News Feeds

Before people can reduce their carbon footprint, they need to know what actions will most help them do so. Research has shown that this domain of knowledge, known as “carbon competence,” is relatively low among the general public. But until recently there hasn’t been much investigation of why, or how to improve it.

A new study identifies two familiar cognitive biases as psychological barriers to improving carbon competence, “meaning inaccurate understanding of climate impact is not just a knowledge gap but also a behavioral and communication challenge,” says study team member Claudia Schneider, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

The team’s findings suggest that simply telling people which climate actions are most effective—until now the gold standard of climate communication—won’t move the needle for everyone. Instead, boosting carbon competence might require an individualized approach.

Schneider and her collaborators conducted an online study of more than 500 U.S. citizens in which they asked participants to estimate what percentage of the average North American’s carbon footprint could be saved by each of 34 different actions.

“Many people misjudge which personal climate actions cut emissions most, often overrating familiar actions like recycling and underrating higher-impact changes such as flying less and eating less red meat,” Schneider says. Those findings are in line with previous studies.

 

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

 

In the new work, people tended to overestimate the effectiveness of actions that were top of mind and those they themselves participated in, and people with higher environmental values were likely to rate all actions more highly, reflecting optimism about the impact they can have as individuals.

Taken together, the results suggest that two well-known cognitive biases, the availability heuristic and motivated reasoning, distort people’s understanding of the effectiveness of climate actions.

The researchers then designed two more studies, each involving about 1,200 participants, to test strategies to overcome these psychological barriers. Reasoning that people like heuristics—rules of thumb used to speed and simplify decision-making—the researchers decided to offer more accurate ones.

They told one group of participants that more effective climate actions tend to have higher costs in terms of time, money, or comfort. Another group was informed that more common climate actions tend to be less effective at reducing emissions. For a third group, the researchers simply listed the four most impactful personal climate actions.

The researchers found some heartening evidence that people are willing to try to overcome a tendency for motivated reasoning: in one of the studies, people who were told that more common actions tend to be less effective were then able to avoid overestimating the impact of their own actions.

But overall, the interventions didn’t improve people’s ability to assess the effectiveness of climate actions as much, or at least as reliably, as hoped. Surprisingly, even straight-up telling people which actions were most effective didn’t necessarily enable them to later identify which actions were most effective.

Instead, the impact of the interventions varied a lot from person to person. “Our data suggests that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to overcoming these psychological barriers,” Schneider says.

As well as figuring out how to tailor messages for different audiences, the search for a broadly effective strategy to improve carbon competence needs to continue, the researchers say.

“An important follow up question concerns the factors that drive engagement in climate actions, above and beyond judging their impact,” Schneider adds. She and her collaborators are investigating the role that perceptions of fairness play in these decisions, she says.

Source: Herberz M. et al. “Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: Based on photo by Am on Unsplash.

The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.

El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.

This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.

The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.

El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.

The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.

Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.

The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, English edition of 1888

As the deadly toll of Israeli/U.S. genocide on Palestinian children became widely known, it served as yet another horrific example of just how expendable and vulnerable our children are to imperial imperatives and capitalist greed. In response to these atrocities, young people raised their voices in loud protest, including elementary school kids, and took up the struggle to stop the bombing, stop the money flowing to Israel, and to free Palestinian children and their families.

Children are far too often victims of a system that values only profit, not humanity. But children are also actors in their world, and at times are powerful voices of dissent in both individual and collective ways. There has been renewed interest on the left in the questions of the oppression of children within the context of the privatized family, the economy, and the state. How can the radical ideas of Marxism be used as a tool to help us understand and advance these discussions?

Contradictions and precarity of childhood today

The images and realities of childhood today are rife with contradictions.

On the one hand, we have the idealized image of childhood as a state of happy innocence and yet, the United States stands alone as a place where over 400 people remain imprisoned serving life sentences for crimes they allegedly committed as children. Seventy-six percent of them are African American.

Contrast this with the image of the child as one of living in a state of constant vulnerability and fragility demanding adult care and protection in the safe refuge of the family.

Of course, this image of vulnerable child and protecting family runs up against a tragic reality that the U.S. has one of the highest, if not the highest, rates in the industrialized world of deaths from child abuse and neglect and that most deaths occur at the hands of parents and step parents. Not coincidentally, the U.S. provides the least amount of government support of families with children (parental leave, childcare, income support for poor families, mental health services, and healthcare).

A corollary to this family-as-safe-refuge-for-vulnerable-child narrative is the notion that outside the family exist adults who threaten children’s safety and wellbeing on a daily basis: from the greedy and lazy teachers who seek to deny them an education to sexual predators (often overlapping in the rightwing imagination with LGBTQA+ people) that lurk around every playground corner and in every daycare center. These fears predate the rise in rightwing conspiracy theories that have become such a big factor in U.S. politics or the very real conspiracy of Epstein and his rich, well-connected friends to traffic, rape, exploit, and abuse young women for their entertainment.

