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File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

In the wake of its recent glacial flooding disaster, Nepal and the kingdom of Bhutan have proposed a new agenda item on mountains and climate change for the COP31 summit which opens on Monday in the Turkish city of Antalya.

In a submission addressed to the COP31 presidency and the head of the UN climate secretariat (UNFCCC), Nepal said the agenda item, entitled “1.5°C Warming in Mountains”, is an effort to strengthen the response of the international community to the climate risks facing the world’s mountain regions.

The item proposes that mountain issues should become a regular part of the formal UN climate change process, with a focus on scientific assessment of the risks associated with warming overshooting 1.5C, an annual high-level dialogue, a dedicated work programme and improved access to climate finance.

Maheshwar Dhakal, chief of the climate change management division of Nepal’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Environment, told Climate Home News that Himalayan countries face similar problems such as collapsing glaciers and flooding from glacial lakes. 

“We are trying to bring all Himalayan countries together under this agenda item,” he said.

COP31 Briefing: What to expect from the Antalya climate summit?

At this year’s UN General Assembly, Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah called for strong global action to ensure climate justice and proposed creating a Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism led by India, China and Nepal. It would share satellite data, monitor glacial slopes and lakes, strengthen early warning systems and coordinate cross-border disaster response.

Nepal has experienced significant infrastructure losses and human casualties from flooding every year since 2020. In late August, the collapse of a glacial slope on the border with Tibet caused a torrent of water and debris to course down the Bhote Koshi River, leaving more than 6,000 people dead or missing.

According to a government needs assessment, the disaster caused an estimated $2.7 billion in physical damage and economic losses, while around $4.8 billion will be required for recovery and reconstruction.

More research needed on threats

Although high mountain regions are known to be fragile ecosystems, especially as global warming accelerates glacier melt, the extent of their vulnerability is still not fully understood. When the devastating Bhote Koshi floods hit, it opened the eyes of the world to the risks.

Dhakal said the Bhote Koshi floods “have proved the impacts of climate change in the Himalayan region”, which were linked to rising temperatures by scientists with the World Weather Attribution group. “Therefore, Nepal wants scientific studies, research and political discussions on mountain climate risks to receive greater attention at international climate conferences,” he added.

Nepal has been making efforts on this front since 2009, when it held a cabinet meeting at Kalapatthar near Mount Everest. Since COP28 in Dubai, Nepal has organised high-level events and dialogues on mountain issues at COPs and is co-hosting one at COP31 with Bhutan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap

Dhakal said the dialogues held so far have raised awareness, but mountain concerns must become part of the formal UN climate process to unlock climate finance and technical support that can bolster countries’ capacity to tackle climate threats.

If specific indicators and priorities are developed for mountain regions, vulnerable developing countries like Nepal would have better access to finance to help them adapt to the climate warming they have done very little to cause, he added.

More detailed data would enable them to prepare stronger project proposals for international climate funds, including the Green Climate Fund (GCF). In 2025, the GCF backed a project to protect livelihoods from climate-induced flooding in Nepal but it took seven years to get approval.

Sindhu Dhungana, an alternate board member at the GCF, said the problem is becoming more widespread and urgent for the Hindu Kush Himalaya region.

“The economies, cultures and almost everything in Himalayan countries depend on mountains,” he explained. “For us, climate change is mountain change… [it has] affected everything, including the economy and biodiversity.”

Debris and mud cover buildings in DevGhat village in Nepal (Photo: Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images) Debris and mud cover buildings in DevGhat village in Nepal (Photo: Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images) Destroyed development projects

Nepal wants the UN climate process to address mountain risks both before and after disasters. Countries need better research, technology, early warning systems and other adaptation measures to protect people and infrastructure. But even when countries take precautions, loss and damage is likely to occur and will require international support to address it.

Nepal has been provisionally allocated $21.6 million from the United Nations’ new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) to help with the aftermath of the Bhote Koshi disaster, but this is just a fraction of needs and the money will come only months after it made an initial request.

Dhakal pointed to the damage caused by floods to infrastructure built with loans, such as the Melamchi Drinking Water Project, which received $312 million from the Asian Development Bank but was destroyed by a major flood in 2021, shortly after it began operating. The recent Bhote Koshi disaster wiped out a dozen hydropower facilities, as well as solar energy systems.  

Nepal flood destruction shows “limits to adaptation”, scientists say

Nepal wants international discussions on what should happen when climate-related disasters destroy development projects built using credit, and how the loans should be treated afterwards.

“Climatic disasters wash out… projects, but the burden of loan is still paid by Nepal,” Dhakal said.

For now, it remains unclear whether the opening session of COP31 will consider or adopt the proposed agenda item on mountains and climate change, with consultations on how to respond still underway among governments and the COP31 co-presidencies.

“If countries agree to discuss the proposal and include it in the agenda, that would be another step forward,” Dhakal said. “Further discussions in the coming years could gradually give the mountain agenda a stronger shape.”

The post Nepal seeks stronger recognition of mountain issues in UN climate process appeared first on Climate Home News.

Solar panels above, fish below: That’s the idea behind aquavoltaics, an emerging way to pair solar power with fish farming. Freshwater aquaculture produces more than 160 million tons of fish, crabs, and shrimp a year, emitting an estimated 438 million tons of CO2 equivalents (tCO2eq). A new study finds that covering the world’s aquaculture ponds with floating solar panels could generate nearly as much electricity as the United States uses, far more than enough to offset the industry’s carbon footprint.

