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On a vast network of rivers flowing through the jungles of Papua New Guinea, researchers have rediscovered the spinach pipefish, a relative of the seahorse, which had not been recorded in more than 40 years. The fish has long been sought after by conservationists, who feared it had gone extinct.

Read more on E360 →

New Zealand’s parliament has adopted a controversial new law blocking a whole avenue of climate litigation and shutting down its most advanced corporate lawsuit, which has been blamed by the government for shaking business confidence and investment.

The Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill, expected to take effect in the coming days after it is formally signed by the Governor-General, prevents all current and future civil claims for climate loss or harm under tort law.

Justice minister Paul Goldsmith said last week that the aim was to give businesses “certainty around their climate change obligations”, noting it would not alter the government’s responsibilities under the Climate Change Response Act 2002 nor business obligations under the Emissions Trading Scheme.

“Our response to climate change is best managed by the Government at a national level and not through piece-meal litigation in the courts,” he added in a statement.

Such litigation, he said, “risks developing a new regime that contradicts the framework Parliament has already enacted” to tackle climate change.

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Goldsmith singled out a key domestic climate lawsuit brought by Northland iwi leader and activist Mike Smith against six big companies: dairy firms Fonterra and Dairy Holdings, energy firms Genesis Energy and Z Energy, New Zealand Steel and coal mining firm BT Mining. A seventh original defendant, Channel Infrastructure, was dropped after it permanently decommissioned its Marsden Point oil refinery.

Smith argued that these companies had caused him harm under public nuisance and negligence law, as well as a third breach of a duty to cease contributing to climate change that has yet to be tested domestically. He did not seek financial compensation, instead asking for the companies to immediately stop emitting or contributing to net greenhouse gas emissions.  

In one of the most advanced corporate climate accountability lawsuits in the world, a trial had been scheduled for April 2027 after the Supreme Court unanimously allowed the case to continue.

Corporate lobbying in the shadows

Smith described the passing of the bill as “deeply concerning”, particularly as it coincided with the Supreme Court hearing another of his climate lawsuits. In that case, Smith v Attorney-General, he argues that the government’s response to climate change and its impacts on Māori communities in particular breaches rights to life and culture.

“That timing raises profound questions about the separation of powers and the rule of law,” said Smith. “Whatever one’s view of the merits of these cases, it is deeply troubling when parliament intervenes to remove a legal pathway while the courts are actively considering fundamental questions about climate responsibility, rights and the crown’s obligations.”

The bill – which says that no person (including the government) can be found liable in tort for emissions-related climate change effects – followed major lobbying efforts by the companies defending themselves in Smith’s lawsuit. They outlined a proposed legal amendment in a briefing note to the government in 2024.

The centre-right government has been fiercely criticised over its lack of transparency in relation to this lobbying activity. The national ombudsman recently found that the Prime Minister’s Office effectively withheld information requested by the Environmental Law Initiative about meetings, discussions and conversations regarding Smith’s case.

Green groups fail to stop bill

The bill sparked huge concern among environmental campaigners in New Zealand and elsewhere. Greenpeace Aotearoa called it a “shocking abuse of executive power” and the vast majority of submissions to a parliamentary inquiry said it should be rejected.

But in the end, it was adopted with little resistance, moving relatively smoothly through parliament, passing its third reading by 67 votes to 53. Sam Bookman, climate law lecturer at Melbourne Law School, told Climate Home News he was not surprised by this, given that the coalition government has a secure majority.

A complaint has been made to the UN special rapporteur on climate change and human rights by Smith, the National Iwi Chairs Forum Pou Tikanga and youth coalition Climate Clinic Aotearoa over what they see as the government’s heavy-handed approach. Smith is also challenging the new law in yet another lawsuit.

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Bookman thinks it “very unlikely” that such a challenge will succeed, noting that New Zealand’s constitution is firmly anchored in parliamentary sovereignty.

But the expert in climate law does not see the bill as the end of legal action in the country, noting that New Zealand has a “sophisticated climate litigation landscape with a growing number of specialist and experienced lawyers and NGOs”.

The country is also approaching its next general election in November, and some opposition parties have pledged to restore access to the courts if elected.

Amanda Larsson, global project lead on agriculture for Greenpeace International, said: “This law deserves to be tested, and I strongly encourage the international climate litigation community to unite and help defend New Zealanders’ fundamental right to hold polluters accountable before this becomes a global blueprint.”

Copycat legislation on the rise

New Zealand’s move is part of a small but growing legislative effort to shut down climate litigation around the world.

In the US, Republican politicians introduced legislation in the House and Senate in April that would shield fossil fuel firms from climate liability lawsuits. Similar laws have already been passed at state level in Tennessee, Utah, Iowa and Louisiana.

The German state of Bavaria has put forward a similar proposal to the Federal Council, aiming to block private climate claims as well as the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments imposing such liability. There are also proposals to limit available remedies and actions in the Netherlands and Belgium.

UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court

Bookman said he expects more efforts to counter climate damages litigation and advised plaintiffs to think about how to respond, including drawing on broader support in opposing them.

“Even though it’s very hard for plaintiffs to win these types of cases, companies are very eager to avoid the expense, embarrassment and political accountability that come even with unsuccessful lawsuits,” he said.

The post New Zealand moves to protect business with law curtailing climate litigation appeared first on Climate Home News.

Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is the Executive Director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), an Indonesia-based economic think tank. Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the Director of the China-Indonesia desk at CELIOS. 

Indonesia produces around 60% of the world’s nickel, a metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) – more than any other country in the world. But in 2026, the government sharply reduced how much of its nickel can be extracted from the ground. 

Production quotas were reduced by around 40% this year compared to 2025. Weda Bay, the largest nickel mine on Earth, had its allowance cut by more than 70% and exhausted its full-year quota by the end of May, halting mining entirely; it cannot resume large-scale extraction until next year unless regulators grant an extension.

The policy has sparked a vivid debate in Indonesian policy circles: how can the country shift its strategy from a decade of mining vast quantities of cheap nickel to producing a high-value and low-carbon material that the rest of the world wants for EV batteries.

The cuts aren’t a silver bullet to clean up Indonesia’s nickel industry, whose smelters are powered by coal – the most polluting fossil fuels. But alongside stricter enforcement of environmental rules, it is one side of efforts to produce more sustainable nickel for a premium.

Restricting Indonesia’s nickel output

Production quotas were introduced to stop the collapse of nickel prices because of oversupply in the market. Prices had fallen more than 40% in 2023 alone and kept sliding as Indonesian supply kept growing, hitting a four-year low of around $13,900 a ton in late 2025.

Critics called the recent tightening of production quotas proof that Indonesia’s nickel strategy has failed, arguing that the industry shouldn’t need to throttle its own output to survive. But when assessed against what the policy was supposed to do – push up nickel prices – it has worked. Prices jumped to $20,000 a ton in May, the highest since 2024.

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Chinese industry groups representing companies that have invested billions to mine and refine the country’s nickel were furious, warning Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto that the cuts put $50 billion worth of investment at risk. But much of that Chinese capital is sunk into smelters and processing plants built specifically to run on Indonesian ore, and cannot simply be moved elsewhere. That gives Jakarta more room to hold its ground than the warning suggests.

Stronger environmental enforcement

Since the start of the year, Indonesia’s forestry task force has seized more than four million hectares of land from mines and plantations operating illegally in protected forests, collecting over two trillion rupiah ($113 million) in fines.

This included 148 hectares seized from Weda Bay for lacking a forestry permit. The share of nickel produced from illegal small-scale mining also fell from about a quarter in 2022 to roughly 10% by 2024.

The crackdown responds to serious environmental damages in the nickel industry. On Obi Island, a waste pond collapsed after heavy rain in June 2025, flooding three villages and killing a resident. Internal company tests found chromium-6 – a carcinogen – in the water, in quantities far above the legal limit. The footprint of another mine near Raja Ampat, which is home to some of the world’s richest coral reefs, grew 60-fold in just eight years.

The fishing villages of Tapunggaya in Sulawesi, Indonesia, are squeezed between the sea and an expanding nickel mine (Photo by Garry Lotulung/NurPhoto)

The market is responding to early cleanup efforts. Low-carbon nickel now sells for a real premium, roughly $18,800 to $19,300 a ton compared with $17,900 to $18,300 otherwise, as carmakers seek to source cleaner materials to comply with the European Union’s new emissions rules for imports.

In turn, this is incentivising the industry to do more to green its operations. Vale Indonesia’s smelter in South Sulawesi now runs almost entirely on hydropower, for example.

None of this addresses coal use, however. Major Indonesian nickel producers still emitted an estimated 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023. Indonesia may be cracking down on illegal mining and rewarding cleaner producers but it is still running its mines on the dirtiest fuel available.

Unequal benefits

For Indonesia to truly benefit from producing cleaner and high-value nickel, it needs to reap the economic benefits too. Although the industry has boosted the country’s economic growth, the reality on the ground tells a different story.  

Konawe in Southeast Sulawesi is home to a major smelting complex. Growth in the district jumped from 6% to 22% between 2015 and 2023, driven almost entirely by the nickel industry, according to a study by the Lowy Institute study. At the same time, poverty levels increased slightly and unemployment remained unchanged.

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In Halmahera, another epicentre of the nickel industry, spending by the poorest fifth grew just 5% between 2019 and 2022, compared with 28% for the wealthiest fifth, according to a separate study.

Part of the reason for this inequality is the system for transferring mining royalties to district authorities where the mines are located. In theory, they are entitled to the largest share. But in practice, payments are delayed, companies routinely dispute what they owe and royalties are pooled and distributed across a larger area.

The Natural Resource Governance Institute has found that decentralisation handed local governments power to approve new mines faster than they could build their capacity to manage them. Higher output raises national income on paper, but local governments remain constrained by fiscal rules and infrastructure costs that scale with mining.

None of this makes the 2026 quota cuts a mistake. Indonesia has every right to defend its pricing power over a resource it controls. But limiting extraction isn’t going to fix underlying issues around environmental enforcement and revenue-sharing. That requires rules that are consistently enforced, royalties that reach communities living by the mines, and a plan to wean smelters off coal.

The post Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Luther “Sunny” Miller is nearly 80, but in his younger days, he worked at Aerojet, a rocket and missile manufacturer located quite literally in his backyard. He can’t prove it, but he worries that his thyroid and bladder problems, and his wife’s kidney disease, can be traced to the plant.