Of course, another very real threat to millions of children’s well being, high rates of child poverty and food insecurity, makes them more vulnerable to abuse of all kinds. The U.S. is a leader in infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. This is routinely ignored or blamed upon the victims of that poverty themselves by our politicians, media, and churches.

This notion that children are simply victims-in-waiting has a two-pronged effect; first, of making parents and children fearful and mistrustful of others in their communities—particularly the workers whose jobs it is to care for and educate our children; and second, of pressuring families to assume more and more of the responsibility for their children’s care within the confines of the privatized family structure and to blame themselves when this responsibility becomes more than they can financially or emotionally bear.

This other dominant image of children runs counter to that of the innocent and vulnerable. In this image, the child is untamed, rude, impolite, nagging, whiney, bratty, spoiled, undisciplined, unpleasant, and at times, down-right dangerous. For these images we can thank both the inheritance of early U.S. settler-colonialists’ Puritan belief in children as sinners in need of having the devil beaten out of them, but even more directly, to the modern capitalist market’s exploitation and degradation of children.

All these images—from the “precocious brat” stock character of television sit-coms to the Fox News hysteria over the Black “teen takeovers” on Chicago’s Gold Coast—are highly charged with racial and class overtones. The annoying spoiled brat is usually a white upper-middle-class child with somehow well-meaning but over-indulgent parents, and the gangs are always low-income inner-city kids of color with neglectful parents. In the latter instance, the child is seen as displaying the worst of what commentators consider to be human nature or a biological predisposition to anti-social behaviors. In the former, spoiled children are products of human nurture gone terribly wrong (they’ve had their egos artificially raised by too much praise and love). In both instances, tougher, more punitive parenting and schooling, and in the case of the poor and Black kids, carceral solutions are required to overcome these defects.

It is also important to note that transgender children and youth are seen both as a threat to society and victims of permissive parenting simultaneously–think gender-neutral bathroom bans in elementary schools, the attacks on trans kid athletes, and the criminalizing of gender affirming care sought out by parents of transgender kids. As well, the arrest and detention of thousands of children by the Department of Homeland Security and its thugs should make all of us question which children deserve protection and from whom.

Underlying all of this is the assumption in contemporary capitalist society that the child exists as incomplete, a lump of clay in need of shaping, training, sanctifying, schooling, parenting, or jailing to mold the future adult, and worker, they will become.

Nowhere is the child as they exist in the present considered important or worthy of contemplation.There is an explanation for this “child-of-the-future-not-the-present” outlook, rooted in the economic structures of society and the corresponding political and social institutions the economic system gives rise to. Marxism gives us a tool to help us understand how these forces impact actually existing children and the people who care about them.

When confronted with these reactionary images of childhood, it would be wise to remember the words of the great Italian educator and left-wing educational philosopher Loris Malaguzzi, who wrote;

It is necessary that we believe that the child is very intelligent, that the child is strong and beautiful and has very ambitious desires and requests. This is the image of the child that we need to hold. Those who have the image of the child as fragile, incomplete, weak, made of glass, gain something from this belief only for themselves. We don’t need that image of children. Instead of always giving children protection, we need to give them recognition of their rights and strengths.1“Your Image of the Child: Where Teaching Begins” Child Care Exchange 3/94, pg. 55 https://hub.exchangepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/5009652.pdf

With this framing in mind, let’s turn to the question of how ‘childhood’ has been culturally constructed and reconstructed throughout history.

Prehistory to class Society: The construction of childhood

Let’s define childhood for the purposes of this article. I will use the general term childhood to cover a big portion of the human lifespan, from birth to young adulthood, roughly 0-18, corresponding with the legal definition in the U.S.. Within that span, there is obviously a big difference, on the one hand, between infancy and toddlerhood (when there is complete dependence on caregivers) and, on the other hand, adolescence/post sexual maturation (when independence from caregivers is a biological, if not an economic, possibility).

There are both continuities and divergences across time and place in how human societies have defined childhood in relationship to adulthood. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the human lifespan was roughly 30-35 years, and most people eked out a living doing hard physical labor requiring no schooling. It would make no sense in such a society to consider a 17-year-old a child. But it is also true that no society anywhere ever has viewed a 4-year-old as an adult or a 21-year-old as a child. Every society has had a view of children as comprising a somehow distinct phase of life, although the contours of that distinction vary substantially depending on how families produced and reproduced their existence.

One of the key things that makes human development unique among mammals, even among our closest relatives, the primates, is the huge amount of time between birth and sexual maturity. This represents a big investment from an evolutionary standpoint where infants and children (as well as nursing mothers to some degree) need care and are not a fully productive part of the group.

Why is this beneficial? Humans have evolved with many physical limitations compared to our closest cousins but with one huge advantage: big brains that can think and learn, which in turn evolved to allow us to communicate through spoken language and symbols. These capacities are necessary to collaborate to transform our environment through socialized labor in order to survive. These big brains are designed to learn from their environment and social interaction rather than to operate primarily from instinct, and this process of acculturation—of learning what needs to be known in order to survive—takes a relatively long time to achieve.