Photovoltaic electricity is Earth’s most abundant potential source of renewable energy, but it requires lots of surface area. So people have tried to combine it with other types of land use, spawning agrivoltaics, in which solar panels are spaced across farm fields or pastures—harvesting a fraction of the incoming sunlight without appreciably reducing crop yields. People have also tried covering lakes, canals, and reservoirs with photovoltaic panels—but the wildly fluctuating levels and large size of these water bodies present major challenges. Aquaculture ponds, in contrast, are generally small and shallow, with consistent water levels.

In the new study, the authors analyzed satellite imagery and other data to estimate the total global area of aquaculture ponds. They identified 50,000 square km of these ponds worldwide, of which only 423 square km currently host water-surface photovoltaics. Some 97 percent of this  aquavoltaic area was in China, with most of the rest in Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, and Israel.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Magenta solar panels may be agrivoltaics’ cleverest trick yet

 

So what if the entire 50,000 square km of ponds were 40 percent covered with photovoltaics? The authors estimated that the electricity generated (4,100 TWhr/yr) could replace enough fossil fuel-derived energy to avoid 2.5 billion tCO2eq per year—nearly six times the current emissions of aquaculture worldwide. This electricity production would concentrate along the coastlines of South and East Asia (including Indonesia and the Philippines), with additional hotspots in coastal regions of the Middle East, Egypt, Southern Europe, Central America, Mexico, South America, and the U.S.

This locally produced power could cover the current national electricity needs of Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines, Cambodia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. This aquavoltaic energy would be produced in non-industrial regions that are often not well connected to larger power grids—potentially sustaining over 800 small- and medium-sized cities worldwide.

These calculations rest on baselines that will need to be refined for different regions, fish and crustacean species—including the assumption that 40 percent coverage of the water surface won’t compromise aquaculture yields. But it raises the possibility that aquavoltaics—a sector that didn’t even exist prior to 2010—could help drive our transition to renewable energy.

Xia, et al. “The global potential of aquavoltaics for power generation and offsetting the carbon footprint of freshwater aquaculture.” Nature Food, 2026.

Photo: IMAGO/Xinhua/Alamy Images

Some governments have backed using Brazil’s voluntary roadmaps on fossil fuels and deforestation to inform the next UN assessment of global climate action, a key process that concludes in 2028, the COP30 presidency told Climate Home News.

Brazil published the roadmaps on transitioning away from fossil fuels and on halting deforestation by 2030 this week, after failing to secure an agreement in Belém to make them part of formal negotiations. The documents set out a menu of policies countries could use to start acting on both issues straight away.

At their launch, Brazilian top climate officials argued the roadmaps could feed into the second stocktake negotiations. Through that process, due to start at this year’s COP, countries are meant to take stock of collective progress on climate action and decide on a plan to ramp up ambition in future policies.

In an interview with Climate Home News in London, COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago said that “some European governments” had signalled their support for the Brazil-led roadmaps to inform the global stocktake negotiations.

“I hope that there will be many other countries that may support this,” he said. “It’s not that you have to take the entire package, because who are we to come up with the solution? But some elements of the roadmaps may be useful.”

• Nov 3, 2026 News Brazil’s fossil fuel roadmap sketches out first global timetable The COP30 presidency’s voluntary timetable asks countries to plan first, then build up clean energy – only turning to oil and gas supplies from 2031 Read more
• Nov 3, 2026 News COP30 roadmap says faster use of existing tools can halt forest loss by 2030 The plan launched by Brazil to help the world end deforestation charts a path to meeting the global goal, but requires national efforts and finance to be stepped up, experts say Read more
• Nov 5, 2026 News COP31 Briefing: What to expect from the Antalya climate summit? Electrification, the fossil fuel transition, adaptation to rising impacts, climate science and trade are key themes as governments gather for COP31 in Türkiye Read more

Corrêa do Lago cautioned that countries might not publicly come forward to champion the lengthy documents at COP31, because “governments have to read [the roadmaps] and they have to be very careful”.

The fossil fuel roadmap invites countries to draw up their own domestic plans to cut fossil fuel use and production and build clean energy systems by 2028, while putting the main push on cutting coal, oil and gas supply after 2031. The deforestation roadmap urges countries to use existing tools to ramp up finance and forest monitoring, and to tackle harmful trade incentives, among other measures.

Santa Marta coalition could put roadmap to use

As his presidency draws to a close, Corrêa do Lago said Brazil would keep championing the roadmaps but that “others will decide” whether they are taken up in the formal UN negotiations. Those talks, where decisions require consensus among nearly 200 countries, might not be the best venue, he added.

He suggested a potential home for the fossil fuel roadmap, outside of the UN negotiations, could be the Santa Marta process. A group of nearly 60 governments met for the first time in April in Colombia to discuss how to wean their economies off fossil fuels.

Countries in Santa Marta signalled their interest in developing national roadmaps away from fossil fuels, as well as building trade systems that favour renewable energy and reforming global finance to remove barriers to the energy transition.

Corrêa do Lago said the coalition “can have a very important role” in putting the fossil fuel roadmap to use, because its members are already focused on implementation and could use the roadmap and “even perfect it”.

Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country

UK says there’s no time to waste

Speaking alongside the COP30 president at an event in London, UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte said the transition away from fossil fuels was “in danger of becoming just a slogan”. She praised Brazil for “helping us turn it into a planning principle” despite the lack of consensus in the formal UN talks.

But Kyte added that the speed at which countries constrain fossil fuel supply was “critical”. Pointing to soaring oil and gas prices, which have put energy policy at the centre of debate in countries such as the UK, she said: “I don’t think we got time to wait until the early 2030s.”

Brazil is among the countries still planning an expansion of oil and gas exploration, with recently re-elected President Lula da Silva saying recent discoveries near the Amazon river could be “a passport to the country’s future”.

