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24 September | New York

A strategy discussion at New York Climate Week 2026, bringing together frontline actors fighting data centers in communities and the policy advocates fighting for guardrails to prevent their economic, social, and climate harms. In this time of relentless attacks on people and planet, our strength is our aligned action. Just as the carbon bubble analysis equipped a generation of climate activists, bringing together community, economic, and political AI expertise can strengthen the fight on the ground.

If interested in attending, please contact events@carbontracker.org

SPEAKERS & TOPICS

• The AI bubble could burst — and take the economy with it
  • Matthew Scherer, Open Markets Institute
• Federal principles for data centers and AI governance
  • Clara Vondrich and J.B. Branch, Public Citizen
• The Investor Dilemma
  • Danielle Fugere, As You Sow
• How communities are stopping data centers
  • Abre’ Conner, NAACP
• Private equity financing of data centers
  • Ashlee Thomas, Private Equity Stakeholder Project
• Big Tech: now Big Oil’s #1 Accomplice
  • Holly Alpine, Embedded Emissions
• Data Centers and Democracy
  • Saul Levin, Hum podcast

The post NYCW 2026: AI Data Center Roundtable appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

24 September | New York

A breakfast strategy session at New York Climate Week 2026, aligning Amazon, Congo Basin and Coral Triangle strategies ahead of COP31. The aim: moving Fossil Free Zones from community-led demands into formalised, low-cost policy tools that governments can integrate into national energy transition and deforestation roadmaps.

PROGRAMME & SPEAKERS

If interested in attending, please contact events@carbontracker.org

The post NYCW 2026: Fossil Free Zones Breakfast appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

24 September | New York

What can we celebrate? What can we challenge?

A Laudato Si’ and Carbon Tracker panel at Climate Week NYC 2026. With overshoot of 1.5°C now called unavoidable and a stable climate recognised as a legal obligation, we ask what the Season of Creation gives us to celebrate, what it demands we challenge, and whether honest realism or optimism better serves the fight ahead.

If interested in attending, please contact events@carbontracker.org

THEMES FOR DISCUSSION

1. Limiting overshoot
   • UNEP’s September 2026 report: at least 1.8°C even in the most optimistic future. “There are no good
     outcomes above 1.5°C.”
2. A stable climate as a human right
   • The ICJ advisory opinion of July 2025, endorsed by the UN General Assembly 141–8 in May 2026,
     with the COP31 host among the abstentions.
3. A decade of COPs without “fossil fuels”
   • From Paris to COP30, outcomes that consistently omitted the phrase, and the Santa Marta coalition of
     the willing formed in response.
4. The growing cost of delay
   • Over 35,000 excess deaths across Europe in the summer 2026 heatwaves; seven of nine planetary
     boundaries already exceeded.
5. Optimism or realism?
   • “What if we stop pretending?” against communities that rise to the occasion, and Laudato Si’s reminder
     that the cry of the Earth is the cry of the poor.

SPEAKERS

 

The post NYCW 2026: Season of Creation appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

Registered nurses at Orange County Global Medical Center in Santa Ana, Calif. voted overwhelmingly in favor of ratifying their inclusion into the existing union contract covering KPC Health registered nurses represented by California Nurses Association. This first contract for Orange County Global nurses secures them important new protections to improve patient safety and nurse retention.

A strategic supply agreement with Waymo and rising EV adoption rates will expand the company’s access to older batteries still fit for use in stationary storage, CEO Freeman Hall told Utility Dive.

While the challenges of building new power infrastructure are real, some of the obstacles that need to be overcome are self-limitations embedded in a deeply rooted mindset, writes Robb.

In a worst-case scenario, the modeled loss of load expectation is “over 100 times worse than PJM’s planning criterion,” indicating an expectation of “more than 13 days with loss of load events per year,” said the study commissioned by the Pennsylvania PUC.

EWG opposes rewrite of proposed ASTM standard that could still classify hazardous amphibole particles as non-asbestos Anthony Lacey September 15, 2026 Attached are EWG’s comments to ASTM International opposing a second proposed standard for classifying elongate amphibole particles. EWG remains concerned that the method’s binary classifications may obscure health-relevant particle characteristics, exclude particles counted by established methods and produce results inconsistent with existing asbestos-counting approaches. File Download Document astm-comments2.pdf Areas of Focus Asbestos Authors Tasha Stoiber, Ph.D. September 10, 2026

At the foot of Njeza Mountain in Zimbabwe’s Mutare district, newly discovered lithium deposits have turned a quiet, small-scale farming enclave into the next frontier of the country’s mineral rush.