Prior to settlements of human beings into agricultural communities (which, in its turn, ushered in the development of class-stratified society), human beings lived in foraging or hunting-gathering nomadic bands: 99 percent of human history has been spent in foraging societies or the smallest of settled agricultural communities. Through anthropological study among the tiny number of these societies which continued to exist until the present, we know a few very interesting and important things about how our ancestors viewed children and childhood. (We also know some falsehoods, as anthropology has messy, sometimes very chauvinist strains as well.)

Across varying social groups in varied terrain, we see these commonalities:

Care of children in these societies is communalized, not privatized. Although nursing infants are held almost continually and breastfeeding occurs on demand (necessarily in close proximity to the mother), they are held by many members of the band, and this sharing of care labor increased as the infant matured. Many anthropologists use the term “allomothering” or “alloparenting” to describe the common practice of shared infant and child care. It is theorized that this sort of practice, where even young infants are in close contact with multiple caregivers, has an important role in helping develop strong social bonds and social intelligence (the ability to discern intention in another through their facial expressions, etc.) among the young. This skill set is very valuable to a species dependent on cooperative labor to survive.

People in these societies live in mixed-age groupings of 20 to 40 people with no peer segregation. People work, have leisure, sleep, and eat in mixed-age groups. Older children are often involved in caretaking and playing with younger children.

Children (as well as adults) gain skills and knowledge without formal schooling or specialized instruction but through what can broadly be termed “play and exploration.” Children learn the skills required in their communities through play in which they imitate adult activities: playing at foraging, hunting, and toy making (tool making).

Children (weaned infants through puberty) spend most of their time in “play” in mixed aged groups with other children, but often within visual range of and interacting with adults.

Children, for the most part, are not expected to be productive (hunting/gathering of food to feed others) until adulthood, although in most of these societies, depending on resources available, children do provide some foodstuffs, provide care for younger children, and play important roles in groups in distributing food and other tasks.

Barry Hewlett and Michael Lamb write their edited book Hunter Gatherer Childhoods: Evolutionary, Developmental, and Cultural Perspectives,2See also: Meredith Smalls, Kids, How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Young Children; Peter Gray, a developmental and evolutionary psychologist,and expert on play in American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522, 2009.

Interestingly, although human offspring are more dependent on adult(s)…than the young of other species, children in hunter-gatherer societies are clearly much more independent than are children in industrial societies like our own, and they contribute to the welfare and provisioning of the groups in which they live much more extensively than one might expect. Many of the contributors to this collection describe a gradual transition from being a dependent recipient of care and provisions to being a participant in the care and provisioning of others—a transition that facilitates the transfer of social and survival skills more seamlessly than the typical patterns of socialization in Western industrial cultures…Comparisons among these chapters underscore a permeability of boundaries between play and work, as well as the gradual nature of the transitions between childhood and adulthood. (p. 412)

This “permeability of boundaries” that characterized early human societies stands in direct contrast to the rigid divisions that capitalism imposes upon both the lifespan and the day-to-day: First, we have the isolation of children and childhood within the privatized family structure, separated from other members of their communities. On a fundamental level, the world of the child and the world of the adult are intensely separated from each other within the family as well.

Children are not just segregated from adults, but also from each other in a multiplicity of ways: same-age classrooms, segregated schools, ability groups (honors classes, special education classrooms, magnet schools, etc.) and in highly gender-specified activities. Today, even children’s book stores contain different boys and girls book sections and legos are colored so we can tell the difference between boys’ and girls’ bricks.

The rigid demarcation between leisure/school/work has been described by Marx and other radical writers as central to the process of how labor is alienated under capitalism. This is becoming more extreme for children today as anything resembling play is taken out of our schools to make more room for more “work” on narrower and narrower bands of subject matter.

Clearly, by looking back at human history we can see that the idea that the private family as the only way to organize childrearing as well as the role of children in society are human constructions that correspond to a definite historical epoch. Therefore, these relations can be reconstructed by humans given new historical, political, economic, and social circumstances.

One of the things that the evidence from foraging societies doesn’t offer us is a roadmap for better parenting or schooling today. While there is much to be gleaned about how children and adults learn and live from this record, it would be a mistake to think we can easily apply these insights within our current contexts. I believe that some of the most well-meaning, sometimes insightful, but also highly moralistic parenting advice and educational philosophy can fall into this trap. For example, many of the insights of “attachment parenting” are based upon the way prehistoric peoples held, slept with, nursed, and reared their young. For working mothers and fathers today who work outside the home, attachment parenting can be held up as an ideal that most families could not attain, thus reinforcing the sense of inadequacy and corresponding guilt that leads one away from the sort of collective solutions based in struggle for a different kind of society that makes parenting easier and more attuned to the needs of children. I think there is much within the left wing “unschooling” philosophy and practice which runs into this same kind of cul de sac.