Kyte added that the UK “would come right behind this roadmap and agree that you have done something diplomatically that we needed”, and said it is important for COP31 co-presidencies Australia and Türkiye, as well as COP32 president Ethiopia, to “find a way to move this forward”.

The post European nations signal support for fossil fuel roadmap, says COP30 president appeared first on Climate Home News.

This is a translation of an article originally published in Presse gauche. With the Parti Québécois in government, we are entering a political moment that,...

The post With the right on the rise, what is the place of Québec Solidaire? first appeared on Spring.

Part of my work as a geographer and glacier scientist involves traveling around the world. Literally. Several times a year, I join expeditions, traversing continents and oceans, sometimes half the planet, in mere days. I’ve visited glaciers in some startling places — like Uganda’s Stanley Glacier, where ice retreat influences human health and malaria outbreaks. Or Iceland’s Breiðamerkurjökull, where glacier change is exacerbating the ice-breaking pressures of global tourism. Or South Georgia’s Heaney Glacier, where ice retreat has provided expansive real estate for one of the largest King penguin colonies on Earth. 

My job is to translate the landscape: how oceans move nutrients pole to pole; why one mountain might support snow but another does not; how glaciers shape societies.

I’ll own it’s a peculiar way to experience the world.

From 30,000 feet, borders fall away. Trees become forests become systems become a living planet. I see connections everywhere. But that view from 30,000 feet, while striking, can miss much of what’s unfolding below at the individual level — the people, the lives, the histories. 

Glaciers, I think, suffer from this same problem of perspective. We tend to see them from a great distance, as a single global story.

They’re tallied together: Some 275,000 individual glaciers remain worldwide. They’re measured together: how quickly they are shrinking, how much they impact sea level change, how long before they are gone. How many of them already are.   

But glaciers have never lived identical lives. My work has shown over and over that every glacier has a distinct life history, shaped by and shaping the communities, landscapes, and systems around it. As glaciers change, we aren’t witnessing a single global glacier story from 30,000 feet. We are witnessing hundreds of thousands of individual stories of transformation. 

One of the most surprising is unfolding right in my own backyard.

In the Pacific Northwest, a young glacier is growing  An aerial view of Mount St. Helens in June 2024, with Mount Hood in the distance on the left. USGS

My most recent expedition took me to nine countries. But I started the trip in Portland, Oregon — just north of my home in Eugene — land of the exhilaratingly perfect medium roast coffee and the Cascade volcano chain I used to orient myself for most of my childhood. The first morning, I ran up to the hotel’s top floor to see if the weather was clear enough to peer 50 miles northeast toward Mount St. Helens, across the border in Washington state. From downtown, it is easy to distinguish her whaleback summit, notably slumped in comparison to the sharper profiles of Mount Hood and Mount Adams.

What isn’t visible from this distance is the secret Mount St. Helens is hiding within.

The volcano erupted in May of 1980, two years before I was born. I grew up hearing stories of how ash coated our family farm, how the afternoon sky turned murky, how one terrified horse kicked through her box stall door. What I didn’t learn until much, much later was that, prior to the eruption, Mount St. Helens supported 11 named glaciers and two small unnamed ones. The nine-hour Plinian eruption destroyed 70 percent of the mountain’s ice, including the Loowit and Leschi glaciers, while the summit and entire north flank collapsed, leaving behind a horseshoe-shaped crater roughly two miles wide.

If you’ve ever received a climbing permit from the U.S. Forest Service, hiked to the crater rim, and gazed into that windy bowl of pumice and dark basalts, I can almost guarantee the very last word on your mind is “nursery.” Trust me. I rocked my baby in a softly-lit Scandinavian-paletted room designed for every possible infant need. But Mount St. Helens, apparently a fan of free-range parenting, took another approach. And it worked. Inside that raw volcanic maw, a baby glacier is growing inside.  

The eruption that destroyed most of Mount St. Helens’ glaciers also created the perfect conditions to grow a new one.

Winter after winter, snow fell on the volcano’s steep headwall, and then it avalanched, repeatedly, into the crater floor below. By September 1996, scientists observed that the 16-year-old body of snow and ice had begun to move, flow. This fact is existential — glaciers are defined as moving bodies of land ice that persist year after year. When glaciers stop moving, they are “dead” — it’s not just loss of volume that threatens their identity as glaciers. The Okjökull glacier in Iceland was declared dead in 2014 when it stopped flowing; in 2019, the nation held a funeral for it.

But here, the opposite has happened. 

Welcome to the world, Crater Glacier.

A view of Crater Glacier in 2005. M Jackson

There is something equally wonderful and strange about being almost exactly the same age as a glacier. We’re both children of the 80s, who grew up under the same Cascade volcanoes. I became a glaciologist; she became a glacier.

And we’ve both had setbacks. Me: paying my bills, becoming a mother, and learning, repeatedly, that adulthood rarely follows the topography you planned.

Crater Glacier: Mount St. Helens, in 2004, erupted again. Magma began pushing up beneath her. A lava dome swelled through the crater floor and into the glacier itself — the first time scientists observed the emplacement of a lava dome through glacier ice.

It split her in two.

As the dome grew, the now separate arms of the glacier deformed, then thickened and sped up, flowing 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimeters) per day. Within four years, those arms stretched all the way around the lava dome and rejoined. And the glacier kept going. Between 2009 and 2019, she gained some 13.8 million cubic meters of ice and advanced more than a thousand feet. 

My colleagues have noted that her advance is slowing. Eventually, warming Pacific Northwest summers may overwhelm the unique climate zone inside Mount St. Helens’ crater. Or, the volcano might erupt again.

And that matters to the people living below.