But more than a year after residents learned of the project, it remains shrouded in secrecy and has become a source of constant anxiety for farmers living in villages surrounding the proposed mine.

“We don’t know much about this project,” says Kwadzanai Nicholas Mukundidza, a farmer in the area. “We were not consulted, and there is a lot of fear among farmers. These projects are linked to powerful people in [Zimbabwe’s ruling party] ZANU PF. We are afraid we might lose our land, our pastures, our rivers, and our water.”

Farmers were resettled in this part of the country in the early 1980s, during the first phase of Zimbabwe’s land reform program after independence from Britain.

The farmers have every reason to fear the new lithium mining project: Similar mining ventures elsewhere in the country have displaced communities from their lands, polluted water and air, and disrupted livelihoods.

Coveted Minerals, Poisoned Communities

As the world races to secure lithium for the clean energy transition, Zimbabwe has emerged as one of Africa’s largest suppliers, attracting billions of dollars in foreign investment. Chinese companies — many with close ties to Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ruthless regime — have acquired much of the country’s lithium sector.

Although President Mnangagwa promised sweeping sociopolitical and economic reforms after seizing power from long-time dictator Robert Mugabe in a 2017 military coup, civic space continues to shrink. Activists, journalists, and community and political leaders have faced intimidation and arrests when challenging powerful political or commercial interests.

In lithium-mining communities this climate of fear has profound environmental consequences.

In Zimbabwe’s Buhera district, for example, Sabi Star Mine’s lithium project has already upended the lives of many local people. James Mupfumi, director of the investigative NGO the Centre for Research and Development, says drinking water around the lithium mine has been contaminated by chemical disposal.

Mupfumi says Zimbabwe’s Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Environment, Climate and Wildlife carried out a fact-finding mission on July 12, when community-based organizations such as Buhera Residents Network Trust gave oral evidence, including testimonies from affected villagers on the dust and water pollution and resulting health problems.

“Latest information from Tagarira [in Buhera] community leaders indicates stomach-related challenges from drinking contaminated water. The Tagarira community is the worst affected,” he says.

He adds that at least 120 30-ton trucks use the dust road daily in the area to transport lithium from Sabi Star to Beira through either Beira or Durban ports. Six villages spread along the 30-kilometer (18-mile) dusty stretch from Tagarira to Gaza in Buhera are the worst affected.

A truck carrying lithium from Sabi Star Mine in Buhera, Zimbabwe- Photo: Leonard Mabasa

“These villages have five schools, and an average of 5 to 7 pupils visit the clinic every day seeking treatment for various illnesses caused by dust pollution,” Mupfumi says.

He says there have been very few efforts at dust suppression by the mining company to alleviate the suffering of communities.

“Villages in Tagarira and Mukwasi are also affected by dust from blasting and crushing, and as soon as the dust is cleaned, it soon settles again,” he says.

Official Threats

Buhera Residents Network Trust — an organization representing the interests of local people —presented oral evidence before the Parliament Portfolio Committee on Environment, Climate and Wildlife raising concerns over environmental pollution, water insecurity, worker injuries, community displacement and mining operations at Sabi Star Mine.

The Trust’s leader, Leonard Mabasa, told legislators that the community was not opposed to mining itself and acknowledged that Zimbabwe’s mining sector remained a cornerstone of the national economy, with lithium among the country’s most valuable mineral exports.

 

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But the residents want to ensure that mining is carried out responsibly and that affected communities receive adequate protection. However, after the presentation President Mnangagwa’s spokesperson George Charamba came out swinging, warning the residents to be “very careful” and not “wreck a good thing for a dime.”

Chengxin Lithium, the company that operates Sabi Star Mine, has maintained that it undertook extensive community engagement before developing the project and provided adequate water, electricity, and sanitation facilities. The company says it compensated villagers who suffered from the mine’s activities.

Charamba’s threatening X post prompted a consortium of Zimbabwe NGOs to issue a statement condemning the intimidation and publicly rallying behind the Buhera residents.

“Communities living alongside mining operations are not enemies of development. They are constitutional rights holders entitled to safe environments, meaningful participation in decisions affecting their lives, and access to effective remedies where harm has occurred. Responsible mining cannot exist without transparency, accountability and respect for human rights,” the NGOs said in the statement.

I asked Mabasa whether he still feels safe after his presentation to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee. He says Zimbabwe Parliamentary privileges — special rights and powers granted to lawmakers so they can do their jobs safely and independently — should protect him from any threats during and after the submissions before Portfolio Committee on Environment Climate and Wildlife, “[But] what happens after that usually becomes too personal and uncontrollable. Smear campaign can make you feel insecure. Certain actions are shrewdly done to psychologically wean you off from the struggle. Safety is delicate. Physical and digital security can be issues of great concern which need not to be breached.”