Children and capitalism

From Marx and Frederick Engels’ historical vantage point, the industrial revolution appeared to be destroying the proletarian family as it pulled men, women, and children out of their previous roles as peasants into modern factory work. All members of families, including children as young as four years old, were forced off the land and into brutal 14-, 15-, and 16-hour shifts, around the clock, in mine and mill. Traditional familial relationships broke down under this system. But, as we will talk about in a moment, capital found that it could not do without the role of the family as a tool for the reproduction of labor; Marx may have overestimated the “breakdown” of the proletarian family in this regard.

The development of capitalism, as Marx writes, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The role of child labor—both within the so-called “free” labor market and within the plantation slave system at the dawn of the industrial revolution was certainly one of the essential pillars of capitalist accumulation of profit. British industries, Marx wrote, “live by sucking blood, and children’s blood too,” and, he went on, U.S. capital was financed by the “capitalized blood of children.”

Louis Hine, the anti-child labor campaigner and photographer whose iconic images of children’s exploitation helped popularize and expand the struggle against child labor in the U.S. in the early 20th century, described a 1911 scene, repeated tens of millions of times over, “Manuel is 5 years old but big for his age. When the whistle blows at 3 o’clock in the morning, he pulls on his clothes and hurries to the shrimp and oyster cannery where he spends the day peeling the shells off iced shrimp. He has been working as a shrimp picker since he was four.” 3Kids At Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor,  Russell Freedman, p. 1)

Marx identified the tendency of capital to transform any and all people and things—including children—into commodities. Child labor was considered desirable for dual reasons: In some industries and services, such as chimney cleaning, small physical stature was desirable. You have to be tiny to climb up small, dirty chimneys and scrub out the soot. But child labor was also desirable because children were considered more easily coerced, less assertive of their rights, and cheap.

Capital was right about the profitability of child labor but was wrong about children’s passivity in the face of their exploitation. Children have joined the labor movement to fight against their own and their fellow workers’ exploitation in every historic upsurge of labor, from the Chartist Movement in Britain to the Lawrence Strike of women textile workers in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, to farm workers struggles in the 1960s to the Indian, Chinese, African, and Latin American labor movements today. Where workers struggle, and where children work, children join—and in some instances lead—the struggle.

The 1899 Newsboy Strike is but one example, when New York City newspaper sellers—some as young as six years old—went on strike for two weeks against the most powerful media titans of their day, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. They faced down vicious repression by police and hired thugs. The strike was sparked by a ten-cent increase charged to the newsboys for a bundle of papers, a fortune to them. A leader of the strike, Kid Blink, said, “Ain’t that ten cents worth as much to us as it is to Hearst and Pulitzer who are millionaires? Well, I guess it is. If they can’t spare it, how can we?” In a mass march across the Brooklyn Bridge, they shut down traffic and brought one of the world’s most populous cities to a stand still for two days. The strike was eventually victorious as the “newsies” forced concessions from the newspaper bosses.

In another example, a mass workers movement across Europe and the U.S. fought for and eventually won laws first limiting the conditions under which child labor was legally employed and eventually outlawing the use of child labor in most cases altogether. This corresponded with the demands by the workers’ movement for universal public education, a demand, which (after decades of struggle), by the end of World War I, was mostly won. Marx and other socialists of his day were at the forefront of these struggles. It might surprise some then to learn that Marx wrote in 1866,

We consider the tendency of modern industry to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes co-operate in the great work of social production as a progressive, sound, legitimate tendency, although under capital it was distorted into an abomination. In a rational state of society every child whatever, from age of 9 years, ought to become a productive laborer in the same way that no abled bodied adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz. to work in order to be able to eat, and work not only with the brain, but with the hands too.

While we can quibble over ages at which this kind of integration into productive labor is developmentally appropriate, Marx was essentially arguing that in a sane society, one not built on profit but upon meeting human need, it is wrong to exclude youth as they grow physically and cognitively from socially necessary labor alongside other members of their community. To do so would be to deny them both the rights and responsibilities of full members of that society.

He goes on later in this passage to make clear that all work–for children and adults alike—must include time for the broadest kind of progressive education and that work hours must be limited to make leisure a possibility for all. In a socialist society under worker’s direct democratic control of the economy, the corresponding transformation of work and school into places that actually fulfill, rather than destroy, human potential, the divisions between mental and manual labor, between schooling/working/playing/leisure/creative endeavor, would dramatically decrease. Alongside this there would be a corresponding decrease in the sharp way in which we demarcate child from adult. Why shouldn’t there be a lifelong process of labor and learning, side by side?

Today, under capitalism, children continue to be utilized for the worst kinds of exploited labor, as some of the most profitable corporations and most well known brand names on Earth knowingly utilize children in either direct production or as part of their “supply chain,” including Nike, Apple, McDonald’s and Hershey’s. Even in the U.S., despite laws on the books banning child labor, child labor continues to be a source of profits, especially in the agricultural industry. In Sub-Saharan Africa, which not coincidentally has the world’s lowest standard of living, 25 percent of children under the age of 14 work.