Crater Glacier’s body wraps around an active vent and lava dome. A future eruption could melt ice, mix with ash, pumice, and rock and become a lahar, a fast-moving slurry of water, mud, trees, and whatever else it picks up as it races downslope. Lahars from the 1980 eruption destroyed homes, bridges, and roads. Growing up, I remember how we were taught drills for lahars alongside earthquakes and fires.  

It isn’t lost on me how radically the landscape I grew up with has changed, or how much more it will change in the years to come. But, as I follow Crater Glacier’s development, I’m reminded that it isn’t all bad. This one glacier, among hundreds of thousands, is writing a story I could never have imagined.  

In Azerbaijan, forgotten glaciers become much-needed water

I arrive in Baku, Azerbaijan, in July. It is sweltering.

This country has glaciers, but I won’t see them on this trip. The last time I saw ice in the Caucasus, I was on a Fulbright in Turkey, living on the Black Sea and exploring these mountains from the west. The ice I saw then would be unrecognizable today.

Between 2000 and 2020, Azerbaijan lost 77 percent of the country’s total glacier area.

To me, that’s baffling to think about: 77 percent. Over 20 years. Half my life.

And yet, almost no one I meet in Azerbaijan seems particularly interested in talking about glaciers. I risk distracting my driver, Kamran, a delightful 20-something local man who weaves through Baku’s insane, seven-lanes-of-madness traffic like it’s nothing. The Caspian Sea twinkles peacefully to our left, oil derricks lazily chugging. To our right, the city’s iconic blue-gleaming high-rises overlap with mosques and war memorials. 

A mud volcano at Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve in Azerbaijan. M Jackson

“We don’t bother with them,” Kamran tells me, speaking of the glaciers. He pivots quickly to Gobustan, a district south of Baku that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Had I seen the mud volcanoes? “Tourists come all the time now to see the methane volcanoes.”

I keep encountering this indifference. My colleague, Suleyman, also doesn’t want to talk about glaciers and spends the bulk of our coffee telling me about the pending F1 race in Baku. He doesn’t even bother glancing at the map I’ve brought. Azerbaijan’s glaciers are remote, tiny, and high in the Eastern Caucasus. By 2025, 14 fragmented glaciers remain, covering together about 124 acres — roughly one-tenth of the ice that covered these mountains in the 1890s. 

But glaciers here, like glaciers everywhere, are critical components of regional water cycles. Glaciers hold water — for years, decades, centuries. They are reservoirs that do not need to be constructed. And in Azerbaijan, water and water storage matter. Agriculture relies on a complex system of reservoirs, canals, and irrigation. Groundwater withdrawals have increased some fourfold since 2000, largely fueled by farms growing wheat, fruit, and vegetables. 

In 2025, researchers climbed Azerbaijan’s Tufandag Glacier and reported retreat, accelerated melting, and expanding crevasses. Below it, the Mahmuddara River had increased water levels and discharge rates.

This is how a glacier can disappear in plain sight: by transforming into liquid. As a glacier melts, it releases more water downstream. And for that reason, the current precipitous decline of Azerbaijan’s glaciers is almost a boon. Glacier becomes meltwater, river, irrigation, drinking water, wheat, lettuce, peaches. Farmers rejoice. 

But, eventually, too much ice dissolves and the runoff peaks, then decreases. In glaciology, we call this “peak water,” when a disappearing glacier gives us the most water it ever will. The cycle of savings and withdrawals that has defined this landscape for centuries will ultimately end like this, when the bank is forced to close. 

Has Tufandag Glacier, or any of Azerbaijan’s 13 other glaciers, crossed that threshold? I don’t know. The increased flow of the Mahmuddara is only one measurement, from one glacier, that cannot fully answer that question.

But I can think back to the ice I saw in these same mountains years ago, then look at the Caucasus today, and I understand that it has transformed. Water that was ice, storage, cold is now warm liquid moving downstream.

Azerbaijan’s remaining glaciers may not survive this century. People in the coming years are going to have to do what glaciers once did — come up with more ways to store more water. Catch it when it arrives and hold it until it’s needed.

I keep thinking about the apparent indifference many Azerbaijanis show towards glaciers. Maybe Kamran’s response is more revealing than I initially thought.

Perhaps the first step of a glacier disappearing from a landscape is it disappearing from conversation.

In Japan, newly discovered glaciers are already fading A view out the window of a plane of Kuranosuke Glacier in Japan.
M Jackson

If you ever get a chance, wander through the Tateyama Museum in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. The exquisite open-air museum explores the nearby Mount Tateyama as both landscape and sacred place: a perennially snow-covered mountain, a dwelling place of spirits and the dead, a realm containing hell and heaven.  

There is a poem there by the eighth-century poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi about Tateyama’s summer snow and its association with the divine. It stops me. Some 1,300 years ago, people were already writing — marveling — about the snow that refused to disappear.  

Japan’s Sea-of-Japan side is one of the snowiest places on Earth, a skier’s powder paradise. And yet, for years, my colleagues and I thought no glaciers existed east of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The landscape was too warm, the mountains too low, to support glaciers under today’s conditions.

For glaciers — moving bodies of land ice that persist year after year — the base variables are critical: snow, time, and temperature. But those variables do interact with intensely local conditions such as wind, topography, shade — even human activity. It matters where snow falls, where it blows, and where a landscape and people allow it to accumulate.

Japan is technically not cold enough long enough to support glaciers. But it is extraordinarily snowy.

When I flew over Tateyama in June, most of the three-peaked massif was gray — alpine bare, with significant snow melt. But I did see a few Dalmatian-like white pockets in shaded nooks and north-facing crannies. If I hadn’t known better, I would have just labeled them as snow patches. Remember: Definitionally, a glacier must flow under its own weight. More movement is a sign of a healthy glacier. 