Community Rights

Mabasa says the community needs to be aware of their economic social cultural rights — which include housing, health, education, and fair work — so compensation on relocation is anchored on “Free Prior Informed Consent.”

“I also think that legal support ecosystem is key for communities to be able to understand the terms and conditions of voluminous documents produced during the … Environmental Social Impact Assessment,” he says. This legal requirement, previously known as an Environmental Impact Assessment, evaluates how major projects affect ecosystems, health, and communities before they start.

Donald Nyarota, communications and advocacy officer for the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG), a Zimbabwe-based NGO, says they have observed a degree of fear and reluctance among community members in lithium producing areas to speak openly about their concerns.

“These concerns include environmental pollution, loss of agricultural lands, loss of livelihoods, water and security, particularly displacement,” Nyarota says. “These are issues that communities are afraid to speak about because [they’re linked to] very powerful government officials. Sometimes they just say ‘government officials’ — they don’t even want to name them because of the fear that they could be victimized and conflict with these powerful interests associated with mining operations.”

At CNRG, Nyarota says, they’re addressing these issues through creating spaces where communities can raise their concerns collectively and safely under their “do no harm principle,” where they protect the identity and maintain anonymity of the communities.

Nyarota says they place a lot of emphasis on community-led evidence gathering, where communities send evidence anonymously through their safe and secure social networks.

A Just Transition

Mupfumi says Zimbabwe requires a just energy transition for its green minerals such as lithium.

“There is a need to secure the supply chain from corruption and criminality that are negatively impacting the rights of host communities. These negative impacts also pose a direct threat to climate action,” he says.

Political elites’ participation in the industry, like what is happening in Buhera, Mupfumi says, seeks to mask these violations and shield extraction from accountability.

“It is therefore important that global measures, such as supply-chain exclusion under clean energy laws, are applied to companies operating in Zimbabwe,” he says.

He adds that the processed lithium from these companies enters the global electric vehicle and green-energy battery supply chains, so markets and laws must prevent automotive companies from receiving green subsidies or selling vehicles where their raw materials are linked to human-rights abuses or toxic pollution.

“For communities to fully benefit from lithium resources, extraction must be linked to human rights protection, environmental accountability, transparent supply chains and meaningful community benefits, rather than allowing communities to bear the environmental and social costs of extraction while global markets benefit from the resource,” Mupfumi says.

He says Buhera demonstrates that communities must recognize lithium as a critical mineral whose extraction should contribute to transforming host communities in line with a just energy transition, rather than leaving them to bear the social and environmental costs.

“This makes community unity, transparency and accountability critical, particularly in securing fair benefits, protecting rights and ensuring responsible extraction. Communities must also recognize their vulnerability under Zimbabwe’s insecure land regime, where state power and corporate interests can weaken their bargaining position,” he says.

At the same time, communities should organize early and seek independent legal support on compensation and relocation, ensuring that displacement only occurs when livelihoods, living conditions and adequate compensation have been properly addressed.

“Community exchange visits, such as the one already facilitated by CRD, remain critical in enabling communities to share experiences, build solidarity and learn from each other’s struggles,” Mupfumi says.

“Ultimately,” says CNRG’s Nyarota, “the issue is not whether the communities support or oppose mining. It’s about whether mining takes place in a way that respects their rights, protects the environment, and ensures that they have meaningful voices in decision-making on issues that are affecting their lands and livelihoods.”

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Anthrax in Zimbabwe: Caused by Oppression, Worsened by Climate Change

The post How Zimbabwe’s Regime Is Fueling a Dirty Lithium Boom appeared first on The Revelator.

What humans have wrought is heavy. In a new study, researchers calculated the weight of more than 600 million buildings in cities across the world and came up with a total of 835 billion metric tons, or gigatonnes (Gt) [1]. That’s almost as much as the weight of all the world’s plants.

All of that weight—in steel, wood, glass, cement, stone, and other materials—means carbon emissions. “If rapidly urbanizing regions follow historical development pathways, this stock could grow by another 419 Gt by 2050,” says study team member Jinchao Song, a research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems.

Conventional life-cycle analyses and green building certification programs like LEED are built on the principle of material efficiency and less is more. But reducing the environmental impacts of buildings isn’t just about making them lighter, according to a second paper [2].

In that work, Fernanda Cruz Rios, a built environment scientist at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, argues that what matters is how resilient a building is to fires, earthquakes, storms, floods, and so on —especially in the current age of increasing climate disasters.