Children in the industrialized global north do not primarily generate profits through their labor for capital. But as a consumer group, children are considered an extremely important market. In the U.S. market, children aged eight to eighteen annually spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 billion dollars of their own money annually. Children under twelve directly influence household spending of an additional $196 billion each year, more than half of which goes to soft drinks and fast food. They indirectly influence the spending of over $400 billion annually, all this according to a report for the advertising industry entitled, “The Kids Market” (quoted in Susan Linn, Consuming Kids, 2004, p.1). Little wonder that children, on average, see 40,000 commercials on television alone in a given year. Think back to the image of a child as whiney, nagging, and spoiled that I mentioned at the beginning of this article and put the blame where it squarely belongs, not primarily on bad parenting but on corporate America’s insatiable greed.

Social Reproduction

I now want to turn to children as another source of profit for capitalists: future profits. Children are the exploited workforce of tomorrow, and both their current care and preparation for their future roles in society is a burden borne not by capitalists or their state but instead placed upon the backs of the working-class family, and in particular, women within the family. All of this is propped up by an overgrowth of ideology proclaiming this as the only possible, natural way to organize our lives and relationships.

In most U.S. families today, all of the adults work outside the home. Because most parents work outside the home, most children under five years old receive child care from someone other than a parent. Almost one-quarter of those children under the age of five are in some form of organized child care arrangement, which includes day care centers, nurseries, and preschools.

The average yearly cost of childcare for an infant in Cook County is more than $13,000. Because so few receive any form of government assistance to help pay for childcare, that cost falls on the families of young children themselves. Low-income families spend a much larger portion of income on child care than do others—more than half of their income in cases with parents of children under 5 years old. Half of all childcare workers who care for these children make so little they qualify for public assistance.

No wonder that most families in the U.S. today depend on what is termed a “patchwork” of childcare arrangements for their children, resulting in a constant shuffle between care centers and care givers, with such correspondingly complicated schedules that one caregiver’s illness or car problem can result in a cascade of missed work, missed school, missed appointments and an almost constant state of stress and anxiety for parents and children alike. Some of the most common patchwork solutions for lack of accessible and affordable childcare are reliance on other family members of young children’s care (including a small but significant percentage of under 5s who are cared for at least some portion of the day by older siblings) and alternating shift-work for parents (extremely damaging from social-psychological perspective).

The investment that the United States makes in early childhood care and education pales by comparison to the investments being made by other capitalist countries. One recent study found that the United States spends $600 per year per preschool-age child on early childhood care and education, whereas France spends five times that amount, and Sweden spends seven and one-half times that amount.

Little wonder that so many of the products marketed to children and their families revolve around two things: fast food so that you can simultaneously drive and feed your child, and passive entertainment–iPad and TV being the cheapest babysitters around.

It is absolutely fundamental to the socialist and working class movement more generally that we place socialized childcare—fully funded, accessible in all senses of the word, and of high quality—at the top of our demands for reforms we seek within the confines of capitalism as well as in our planning and vision of a future socialist society.

This overview of the sorry state of childcare in capitalist U.S. gives a description of the reality facing working class families. To understand why we live in a society which refuses to take responsibility for the care of its young, we need a deeper explanation. For this, we need to look at the structure of capitalism itself and within it, the special role of the family.

In the U.S., capitalist profits result from labor power, but capitalism does not produce that labor power. There is no mechanism to ensure labor’s daily and general renewal. The capitalist state therefore develops ideological, legal, and material “support” for unpaid labor in the home, performed for the most part (though not exclusively) by women.

Under capitalism workers are “free”: Our free time is ours–sort of. But the burden for reproduction resting on the shoulders of families necessitates that even this “free” time is in service to capitalism. Capitalism permits a limited range of options—daycare, divorce, and single parenting, for example. Twenty-eight percent of children now live in single parent, overwhelmingly single-mother households, and a majority of children will at some point reside in a single parent household. Yet, all of those forms are still driven and shaped by the capital/labor relationship. For example, public services like government-funded daycare are increasingly driven back into private families under neo-liberal austerity, women’s work is paid less, and therefore the single mother supports her children with fewer and fewer resources.

This doesn’t mean that the sphere of paid work or production is more important than, or superior to, the private sphere and social reproduction. Indeed, Marxist theory shows the reverse to be true: Production in the formal economy is made possible only because of reproductive labor. It is through care and nurturing (reproductive labor) received in the private sphere that capital receives a full functional being–the worker–ready to work at the point of production, while having to pay nothing for her/his/their work-readiness.

Children’s rights

In a very interesting book Seen and Heard, Children’s Rights in Early Childhood Education (2011), author and preschool teacher Ellen Lynn Hall recounts a study in her preschool classroom that sparked her interest in writing on this topic.

Shortly after the United States began its military campaign in Iraq (2003) a 4 year old boy who demonstrated with his parents against the war carried a protest sign into his class and declared, “1,2,3,4 We don’t want your muddy war.” The sign intrigued his classmates, one of whom asserted, “Soldiers don’t have the right to kill people.”

The teachers became interested in this question of “rights” and what the children thought about them. They initiated a conversation among the preschoolers, who had lots to say:

“A right is like you know in your heart it’s okay to do it…you can do it if you want and that’s it.”

