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

Serena Jampel

April 8, 2026

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 artificial airborne chemicals released from objects as they vaporize in heat or slowly decay.

Humans smell by inhaling these chemical components through our noses. Mucus dissolves the molecules and binds them to olfactory receptors on hair-like strands inside the nasal cavity. The receptors send neurological signals that our brain interprets as smell. In this way, “The olfactory system is the only part of the brain that actually is in direct contact with the outside world,” says Lucia Jacobs, a psychologist specializing in smell at the University of California, Berkeley.

Smell is deeply connected to memory because of how closely situated odor signals are to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, linked to memory. Odor-based memories can be nearly instantaneous, conjuring past experiences before the conscious mind registers the scent. Familiar smells can evoke a powerful nostalgia that enhances self-esteem, social connectedness and the feeling that one’s life has deeper meaning. Research has shown that exposure to evocative scents even has beneficial physiological effects.

But despite its prevalence in our lives, smell is often overlooked and undervalued. “We’re embedded in these invisible olfactory environments that we tend, at least in the Western world, to not think about very much,” says Gregory Bratman, a researcher in the Environment and Well-Being Lab at the University of Washington.

In an increasingly audio/visual world—made even more so by our reliance on screens and disconnection from the outdoors—smell may not often be top of mind. A 2022 study found that over a quarter of college students surveyed would rather give up their sense of smell than their phone. So, as climate change and biodiversity loss threaten natural scents, thereby threatening both health and heritage, many people may not even notice. “Humans are blinded by vision,” says Jacobs.

Climate change is altering smell

Whether or not we pay attention to the world’s “scentscape,” heat and pollution are causing it to shift. As temperatures rise, man-made substances release more scent molecules, and biodiversity loss due to climate change threatens the plants that scent the environment.

“If you go to a forest, you have a given environment and temperature. If that temperature goes a little bit high, you change the profile of the chemical components in the air,” since temperature can affect the amount of smell-carrying gas particles released from substances, explains Idelfonso Nogueira, a chemical engineer who leads the SCENTinel Project to preserve olfactory landscapes. “And therefore, you change the perception of how the forest smells.”

That effect extends beyond forests. Snow—already threatened by a warming climate—absorbs different chemicals from the atmosphere as temperatures rise, which alters its cold-clean scent. Warmer conditions can intensify odors, leading the snow to grow more pungent and potentially accumulate more pollutants.

Human-designed structures like asphalt roads and homes can off-gas more volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde and benzene in the heat. “If the temperature is higher and the molecules move faster, you’re more likely to smell things from materials,” says Jieling Xiao, a researcher in architecture and sensory environments at Birmingham City University in England. Cooking fumes from restaurants and rotting trash contribute disruptive smells that can affect wildlife, she adds.

Climate change is also hastening the loss of biodiversity, threatening to erase certain smells entirely. When plants disappear, their scents become more difficult to produce. Sandalwood, vanilla, bergamot, lavender and hundreds of thousands of other plants are threatened by changing environments.

Frankincense, the spicy-smelling tree resin featured in religious ceremonies for millennia, is also disappearing from the wild. Forest fragmentation, overharvesting and climate change all pose a threat to the Boswellia trees that produce the resin. The ancient plants demonstrate how some scents are linked to cultural heritage—frankincense is mentioned in the Bible as a gift to the baby Jesus. “It’s not just a smell, it’s 3,000 years of history that we lose,” says Bembibre of Odeuropa.

Likewise, Nogueira’s team at SCENTinel studied Yoruba scent traditions among practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions. His team found that smell is particularly important in rituals like Lavagem do Bonfim, a washing ceremony involving perfumed flowers and water. This ritual and others took root in Brazil as enslaved people and their descendants carried on ancestral African traditions despite severe oppression. “The element that survived this very sad history was specifically smell,” Nogueira says, “and now these smells are endangered by climate change because [communities] are not going to have access to the ingredients to produce that last remnant of cultural expression.”