Consider two otherwise identical buildings: one built directly on the ground and one on a raised concrete platform. The concrete platform increases the carbon emissions involved in construction. But when a major flood comes, the building on the concrete platform stays high and dry, while the one on the ground is inundated requiring costly and time-consuming repairs.

When all the impacts of the flooding are added up—new materials, mold remediation, the need for the building’s occupants to decamp to an alternate location for months—the building on the concrete platform may well come out ahead.

“Once you account for what happens when a building actually gets hit by a disaster, designing it to stay functional can prove to be the sustainable choice, not a trade-off against it,” says Cruz Rios

 

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Existing life-cycle analyses sometimes account for the impact of the materials necessary for repairs. But when Cruz Rios analyzed 40 previously published life-cycle analyses focusing on flood, wind, heat, and seismic hazards she found that none of them captured all dimensions of building resilience.

“Almost no studies look at what happens during a disaster response (the emergency actions like evacuations, temporary fixes, and workarounds a building or community relies on while the event is unfolding),” says Cruz Rios. “Those actions clearly carry environmental costs, but they’re essentially invisible in the data.”

In the paper, Cruz Rios sketches out a new approach to life-cycle analysis that foregrounds resilience, making the benchmark of sustainability a building’s material use in relation to the function it delivers over its lifetime. Cruz Rios reports that her lab is now “working to gather the kind of data that could make this analysis fully usable in practice.”

At the same time, no building is an island. According to the first study, urban form—meaning the height, density, and uniformity of buildings across a city—makes a big difference in material use. Cities with a dense, uniform arrangement of low-rise buildings maximize per capita floor space per pound of building material.

“I was also surprised by how much urban form could influence future material demand,” Song says. Going forward, if rapidly growing cities in the Global South adopt the dense, low-rise arrangement they could require about 30% less material than if they were to adopt the least efficient urban form (a sparse arrangement of uniformly high-rise buildings).

The finding “suggests that early urban planning decisions can substantially shape a city’s long-term material needs,” says Song—underlining the need to consider building sustainability across multiple levels of space and time.

Sources:

[1] Song J. et al.  “Weighing 600 million buildings reveals global urban material inequality and efficiency paths.” Nature Cities 2026.

[2] Cruz Rios F. “Resilience in building life cycle assessment: a critical review and framework for time‐integrated functionality.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 2026.

Image: John Fleck/FEMA.

You know those memories of childhood that catch you decades later when you are doing something entirely different, thinking about something entirely different? For me, one that frequently finds me is waking to the call of the vegetable pushcart walla while visiting my grandmother’s flat in Karachi.

Aloo-ooo, Py-azzzz, Tamatarrrr, Baiṅgan. Sabzi! Sabzi! Sabzi!

(Potato, onion, tomato, eggplant. Vegetables! Vegetables! Vegetables!)

Warm summer morning air filling the room, the fan turning overhead. Waking next to my sister, the two of us insisting on sleeping in my grandmother’s beautiful salwars that were probably not ready to be turned into pajamas. The sounds of traffic humming from the dusty streets below.

I could not see him, but he was ever present as his voice crisscrossed the neighborhood announcing fresh vegetables. And he always called out the price. His call made clear that price was part of the enticement. A good deal was passing by.

That unseen vegetable pushcart was a pocket of possibility.

Each day, Dadu, my grandmother, would sit with Sherbano, who worked in her home, and methodically go over what would be cooked. Dish by dish, they discussed who would be eating, what ingredients were still needed, the cost of the meal in relation to the week’s budget, and what else had been cooked that week. Sometimes Sherbano would double-check what remained from Juma Bazar (the Friday farmers market) or from the supermarket, where shelf-stable foreign goods like canned cheese were available.

Sherbano and my grandmother discussed what to look for when purchasing each vegetable: its appearance, size, texture, freshness, and aroma. Let’s not buy it if it’s not fragrant. The potatoes should be this size. Always the freshest. We’ll only know how many curry leaves and chilli peppers we need once the cooking starts. The aroma should pop.

Planning the day’s meals was a priority. Dadu and Sherbano held these discussions with seriousness, and occasionally argument, as each brought her own knowledge and skill to food procurement and meal preparation. These conversations brought out the most serious side of my grandmother. At most other times, there was always an excuse for a little fun, let’s paint the town red!

Sherbano returned with the day’s purchases to my grandmother’s tiny kitchen. There were a few pots. She sat on a low woven stool and cut vegetables on a cutting board on the ground. With her knowledge, skill, and labor, she transformed whole food ingredients into meals that brought joy. Meals that were festive and nourishing. Meals I long for.

That kitchen in my grandmother’s home was another pocket of possibility.