Last year, national nuclear supplier BWX Technologies purchased the factory in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and announced plans for a significant expansion. The new facility will convert depleted uranium oxide supplied by the Department of Energy into high-purity depleted uranium. The 10-year, $1.6-billion contract will supply the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with the material needed to maintain the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Despite the company’s promise to bring 175 permanent jobs to the area, Miller and many neighbors were left irate. 

“They’re going to turn over the most beautiful parts of Tennessee into a nuclear waste area,” Miller said. 

But for others, the promise of jobs is what makes a nuclear “renaissance” centered around the nearby city of Oak Ridge in East Tennessee so promising. BWXT’s planned buildout is part of what state officials hope will be an economic revival driven by a renewal of the Manhattan Project’s legacy. Billions of dollars are already flowing into a region whose experience and expertise in nuclear energy and weapons development make it especially attractive to the industry. 

Now Tennessee is among five finalists for a Department of Energy “nuclear lifecycle innovation campus” that could make it the centerpiece of a federal plan to finally deal with what’s left behind after splitting atoms to generate electricity. But the history that makes the Volunteer State so attractive a contender is marked by contamination, illnesses, and accidents, leaving some wary of what a renaissance might bring.

Nuclear waste is a logistical and public relations nightmare. Spent fuel, which remains radioactive for millennia, eventually finds its way into secure concrete containers. It remains there indefinitely because there is nowhere else to put it. The federal government has long wanted to build a permanent repository deep underground, but the only serious candidate, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, stalled amid political and public opposition. With the Trump administration hoping to quadruple nuclear energy output, solving this problem is increasingly urgent given that the nation’s 85 interim storage sites already hold more than 86,000 tons of radioactive waste, or just about enough to fill a football field nearly 10 yards deep.

The nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses are the latest attempt to address that problem. Rather than foist a site on an unwilling community, the Department of Energy invited states to volunteer as potential hosts. These industrial centers would support far more than waste storage. They would include uranium enrichment and fuel fabrication, reprocessing and recycling of spent fuel, and even energy generation. But federal officials said waste management would anchor the project. In July, Tennessee joined Utah, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Idaho as the five states selected to continue discussions with DOE.

Tennessee’s advantage in that competition dates back more than 80 years to the end of World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age. The federal government chose Oak Ridge, at the time a remote southern Appalachian farming community, as a key site for the Manhattan Project. The town grew to encompass an array of separate sites related to the nuclear weapons development program, including a nuclear reactor.

BWXT president of operations Ronald Daily said that the company, and others like it, is building on the region’s history of contributing to national energy security and defense. “Appalachia was key to the U.S. developing a defense power in a time frame like no other because of the industrious nature of the people of Appalachia,” he said. 

The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, produces materials for nuclear weapons. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Oak Ridge’s rural feel has given way to a concrete sprawl hosting a mismatched array of museums, highway-exit chains, and top-secret facilities. Today, the federally managed Y-12 Security Complex and the laboratory, now a federally funded research institution, remain, sitting alongside private companies of all kinds hoping to get a little shine from the area’s legion of talented engineers. All of it is dotted by verdant public lands.

For those at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this moment is a chance to leverage its expertise for the continued local and national public good.

“Part of Oak Ridge’s role is that we have expertise in all parts of that fuel cycle,” said Joe Hoagland, a physical chemist and associate laboratory director of the laboratory’s Fusion and Fission Energy and Science Directorate. “We know how to enrich it. We know how to use it. We know how to store it. We know how to transport it, and we understand the chemistries around how to recycle it.”

For many years, Hoagland said, East Tennessee was home to a handful of legacy companies like GE and Westinghouse, which created technologies for traditional utilities. But these days, it looks a lot more like startup culture, he said, because growing demand for electricity “creates an opportunity for others to get in the energy game.” 

Hopes for local benefit are lofty. In the past 10 years, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development has secured $10 billion in investment to recruit new companies and bring the region 3,000 new jobs, said the agency’s nuclear advisor, Braden Stover. They include companies like BWXT, Orano, and Centrus, which are involved in various aspects of the processes that enrich uranium.  

Officials said this growing sector could bring tens of thousands of jobs in everything from construction and manufacturing to engineering and research. They also envision an educational pipeline that prepares local residents for many of those positions. “The second graders of today are going to be the ones that actually are coming in to work at these facilities,” Stover said. “We need to get to them and just let them know, Hey, here is what is coming.”

BWX Technologies has announced plans to open a high-purity depleted uranium processing plant in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Jesse Barber / Grist

But the region’s long industrial and nuclear history has left another legacy, and opposition to the coming nuclear revival is rooted in memories of the harm already done to the people and the landscape of East Tennessee. 

For some, that harm started with the eviction of 3,000 farmers to make way for the Manhattan Project. Wariness has only grown in the years since as the risks of living alongside the facility and those that support it emerged.

Past studies have linked patterns of neurological conditions, cancers, and fatal respiratory ailments to workplace exposures at the now-shuttered K-25 plant that enriched uranium from 1943 until 1985. The federal government continues cleaning up contamination left by decades of nuclear weapons production in Oak Ridge. Nuclear Fuel Services, a uranium processing plant in Erwin and subsidiary of BWXT, has a record of leaks, potentially toxic dust, and groundwater contamination.  

The mistrust also arises from incidents beyond the nuclear industry. In 2008, 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash spilled at the Kingston Fossil Plant, originally built to power the Oak Ridge war complex. Coal ash cleanup workers were not informed of the hazards they faced or provided with protective equipment. Over the past decade, many workers exposed to the toxic waste have fallen ill, and some have died of rare cancers.

Those histories have contributed to skepticism and fear as the Trump administration has streamlined and overhauled radioactive waste storage and siting requirements. Valerie Thomas, who studies nuclear engineering and environmental impacts at the Georgia Institute of Technology, called those changes concerning.

“There are two reasons we want nuclear regulations to be very strong. One is, no, you don’t want to have errors,” Thomas said. “The second is if people think the regulations aren’t very strong, they’re not going to want nuclear power and nuclear facilities.”

That distrust has already shaped fights over the nuclear industry’s expansion in East Tennessee. In early March, hundreds of residents in Claiborne County packed a town hall to oppose a proposed nuclear graphite facility. Their efforts stopped the proposal in its tracks.

This history wasn’t far from the minds of many in Jonesborough, where residents expressed concerns about waste storage and uranium dust. Many filled local county commission meetings to oppose BWXT’s proposal and fought zoning rules that would clear its path. BWXT responded to community questions about the plant’s waste storage plans, but the answers weren’t satisfactory for many local residents. A late March meeting at the Washington County courthouse left many residents angry and hurt. Will Manning, a 42-year-old knifemaker and father, had spent the winter knocking on doors in Jonesborough, urging neighbors to turn out to oppose final zoning approval for the facility. Ultimately, however, the measure passed, clearing a path for the plant. 

Some residents of Jonesborough, Tennessee, are wary of nuclear and defense industries and oppose efforts to lure them to East Tennessee. Jesse Barber / Grist

“I honestly don’t know what was more disgusting, disappointing, depressing: the outcome of the vote or the dog-and pony show they put on and blatant disregard for the strong voice of this community,”  Manning later told Grist. 

Jonesborough residents remain active in a Facebook group created to organize opposition to BWXT, monitoring any news about the nuclear industry’s moves in Tennessee. Some participants have followed local elections closely, vowing to vote out officials who supported the zoning change.

As for the DOE’s nuclear lifecycle innovation campus, most of it would likely be located in Oak Ridge, but waste disposal might happen elsewhere, and that location remains undecided. Federal officials familiar with the process told Grist the selection process will include extensive discussions with the communities that might be considered, although they did not say what those conversations might look like. They also said any waste storage decisions would be preceded by years of environmental analysis to rule out locations with fatal flaws like streams, aquifers, or geologic instability. The initial Tennessee project application sought letters of support from officials in adjoining counties, and suggests that campus funding could support infrastructural improvements locally.

Sunny Miller concedes East Tennessee needs the jobs a nuclear revival would bring. Many residents are poor, he said, and employers would offer good pay. What troubles him is being asked to weigh those benefits against risks he doesn’t feel he fully understands.

“You can’t live on car washes and chicken places alone, that’s a real feeling,” Miller said. “But let me make this decision based on facts.” 

This piece has been updated to clarify the role and origin of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 Security Complex.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Tennessee helped usher in the nuclear age. It wants to lead the way again. on Aug 24, 2026.

Cattle are a central part of the identity of Andrew Msami’s Maasai community in northeast Tanzania. Herd size determines social position, and many people keep all their wealth in livestock, not banks. But in recent years, Msami and others have been forced to sell the animals and buy goats, which can handle drought better but are less financially and culturally valuable. Msami says adapting to a shifting climate has been a part of Maasai life for generations, but recent conditions represent an existential threat.

“We have to adapt because it’s like desertification is attacking our identity,” Msami told Grist. “If you lose your identity, it means you have lost everything.”

The Maasai are pastoralists, a term that describes the roughly 500 million people around the world who tend herds of livestock like cattle, goats, and sheep. They often move with the animals as they seek grass and water. Because they live and work in places with arid conditions and extreme temperatures, they are particularly vulnerable to climate change. 

Around the world, drought and land degradation threaten rangelands, which make up roughly half of the planet’s landmass, and the pastoralists from Tanzania and Sudan to Nepal and Mongolia that rely on them. Desertification is occurring at 30 to 35 times the historical average, threatening even the most resilient communities. That’s on top of an influx of invasive species, extractive industries, tourists, and other threats. 

To address these overlapping crises, Msami and hundreds of other pastoralists are in Mongolia this week for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, or UNCCD. They are calling for stronger protections for Indigenous pastoral traditions, greater access to funding and resources to combat the crisis, and official recognition that the experience of generations living on increasingly marginal lands offers lessons for adapting to a hotter, drier world.

“We want to give the world a message that it’s not only the land that you will have to really look at,” said Msami, who is the program lead for the Pastoralists Indigenous Non-Governmental Organizations Forum, or PINGOs Forum, which is a network representing over 50 pastoralist organizations in Tanzania. “But you look at the people in that land, and maybe their lives should not be disturbed or sacrificed for the development of the world.” 

That message must first overcome a global environmental movement that has not always prioritized rangelands and the peoples who steward them. 