Snow patches, regardless of how long they’ve existed or if they contain ice, do not move.

Everyone in the bustling world of cryospheric research knew Japan had snow patches. More than 100 had been identified in the northern Japanese Alps alone. 

In the 1970s, researchers began observing holes in Kuranosuke — one such snow patch, roughly 6 acres in area — that looked and behaved like glacial features called moulins. In 1979, a Japanese researcher investigated one of the moulins by using the time-honored glaciological technique of climbing directly into it. He discovered layers of ancient ice, an observation supported later by radiocarbon analysis of embedded wood and leaf debris that were dated to approximately 1,700 years old.

Old, yes. But old does not make a glacier. Movement does.

And so Kuranosuke remained, scientifically speaking, for decades and decades, a snow patch.

Sunrise at the Kuranosuke hiking hut in the Northern Japanese Alps in July 2025. Antoine Boureau / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

But then, starting in 2009, researchers Kotaro Fukui and Hajime Iida of the Tateyama Caldera Sabo Museum used state-of-the-art geodetic measurements and ground-penetrating radar to take a closer look at several well-known perennial snow patches in the Japanese Alps. They showed that the Gozenzawa, Sannomado, and Komado snow patches were, in fact, flowing. They were glaciers.   

Take that in. I have spent my entire life watching ice disappear faster than we can understand it. Yet here are glaciers we never knew existed. It makes me immediately wonder — what other ones might be out there, if only we had time, resources, and the will to look?

The researchers turned to Kuranosuke next. They found that the snow patch was flowing roughly 3 centimeters a year — the equivalent width of one of the LEGO bricks my son always leaves on our stairs. An almost absurdly small measurement, but 3 centimeters is still flow. Movement. This transformed Kuranosuke from a snow patch into a glacier.

Still, identities are never quite so fixed. Recently, Kukui, Iida, and Tomoyoshi Kosaka have argued that Kuranosuke is in the midst of another slow transformation. As Japan warms, its glaciers and snow patches are losing crucial ice mass. They say that Kuranosuke is declining. It exists now in a nebulous no-scientist’s-land between glacier and snow patch, blurring the very boundaries of glacierhood.

One could easily look at that as a poignant story of loss: This glacier is dying, and we’ve barely had a chance to really know her. But when I look at Kuranosuke, I see a story of persistence. For at least 1,700 years, some form of ice and snow has held here, through centuries of summers, through blurring with the divine, through recognition as perennial snow patch and then glacier. 

And now, glacier-in-transformation.

I don’t think the disappearance of Kuranosuke will diminish local people’s reverence for Tateyama. If anything, as the mountain’s once-perennial snow and ice disappear, Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s poem may take on even greater meaning. For 1,300 years, these words and this snow have persisted. We may be the last generation to witness them together. 

For all these glaciers, and countless others, their stories are neither simple nor predictable. These are not merely stories of inches lost. If anything, they prove that we are far from certain about what the future holds. Kuranosuke and her neighbors defied decades of settled science by asserting their existence as glaciers. Tufandag is bringing abundance to the river and farms below it — though for how much longer, we don’t know. And Crater Glacier is still growing, thriving as so many others dissolve. I find something profoundly moving in that.

And me? I’m still circling the planet, collecting glacier stories. Maybe, like Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s poem, we’ll need them someday.

To remember.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Glaciers around the world are endangered — but no two are alike on Nov 6, 2026.

Plastic pollution blights the streets, beaches, parks, and lawns of Baltimore. A significant amount of that litter bears the circular red-and-blue Pepsi logo or the flowing white script of Coca-Cola’s branding.

But, legally speaking, none of that rubbish is Pepsi’s fault. Or Coke’s.

That’s what a Baltimore city circuit court judge ruled this summer following a legal battle in which the city and county of Baltimore sought money from PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and others to clean up plastic pollution. Companies “conducting lawful activities,” wrote Judge Audrey J.S. Carrión, referring to the sale of single-use plastics, “should not be held liable under public nuisance claims because others are misusing the products in an unlawful manner.” 

In other words, plastic pollution is a problem of consumer behavior, not corporate irresponsibility. As far as the state’s public nuisance law is concerned, a company’s liability ends at the point of sale.

Similar reasoning scuttled a public nuisance lawsuit the state of New York filed against PepsiCo and Frito-Lay and has arisen in similar litigation from Missouri to California. As environmental advocates and governments continue to develop this legal theory, those setbacks raise a fundamental question: When does a company’s responsibility for its products end? And can public nuisance laws succeed in making polluters pay?

The notion of public nuisance dates to 13th-century English common law and traditionally applied to violations of rights shared by the public, such as access to clean air. Since the 1970s, plaintiffs have increasingly tried to apply that idea to manufacturers whose products allegedly jeopardize public health, safety, and access to a clean environment.

These lawsuits, however, have “a mixed record of success,” said Timothy Lytton, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law. Cases against opioid manufacturers, e-cigarette companies, and even the landmark litigation against Big Tobacco have sometimes succeeded — but mostly by securing favorable settlements, not because judges ruled in favor of the public-nuisance arguments.

Cases that have been heard, meanwhile, have struggled to convince judges of “causation,” or the idea that corporate defendants are substantially responsible for violating a public right. Judges are wary of extending corporations’ liability past the lawful sale of their products, particularly when those products aren’t used as intended. If a doctor or patient diverts opioids to the black market, for example, are the manufacturers responsible for the resulting harm?

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This is essentially what Carrión said in the Baltimore case. It also echoes questioning from Justice Stephen Lindley last month as he heard arguments in the appeal of New York’s Pepsi lawsuit. “If [Pepsi] has to pay for the cleanup when somebody else is littering, … it’s not going to be sustainable,” he told the plaintiff’s lawyers. He appeared sympathetic to PepsiCo attorney Andrew Tulumello’s argument that the state had a “honking causation problem”: Pepsi, Tulumello said, “is not encouraging people to throw stuff in the litter.”