The vegetable pushcart walla was one of many who started around 3:00 a.m., purchasing vegetables from the Sabzi Mandi before dispersing across neighborhoods. Without a storefront, they helped keep fresh vegetables within reach. Across generations and geographies, mobile vendors have carried fruits, vegetables, grains, and more toward people in baskets, bundles, and pushcarts.

Most of us do not experience the food system in its entirety; we experience it through food environments. Food environments are the living confluences where climate, biodiversity, agriculture, markets, policy, culture, economics, nutrition, and health come together in our daily lives. Collectively, these relationships shape food availability, affordability, convenience, promotion, quality, and sustainability.

The Sabzi Mandi, Juma Bazar, supermarket, and vegetable pushcarts were all part of the built food environment my grandmother accessed. Built food environments extend from traditional markets and mobile vendors to supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and digital marketplaces. People also obtain food directly from wild and cultivated food environments, from forests, rivers, and coastlines to farms, fields, and home gardens.

I have delighted in co-creating frameworks, tools, metrics, and surveys to understand diverse food environments. What we define and characterize determines what we see and measure, and what we measure determines what we can manage. If we only measure food available in markets, we miss extraordinary pockets of food diversity in wild and cultivated food environments and the knowledge and relationships that make them accessible.

Food can be available but unaffordable. It can be affordable but poor quality, culturally irrelevant, or undesirable. Diverse foods can persist in a landscape while the knowledge to recognize, harvest, prepare, and value them disappears.

Food environments are dynamic. We are living through a profound global food-environment transition, with growing availability of ultra-processed and ready-to-eat foods and more food consumed away from home. These shifts bring convenience while distancing us from food knowledge and agency once practiced in our kitchens.

A pocket of possibility can shrink. It can also be expanded.

My grandmother’s kitchen reminds me that access to fresh and affordable ingredients was only part of what made those nourishing meals possible. Dadu had support. She and Sherbano brought knowledge, skill, labor, and time to making those meals, discerning quality, working within a budget, minimizing waste, and adjusting ingredients until the aroma popped. Nourishment requires an enabling environment inside the home, too. Today, many of our kitchens have vacancies in time, labor, knowledge, skills, and support.

But we are not going back to our grandmothers’ kitchens, nor the labor arrangements that helped make them possible. The opportunity is to carry the best of that knowledge and intention forward while finding new ways to fill some of the vacancies.

Policies can support mobile vendors in bringing fresh, affordable food closer to home. They can also help community gardens flourish, while hunting, fishing, and foraging can enhance food access. Food education can help navigate increasingly complex food and information landscapes. Where Dadu and Sherbano brought knowledge and collaboration to the meal, better food-quality data and emerging AI tools for meals can offer new forms of support. One possibility we are exploring is Swap It Smart, powered by data from The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI).

The meal itself becomes another pocket of possibility.

Meals can heal. Evidence is growing that interventions centered on meals can improve diet and health. Providing convenient access to minimally processed meals improved dietary quality and mental health symptoms in a randomized controlled trial. Medically Tailored Meals can improve health outcomes and reduce hospitalizations and healthcare costs. Culinary medicine and cooking interventions can build knowledge and skills to prepare healthier foods. Universal school meals can improve children’s health at population scale, while school meals from regenerative agriculture extend those benefits to planetary health.

Across interventions and scales, the same fundamental possibility emerges: creating the enabling conditions and support for good food to become a nourishing meal.

As leaders and advocates gather in New York around the U.N. General Assembly and Climate Week, conversations about climate and health unfold at planetary scale. We do not have to invent every solution anew. Food environments are powerful levers because so much of the food system converges there. Some of these solutions have been moving through our streets for generations. Others are growing in home gardens. Some emerge from tiny kitchens, where what is available meets knowledge, skill, care, and imagination.

Bring good food within reach.

As we pursue planetary-scale solutions, some of the largest pockets of possibility may already be within reach.

From the dusty streets rises the familiar call.

Sabzi! Sabzi! Sabzi! (Vegetables! Vegetables! Vegetables!)

This essay is part of Food Tank’s Flourish Series: Food and Health from Molecules to Systems, authored by Selena Ahmed, exploring how food connects us to the living world while asking what it means to flourish. For more in the series, click here.

The post Op-Ed | Pockets of Possibility: From Food Environments to Nourishing Meals appeared first on Food Tank.

Human rights lawyer Julian Aguon explores how warming threatens not only the survival of small island nations but also the traditions of their Indigenous peoples. He is citing these injuries in legal actions, including in a major victory at the International Court of Justice last year.

Read more on E360 →

CALGARY — DAVID PICKUP, Director of Electricity at the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the expansion of Saskatchewan’s Bell AI Fabric centre.Yesterday’s announcement from the Saskatchewan and federal governments...

