cutting operational emissions in existing homes. Energy-efficient buildings require long-term policy certainty, robust life cycle cost analysis and practical sustainable building practices, not fragmented incentives. Green construction must be judged by building lifecycle performance, carbon footprint reduction and the carbon footprint of construction, including embodied carbon, embodied carbon in materials and the specification of low embodied carbon materials.
Climate adaptation is now becoming core construction policy. A £1.6m programme to install flood-resilience measures in 100 East Midlands homes after Storms Babet and Henk shows resilience retrofit moving into mainstream housing delivery. The River Trent restoration analysis, indicating £10bn in economic gains and more than £7 of benefit for every £1 invested, strengthens the case for green infrastructure, sustainable urban development and nature-based investment as serious economic strategy.
Future growth in construction will need to align with circular economy principles, circular economy in construction, resource efficiency in construction and circular construction strategies. Low carbon construction materials, renewable building materials, green building materials, green building products and environmental product declarations (EPDs) will become central to sustainable material specification and eco-design for buildings. New building demand that ignores flood risk, heat demand, end-of-life reuse in construction and the wider environmental impact of construction risks creating stranded assets. Sustainable architecture, eco-friendly construction and low-impact construction are entering a stricter phase, where BREEAM, BREEAM v7 and whole life carbon performance will matter as much as planning consent, capital cost and short-term market recovery.
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