“But you can do that only if it’s okay, like you won’t hurt somebody and it’s not safe.”

“People have the right not to be hurt too, right?”

This conversation sparked a week-long project where children in the school compiled a list of all their rights, 61 in all, including:

“Children have the right to have friends.”

“Children have the right to pretend everything and to pretend there’s a beach anywhere.”

“Children have the right to say ‘No!’ or ‘Stop it’ when someone tickles them without asking.”

“Children have the right to say ‘Yes’ when people tickle them too.”

“Children have the right to be listened to.”

“Children have the right to good stuff that makes them happy.”

Children are rarely asked to comment on their desires for their world in the way these thoughtful teachers did, but despite that we have ample evidence that children have very strong opinions on how they want to live. In Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), Steven Mintz quotes this passage from Benjamin Franklin on the common phenomenon of English colonists who who ran away from home or were taken captive and decided to stay with Native Americans:

When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them…in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. (p. 8)

Quoted in the same book, a 19th century children’s rhyme speaks to the political thoughts and aspirations of slave children:

My old mistress promised me,

When she dies she would set me free

Now she’s dead and gone to hell

I hope the devil will burn her well. (p. 107)

Working children have been and continue to be participants in the labor movement. They have also been, and will continue to be, participants and leaders in the struggles for social justice across society. The Children’s Crusade during the 1963 Birmingham desegregation campaign is a well known part of the civil rights movement in this country. Over 2000 children and youth were arrested that spring and summer as marchers attempted to shame the white supremacists by forcing them to arrest and attack kids. Of course, the racists had no shame, and so children also paid the highest price in that movement. The KKK firebombing that killed four little girls in a Birmingham church that September was a direct retaliation for the role that young people had played in pushing forward the movement against Jim Crow.

The U.S. is the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. For this we can thank the U.S. right wing, including so-called “parents’ rights” groups, which mobilize every year against ratification because, as it is argued, recognition of children’s rights drives a wedge between parent and child. This is a scary admission on the part of the right wing that all might not be right between parent and child to begin with if this would be the result of signing the treaty. In fact the UN Rights of the Child is a very un-radical document in many respects, placing the child’s “right to a family” at the top of the list of rights. While the UN’s rights of the child contain many progressive ideals, including the right to adequate nutrition, 25 years after its initial ratification by the vast majority of the world’s countries, five million children die every year from hunger in a world literally awash in food. Clearly, more than a document asserting children’s rights is needed–movements that fight for those rights are an urgent necessity.

A welcome discussion among radical thinkers and activists is developing on the question of children’s rights and liberation, the family and care, and how solidarity, mutual aid, and reciprocity could shape our thinking and practice alongside children in struggle. This article hopes to contribute in small part to those hopeful discussions.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: verkeorg; modified by Tempest.

The post Childhood and Marxism appeared first on Tempest.

With 255,000 Ontario education workers currently in bargaining, we have a huge opportunity to win the kind of public education that students deserve — as long as we think strategically and take concrete action.

The post Lesson plan for fighting Ford first appeared on Spring.

On August 9, 2026, the Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution Julio Cordano shared an informal reference document titled “Aid to Negotiations” ahead of the anticipated resumption of negotiations for an international legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution. 

This document was a culmination of all the informal talks that happened after electing the Chair in INC 5.3 in Geneva, Switzerland in February 2026. The document is meant to “aid” the discussions in the next informal heads of delegation meeting that is set to take place in Bangkok on September 27-30, 2026. 

In his explanatory note, Cordano said that the document was informed by past texts and discussions that happened in previous INCs, but critics are quick to notice that most of the ambitious treaty elements that garnered the support of more than a hundred Member States in past discussions were missing from the recently released document. 

The Chair said that he hopes that this document will help to “begin identifying possible bridging approaches and solutions” but many are wary that the current text is bound to bridge the weakest and most watered down measures without articles pertaining to continued plastic production and chemicals in plastics.

Melissa Aguayo, Co-Coordinator for Break Free From Plastic, calls on all Member States to bring back the important provisions, terms, and key measures from previous texts that obligate States to act towards ending plastic pollution. "The text cannot be accepted as is," said Aguayo. "The process is raising serious concerns about legitimacy and trust. This document emerged from closed-door sessions that once again excluded civil society, while critical issues were kept off the formal agenda, undermining the integrity of the process."

Break Free From Plastic members respond to the Chair’s Aid to Negotiations: 

Eskedar Awgichew Ergete, Executive Director, Eco Justice Ethiopia, said: 

"The Chair’s Aid to Negotiations falls short of the justice centered ambition that governments agreed to in UNEA 5/14. A treaty that treats upstream obligations as optional, sidelines independent science, and weakens global decision making cannot end plastic pollution. It only protects the interests of those who profit from it. For African countries and frontline workers who live with the daily realities of waste colonialism, this text is not balanced; it is inequitable. We need a treaty that confronts plastic production, embeds worker centered just transition, and upholds the rights of communities most affected. Anything less is a retreat from the mandate and a failure of global responsibility."