According to Albert Lin, co-director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at the University of California, Davis, there are three basic elements of a successful public-nuisance lawsuit. The first is demonstrating “substantial interference with a public right.” The second is causation — linking a defendant to that interference. The third, he said, is negligence, intent, or other “tortious conduct” in the defendant’s activities.

Environmental groups and governments are trying to get around the point-of-sale argument by linking causation and conduct: Plastics companies, they argue, are responsible for the pollution and knew their actions would harm public rights. Courts will therefore pay close attention to “foreseeability” — whether it was foreseeable that plastic would end up as litter, Lin said. As Lytton put it, manufacturers allegedly acted “in a way that foreseeably increases the risk of misuse.” The word “foreseeable” appears 22 times in Baltimore’s complaint.

Plaintiffs have evidence they can point to in arguing that plastic pollution was foreseeable. At least some manufacturers have known for decades that mass production of single-use plastics would contribute to environmental pollution, and that recycling would be unable to manage the problem. The lawsuits also cite microplastics contamination as part of the alleged nuisance, and an investigation published last week by the Los Angeles Times found that industry scientists have known since at least the 1970s that microplastics could lodge in humans’ bodies.

That history informs the framing offered by Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute. “Companies induced consumers to purchase these products while knowing the likelihood that they would end up as trash,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

Whether this framing succeeds may depend, in part, on the jurisdiction. In addition to the causation requirement for public-nuisance lawsuits, Lin said some states have a higher standard for demonstrating that defendants had “control” over their products at the time the nuisance occurred. New York and Maryland are two such states. California, on the other hand, is not, and courts there have so far proven more receptive to plastics public nuisance suits.

Judge Richard Seeborg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who is overseeing two lawsuits against Exxon Mobil Corp., allowed one — from the Sierra Club — to proceed to trial. (He has not yet ruled on the other one, brought by the state’s attorney general.) 

But even in California, surviving an early challenge is no guarantee of success. A judge there allowed Earth Island Institute’s public-nuisance claim — which rested in part on allegedly misleading recycling labels — against 10 food and beverage companies, but it was ultimately rejected earlier this year in a summary judgment. Earth Island plans to appeal.

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Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.

Lin said it’s still “early days” for this legal theory, and the rejections do not necessarily signal a losing strategy. He noted, however, that the courts have shown significant skepticism for public nuisance in ongoing climate litigation, and a case the Supreme Court is hearing this term could make it more difficult for cities and states to bring such claims in the future. 

Lin added that in climate lawsuits, plaintiffs have leaned more heavily on fossil fuel companies’ allegedly deceptive conduct, invoking consumer protection and false advertising claims that can be easier to substantiate than those based on public nuisance. Plastics plaintiffs could pursue a similar strategy, he said, potentially winning damages — though likely not orders requiring companies to clean up the pollution their products create.

Public nuisance laws could face new constraints at the state level, too. Last year, Montana enacted a first-of-its-kind law preempting state and local public-nuisance lawsuits based on “lawful activities,” while Kansas and Utah have since enacted their own restrictions.  All three states’ laws are connected to model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative policy organization that brings together state lawmakers and private-sector members to develop model legislation.

Whatever their ultimate outcome in court, Lytton said plastics lawsuits can “win” in other ways — by unearthing new documents, for example, and putting the plastics issue higher on the public-policy agenda. They also provide an opportunity for plaintiffs to refute the plastics industry’s consumer-responsibility narrative. 

“When you file a lawsuit, what you’re doing is you’re telling a story” — often about some sort of structural or corporate wrongdoing, Lytton said. “When you talk about tobacco, it’s not just about smokers. Or opioids, it’s not just about users. It’s about the companies and their design and marketing decisions. And so the framing that goes on in these [lawsuits] is moving the discussion of plastics away from ‘litterbugs’ and toward corporate responsibility.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Plastic pollution is putting an old legal doctrine to a new test on Nov 6, 2026.

How many people driving on California’s roads, right now, have multiple drunk-driving offenses? How many have driven recklessly and caused crashes where someone was killed? Almost no one knows. Of course, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) knows, but it probably won’t tell you. Last year the journalism nonprofit CalMatters pried some of these numbers loose, and they were disturbing. Known dangerous drivers are common, and all too often they go on to hurt or kill more people. 

Does the DMV erect barriers to public information because it wants California’s roads to be unsafe? Almost assuredly, no. More likely, the DMV exhibits some of the worst instincts that afflict large institutions: insularity, and a reflexive fear of oversight and accountability. Over decades, these organizational habits have manifested as a culture of obstruction, so now, when someone seeks public information about what happens on our roads, the DMV’s first, second, and third responses are to refuse. 

As transportation researchers, we have some experience here. The DMV oversees California’s disabled parking placard program. In California, like many other states, people who hold these placards can park in designated “blue” spots that offer more access. Unlike many other states, however, California placard holders can also park free at meters for an unlimited time. This benefit, combined with lax oversight, has created a lot of fraud. Particularly in places where street parking is expensive, illegal placard use is rampant. News organizations, government agencies and academic researchers have all documented this abuse. People buy and sell placards on the black market, doctors charge people to falsify applications, and—-as California’s state auditor has found—people regularly report their placards lost so they can sell or give away the replacements (some placard holders received up to twenty replacements over a three-year period). This abuse deprives local governments of revenue, casts unfair suspicion on people who really need accessible parking, and makes it more difficult for those people to find such spaces.   

