Francis Tony is buried on an island that is much smaller than before. The sea breaks on a shoreline that is now less than five meters away from his simple gravesite (墓地) on Toruar Island in the Solomon Sea. But his son Christopher says the family have no plans to move Tony’s bones to a new gravesite. “My father will be like the captain of the Titanic. When Toruar Island goes down, he will go down with it,” he says.

Toruar lies in the Saposa Islands group, south of Bougainville, in the east of Papua New Guinea. Paramount chief John Wesley points at a grassy area in front of the school building, explaining that during king tides, the entire field is covered in water. “Last time, the boats from town drove all the way in and were spinning around on top of the school field,” he says.

In addition to being major chief, Wesley is a civil engineer. He has been trying his best to get the residents involved in small projects around the island, such as building a seawall from old 10kg rice bags filled with dead coral and shells to protect the land from rising waters. He has also put together proposals (提案) to get support from national and international bodies in an effort to get land protection measurements carried out.

The most obvious impacts of rising sea levels are coastal erosion (侵蚀)and flooding of low-lying land. But people are affected long before their islands become buried underwater. Saltwater leaks into groundwater, making it unfit for household use and leaving residents dependent on rainwater for drinking, and meaning they cannot grow crops.

“Before we could plant bananas, and there were some coconut trees and some breadfruit,” says Bobby Soma, born on Toruar in 1962. “We even had mangoes. But now, we can’t plant anything here because the soil is no longer rich. It is just sand.”

From the loss of wildlife to rising sea levels, we’re all well aware of the problems that climate change could cause.

But while it may seem like such issues won’t affect most of us directly, it looks like future generations could grow up without something that many of us now take for granted: chocolate.

According to an essay published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, changes to the climate in the regions that produce cacao--the plant from which chocolate is produced--may mean that it will soon become extinct.

Most of the world’s cacao grows in countries close to the equator (赤道), with over half of it growing in the African nations of Ghana and Ivory Coast. It’s predicted that by 2050, climate change will have accelerated the rate at which temperatures in these countries rise, making it extremely difficult for cacao to grow there.

The problem doesn’t lie in increased heat, however, but in lower humidity(湿度), as it’s believed that rainfall will stay at the same level if the temperature rises.

“In other words, as higher temperatures squeeze more water out of soil and plants, it’s unlikely that rainfall will increase enough to offset the moisture (水分) loss, “ Michon Scott, the essay’s author, wrote.

To help fight this problem, researchers from Berkeley University in the US are working on changing the DNA of cacao plants to allow them to survive in dryer conditions by using gene editing technology, according to US News. In the meantime, US company Mars, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of chocolate products, announced in January that it would spend $1 billion to help reduce the effects of climate change.

“This is a world issue, and it requires everyone to work together,” Mars spokesperson Barry Parkin told Business Insider.

The message here is that if we all do our part, we may be able to prevent some of the worst impacts of climate change. Or if we’re unlucky, chocolate will become a thing of the past.

An ancient chemical process enabled Earth to become a fertile place packed with life. Now researchers are imitating this process in an attempt to slow global warming. Every plant, animal, and person owes their life to a series of chemical reactions: photosynthesis, which turns water and carbon dioxide into food using sunlight. As benefit receivers of photosynthesis, humans depend on plants in a sort of carbon seesaw (跷跷板). Plants take in CO₂ and release O₂. We do the opposite, taking in O₂ and releasing CO₂.

This seesaw is part of the much broader carbon cycle that has affected the radiation balance of our planet. Cutting down plenty of forests and the burning of carbon-based fossil (化石) fuels cause the levels of CO₂, a major greenhouse gas, to rise. And plants on Earth along with other natural parts of the carbon cycle can’t restore the balance on their own.

But what if we could copy what plants do to seize some of that extra CO₂ to make fuels constantly, instead of relying so heavily on fossilized carbon?“ Artificial photosynthesis is a really attractive approach,” says Jillian Dempsey, a chemist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “You’re able to store the energy of the sun in the bonds of molecules (分子).”

A hydrogen device with 12.6% efficiency that Agbo recently built was less than one inch across. For artificial photosynthesis to become practical, it needs to produce enough fuels to compete with the world’s existing energy supply of relatively inexpensive and abundant fossil fuels. It will take a lot of time and money before artificial photosynthesis can compete with fossil fuels. But the needed expenses won’t come close to the social cost of climate change. A recent survey of more than 2,000 economists projected the economic damages from climate change will reach $1.7 trillion per year by 2025 and roughly $30 trillion per year by 2075. Artificial photosynthesis could inch us back toward a better balance on the planet’s carbon seesaw.