In 1992, world leaders gathered at the historic United Nations Earth Summit in Brazil, where they identified three great environmental challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification. Global conferences were established for each, creating a forum where the world would develop plans to tackle them. In the decades since, trillions of dollars have flowed toward the first two, while desertification has largely been relegated to a problem for the developing world to address.

“But now the history is catching them because when you look at Spain, France, even Sweden, all those countries, they have a bigger drought ever since the last two years,” said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is Mbororo from Chad and the first chair of the Indigenous peoples caucus at UNCCD. “So it is becoming a developed countries issue, and now they start paying more attention, but still it does not get the same attention on the level of political will or finance.”

Although this is the 17th meeting of the convention, Ibrahim described this year’s event as “unique, historic, and particular.” That is because it is the first with a formal caucus specifically for Indigenous peoples, something not found at the climate and biodiversity conferences. Because of that, Ibrahim and others consider this gathering a unique opportunity for Indigenous pastoralists to advocate for their rights and advance their goals on the international stage. 

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The gathering also comes during the United Nations’ International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, which Ibrahim said has had a positive impact on raising awareness of the challenges communities like his face and the contributions they are making to climate resilience.

Despite those signs of progress, attendees in Mongolia said that the Indigenous caucus has faced resistance. In the first week of the conference, Ibrahim led a protest to demand full participation for the caucus and for its official functions to be established.

As the world increasingly works to address drought, Ibrahim and others are concerned that, after decades of being overlooked, a global focus could sideline them even further. About a third of Mongolia’s population practice pastoral lifestyles, for example, but often have no role in global climate discussions.

Some countries have responded to drought and land degradation by restricting pastoralist herd sizes and restricting movement. That comes despite scientific evidence that pastoralism boosts biodiversity and supports climate resilient landscapes, among other benefits. 

But Ibrahim said that the rate of desertification has accelerated beyond the point where traditional knowledge alone is enough. She said that in Chad the desert is advancing 2 kilometers, or 1.2 miles, each year. “We have the land degradation very, very fast, and of course we use our knowledge to try to restore the land,” she said. “We try to fix it, but it is still there.” 

That’s why a call for greater legal protections and resources for their livelihoods is central to this year’s conference. “Securing land and mobility rights is not separate from climate adaptation,” said Solange Bandiaky-Badji, who is coordinator and president of the Rights and Resources Initiative, a global coalition of over 200 organizations focused on land rights. “It is a fundamental part of building resilience.”

Bandiaky-Badji said the rest of the world should learn about climate adaptation and resilience from pastoralists. But, she said, none of their expertise and experiences matter unless countries protect rights to land and mobility. The right to free, prior, and informed consent, which requires that Indigenous peoples have a say in what occurs on their lands and in their waters, is one that Bandiaky-Badji said needs greater enforcement. Because pastoralists are mobile, their land rights are not always recognized, and pastoralist leaders often do not receive an invitation to negotiate agreements and solutions.

Both Ibrahim and Bandiaky-Badji said global climate change and biodiversity conferences should follow the UNCCD’s focus on active inclusion of Indigenous voices. 

But beyond that, Bandiaky-Badji said desertification and rangelands can no longer be treated as secondary issues. “There is a link between climate resilience, protecting biodiversity, and restoring landscapes,” she said. “They’re all interrelated. And until we start seeing them as interrelated, we might have these different COPs, but it will not really solve the systemic problem that we have been dealing with. And the climate crisis is a systemic problem that we need to deal with.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Living with drought has taught pastoralists lessons the world needs on Aug 24, 2026.

Unprecedented. Record-breaking. Baffling. Experts are running out of ways to describe this year’s tornado season in the Midwest, which has unleashed more twisters on Illinois than any other place on Earth. 

So far, 207 cyclones and counting have touched down in the Prairie State, some of which have flipped homes, toppled power lines, and even torn through solar arrays. That figure may rise as officials continue working through the remaining post-storm assessments, according to the National Weather Service. The season has yet to wrap, but it has already handily topped the previous record of 142 funnel clouds set just two years ago, according to Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist. This is the third year in a row that Illinois has experienced a triple-digit tornado season; the state’s historical average is closer to 50. 

“It’s just anything beyond what we would expect,” Ford said. 

The dramatic surge in Illinois and throughout the Corn Belt contrasts with a decreasing trend of twisters in the Great Plains, the region traditionally billed as Tornado Alley. Experts are still working through the data, trying to understand whether it has been inching eastward, and if so whether climate change has anything to do with it. 

Regardless of the answer to that question, Illinois is today the epicenter of tornadoes in the U.S. A recent analysis by Steve Nesbitt, a meteorologist and professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, found that the region is getting a historic hammering. Illinois and Indiana have already recorded the highest level of tornado activity since the National Weather Service started keeping track in 1950. He added that nearby states including Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, and Ohio are in the top 10. A pair of tornadoes even touched down in New York City and Long Island. 

That said, overall it has been a slow year. “It has been below average nationally, with the southern Plains and Southeast less active than normal,” Nesbit said.

Even with the unusual flurry of tornadoes, the Land of Lincoln remains well short of the all-time record. That belongs to Texas, which experienced 255 in 2015. Some experts argue it’s not a fair comparison because Texas is about 4.7 times larger than Illinois. However, Nesbit said that in terms of tornado density, or concentration of tornadoes touching down in 80-kilometer (50 mile) squares, Illinois is on top. He added that as of mid-August no region of the country has had a higher reported density of tornadoes than parts of central Illinois. 

Tornadoes are the result of atmospheric contrasts and chaos. They develop when moist air near the ground lies beneath drier, hotter air aloft, creating a sandwich of sorts. In this unstable atmosphere, differences in wind speed and direction at different heights create rotation and thunderclouds. “So just a difference between air masses,” said Shel Winkley, chief meteorologist at the research group Climate Central. “That’s also going to provide some spin in the atmosphere.” 

Scientists measure this as “convective available potential energy,” or CAPE, which describes the available fuel for thunderstorm development. Look inside these towering thunderclouds and you’ll find warm air rising but cool air falling, which creates spinning currents that can spawn a tornado. One trend scientists can parse, Winkley said, is the increase in the number of potential thunderstorm days. “That doesn’t necessarily mean a tornado will form,” Winkley added, “but we have these higher values of CAPE over the East and the Southeast during the spring than we used to have.”

The other component is that moisture. An abundantly clear climate signal is playing out in the Gulf of Mexico, which has been exceptionally warm of late. Since humans began pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the additional heat. The hotter the Gulf gets, the more moisture it can pump into the atmosphere, and the more fuel it can provide for thunderstorms and tornadoes. (This is also how climate change is supercharging hurricanes, as those storms also love moisture.)

Even given all that, it doesn’t seem that climate change is in and of itself resulting in more tornadoes. However, on the days when we get the biggest tornado outbreaks, more twisters are touching down, Winkley said. Tornado Alley also seems to be shifting east, putting new communities in danger.  “At least the science that we have right now, we don’t see a connection between more tornadoes occurring because of climate change,” Winkley said. “It’s more about where they’re occurring, when they’re occurring, and then again the number that they’re happening on specific days versus others.”

Another wrinkle: It has never been easier to spot a tornado. 

“Our radar data has increased in resolution multiple times over compared to even when I started at this office 20 years ago,” said Ginno Izzi, a senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service office covering Chicago. He adds that advancement in radar resolution, satellite data, and remote sensing has made it possible to count smaller tornadoes that might not have been previously detected. 

If that seems unsatisfyingly inconclusive, it’s not for lack of trying. Tornadoes are hyperlocal weather events, so they’re difficult to simulate in climate models. Massive hurricanes, on the other hand, are easier to model. So scientists are still working to figure out how much the change in tornado activity is due to natural variability — what you’d expect if humans hadn’t warmed the planet — versus what’s the consequence of runaway greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s still one of those things that we just need faster computers and stronger computers in order to be able to do that sort of modeling with it,” Winkley said, “and we’re just not quite there yet.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Even meteorologists are baffled by the Midwestern tornado season on Aug 24, 2026.

Dominika Parry never stopped fighting for Jackson, Mississippi, residents even after the Trump administration terminated a multibillion-dollar program last year meant to help the Black city still reeling from a water crisis. 

For years, if water did flow out of Black households’ faucets in Jackson at all, it was often brown. It left elders and babies with rashes and caused a slew of health problems across the city.

Parry and other community leaders and organizations got some semblance of hope in 2023 with a federal grant. Yet, two years later — before any funds could be distributed — President Donald Trump entered office and terminated a $2.8 billion program meant to help mitigate the harm from climate change and environmental issues in Black, low-income, and disadvantaged communities. 

More than a year later, federal courts stepped in and rebuked the administration’s effort to dismantle climate funding. The case centers on the administration’s effort to roll back climate investments authorized by Congress under the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s cornerstone economic policy.

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Last month, a South Carolina federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to resume distributing funds designed to address environmental and health challenges in underserved communities.

The July ruling came just before the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court blocked the EPA from rescinding nearly $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awards. That program is different from the environmental justice grants promised to Jackson and other overburdened communities. 

That means that over $22 billion meant for climate and environmental projects in disadvantaged communities may soon be distributed. 

Parry did not respond to requests for comment after the ruling, but Matt Sedlar, climate analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the outcomes of these lawsuits are “sending a message to the administration that the separation of powers exists and that it must follow the law.”

What the billions could be spent on in Black communities

In 2023, a $20 million federal grant offered a life-saving chance for Jackson’s poorest. The money was for a resilience hub that would offer year-round access to housing where the lights would stay on with clean drinking water in the time of disaster by funding a micro electric grid. It would also include backup generators, an independent water well, showers, and overnight shelter for up to 150 people at a time facing water issues in their home.

The goal was building “a place where people can come, stay overnight, have access to energy, be in healthy conditions,” Parry said last year. Parry founded the recipient group 2C Mississippi, a Ridgeland-based nonprofit focused on climate resilience in Mississippi.

Since February 2025, the billions made available through the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program have languished as the Trump administration has moved to gut a historic number of environmental rules and protections. The Associated Press estimates that the EPA programs and rules cut were projected to prevent roughly 30,000 deaths per year, particularly in Black and disadvantaged communities. 