In an effort to study this problem, last fall we asked the DMV, through a public records request, for data showing how many placards it was issuing, and the reasons why. This information is plainly in the public interest, and we stated explicitly that we did not want any personally-identifiable information. This information should also not be hard to provide; this is a task that could be handled, in almost any imaginable circumstance, via a rudimentary spreadsheet program. 

 It has now been roughly a year, and the DMV has provided us a total of zero records. What it has provided instead is a master class in obfuscation. Over the course of many jargon-laden emails, the DMV told us (among other things), that the data we want are in a format that would require (depending on the message) expensive hand tabulation, or a mysterious procedure called a “file pass,” which seems to involve the DMV writing custom software (at huge expense) to extract it. We asked for a plain language explanation of what this data format was. We got no answer. The DMV told us repeatedly that the data we wanted were not in its “driver database,” so we asked, multiple times, if any of the data were in other DMV databases, or in already-compiled reports. We got no answer. More than once the DMV said our request couldn’t proceed until they estimated the total likely cost to us of meeting it. When we asked for that estimate, the DMV never provided one. When the DMV said there were too many records, we said we would happily work with a sample. Rather than produce the sample, the DMV offered new explanations about why it didn’t have to share the data. The goalposts, in short, kept moving. Eventually the DMV stopped replying completely and we threw up our hands. This felt like the outcome the process was designed to produce. 

Did we just get unlucky, and correspond with a uniquely uncooperative DMV representative? No. This was our third attempt at getting these records, and the other two experiences were similar. And one of us, for a separate project, was similarly stonewalled by DMV officials who were wary of being interviewed; one official didn’t come to a scheduled interview but a PR staffer did, who proceeded to ask the researcher questions.  

All this behavior runs afoul, at least in spirit, of California’s Public Records Act. The law clearly requires agency staff to explain how data are stored, and to help the public access it. The DMV did neither.  If we believe the DMV’s excuses, then its data management system is essentially unusable. But given its shifting explanations and evasions, there is little reason to believe them. It seems more likely the DMV goes out of its way to not share information. That’s absurd; the DMV isn’t the CIA. There are few benefits to shrouding depersonalized DMV data in secrecy, and there are real costs. People may or may not think placard fraud is important. But driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do on a daily basis, and the part of our life where we pose the greatest risk to others. The DMV plays a big role in managing this everyday risk, and we cannot continue on with their status quo of doing so in secret. 

Marcel Moran, PhD is assistant professor in the School of Planning, Policy, and Environmental Studies at San José State University. Michael Manville, PhD is professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Miriam Pinski, PhD is Research Lead at the Shared-Use Mobility Center.

• With the cost of living a major issue for American voters, the American Public Transportation Association reports that using transit instead of driving can save and average of $14,000 a year when fuel, maintenance, insurance, parking and depreciation are taken into account. (Governing)
• New governors in states like California, Georgia, Colorado and Michigan have a chance to overhaul transportation so that families don’t have to spend a fifth of their income on car ownership. (Natural Resources Defense Council)
• The Open Markets Institute warns that robotaxis could put control over transportation in the hands of a few big tech companies.
• Millennial homebuyers want to live in the suburbs, but they also want the suburbs to look a lot more like cities. (Business Insider)
• What if cities had randomly chosen juries make decisions instead of letting the same handful of NIMBYs with too much time on their hands kill every good idea? (We Can Have Nice Things)
• Pete Hegseth’s “Fortress America” plan for military bases sounds an awful lot like 15-minute cities. (CleanTechnica)
• Plans for a new Chesapeake Bay bridge include widening a highway, $40 million for vague transit improvements and “consideration” of a bike lane. (Fox Baltimore)
• The Houston Metro is spending $4 million on road repairs along bus routes, but some advocates think it should be used to improve bus service instead. (Click 2 Houston)
• Almost 80 percent of voters in the San Antonio suburb of Converse opted to stay in the VIA transit system. (Texas Public Radio)
• Los Angeles landlords are turning parking into accessory dwelling units, prompting lawsuits from tenants. (L.A. Times; paywall)
• Denver’s transit agency is funding free first mile/last mile micromobility. (Mass Transit)
• It’s taken Seattle almost five years just to build a small parking lot for electric vehicle charging. (The Urbanist)
• Missoula passed an updated complete streets policy. (Missoulan)
• Amtrak is promoting snowy views on some of its Northern and mountain routes. (Quartz)

“Careless Driver Slays Innocent Lives; Held for Drink and Drug Testing.”

You’ve read that headline a hundred times, or one very like it. A photo of a crumpled bicycle, perhaps, or a small shoe on the pavement. A neighbor quoted saying the motorist always drove too fast. The reader shakes his head and turns the page.

I have very nearly been that driver. More than once. I was not drunk, I was not on drugs, and I was not driving too fast. But I still almost killed someone, because of structural conditions that made it almost impossible not to.

I live in Skyline Plaza, a condominium in Falls Church, Virginia, and park in the building’s mostly-underground garage. Several doors used by pedestrians open directly from that garage into lanes used by moving automobiles.

One day in 2023, I was driving towards the garage just as someone stepped through one of those pedestrian entrances. A mother was taking her three young children to their car parked outside, and I suspect the children enjoyed racing each other to it. All three burst through the door at once, directly into my path.

The mother shrieked in stark terror.

The children stopped dead in their tracks — figuratively, not literally—and I drove through the place where, had their mother not screamed, I could easily have killed three young souls in two blinks of an eye.

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Here’s the thing about that pedestrian door: someone, at some point, recognized how dangerous its placement is. When it opens, two warning lights come on to alert approaching drivers.