A 2022 study reported that Indigenous communities in Peru noticed a change in the smell of the Amazon River due to industrial pollution and illegal resource extraction. Over generations, communities became desensitized to increasingly putrid river stenches, a sign of broader ecosystem degradation. At the same time, in some Amazonian belief systems, declining water quality and its unpleasant odors will lead to the dispersal of the river’s spiritual entities. The damage to the scentscape could result in harm to both health and spiritual practice.

“Even though we have other assets endangered by climate change, like food access, there is also an element of cultural identity, cultural survival, history,” Nogueira says. “If we don’t look at it, we lose all the richness behind it.”

‘Go out and smell woods’

Scientists are only beginning to understand how the loss of smell affects human well-being. Research suggests that anthropogenic activity that damages or destroys natural scent environments is a detriment to human health and happiness. On top of that, it could reduce a person’s capacity to smell at all.

“Increased pollution, increased ozone, et cetera, actually is causing damage to the peripheral olfactory system and our ability to smell,” says Rachel Herz, a cognitive neuroscientist with a focus on smell. Studies show that people living in highly polluted areas have a reduced ability to discern smells, and the least well-off urban areas tend to have the worst air pollution. Who gets to smell what and to what effect, Herz explains, is another manifestation of urban inequity.

A world without smells would be a more depressing place—literally. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, loss of smell—also known as anosmia—has been growing in prominence. In a survey of 322 people who lost their sense of smell and/or taste from Covid, 56 percent reported a decline in overall quality of life and 43 percent reported depression linked to that sensory loss.

Conversely, the benefits of smell—particularly natural smells—are broad-reaching. A recent pilot study found a promising link between sniffing the aromas of nature and improved well-being. The Japanese traditional practice of Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, has long demonstrated an understanding of the physical and medicinal benefits of spending time among natural smells. Substances called phytoncides, released from trees and inhaled by humans through the nose, may decrease stress, boost immune function and enhance relaxation.

Scientists working on olfaction and well-being note that common “wellness” trends often miss the potential health benefits of smell. “If you read blogs, life hacking, a lot of people are talking about walking in nature, touching grass. What we’re saying is, don’t just touch it, smell it,” says Jacobs. “Go out and smell woods.”

Beyond the individual, Nogueira’s work with SCENTinel has demonstrated that connecting with ancestral and traditional smells is an important way of sustaining community and forming collective identity. Scent has also been linked to family cohesion and belonging.

Save our smells

Some of climate change’s effects on smells are likely irrevocable. And because scientific research is trailing behind the rate of change, “We don’t know what we’re losing,” Jacobs says. She and some of her collaborators have been discussing hosting a “festival of lost odors” to bring together artists, scientists and Indigenous communities to raise a stink about the importance of smells.

Beyond academia, the connection between climate change and smells is not going unnoticed. O Boticário, a Brazilian perfume brand, released a line of perfumes that capture the scents of endangered ecosystems. Called Extinto, the collection includes re-engineered olfactory renderings of the now-polluted Guanabara Bay of Rio de Janeiro, plastic-laden mangrove forests in India and critically threatened Malagasy vanilla. Not for commercial sale, the perfumes were designed as a warning, representing the scents of natural places before they were polluted by human activity.

When scents are lost or inaccessible, Bembibre’s team at UCL works with perfumers and chemists to reconstruct them—recently, they reproduced the smell of potpourri from the 1750s. There is historical value to the preservation of smells. “We are immersed in this smelly environment, and we are losing them,” she says. “The way we interact with [smells] says a lot about our way of life and who we are and how we live.”

With its connection to memory and emotion, smell might be able to viscerally convey the urgency of addressing climate change, experts say. At SCENTinel, Nogueira and his colleagues are engineering artificial intelligence models that can chemically re-create the smells of the past and generate the projected scentscape of the future. The models predict the molecular makeup of certain environments, creating “recipes” for smells that can then be created in the lab. Nogueira hopes that sharing these efforts will induce emotional connections that raise awareness about the world’s diminishing smells, bring about policy changes and “drive our society toward a constructive future instead of destructive future.”

“If we could represent, for example, a Nordic forest smell or the Arctic smell now or in the past, people could perceive the difference in how climate change affects the smellscape in that specific area. I think that can be very impactful,” he says. While images of the ongoing climate crisis can be effective, Nogueira explains, “smell is playing with our emotions more directly.”