After prison, Leon Dillard participated in a solar installation program for formerly incarcerated people in Houston. The program no longer exists. Adam Mahoney / Capital B

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was designed as a $27 billion national clean-energy financing program. Its goal was also to make clean-energy investments like home-energy upgrades, solar installations, and electric vehicles more accessible in low-income and disadvantaged communities that have historically been shut out of affordable green financing.

The Trump administration has already moved to legally appeal the judge’s ruling regarding the environmental and climate justice grant program, claiming that the EPA now lacks the money and staff to implement the program. (The Trump administration has fired 25 percent of EPA workers since 2024, bringing the agency to its lowest staff total ever.) 

Already, some of the programs that received the initial approval for funding in 2024 have ceased to exist, including a solar installation program for formerly incarcerated people in Houston. 

Last year, Leon Dillard, a formerly incarcerated man who was a part of the program before it was cut, said the climate-friendly work gave him a “sense of purpose.” 

“I really just needed to be a part of [the program], be a part of something,” he said. “You have to make a choice to take a chance, or your life will never change. But you need other people with you on that journey.”

It is likely that the administration will attempt to appeal the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund ruling as well. 

Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program projects include: 

• More than $14 million to install wastewater systems in Alabama’s Blackbelt communities where failing septic systems and untreated sewage have long sickened Black residents.
• A $500,000 micro electric grid project in Gentilly, a historically Black New Orleans neighborhood that has faced chronic flooding, heat, and power-outage risk, particularly during hurricane season.
• A $20 million grant for four connected disaster hubs in Florida’s historically Black areas of Lee County. The hubs would include cooling centers and, during disasters, sites for electricity, communications, water and food distribution, and emergency health support. The project also included money for stormwater treatment, new shade trees, and workforce training.
• $500,000 for solar-workforce training for formerly incarcerated Texans, illegal-dumping cleanup, and environmental education in a Black community in Houston overburdened by pollution. 
• $20 million to weatherize, electrify, repair, and improve air quality in 500 homes in East Alabama and West Georgia. The plan also included 10 solar-and-battery resilience hubs for residents during outages and extreme weather. 

Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund projects include:

• Mississippi Solar for All: Hope Enterprise Corporation received $62 million to expand residential solar access for low-income and disadvantaged Mississippians.
• Arkansas Solar for All: Hope Enterprise Corporation received $94 million for a companion program bringing solar benefits to low-income households across Arkansas.
• Georgia BRIGHT Communities Coalition: Capital Good Fund received $156 million to expand access to clean energy and related jobs in Georgia.
• EnergizeNC: The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality received $156 million for its statewide low-income solar initiative.
• Industrial Heartland Solar Coalition: Growth Opportunity Partners received $156 million for a multistate solar effort serving Midwestern industrial communities.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump ordered to release billions in climate grants meant for Black communities on Aug 23, 2026.

The U.S. has faced a critical shortage of firefighters at the Forest Service, or USFS, this summer as thousands of fires erupted across the country.

Despite officials’ claims that the firefighting workforce was stronger than ever, the agency has failed to keep pace with escalating conditions and the catastrophic fires fueled by them, according to nine firefighters who spoke to the Guardian anonymously, because they are barred from disclosing the information to the public.

Several people familiar with internal hiring data at the agency said there were also large gaps in important leadership roles, which had caused bottlenecks and operational challenges during a busy and dangerous year.

They described a response system that’s been pushed to the brink, as unsustainable pressure is put on skeleton crews with months to go before the highest fire risks subside. Last year, many firefighters had to work more than 1,000 hours of overtime — the equivalent of cramming an extra five months of work into an already busy season. This year is expected to be even worse.

“We just do not have enough people,” said a federal fire captain who works in the Pacific Northwest, where wildfires recently devastated neighborhoods in Washington state’s second largest city, Spokane. “Every firefighter is engaged at the highest priority we can possibly engage them, but houses are burning. When it’s not Spokane, it’s going to be the next town, and the next town.”

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The USFS, housed under the Department of Agriculture, employs the bulk of the federal government’s fire workforce and manages more than 193 million acres across the country. The agency has struggled with recruitment and retention for years, an issue that’s come to a head as the climate crisis fuels a rise in dangerous fire conditions.

A fire captain put the shortages in context by comparing crews to players in a soccer match, where each team has 11 players allowed on the field but an active roster of 30 in case substitutions have to be made. In the forest service, he said, there were no backup players.

“Showing up to a game with 13 people is insane. Playing a whole season with 13 people is abuse,” he said. “That’s how we fight fire — and nobody gets to take a day off.”

The picture stands in stark contrast to the one painted by Tom Schultz, the USFS chief, who has repeatedly assured lawmakers and the public that the agency’s firefighting workforce is at full capacity.

“Our firefighting workforce is stronger than at any point in recent years,” Schultz said in testimony to a congressional subcommittee in July. “We are fully staffed and equipped to respond aggressively to every unplanned ignition.”

The agency has avoided disclosing breakdowns in its staffing totals, even after repeated requests from journalists and members of Congress. Instead, the USFS points to a hiring goal of 11,300 positions as the benchmark for operational staffing levels — a number that has remained flat for years.

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John Winn, a spokesperson for the USFS, declined to answer questions about the staffing challenges or provide clarity on the numbers. He doubled down on Schultz’s claims, saying in an email that the agency was “fully staffed at the level we are funded for, and our posture allows us to respond effectively — just as we have for decades.”

But the minimum “operational” staffing levels are far different from what’s required to have a functioning firefighting force in the current climate, according to several firefighters.

Firefighters who have seen internal staff totals said the actual number of people who were able and available to be deployed when large blazes erupt was probably far smaller than what the USFS had reported to the public.

The disparity between the rhetoric repeated in public and the situation on the ground has added to the burdens borne by exhausted crews.

“Having more firefighters means I have a higher probability of coming home,” a fire captain said. “How are we supposed to feel when our leaders — the same people who get up and speak to the mourning families when firefighters die — are lying about our capacity?”

Gaps in leadership

Firefighters who spoke to the Guardian were most concerned about the widening gap at the management level. Specialized positions needed for running large-scale fire suppression operations, including taskforce leaders, division supervisors, and heavy equipment bosses, require decades of experience. Losses in these on-the-ground leadership roles have become extremely difficult to replace.

Seth McKinney, a fire management officer with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, spent 12 years working for the USFS before leaving the agency, but he returned this summer to help because the forest he previously worked for was short on chief officers.

“It shouldn’t really surprise anybody that we’re in the situation that we are in, because we haven’t invested in our federal firefighters,” he said, adding that the workforce had become a shadow of what it once was.

For years, escalating job hazards paired with low pay pushed scores of people with experience to leave the USFS. Even after an overdue bump in pay was finalized in 2025, the damage was already done. The USFS lost nearly half of its permanent employees between 2021 and 2024 alone, leaving the agency scrambling to fill leadership positions during the most active parts of the year.

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The agency lost roughly 20 percent of its workforce during the Trump administration’s mass-firing spree in 2025, according to a recent government report. While the cull wasn’t directed at firefighters, it affected vital support roles that crews are now searching desperately to fill.

“Without experienced middle management you don’t have anything resembling effective coordination,” a firefighter familiar with the shortages said. “It’s no small thing to be short in those areas and it is a significant safety issue.”

These positions oversee thousands of people deployed when big blazes erupt. When there are gaps, it can mean that other parts of the fire-suppression workforce can’t be utilized.

When fires tore across Oregon this summer, private contract resources sat idle, because there weren’t enough qualified managers available to supervise them, state Senator Mike McLane said. He found out about the issue from constituents and then confirmed with the incident management team staff and the Oregon department of forestry.

The problem has been compounded by decades of mismanagement at the agency, according to a firefighter who explained that the losses in positions critical to coordination and supervision left holes that exponentially affected response efforts. “We are now completely unequipped to deal with the sort of fire seasons we will see more and more of.”

A destructive summer adds more pressure

It’s already been a destructive wildfire season. The country has been classified at “preparedness Level 5” — the highest level of resource deployment and an indication that new requests for support may go unanswered — since July 18.

As of Tuesday, more than 49,200 wildfires have erupted and burned more than 7.2 million acres (2.9 million hectares) nationwide since the year began, eclipsing 10-year averages, and the dangers are far from over. In many regions, fire risks will remain high through autumn and could linger into winter.

Inter-agency complex-incident management teams, specialized groups that are crucial for organizing responses to large-scale disasters, have also taken a hit, with fewer experienced leaders to run them. There were 46 teams in 2023. Now there are just 38.

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Dave Upthegrove, the commissioner of public lands for Washington, a publicly elected official who manages the state’s roughly 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) of public lands and directs statewide wildland firefighting efforts, said the USFS has been an important partner. But he raised the alarm early this year about the agency’s diminished capacity.

“There are fewer teams, which was true in 2025 as well,” Upthegrove said. “The difference this year is the extreme weather conditions, dangerously high winds at times, very dry fuels, and a fourth year of drought. All of that has combined to make us highly vulnerable to large and catastrophic fires like we have seen throughout the state, especially in Spokane.”

With resources spread thin, it’s also been increasingly challenging to meet the needs for equipment and manpower when new fires ignite.

More than 600 requests went unfilled during a 72-hour period last week, according to an internal dataset shared with the Guardian, the bulk of them coming from the Pacific Northwest region currently being hammered by fires. Requests for aircraft, crews, and equipment were unable to be filled 265 times over the three-day period. Dozens of requests for experienced managers and supervisors also went unfilled.

Staffing shortages have also affected urgently needed landscape treatment work that helps stop blazes before they spread.

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More than half of federal firefighters who responded to a survey, conducted in March by the firefighter advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and the National Federation of Federal Employees union, said their unit had to cancel prescribed burning projects due to staffing shortages.

Last year, the USFS treated 35 percent fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Center for Western Priorities. In Oregon, a state now in the midst of a historic season when more acres have burned than in any other recorded year, treatments fell by 47 percent.

Only a quarter of federal firefighters who responded to the survey said their unit was fully staffed. A fifth reported that unqualified personnel are filling the vacant positions.

This comes amid a major consolidation of the federal firefighting workforce under a new agency, known as the Wildland Fire Service, housed under the Department of the Interior. Officials say the strategy will ensure better coordination and streamline costs.

While many federal firefighters are supportive of a centralized approach, there are also widespread concerns about how this consolidation will be achieved and whether officials will make good on promises to improve working conditions for the crews who bear a severe mental and physical toll trying to protect communities year after year.