On August 17, 2026, Mark Carney announced the largest clean energy investment in North American history. The investment totals around $70 billion with $10 billion...

The post How Carney plays both sides on climate policy first appeared on Spring.

Headline News:

• “Germany Switched On A Solar Farm Over 150 Fallow Deer In Time For A Rutting-Season Battles” • Germany has reimagined how solar panels are deployed. An 8.3-MW solar park, developed by Perigus Energy, is in a fallow deer enclosure. The solar panels are elevated 5.2 to 5.9 feet above the ground to allow for rutting season battles beneath them. [Energies Media]

Stag (Pushkaraj Deshpande, Unsplash)

• “What Does The Closure Of Saudi-Arabia’s East-West Pipeline Mean For Gas Prices?” • Global oil prices climbed to their highest level since May after Saudi Arabia shut down a key pipeline, choking worldwide crude supply and threatening to put upward pressure on US gasoline prices. Brent crude had a 50% increase since the start of the war. [ABC News]
• “More Than 56% Of California Electricity Demand Supplied By Wind, Water, And Solar In 2026” • California keeps installing renewable energy power plants and rooftop solar systems. And so it keeps using more renewable energy. Stanford professor Mark Z Jacobson highlighted a few milestones for renewable energy in the state. [CleanTechnica]
• “EPA Announces Repeal Of Power Plant Emissions Limits” • The US EPA said it’s repealing most of the GHG limits for fossil fuel power plants set during the Biden administration. And the agency is proposing eliminating all other other GHG emissions for the power industry, saying there’s been “virtually no benefit” from those regulations. [ABC News]
• “US Solar Has Enough Installed Capacity To Generate Power For 50 Million Homes” • Despite the current administration’s opposition to renewable sources of energy, the US recently hit a significant milestone for solar power. By the end of the second quarter of 2026, US solar installations could match the electricity demand of over 50 million homes. [The Cool Down]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

For several decades, IMF's financing has often been conditional on adjustment measures and economic reforms that profoundly transforms the way a country produces, trades and consumes its food.

The post Briefing Note: Trade Liberalization in the Carebbian Region and IMF Impacts in Haiti and the Dominican Republic appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Several hundred scientists, government officials, and environmentalists gathered for an unusual two-day conference in Newport, Oregon, last week, entirely focused on a single species: gray whales.

It was an urgent meeting. The number of gray whales along the U.S. West Coast has recently plummeted by the thousands, falling by half in the last decade. The leading theory is that climate change has been causing the whales’ food source in the Arctic to dwindle. And the situation seems to be getting worse. This past summer, 187 gray whales washed up dead on beaches across the region. So far, the Trump administration has largely ignored the problem. 

The attendees at the conference, who came from across North America, were there to share as much as they knew about the animals. Bill Keener, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Center, a nonprofit in California, said it was inspiring to see so many scientists come together to tackle the issue. 

But the atmosphere in the rooms was tense, others said. Gray whales have been off the list of animals protected by the Endangered Species Act for decades. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — whose scientists participated in the meetings — recently missed the legal deadline to respond to a petition to relist them. At the end of August, three conservation groups filed a notice of their intent to sue, which would kick off a lawsuit if the Trump administration doesn’t respond to the petition within two months. 

“People were walking on eggshells there,” said Mark Palmer, who helps lead a project protecting marine mammals at the Earth Island Institute, one of the groups behind the potential lawsuit. Presenters at the conference were careful to focus on science and avoid politics, he said, adding that the event organizers “made it very clear from the beginning that they would not discuss policy issues.”

That’s likely because many of the attendees were scientists who work in the government, or depend on federal funding in some way, Palmer said. Since taking office in 2025, the Trump administration has made sweeping cuts to staff and funding at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to better align with partisan beliefs. It has also proposed eliminating the Marine Mammal Commission, which helps other parts of the government protect animals like whales, and it recently rolled back habitat protections from the Endangered Species Act. There is a backlog of some 400 species currently awaiting a federal listing decision.

“Obviously they are very nervous about what the administration could do to them,” Palmer said. In addition to failing to respond to the petition, NOAA is several months late in releasing the count of gray whale births this year. “Yes, they’ve been dragging their feet, but also the administration has been targeting this funding,” he said. The agency declined to comment in response to Grist’s request.

In many ways, gray whales’ fortunes have long been decided by humans. Starting in the 19th century, commercial whaling drove their numbers to historic lows, but bans on the practice, along with federal endangered species protections beginning in the 1970s, helped the population along the U.S. West Coast more than double. Their recovery was so strong that, in 1994, U.S. officials decided to remove them from the endangered species list.

