Earth's Smells Are Disappearing Because of Climate Change, and It's a Vast Cultural Loss

A triple threat of pollution, extinction and warming temperatures is altering the way the planet smells. Scientists are only beginning to understand the stakes for humans



More than 95 percent of the world’s bergamot oil production is concentrated in Southern Italy’s Calabria region. But harsh conditions driven by climate change threaten that supply.

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Serena Jampel

April 8, 2026 8:57 a.m.

Take a whiff of the air—chances are you’re smelling something this very moment. The human nose can detect more than one trillion scents. If this article were scratch-and-sniff, I’d be able to conjure the smell of old-growth forest and the ocean at daybreak, desert creosote after a rainfall or maybe even the aroma of a rosebush growing on an urban balcony.

But as a matter of medium, I can’t bring those scents to life on the page—and that’s a pity, as scientists say many odors are disappearing from the Earth. A triple threat of pollution, biodiversity loss and warming temperatures is changing the way the planet smells. Like endangered species, some scents might soon become extinct, and scientists are only beginning to understand the stakes for humans.

The loss of certain odors may cause irreparable damage to an important element of intangible human heritage. “Thinking about smell more holistically, thinking about the objects, the places, the stories and the people associated with certain smells, helps us articulate our history as human beings,” says Cecilia Bembibre, a scent preservation researcher at Odeuropa and at University College London. Without these scents, she adds, “we lose information, we lose meaning, we lose stories.”

‘Blinded by vision’
Smells are all around us, inseparable from the air we breathe and the spaces we inhabit. What we know as a scent is a collection of natural or man-made airborne chemicals released from objects as they vaporize in heat or slowly decay.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/earths-smells-are-disappearing-because-of-climate-change-and-its-a-vast-cultural-loss-180988496/