After years of raising the alarm about the widening gap between limited capacity and growing catastrophes, federal firefighters are becoming disillusioned with the sacrifices they’re being asked to make.

“What’s the purpose of the fire service? That’s the hard question we’re starting to ask ourselves,” one fire captain said. “Is it actually to manage fire and to do what we’re telling the public we’re intended to do? Or is it simply to sell the public a belief so that they can sleep at night?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Firefighters sound alarm as US faces critical staffing shortage: ‘We don’t have enough people’ on Aug 22, 2026.

On the arid African savanna, grasses are growing faster than they were a generation ago, boosted by rising levels of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. That is the finding of a new study that warns that faster growth could fuel larger wildfires and alter the distribution of wildlife.

Read more on E360 →

Inger Andersen is Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme

When you live on the edge, you become acutely aware of balance.

As a young woman straight out of university in 1982, I had the privilege of teaching English at a Sudanese girls’ high school. After a couple of years, I landed a job supporting the emergency and relief work during the Sudanese drought and associated famine. 

Those communities in Sudan knew very well that their two most precious assets were the acacia trees on their lands and the seeds saved for next year’s planting season.

Acacia fixes nitrogen in the soil – a natural fertiliser – while the gum Arabic from the trees is an income source. But when drought hits and all animals are sold, and the last of the food is eaten, the only thing left is to cut and sell the trees for firewood and charcoal. Once the trees are gone, the last thing left is the seeds. And once the seeds have been sacrificed for food, nothing is left. 

After witnessing the devastating impacts of this famine, working on development and environmental sustainability became my life’s calling.

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From projects in Kordofan and Darfur in Sudan, to Northern Uganda, Somalia, and the arid and semiarid lands of Tanzania and Kenya, I saw how long-term solutions could help move us beyond just a humanitarian response. Because nature is incredibly generous, if we allow it to be.

Solutions like re-establishing the gum arabic trees with communities in Western Sudan, to working on water harvesting in arid lands. Supporting “cut and carry” schemes to replace animal grazing, a major driver of land degradation and the associated desertification. Or re-introducing the old pre-colonial approach of “al-hima”, a practice known by dryland communities for hundreds of years that protects and allows fragile land to rest, optimising soil health and land management.

Land – and its fragility – teaches us a lot. Dryland communities around the world have spent generations adapting to extremes. History that allows pastoralists, farmers, Indigenous Peoples and local communities to understand the deep interconnections between land, water, biodiversity and livelihoods.

Today climate change is pushing these finely balanced systems beyond what they can withstand. As extreme and compounding impacts intensify, the margins for resilience are shrinking, meaning landscapes, livelihoods, and communities are being pushed closer to their limits.

Land degradation now affects 3.2 billion people. Desertification impacts 45 per cent of Africa’s land. Around 95 per cent of the food we eat depends on land, while by 2050, water scarcity could affect more than three-quarters of the global population.

As migration and security rise rapidly on the global agenda, we must also recognise the role that healthy – and degraded – land can play. Healthy, productive landscapes can strengthen resilience and stability. Degraded land can deepen insecurity, intensify competition for resources and leave people with fewer options, including whether they stay or move.

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Land also shows us how interconnected our future is. We know the answer is not a simple, single-issue solution. We need to bring together science, local knowledge and multilateral cooperation to understand thresholds, navigate trade-offs and – ultimately – work with nature rather than against it.

This approach is at the heart of the World Restoration Flagships programme under the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, led by the UN Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It recognises ambitious restoration initiatives that show what is possible when we move beyond protecting individual ecosystems to restoring landscapes at scale – halting land degradation, supporting livelihoods and strengthening resilience to climate change.

Now we must build on this work. A ‘Rio Trio’ year – with talks across land, biodiversity and climate change – creates a unique opportunity to put land at the centre of a more integrated response. As the first of these negotiations, COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, can help set that direction and deliver greater global ambition on desertification, land degradation and drought.

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Drought will be a key topic. Our challenge remains shifting from reactive crisis response to prevention – stopping drought before it becomes a disaster. The Great Green Wall, a World Restoration Flagship, reminds us the most effective drought solutions are not emergency measures, but long-term investments in healthy landscapes.

That is why collective action on land is such a powerful opportunity. Land is not one issue among many. It is where climate, nature, food, water and security come together. And the places that have lived on the edge for the longest may hold the blueprint for how we can all learn to thrive within the planet’s limits.

Quite simply, land is life. 

As leaders meet in Ulaanbaatar over the next week, we must remember investing in healthy land is an investment in food, health and water security, as well as peace and economic growth. 

The future of people and planet will be shaped by the health of the land beneath our feet. If we restore land, so the Acacia trees across the world can grow, we restore hope in a future for every community. 

The post How safeguarding land protects our future appeared first on Climate Home News.

Repeated record-breaking heat waves cooked the European continent this summer, delivering the region’s hottest June on record. A simultaneous, though possibly related, drought shriveled rivers to record lows. In addition to their impact on public health, the dual crises put pressure on Europe’s energy system: Wind power struggled under stagnant conditions created by heat waves, and “thermal” power plants — nuclear, gas, and coal plants — had to reduce their output as European waterways warmed and dried, taking away water used for their cooling systems.

Solar power proved the only major energy source that performed better than normal during Europe’s summer of extremes, experts found. When paired with batteries, it helped supply thousands of AC units during historic hot conditions.

Scientists are still trying to understand why so many recurring heat waves materialized this summer, but studies have found that individual heat events are more likely and more intense because of climate change. The intensity of the June heat wave that scorched Western Europe was roughly 200 times more likely in today’s fossil fuel-warmed climate than it would have been two decades ago, one study found. As the continent continues to warm and Europeans install more cooling systems to cope — just 23 percent of households currently have access to or use air conditioning — experts say this summer provides lessons for the future.  

Extreme temperatures in late June bumped up Italy’s power demand by 28 percent compared to the previous week, according to the energy think tank Ember. In France, that number was 14 percent. Electricity and natural gas prices spiked in evening hours as demand grew highest and solar generation ended, with some prices hitting their highest levels since the 2022/2023 winter gas crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

As demand and prices were climbing, power generation in some areas was falling. In the United Kingdom, five gas plants reduced their output by a combined 2.5 gigawatts in generation because heat reduced their cooling systems’ effectiveness. At the same time, heat-induced low wind speeds halved the country’s typical wind farm generation in June. 

Historic dryness dropped river levels across Europe: England and Wales reported their driest July on record, while water levels in the Danube River in central and Eastern Europe reached record lows, exposing WWII shipwrecks and prehistoric relics. Europe’s hydropower production hit its lowest July level in a decade, and multiple countries curtailed nuclear power generation as warm, low rivers threatened water supplies for cooling. France lost 18 percent of its nuclear capacity to “environmental factors” in mid-July, Ember found, extending a trend of summertime nuclear outages that has plagued the country in recent years. French nuclear plants often use river water as a vital component of their cooling systems, drawing the water in at natural temperatures and then discharging it back into the rivers slightly warmer. Because French law caps the temperature of this discharged water to protect aquatic life, plants must reduce cooling operations and related power generation when the intake water from rivers is already warm because of heat waves or drought. 

But where these sources faltered, solar shone through. European heat waves tend to deliver optimal conditions for solar power: clear, sunny days. Europe’s solar panels produced 17 percent more power during the summer’s heat waves than they normally do, stabilizing the grid as afternoon cooling demand climbed, according to Ember. Battery systems helped deliver this solar power into the evening hours, when heat still lingered and air conditioners cranked to allow households to sleep.

“The next challenge is the evening period. Temperatures often remain high after sunset and AC demand can stay elevated, even as solar production declines,” said Walburga Hemetsberger, CEO of SolarPower Europe, an industry group. “This is why battery storage is becoming such an important part of the energy transition.”

For as much as this summer’s extreme heat strained Europe’s grid, the continent’s cooling demand has a lot of room to grow: About half of households in Italy and Spain have air conditioning, and a quarter in France — compared to 90 percent in the United States. 

“There are places where we just can’t do without it now,” Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the Ecologist Party, said this June, a reversal in the party’s longstanding argument against air conditioning because of its greenhouse gas emissions.

France’s state-owned utility plans to spend over $10 billion to adapt its nuclear and hydropower plants to warmer temperatures and lower water availability over the next 15 years, including investments in equipment that cools the water nuclear plants discharge into rivers so that it complies with environmental standards. But adapting to that new demand could also take new generation and storage, especially as grids simultaneously increase demand from data centers. 

Solar and batteries have already been growing at a breakneck pace across Europe, with 36 gigawatt-hours installed in 2025, a 48 percent increase over new additions the previous year. Battery installations saw their 12th straight year of growth in 2025, according to industry group SolarPower Europe.

“Extreme price spikes during heatwaves are a blaring signal for regulatory changes that increase power system flexibility,” said Beatrice Petrovich, a senior energy analyst covering Europe at Ember. “Treating this summer as a turning point for energy storage would be an opportunity to remove existing barriers.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Solar buoyed Europe’s grid amid record-breaking heat and drought this summer on Aug 21, 2026.

The world has become hotter and, in many places, drier than ever before in recorded history. Just this summer, as some U.S. states battle over rights to the Colorado River, major reservoirs are at historically-low levels. In Puerto Rico, extended drought has exacerbated an infrastructure crisis, leaving residents to suffer weeks-long stretches without water. In Europe, the Danube and Rhine rivers reached record lows, causing nuclear plants to shut down, devastating crops, and revealing long-lost relics from WWII. More than 60 percent of farmland in Italy is affected by critical drought. 

Emerging research shows that a drier world is often a sicker one, too. A new paper, published last week in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, takes stock of nearly 100 scientific studies of diseases found throughout the animal kingdom — from humans to large mammals, fish, amphibians, and insects — to reveal how drought can help deadly infections and parasites spread. 

The majority of human parasites and many pathogens need water to thrive. And while cases of some infectious diseases — like schistosomiasis, a dangerous flatworm infection also known as snail fever, and malaria — sometimes fall dramatically when ponds and lakes dry up, others — like cholera, West Nile virus, and dengue — end up booming. 

This is called the “drought-disease paradox,” said Tara Stewart Merrill, an aquatic disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and coauthor of the paper. “It’s so counterintuitive,” she said. “We think a water-borne disease should thrive only when there’s plenty of water, but in some cases they thrive when there’s less water.”