Now, sharing a planet with humans appears to have reversed their fortunes again. Those found on the U.S. side of the Pacific are known as eastern gray whales, and they are distinct from the western population, found near East Asia and Russia. They feed on small crustaceans in the Arctic waters near Alaska in the summer, and then swim down to Mexico to give birth in the winter — one of the longest migrations of any mammal. But climate change is heating up the Arctic nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, and the melting ice has led to a number of cascading changes that have caused the whales’ prey to sharply decline. Scientists think hungry gray whales are beginning their migrations with too little energy in reserve, leading to fewer births and more deaths. 

“The science on this is perfectly clear,” said Richard Steiner, a marine conservation biologist who initially submitted the petition to relist gray whales. “As goes Arctic sea ice, so goes the gray whale population. And Arctic sea ice will continue its decline throughout this century.” If humans don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet, he said, the consequences could be “apocalyptic” for gray whales, as well as many other species on Earth.

Gray whales on the other side of the Pacific are struggling too, with only a few hundred remaining. And the Atlantic gray whale disappeared centuries ago, likely due to whaling. The loss was “the only extinction of a whale in human history,” Steiner said. “Thus, we know this particular whale population is extremely vulnerable to anthropogenic impact.”

Experts from the Marine Mammal Center and the California Academy of Sciences pull in a gray whale carcass found in the San Francisco Bay for examination.
Clara Field / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Malnutrition may be making it harder for whales to withstand threats along their routes, like collisions with ships or getting tangled in fishing gear. It may also be pushing more whales to forage for food in dangerous stretches of their route — like the San Francisco Bay Area, where scientists have been tracking an increased number of whale strandings in recent years. At least a fifth — and possibly up to half — of all whales that enter the San Francisco Bay end up being killed by ships. This summer, 13 were discovered dead in the area, but scientists say many more are sinking before they can be counted. 

U.S. government scientists estimate that eastern gray whales peaked in 2016 with some 25,000 to 30,000 individuals. But in the last decade, the population crashed to about half that, with estimates ranging from 11,700 to 17,000. Normally, a thousand calves are born each year. But last year, scientists estimated just 85 births — a record low. 

Relisting gray whales as an endangered species is an important first step, said Miyoko Sakashita, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit, who is leading the impending lawsuit against the Trump administration. Once a species is formally protected, federal agencies are generally required to develop a recovery plan. Listing also opens the door to federal funding for monitoring, research, and efforts to protect or restore habitat. That could “buy us some time for us to solve that bigger climate change problem,” Sakashita said. 

If the Trump administration decides not to relist the whales, Sakashita said, the plaintiffs would file another lawsuit and probably end up in court anyway. “The law says they have to use the best available science,” when deciding which species are endangered, she said. “When we look at this terrible population decline, it seems like there cannot be any other answer than to proceed forward with a threatened or endangered listing.”

NOAA has released estimates indicating that whale populations rebounded by roughly 5,000 whales in the last year. Palmer, of Earth Island Institute, is among those who are skeptical of these numbers. Especially considering the low number of calves born last year, “it’s just physically impossible for gray whales to produce that many animals in such a short time,” he said.

Many groups are racing to protect whales, even without an endangered species listing. One promising approach starts with asking ships to slow down near hotspots of whale activity — a step that can significantly increase the odds that a whale will survive a collision, said Rachel Rhodes, a scientist with the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She leads Whale Safe, a large project that has been mapping whales in shipping lanes by using sonar, thermal cameras, and satellite tags. 

In an ideal world, ships would be able to avoid whales entirely. But waterways are often too busy and confined for that to be possible, she said. “So the next best thing is to ask ships to slow down to 10 knots or less.” 

Similar speed limits are mandatory for large vessels on the East Coast, but remain voluntary on the West Coast. Another California project, Blue Whales Blue Skies, has had success in paying and publicly praising shipping companies whose ships slow down. But some vessels, particularly cruise ships, continue to speed through these areas. 

“The scientists have done their job in reporting the dire situation for gray whales,” said Steiner. “Now it’s time for the policymakers to put that science to work in protecting them as much as possible.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gray whales are starving as the Arctic warms. Will the US protect them? on Sep 15, 2026.

A fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are linked to international trade in goods and services, a new tracker shows, spotlighting a little-studied issue that researchers say should be tackled by the UN climate process.

Currently, as part of the Paris Agreement, every country is responsible for counting and reducing the planet-heating emissions that are produced within its territory. Manufacturing countries, for example, may have high emissions even if what they make is exported for consumption elsewhere.