Nyebon Faustin, Executive Director of Appui aux Initiatives Communautaires pour l’Environnement Durable (AICED), said: 

“Plastic pollution is, above all, a matter of human health and survival. Even before contaminating our ecosystems, plastic and the toxic substances associated with it affect our health—including that of unborn children—thereby compromising their development and humanity’s future. The Chair of the INC, has the power to turn the tide by setting the foundations for countries to take action towards an ambitious, legally binding global treaty based on an approach that covers the entire lifecycle of plastic, from production to end-of-life.”

Salisa Traipipitsiriwat, Senior Campaigner and Southeast Asia Plastics Project Manager at Environmental Justice Foundation, said: 

"The Chair's Aid to Negotiations does not reflect the outcome ambitious countries have worked for. Its provisions leave the pace and action against plastic pollution largely where the world already stands today, without the binding commitments that would justify negotiating a legally binding instrument. It is not possible to address plastic pollution while leaving production out of the conversation. Upstream measures to reduce plastic at the production stage must be part of any credible outcome. This is a moment for high-ambition member states to hold firm, make their voices heard, and demand a text that truly matches the urgency of this crisis."

Muriel Papin, Executive Director, No Plastic in my Sea, said: 

“This text, which was intended to facilitate future negotiations, is extremely disappointing and falls short of the ambition set out in the original mandate. It is a war of attrition, which favours the lowest common denominator, and one which the ambitious countries – despite being in the majority – are now facing.”

Fabienne McLellan, Managing Director of OceanCare, said: 

“This treaty is meant to end plastic pollution, including in the marine environment. What the Ocean needs most from this treaty–upstream measures to prevent plastic getting into the environment in the first place–is what it is least likely to get. Member States need to stand by their previous positions and refuse to settle for this low-ambition document. They must demand that their ambitious proposals be reintroduced and reflected in the text going forward.” [see interview with The Guardian]

Christina Dixon, Ocean Campaign Lead of Environmental Investigation Agency, said: 

“One year after countries rejected a weak outcome in Geneva, they are now being presented with much the same level of ambition, repackaged as progress. Key measures that could tackle the problem at its source remain diluted, deferred or dropped altogether and new proposals remain totally absent. Ultimately, the world needs a treaty that bends the curve on plastic production and pollution, not one that bends to the lowest common denominator.” [see full statement]

David Azoulay, Director of Environmental Health at the Center for International Environmental Law, said: 

“The Chair called this draft a ‘no surprises’ document, and on that count, it delivers. The text is the lowest common denominator. And it is indeed no surprise that a text developed behind closed doors, following a meeting where production, chemicals, and decision-making were kept off the formal agenda, and observers were kept out of the room, fails to reflect the science on what it will take to address the plastics crisis…” [see full statement]

 

Note to Editors: 

• More quotes from environment activists and experts are available here

• Photos of civil society from previous negotiations: INC-5 in Busan, South Korea, 2024 | INC 5.2 in Geneva, 2025 |INC 5.3 in Geneva, Switzerland, 2026

 

Press Contacts: 

• Marianella Nuñez, news@breakfreefromplastic.org 
• Eah Antonio, eah@breakfreefromplastic.org, +63 927 827 7960

 

Other Regional Press Contacts: 

• Africa: Masego Mokgwetsi, masego@breakfreefromplastic.org
• Asia: Devayani Khare,  devayani@breakfreefromplastic.org  
• Europe: Bethany Spendlove Keeley, bethany@breakfreefromplastic.org 
• Latin America: Masego Mokgwetsi, masego@breakfreefromplastic.org 

 

###

About BFFP — #BreakFreeFromPlastic is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 2,700 organizations and 11,000 individual supporters worldwide have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain – from extraction to disposal – focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions. www.breakfreefromplastic.org.

In rhetoric, the far right pitches itself as a defender of ordinary citizens, but its policies often serve the powerful. In Czechia, building and agricultural land reforms put forward by Andrej Babiš’s government exemplify this dynamic. Civil society and grassroots organisations are fighting back. But can they turn their opposition into organised political power?

Democratic backsliding is most typically associated with attacks on courts, media freedom, elections, or civil society. In Czechia, some of the most consequential shifts are currently arriving in a less visible way – disguised as solutions. Since returning to power in 2025, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s ANO movement, backed by the far-right SPD and Motorists parties, has been promoting a series of reforms supposedly designed to tackle pressing problems such as housing unaffordability, land speculation, and precarious food security. However, what these reforms deliver is less public oversight, less social welfare, less resilience, but more power in the hands of corporations and oligarchy.

The first proposed reform aims to introduce a preferential purchase right for farmers leasing agricultural land, ostensibly to protect food sovereignty and curb speculation. The second, nicknamed “Lex Developer” by its civil society critics, is framed as a solution to the housing crisis through faster planning and permitting procedures.