She and her collaborator and coauthor, Pieter Johnson, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, became interested in how drought would affect these pathogens several years ago while studying parasites in pond ecosystems in California. Suddenly, Stewart Merrill said, more than half of their study sites dried up. 

“Beyond drought screwing up our study, we then started having conversations about how drought might be shaping disease transmission in ecosystems around the planet,” Stewart Merrill said. 

Research on climate change and infectious disease is a relatively young but fast growing field. Until recently, many studies focused on how rising temperatures, but not drought, affect the spread of diseases, Stewart Merrill said. 

Now, their paper shows how scientists are beginning to untangle the complexities of diseases and the water cycle. Understanding how drought affects the spread of certain diseases could also help scientists better predict which diseases will spread and be the most problematic for humans in the future. 

As fossil fuels warm the planet and change the climate, the hotter atmosphere sucks more water from the landscape and holds onto it longer, leading to more intense and prolonged droughts. The world is 77 percent drier than it was three decades ago, according to a United Nations report. 

The consequences for human health have already been felt. Droughts in California throughout the 2000s led to thousands of excess cases of valley fever, and in 2014, a superdrought contributed to the state’s second-highest cases of West Nile virus. In 2017, a drought in Somalia led to nearly 80,000 cases of cholera, which killed more than a thousand people. And in Brazil, where millions are afflicted with dengue each year, researchers have found that the risk of infection can rise a few months after drought.

City workers in Sao Paulo, Brazil fumigate a neighborhood to fight against an outbreak of mosquito-borne dengue in March 2024.
Andre Lucas / Getty Images

Tracking disease is fundamentally about the movement of animals that carry it, said Georgia Titcomb, a wildlife disease ecologist and assistant professor at Colorado State University. 

“Throughout history, living things have been moving to get water, and so when there are massive changes to the way water is distributed on the landscape, we’re going to also expect big changes in the ways animals move to access that water,” she said. “That’s going to remove some opportunities for transmission, and introduce new ones too.” 

For example, Titcomb said, picture watering holes in the African savannah, surrounded by animals like zebras, elephants, rhinos, and giraffes. During droughts, some of them dry up. More animals crowd around the remaining pools. These crowded areas are also full of dung from those animals, making it easier for parasites that lay their eggs in feces to spread and thrive, and more likely that the animals will encounter parasites.

Titcomb’s paper, included in the new review, found that after periods with less rainfall, parasites thrived — with more than 100,000 eggs found per each kilogram of dung.

Research in other areas has found similar dynamics: When drought results in fewer bodies of water, birds carrying West Nile virus can come into closer contact with mosquitos, resulting in more mosquitos that carry the disease and can infect humans. Drought can also make bodies of water warmer, creating conditions in which some dangerous mold, algae, and bacteria can thrive.

In other cases, drought can diminish disease. Hotter, saltier, and less oxygenated water can become unsurvivable for certain pathogens, bacteria, fungus, and parasites, the paper found. 

The severity of the drought also matters. Vibrio vulnificus, a bacteria that infects oysters and causes 80,000 cases of food poisoning in the United States each year, initially spreads during a drought but can be eliminated entirely if it goes on long enough. 

And heavy periods of precipitation can also make an outbreak worse when a drought eventually comes, said Samantha Sambado, a biologist and postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University who was not affiliated with the study.  This phenomenon, known as ‘weather whiplash,’ is becoming increasingly common as the planet warms. 

The fungus that causes valley fever, for example, grows during wet winters, and then dries and spreads as wind-borne dust in the summer, she said. “It’s a classic case of, climate change will make this worse,” she said.

The new paper sheds important light on these dynamics, Sambado said. “It’s going to be really foundational for how we teach disease ecology,” she said. 

In the coming years, improvements in satellite monitoring technology could make it easier for scientists to track water as it shifts around the planet, she said. Paying attention to how humans respond to drought and manipulate the movement of Earth’s water will become increasingly important, too: Building dams or using more irrigation on crops can create conditions that spread or foster disease. Increasingly unpredictable weather can make it harder for communities to manage their water with disease prevention in mind.

“Water touches almost every aspect of life,” Sambado said. “How do we manage this resource, knowing the future will be warmer?”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Samantha Sambado’s name.

Read more about climate change and your health A deadly bacteria is creeping up the Atlantic Coast. How worried should you be? Zoya Teirstein

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a drier world, some infectious diseases are unexpectedly thriving on Aug 21, 2026.

A cruelty ban without an exit plan Channel News brendan 21st August 2026 Teaser Media

With record-breaking ocean temperatures weakening the world’s largest carbon sink, a group of countries is pushing for the UN COP31 summit to deliver meaningful commitments to protect marine ecosystems. Yet this effort could be hobbled by a shrinking pool of climate finance, experts warn.

While discussions on oceans at UN climate talks have so far been limited to annual informal dialogues on the sidelines, African countries, the European Union, some Latin American nations and small island states have launched a bid for COP31 to incorporate ocean protection measures into “negotiated decisions”.

COP31 co-presidents Türkiye and Australia have responded to this call and are working with interested countries on a voluntary ocean roadmap, described as a “concise action plan” and expected to include regional and international steps to integrate measures to safeguard the planet’s ocean and climate.

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At a meeting in Türkiye in September, which plans to convene more than 25 ministers from Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe and Latin America, governments will consider how to incorporate the recommendations of the informal UN ocean dialogues into global climate policy, according to the Turkish co-presidency.

Whitney Berry, associate director of climate policy at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, said that even an informal “multi-year” plan, instead of a negotiated roadmap, could help guide the ocean dialogues series in the UN climate process towards more concrete results.

“If this plan informed the following dialogues and made sure they were aligned with the Paris [Agreement] ambition cycle, including opportunities like the Global Stocktake, we’d have such a strengthened opportunity for ocean integration,” she said.

The upcoming stocktake – an international assessment of countries’ climate policies that takes place every five years and will culminate at COP33 in 2028 – presents a “huge opportunity” to turn fragmented actions into a “globally recognised evidence base” that can inform the next round of climate plans, Berry added.

Addressing rocketing ocean temperatures

Influenced by this year’s projected “super El Niño” on top of climate heating, the world’s oceans have experienced the warmest July on record, according to both EU and US monitoring data. Scientists are warning of severe mass die-offs of key species like corals, sponges and macro-algae.

John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told journalists in a briefing that some organisms like coral reefs can only tolerate an increase of about 1 degree Celsius before they start experiencing heath declines. In some seas like the Mediterranean, marine heatwaves have caused temperature increases of up to 6C.

As climate pressure mounts on ocean systems, a group of more than 150 top scientists has called on the COP31 Turkish and Australian presidencies to urgently “integrate ocean priorities into negotiation texts on mitigation, adaptation, and finance”.

They also urged world leaders to issue a “clear political declaration and finance outcomes” on ocean-based climate solutions at the World Leaders Summit, a two-day event during COP where heads of states give speeches laying out their climate priorities.

Measures to protect marine ecosystems have gathered more attention in recent years, as 90% of national climate plans submitted last year included at least one ocean-based target, compared to 62% in 2015. But countries have faced challenges implementing these commitments due to finance and governance constraints, according to a paper published in June by the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Most of the current targets focus on protecting marine areas, but have so far lacked commitments to reduce emissions produced at sea, for example through offshore wind or cleaner maritime transport.

Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia?

Rethinking ocean negotiations at COP

At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, countries agreed to “integrate and strengthen ocean-based action” across climate negotiations, which led to the creation of a yearly informal Ocean and Climate Dialogue. This dialogue does not produce a negotiated agreement like other parts of the COP.

The dialogue’s informal nature is both an advantage and a challenge, said Jonathan Baines, ocean programme manager at WRI. It provides a more flexible space than formal negotiations and has helped raise the ambition of countries’ climate plans, but COP presidencies have not fully incorporated its outcomes into the official climate talks, he said.

After five years of holding this dialogue at the mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn, countries called for more tangible outcomes in their submissions to this year’s Ocean and Climate Change Dialogue in June. Some proposed the creation of a roadmap to guide discussions on specific topics and feed them into the formal COP negotiations.

In their submission, the African Group of Negotiators called for a “structured, multi-year roadmap” aligned with the next Global Stocktake. The EU also backed this roadmap proposal, while Pacific islands and some Latin American countries supported incorporating the dialogue outcomes into the negotiations without specifically endorsing the roadmap initiative.

As part of a preparatory event before COP31 focused on oceans, Türkiye has confirmed to Climate Home News plans for a Blue COP31 roadmap, which will be discussed by the ministers attending the gathering in September.

“In essence, this programme is designed to ensure that the ocean is no longer the missing link in climate action, but rather the driving force behind a more resilient, sustainable, and prosperous future for all coastal communities,” Türkiye’s COP31 presidency said in a written comment.

Co-facilitators of the Ocean and Climate Change dialogue Ulrik Lenaerts from Belgium and Sivendra Michael from Fiji. (Photo: IISD/ENB/Maja Schmidt-Thomé) Opposition emerges to “additional burdens”

Some regional groups have already started presenting their priorities publicly, with small island nations calling for more finance, ocean-based renewable energy and bolstering regional research institutes.

African diplomats said “the core problem remains translating these paper commitments into real-world, on-the-ground implementation” and noted that while countries in the region have strengthened their climate plans, “the support required to implement these commitments has not kept pace”.

“The truth is that ambition without implementation is an illusion,” the African submission reads, adding that nearly half of all ocean-related commitments in national climate plans are “strictly conditional on external support”.

This year’s Ocean and Climate Dialogue, chaired by Fiji and Belgium, urged countries to discuss ways of “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, which generated pushback from big fossil fuel-producing and consuming countries who said they would not accept this as a negotiated agreement.

Both the group of Arab nations and India, meanwhile, warned against “imposing additional burdens” on developing countries and rejected a dialogue with “prescriptive expectations”.

The Arab group submission said its members oppose “any report that explicitly or implicitly targets specific energy sources, advocates sectoral restrictions, or fails to adequately reflect different national circumstances, development priorities, and energy security considerations”. This is a thinly veiled reference to singling out fossil fuels within the discussions.

New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus

Climate finance constraints

While developing countries are already seeking more funding to implement ocean-based conservation, carbon storage and clean energy measures, experts said this will be a “difficult discussion” at COP31, as developed countries will arrive in Antalya with shrinking aid budgets.