But new analysis from the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and climate consultancy Matière, based on the tracker’s data, shows that some countries have a high footprint of “imported emissions” from goods and services they ship in. These emissions are often ignored in the places where the products are consumed because they are not formally counted under greenhouse gas inventories.

In the European Union, for example, while domestic emissions have declined since 2015, imported emissions have remained unchanged, the analysis shows. In some countries, like Austria or Sweden, they are as high as the country’s entire annual carbon footprint.

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Former EU lead climate negotiator Jacob Werksman said that under the Paris Agreement, these traded emissions are accounted for in the countries where they are originally produced, but importing countries can also take responsibility for their consumption.

“It starts with a wide recognition by many jurisdictions around the world that we need to know the carbon content of these products, and we then need to agree what is a fair, effective, transparent and relatively easy-to-implement way of measuring that carbon in traded products,” he told a launch event for the trade emissions tracker, which contains data for different countries, sectors and gases.

Trade and its role in addressing climate change has become a higher priority at UN climate talks after a push led by emerging economies including China, India and South Africa led to the first trade and climate change dialogue held this year at the mid-year session in Bonn.

At the upcoming COP31 UN summit in Antalya, some voluntary initiatives like the Brazil-led Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade are expected to continue, but the issue does not feature in Türkiye’s Action Agenda of climate initiatives and formal negotiations are not scheduled on the topic.

China: the world’s top emissions exporter

As a manufacturing powerhouse, China ranks first in the new tracker as the world’s top-emitting country, but the data shows that a large chunk of the country’s carbon emissions – an amount larger than Brazil’s entire annual carbon footprint – are linked to products that are exported and consumed abroad.

Russia, Brazil, the US and the EU rank as the top destinations for Chinese trade-related emissions, which are mostly linked to components for power generation, basic metals like copper and lead, and non-metallic minerals like graphite and phosphorus.

Yet China is also the world’s top emissions importer, related mostly to agricultural products, fossil fuels and minerals brought from the US, the EU, Japan and India, among others. The US ranks second by a close margin, with both countries importing about 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit

Richard Baron, ECF’s industrial policy and trade director, said Chinese clean energy products are key for reducing emissions around the world, adding that Europe is “not able to do without those technologies” for its energy transition.

“China has an emissions trading system that counts CO2 differently there. But if China and the EU were to agree on some kind of translation mechanism to say ‘this is how we measure it’, and companies can understand the protocol to navigate both markets, that would set the tone for a lot of other conversations,” he said at the platform’s launch event last week.

The analysis suggests that if the EU and China aligned their climate requirements for products, the resulting standards could influence trade flows representing about 7% of global emissions.

Baron said there’s “a plethora” of multilateral spaces to hold these discussions, including the climate and trade dialogue at the UN climate talks or the Climate Club at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which seeks to cut industrial emissions.

Trade breaks into agenda of UN climate talks – but will it have teeth?

Controversial trade measures

Instruments like the Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) – a recent piece of legislation that penalises emissions-heavy imported products – are one tool that could be used to address trade-related emissions, said Antoine Oger, executive director at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

He said a significant portion of imported emissions in Europe are already covered by CBAM, as it includes sectors like cement, iron and steel, fertilisers and aluminium. This then allows the EU “to engage in constructive dialogue with our trade partners”, he added.

An employee of Dirostahl, a medium-size forging steel firm that produces large parts, works on a glowing steel element that has been heated in a classic natural gas-fired furnace to 1,200C in Remscheid, Germany, June 30, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen) An employee of Dirostahl, a medium-size forging steel firm that produces large parts, works on a glowing steel element that has been heated in a classic natural gas-fired furnace to 1,200C in Remscheid, Germany, June 30, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen)

But across diplomatic summits, including at UN climate talks, emerging economies have pushed back heavily against the CBAM and other trade measures. The most recent BRICS declaration adopted on Saturday by 11 such countries – including China, India and Russia – condemns “protectionism under the guise of environmental objectives”.

The declaration calls for the “elimination of such unlawful measures”, which they argue have “far-reaching negative implications for the human rights, including the rights to development, health and food security” of vulnerable communities.

“The question of responsibility is a political question,” Oger said. “These emissions exist – they are emitted somewhere to make a product that will be consumed elsewhere. So you can debate responsibility but the idea is for the two parts to recognise there’s a problem.”

The aim, he added “is not to point fingers, but to accept this is a reality of our emissions profiles and ask what we can do about it”.

The post International trade linked to 20% of global emissions – but imports ignored appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the face of climate change, these small changes can support the recovery of declining populations of birds, insects, and other pollinators.

Humanity has dug itself into a hole. The first step to digging ourselves out is to acknowledge the depth of our civilizational failure.