They are shriveled little things, those lights, installed behind two pipes, so that a driver cannot see them until he is a few feet from colliding with a walker — which is to say, too late for them to do any good.

Compare that with the street outside. Nearby Arlington County has installed highly visible flashing lights at pedestrian crossings, giving drivers ample time to react. Car-on-pedestrian crashes can be prevented — if you use the right tools well.

In April 2024, I reported the problem to our condominium’s Safety Committee and demonstrated it in person to a committee representative. In November 2026, she confirmed that the committee had notified management. Still, nothing had been done.

At least six garage doors have inadequate warning lights, or none at all.

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This was not the first time I narrowly avoided striking a walker, though.

Garland, Texas, 1982. Behind our house ran an alley bordered by a six-foot wooden fence. You could not see over it or around it. Normally I drove the alley at ten or fifteen miles an hour. That day, for no reason I can recall, I was poking along at five or seven.

A boy shot out from behind the fence, directly in front of my car, without looking. Thank goodness, I thought, I was barely moving.

Then a second boy, chasing the first, crossed in front of me. Another near miss. That one was Adam, who lived next door.

By now I had stopped. A third boy, plainly hell-bent on catching the other two, came around the corner at full tilt and ran smack into the side of my car.

My stopped car.

He bounced off, unhurt. He was, as it happened, a member of the youth soccer team I coached.

What happened next told me a good deal about two families.

Adam’s father heard about it and made his son come to my door and apologize. Adam hadn’t touched my car, but his father understood what had nearly happened and wanted his son to understand it too.

The third boy’s father reacted differently. I went to explain what had happened, opening rather clumsily with, “I hit your son.”

Once I explained that his son had actually run into my stopped car and was unhurt, the father relaxed. He seemed to regard the whole affair as nothing worth discussing.

Two fathers. One recognized a narrowly avoided tragedy and acted. The other saw that nobody was hurt and left it there.

Forty-four years later, I’ve encountered the attitude I experienced from the second kind of father again. This time, though, it’s coming from the condominium association.

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I still think about the headlines that would have run if I’d actually killed those children.

They would not have been about the six-foot fence. They would not have been about warning lights hidden behind pipes, or a safety recommendation that management ignored. They would have been about me — “careless driver slays innocent lives.”

I was lucky twice. Once because I happened to be poking along. Once because a mother screamed.

Neither of those is a safety system, and we can do better.

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Antalya, Türkiye | 9–20 November 2026

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) will lead a delegation of its member organisations to the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) in Antalya, Türkiye, with a clear message to world leaders: Africa cannot build a climate-resilient future without transforming its food systems, and agroecology must be at the heart of that transformation.

Representing a broad continental movement of farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, women, youth and civil society organisations, AFSA enters COP31 determined to move agroecology from recognition in climate negotiations to concrete policy commitments, public investment and action on the ground.

For millions of African food producers, the climate crisis is not a distant threat. It is already unfolding through failed harvests, prolonged droughts, devastating floods, declining soil fertility and rising food insecurity. Yet the communities bearing the heaviest burden remain among those with the least access to climate finance and the smallest voice in decisions affecting their future.

“Africa does not need another climate summit that celebrates commitments while its farmers continue to bear the cost of inaction. We know what works. Agroecology is already restoring soils, protecting biodiversity, strengthening livelihoods and building resilience across our continent. What is missing is the political courage to put these solutions at the centre of climate policy and finance. COP31 must be where recognition becomes real investment and action,” said Dr. Million Belay, General Coordinator of AFSA.

Building on years of advocacy through its Agroecology for Climate Action campaign, AFSA will actively engage in negotiations on agriculture and food systems, adaptation, climate finance and just transition. A central priority is securing the future of the Sharm el-Sheikh Joint Work on Agriculture and Food Security, whose four-year mandate concludes in 2026. AFSA is calling for a stronger, implementation-focused framework that explicitly recognises agroecology and delivers meaningful support to small-scale food producers.

Climate finance will be another defining priority. AFSA is demanding a credible pathway to triple adaptation finance by 2035, with predictable public funding delivered primarily through grants rather than debt-creating loans. This funding must be accessible to frontline communities and support farmer-managed seed systems, soil restoration, water conservation, biodiversity and local food markets.

“The real test of climate action is not how many billions are announced in negotiating rooms, but how much support reaches the communities protecting our food systems. A just transition cannot leave African farmers dependent on expensive inputs, burdened by debt or excluded from decisions. We want climate finance that strengthens their autonomy, protects their rights and enables agroecology to thrive,” said Karen Nekessa, Chair of AFSA’s Climate and Agroecology Working Group.

Ahead of COP31, AFSA is also officially launching its new policy brief, From Commitments to Delivery: Enhancing Climate Action on Food Systems and Agriculture through Agroecology. Grounded in the collective Addis Ababa Declaration adopted by African civil society in September 2026, the brief presents concrete recommendations for governments and development partners to strengthen agricultural climate action, make adaptation accountable to communities, ensure equitable climate finance and place food systems at the centre of a just transition.

Throughout COP31, AFSA and its members will engage African negotiators, policymakers, development partners and global civil society allies through thematic negotiations, bilateral meetings, advocacy events and strategic partnerships. Their collective mission is to ensure that Africa’s food producers are not merely recognised as vulnerable populations, but respected as leaders and agents of climate solutions.

With COP32 scheduled to take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2027, the decisions reached in Antalya will also help shape an important new chapter in Africa’s climate leadership.

AFSA’s message is unequivocal: climate justice begins with food justice. The solutions are already growing in African fields and communities. It is time for global climate policy and finance to catch up.

Read AFSA’s full COP31 Policy Brief: From Commitments to Delivery: Enhancing Climate Action on Food Systems and Agriculture through Agroecology.

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