Historically, ocean-related finance has accounted for only a small share of overseas development assistance (ODA), fluctuating between 0.8% and 1.4% of the total, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Berry of the Ocean Conservancy said one opportunity to “grow the pie” of available climate funds will come at a meeting of the UN climate convention’s Standing Committee on Finance, which this year will be held in September in Sydney and will concentrate on financing water systems and the ocean.

“We haven’t had a focused conversation on ocean climate finance before from the UN climate process,” she said. “If they can clarify those financing pathways specific to ocean climate action and help provide the necessary support for countries to translate commitments into projects, that will be a real benefit.”

The post As marine heat breaks records, countries seek ocean roadmap at COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Phalkun Out is manager of energy policy and government relations at EnergyLab Asia.  

Cambodia has made impressive strides in transitioning from dirty coal and imported electricity to homegrown renewable energy that now accounts for nearly half of the electricity mix. The kingdom has a target to source 70% of its total power capacity from renewables by 2030. This is achievable but requires global support and cooperation.

The recent momentum on developing a formal process to assist countries in transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF) is very encouraging. The roadmap process championed by the COP30 Brazil presidency and at the Santa Marta conference in Colombia shows a clear appetite among countries to invest in a just and orderly transition. 

The current energy crisis provides a stark reminder of how relying on imported fossil fuels, like oil and gas, puts at risk our economic competitiveness and energy security. The impact on families, particularly poorer households, has been devastating as they struggle to pay for transport, food and electricity. 

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Even as Cambodia has been able to shield itself from the worst impacts, thanks to its renewable investments, this moment is still a wake-up call for all of Southeast Asia, which has experienced a devastating oil shock twice in a decade. 

Given the turbulent times ahead, the region cannot afford a return to the status quo of high dependence on foreign fuel supplies. As a clean energy leader, Cambodia can play a critical role in elevating the importance of clean energy transition at the regional level. 

Cambodia cannot go it alone 

A new international governance framework and coordinated transition plans are essential for Cambodia and the rest of Southeast Asia to achieve a just and orderly transition. There are structural barriers that need to be overcome swiftly. 

However, to reach Cambodia’s 70% renewables target, the government plans to overcome structural hurdles – upgrading grid infrastructure, managing limited fiscal space, and addressing the high upfront capital costs of renewable energy – that require more than local effort. 

Concessional loans and grants similar to the $110-million World Bank credit to Cambodia for the Sustainable Energy Transition Project, approved in June 2026, are crucial to help build smart grids, high-voltage transmission lines and large-scale battery energy storage systems, needed to make the most of the new renewables coming online.

Global initiatives like the COP31 Türkiye presidency’s plans to champion electrification and a global target for electricity to provide 35% of final energy consumption by 2035 are commendable. But they still need to be understood in terms of what opportunities and support this could offer for countries like Cambodia.

Drone shot of solar-powered water pumping and irrigation stations implemented by SOGE in Batheay Commune, Batheay District, Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia (Photo: EnergyLab Asia) Drone shot of solar-powered water pumping and irrigation stations implemented by SOGE in Batheay Commune, Batheay District, Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia (Photo: EnergyLab Asia)

Cambodia has seen progress on electrification, recording a 127% increase in year-on-year electric vehicle registrations in 2025. And, to sustain the renewable energy momentum, the government eliminated import taxes and duties on solar and energy storage technologies in April, which analysts predict will slash total renewable project costs by an estimated 7% to 30%.

Energy think-tank Ember has also noted a trend across Asia in which countries that built the skills to make electronics then moved into electric technologies, manufacturing solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicles. This suggests Cambodia could follow with the right government financial and policy support.

However, for these trends to continue and even accelerate, continued international financial and technical support for countries like Cambodia is also essential. 

COP31 can enhance cooperation and support

At COP30 last November, Brazil agreed to develop a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and several countries made it clear this was a priority for them. 

The Brazil COP30 presidency previewed its roadmap at the Bonn climate talks in June, championing the roadmap as a flexible implementation tool adaptable to national circumstances. This guide can be used by countries like Cambodia to structure its transition and tackle technical barriers. 

Southeast Asia’s fragile grids threaten billions in clean energy investment

The Turkish and Australian COP31 presidencies this year have the opportunity to transform the roadmap and prevent the issue from being sidelined at the summit in Antalya. The world needs a coordinated process that can sustain deliberate planning, technology transfer and adequate public investment. 

For regions like Southeast Asia and Africa, the transition is not just a climate obligation; it is an economic necessity that requires the world to stop talking and start building. 

The post Collective global roadmap can boost Cambodia’s energy transition goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

When a South Korean firm pulled the plug on a multibillion-dollar investment last year, it was a major blow to Indonesia’s plans to build an integrated battery-manufacturing ecosystem – until a group of Chinese companies stepped into the breach.

Project Titan aims to tap Indonesia’s vast nickel reserves in East Halmahera – the epicentre for mining the sought-after metal – before shipping refined and processed material to make batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) more than 2,000 kilometres away in a factory in West Java.

Even before South Korean battery firm LG Energy Solution scrapped its planned $8.45 billion investment in Project Titan, citing “various factors” including market conditions, years of stalled feasibility studies had cast doubt on the initiative – a pillar of Indonesia’s goal to use its nickel riches to become a global battery manufacturing hub and a base for EV production in the region. 

The $6-billion investment and cooperation framework struck earlier this year between state companies and a Chinese consortium keeps Project Titan alive, but it also highlights Indonesia’s heavy dependence on China for capital, technology and materials in battery manufacturing.

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“We get cash but there is no tech transfer or skilled labour jobs,” Zulfikar Rakhmat, director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies, told Climate Home News. Indonesia’s dependence on China for funding, nickel smelting and processing capacity is “almost total”, he added. 

And at a time when cheaper nickel-free battery alternatives are winning over the EV market, China’s outsized role could bring additional commercial risks for Indonesia’s emerging battery industry.

“If Indonesia’s battery chain is seen as entirely Chinese-owned and coal-powered, its product will struggle to enter the Western markets,” Rakhmat added, referring to efforts by countries, including the European Union, to break their dependence on Chinese cleantech and reduce imports of carbon-intensive goods.

A Chinese tale of two halves: steel and batteries

Chinese investment in industrial projects to develop Indonesia’s nickel reserves – the world’s largest – is not new.

China was “the main engine” behind the country’s successful push to refine its nickel domestically after the government banned the export of raw ore in 2020, said Berlin Syahputra Situmorang, a researcher at the Indonesian Initiative for Sustainable Mining.

China, which imported most of Indonesia’s raw nickel ore prior to the ban, invested billions of dollars in building the country’s refining capacity. 

Large, mostly coal-powered industrial parks sprang up near mines to refine nickel, some of which have been associated with extensive environmental and human rights abuses.

A smelter burning coal to refine nickel at the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP) in Weda Bay, on Halmahera Island, North Maluku, Indonesia (Photo by Muhammad Fauzy/NurPhoto)

By 2025, Indonesia produced two-thirds of the world’s raw nickel supply and boasted 43% of nickel refining capacity. Yet three-quarters of the country’s refining capacity is controlled by Chinese firms, according to research by the Washington-based research organisation C4ADS. 

And while the Indonesian government talked about developing its mineral wealth to power the batteries needed for the energy transition, Indonesia’s real success was to develop a stainless steel industry, the biggest consumer of nickel globally.

More than 80% of Indonesia’s nickel supplied the stainless steel sector in 2025, with only 17% going into the EV battery supply chain, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). 

“It’s a tale of two different parts,” said Lloyd Hain, managing director of Xenith Market Services, an Australian mining and supply chain consultancy. “Indonesian stainless steel goes all over the world. The battery side, however, has been a completely different story.”

An emerging battery ecosystem

Developing a battery industry has proved a lot more difficult. Several plants to process nickel into battery-grade materials are planned or under construction across the country, but many remain at early stages of development.  

Still, Indonesia’s battery exports exceeded $1 billion in 2025, according to data from the UN Comtrade Database. By 2028, CREA estimates that 30% of Indonesia’s nickel production will go towards making battery materials. 

The nation’s first battery cell plant in Karawang, West Java, began operating in 2024. It was developed by South Korean car maker Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, which continues to operate the facility despite withdrawing from Project Titan.

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Project Titan, the flagship integrated battery project, aims to develop 20 gigawatt hours (GWh) of capacity to produce nickel-based EV batteries as well as energy storage batteries to support the country’s goal of rolling out 100 GW of solar capacity in the next four years. 

Under the deal agreed this year, it will be operated by Indonesian state companies and a consortium including China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt and battery manufacturer EVE Energy. 

Another $5.9-billion joint venture between state firms and a consortium led by Chinese battery giant CATL will develop nickel mining, processing and a battery-recycling factory in East Halmahera as well as a 6.9 GWh battery facility in Karawang, with plans to scale. 

Former Indonesian President Joko Widodo shakes hands with Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung during the launch of Indonesia’s first EV battery cell production plant in Karawang, West Java province (Photo: REUTERS/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana)

Collaboration with Chinese firms “is expected to encourage technology transfer so that national companies can become leaders in their own country”, Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Bahlil Lahadalia said in a statement about Project Titan. 

Foreign companies investing in Indonesia are required to partner with the Indonesia Battery Corporation (IBC), a state-owned enterprise made up of state mining and energy firms, tasked with establishing the capabilities for developing a battery and EV ecosystem. 

It is the complexity of making batteries that underlies Indonesia’s dependence on Chinese know-how, said Situmorang of the Indonesian Initiative for Sustainable Mining. 

Without a transfer of technology, Indonesia “risks remaining dependent on external players for the most advanced parts of the value chain”, Situmorang told Climate Home News.

Forging a path of its own

Indonesia’s reliance on China does not stop at money and technical knowledge. It also relies on Chinese imports of key battery materials, such as lithium and graphite. 

That means Indonesia should aim to diversify its investment partners by working more closely with South Korean companies and seek long-term lithium and graphite supply deals with major producers such as Australia, said Rakhmat of the Center of Economic and Law Studies.

It must also invest in domestic research and development as well as nurturing its own engineering talent, he added.

A worker inspects large bags of nickel subsulfide at a nickel smelter in Sorowako, South Sulawesi province, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana)

Eventually, however, the Indonesian government will need to decide whether it wants to integrate its battery ecosystem “completely and unconditionally” into China’s EV supply chain “or go its own way”, said Shen Wei, a research fellow at the UK-based Institute of Development Studies.

He warned that it would be “inherently difficult” for Indonesia to continue to learn from China while simultaneously trying to compete with it.

In a sign of tension between Indonesia’s efforts to capture more value from its resources and the Chinese firms that have bankrolled the industry’s expansion, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce wrote to President Prabowo Subianto in May warning that recent policies, including a sharp reduction in nickel ore production quotas to push up prices, could undermine existing projects and future investment. 

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources or the Ministry of Investment and Downstream Industry. 

A damaging myth: “Nickel is everything, forever”

The rapid shift towards nickel-free EV batteries poses another threat to Indonesia’s plans.

China is driving global adoption of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, a battery chemistry which relies on more common materials, is cheaper to produce and is better suited for frequent charge and discharge, making it an attractive alternative to power electric two- and three-wheelers, urban EVs and stationary power storage. 

LFP batteries accounted for more than 55% of EV batteries deployed globally last year, driven by China and imports of Chinese-made vehicles by emerging market countries, according to the International Energy Agency. They also accounted for about 90% of battery storage deployment.

“If Indonesia stays too fixed on a ‘nickel equals EV future’ mindset, there’s a risk of missing where the bulk of the market is actually going,” Situmorang said, noting that in Indonesia, most of the EVs sold in 2025 used LFP batteries.

Nickel-based batteries, which can pack more energy in each battery, are still in demand for long-range and premium EVs popular in the US, Europe and upper-end Asian markets. Outside China, almost 80% of EV batteries used nickel-containing types in 2025. 

Rakhmat said Indonesia is adapting its manufacturing strategy, targeting its nickel-based batteries for the export market and boosting production of LFP batteries to meet domestic demand. 

Several Chinese firms are already investing to manufacture LFP batteries in Indonesia. 

But Rakhmat said the realisation of changes in the market “came very late” and that many local officials still incorrectly believe that “nickel is everything and forever”. 

Without a robust industrial policy and a strategy to create sustained domestic demand for “Made in Indonesia” batteries, “there is a possibility that we will be left behind,” he warned.

Main image: A view over the PT Virtue Dragon nickel industrial complex in Konawe, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia (Photo: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)

The post China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain appeared first on Climate Home News.

For decades, cities throughout the world have based their mobility programmes on a misguided assumption: that car ownership will only keep growing. But as more cities challenge the auto-centric model and embrace “multimodality”, a new paradigm is emerging. Bringing about this alternative vision requires not only bold, innovative solutions, but also robust new planning institutions.

For many of us, having to juggle work, school, and other daily obligations, getting stuck in traffic is a daily nuisance. In order to carry out our responsibilities, we participate in the traffic system, which costs us a lot of time and money and harms our physical and mental health.

Some of these consequences, such as safety and stress, are easy to recognise. But research tells us that daily urban mobility also has a great impact on rates of obesity, diabetes, heart complaints, respiratory illnesses, dementia, and depression, amongst other health problems. These health conditions are also linked to common harmful transport emissions, such as particles resulting from the friction of tyres on asphalt, exhaust fumes, and general noise pollution created by vehicles. What’s more, traffic also causes greenhouse gas emissions, which are directly linked to the climate crisis and other related social and ecological problems.

In order to improve urban mobility and address its problems, modern cities put special care into the planning of their urban mobility systems. To this end, one of the main goals they aspire to is becoming a “multimodal” city – a place where inhabitants can choose and combine high-quality methods of mobility, and where owning and using a car is the last option, not a compulsion. This means prioritising more active forms of movement, such as walking and riding a bicycle, especially for journeys of only a few kilometres. For longer journeys around the city, the mobility system must offer a variety of complementary combinations using high-quality public transport, such as buses and trams for short journeys, and underground trains and regional train lines for longer trips and transporting large numbers of people.

In practice, however, many cities still struggle to establish effective new planning institutions to achieve this desired result due to a variety of reasons.

Firstly, following the influence of the North American urban planning paradigm, many cities in the previous century gave priority to private cars – by dedicating street space as well as setting aside large areas for car parks – instead of, say, green spaces. This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

Now, cities find themselves at a turning point between old and new paradigms of urban mobility planning. As the problems with the old system become clearer, a new paradigm is still developing and trying to find its way into practice. So far, it appears in cities that have been brave enough to leave behind old ways of thinking and create new, modern planning institutions. These cities, including Paris, Vienna, Helsinki, and Ljubljana, are leading by example. Although the emerging paradigm is not yet clearly defined, five main elements can often be found in their planning institutions.

This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

The pillars of good planning

The first and most fundamental consideration in planning for multimodal cities is to have a far-reaching outlook. When it comes to urban mobility, even short-term interventions should follow long-term priorities. Taking a long-term view means considering possible future scenarios at least 20 years from now, and ideally even 30 to 50 years. Moreover, innovative thinking should be an inseparable part of this exercise to ensure that expectations of the future are not just a continuation of past trends. In concrete terms, this means we shouldn’t just assume that the rate of motorisation will grow, and that the number of cars on the road will increase as the population increases. Instead, cities must imagine alternative scenarios in which most journeys are made on foot, by bicycle, and by public transport. In other words, such a vision of the future must have citizens’ wellbeing at its heart.

This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. 

In addition, a strategic planning perspective requires understanding the difference between costs and investment. Changing public transport infrastructure (and especially rail) requires millions of euros in investment, but the investment is well worth it when it is considered over 50 or even 100 years’ time – its usual length of service.

A key insight in modern planning courses entails that land use is the first and most important public policy for urban mobility. This brings us to the second pillar of multimodal city planning: the integration of spatial planning into urban mobility as part of a wider package of public policies.

As soon as you have a beginning and end point for any planned movement, you are defining a mobility system. Therefore, to realise the desired vision of the city, the spatial plan and the urban mobility system must be closely connected. This means viewing public space as a whole and considering factors like population density, planned activities, land-use diversity, and the design of all elements that make up the streetscape.

Beyond these infrastructural considerations, an integrated plan must also address economic factors, such as how public transport services, as well as educational and medical infrastructure, will be paid for. In practice, this means public policy needs to consider a package of complementary measures: those that encourage walking, cycling, and public transport, as well as measures to discourage unnecessary car use. Here, complementarity also means measures which relate to other areas of public policy, such as education, health and employment systems.

The third element crucial in successful urban planning is having quality data about mobility systems for different groups of people. The basic idea taught in traffic management courses for decades is that cities must follow a digital-numerical model of urban transport systems. This enables the modelling of a series of steps – from how the need to move around develops to how movement equates to traffic flow on this or that street or line of public transport. A computer model like this is ideal for examining the complex consequences of different intervention packages, because it not only allows us to understand the problems that exist today, but also enables us to explore different future scenarios relatively cheaply. Urban mobility models should be built based on relevant data about people’s daily travel habits as well as their characteristics and desires. This kind of analysis is usually done through questionnaires that ask residents about their current and desired travel patterns.

That said, models and surveys are not enough on their own. A modern planning institution needs to collect large amounts of automatic data, as well as data that enables deeper analysis. One example would be information collected anonymously and automatically by smartphone, through analysis of telecommunication network signals or various applications using GPS or other telephone sensors. Another useful strategy would be collecting data about reasons for travel, such as attitudes and beliefs, as well as information about the characteristics of movement for particular groups of people – data obtainable only through carrying out surveys or interviews with the relevant population sample.

Perspective is key

You may have noticed that this text does not use the traditional term “traffic planning”, but instead talks about mobility planning. This is one of the important assumptions that a modern urban planning institute should have. The aim of planning is not to enable traffic flow or prevent traffic congestion. Those are important elements to consider, but the primary concern is creating a system that enables people to move around the city and gives them access to all the various activities a city can provide within a certain timeframe. This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. Therefore – and this is the fourth pillar of good planning – evaluating different scenarios must include systemic perspectives as well as those of citizens themselves.

The city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

On the one hand, it is necessary to show with a model what the cumulative effects of any mobility infrastructure will be, for example in greenhouse gas emissions caused by the transport system, or the overall level of noise on one street. On the other hand, it is necessary to assess whether an alternative system can offer a functional and high-quality daily experience of mobility infrastructure. The model mentioned in the third pillar is a way to achieve this, but we can also use other methods. One of these solutions, which can be called the “person method,” evaluates mobility systems from the perspective of specific groups, such as children, older people without access to a car, or young parents with limited financial means.

It must be noted that high-quality planning focuses not solely on the content, but also on the infrastructure development process itself. The essence of a modern planning institution is a carefully considered process that develops through a series of clearly defined activities over time, with shared and clearly defined responsibilities for all participants. It is vital to include a range of experts, in addition to those who traditionally take part in urban mobility planning projects. For example, a high-quality process should include experts in regional economics, sociology, psychology, and the environment. What’s more, the city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

A planning process that explicitly includes different perspectives – the last of the five pillars – makes it possible to develop solutions that take into account citizens’ needs and experiences, rendering the various public policy measures more acceptable to them. Citizen participation itself can be organised using traditional methods, such as workshops and public hearings, as well as through modern digital tools like online questionnaires which use interactive maps. These tools provide valuable data, comments, and suggestions from citizens which can be directly linked to concrete locations in the city. Such an inclusive approach demands robust cooperation and entails constructive conflict between different values and assumptions about life in the city.

Towards a 21st-century paradigm

Cities have always changed and will continue to do so, along with humanity itself. New forms of mobility will appear in the transport system, as we have recently witnessed with the arrival of electric scooters on streets across the world. People’s habits will also change and diversify, leading to ever-increasing demands on urban mobility systems. Thanks to the rise of remote working, we are also seeing a change in people’s mobility habits.

Even though the majority of these and other aspects will remain extremely difficult to predict, one thing is certain: planning institutions need to change. They need to rise to the challenges of the 21st century in order to respect the needs of citizens as well as the environment. New institutions will also have to think carefully about how to invest in effective, applicable interventions that fulfil the desired objectives of new mobility paradigms. Only through the development of visionary and brave planning institutions can a city of wellbeing emerge.  

This article first appeared in Serbian in Omorika. It is republished here with permission. Translated by Alex Melbourne | Voxeurop