The likely beneficiaries of these reforms, however, are not struggling family farmers or households priced out of the housing market. In a country where the state has long been captured by corporate interests (and the prime minister himself is one of the country’s most influential agribusiness owners through the conglomerate Agrofert), these seemingly pragmatic responses to urgent public problems risk major societal and environmental consequences.

A Czech shock doctrine

Human societies are facing multiple, mutually reinforcing crises that scientists increasingly understand as interconnected expressions of deeper structural contradictions in capitalist socio-ecological relations. Under the dominance of the market, housing, agricultural land, and food are treated as financial assets instead of basic rights and strategic resources. The environmental and social costs of this model accumulate over time, occasionally erupting in visible moments of disruption.

Some critics argue that the term “crisis” has lost its meaning. Crisis implies a temporary condition demanding urgent political action, yet many contemporary problems are chronic and structural. They require long-term, systemic transformation rather than emergency responses. Instead, political and economic elites often choose to exploit the language of crisis, using urgency to obscure root causes, advance their own interests, and consolidate the status quo.

As Naomi Klein famously argued in The Shock Doctrine (2007), moments of heightened urgency create opportunities for accelerated decision-making, controversial policies, and exceptional interventions. Drastic measures are often shielded from democratic scrutiny by being presented as technical and pragmatic solutions. It is often through appeals to efficiency that bypassing public debate becomes justified. Critics, meanwhile, are dismissed as simultaneously unrealistic and obstructive, to the point of being held responsible for worsening the crisis.

In Czechia, these dynamics can be illustrated through housing and its entanglement with post-socialist legacies. The Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and its founder, former prime minister and president Václav Klaus, have promoted the idea that democracy is inseparable from the free market and under threat from an unelected civil society operating outside of formal politics. Public debate in Czechia has thus largely accepted that anything from rising prices to housing shortages should be attributed to state bureaucracy and activists: the former for its slow permitting procedures, the latter for delaying development and preventing the market from meeting demand.

A different pattern is followed in the case of food security. In Czechia, agricultural production is concentrated among domestic oligarchs, whose interests are closely linked to the state. High food prices and supply disruptions are therefore often blamed on external factors, such as international retail chains, European environmental policies, and geopolitical instability. What remains similar is the perception of the state and civic actors as a threat.

Both cases reveal a governing strategy which relies on real or perceived crises to shift attention away from questions of power, ownership, and alternative futures, redirecting it towards scapegoats and supposedly straightforward fixes. In this way, solutions to serious contemporary problems are devised by those who contributed to the problems in the first place, whereas weakened democratic oversight helps secure the growing influence of hegemonic actors.

Food sovereignty as concentration

Czechia, due to its socialist legacies and neoliberal transformation, has a peculiar agricultural structure. With the collapse of state socialism, agricultural land was returned to millions of individual owners whose ancestors had lost their land due to collectivisation. After 1989, large production units and farming cooperatives created through this process were transformed into big agricultural enterprises and agroholdings. This led to land ownership becoming highly fragmented, despite farming itself being among the most concentrated and industrialised in Europe. According to a 2024 report by the Czech Ministry of Agriculture, 71.8 per cent of Czech agricultural land is leased rather than farmed by its owners, and most of that land is cultivated by large agricultural enterprises.

In this context, Andrej Babiš’s government has proposed introducing a pre-emption right for farmers leasing agricultural land. If adopted, owners wishing to sell their land would first have to offer it to the current tenants. The reform is presented by the government as a response to two widely recognised concerns: the growing financialisation of farmland and the need to strengthen Czech food sovereignty and food security in an increasingly unstable world.

At first glance, such a proposal sounds reasonable. Few people would object to protecting agricultural land from speculative investment. But the popular image of a family farmer working a modest piece of land, which agrifood enterprises and retail chains like to use in their marketing, hardly corresponds to the realities of Czech agriculture, dominated by large enterprises farming hundreds or thousands of hectares. By contrast, family and smaller private farms operate on only about 10-20 per cent of agricultural land. Therefore, the pre-emption right would grant dominant agricultural actors an opportunity to gradually purchase the land they already cultivate, and to further increase their control over agricultural resources.

71.8 per cent of Czech agricultural land is leased rather than farmed by its owners, and most of that land is cultivated by large agricultural enterprises

The gap between crisis rhetoric and the outcomes of proposed solutions is particularly visible through the government’s attempt to frame the reform as a defence of food sovereignty, a concept developed by farmers’ movements and food justice activists in defence of their communities’ access to land and ability to shape their own food systems against the control of large agricultural businesses. Research consistently shows that highly concentrated agricultural systems tend to favour a narrow range of export-oriented commodities and large-scale industrial production. In Czechia, this often means vast fields of cereal and industrial crop production (accounting for over 62 per cent of total crop production), while production of fruit, vegetables, and other labour-intensive foods is declining due to cost efficiency (for example, fruit production fell from 557,447 tons in 2000 to 123,530 tons in 2024).

Concentration of land ownership will thus inevitably undermine rather than strengthen food sovereignty, as well as more sustainable and just food systems. Our research on state food politics conducted at BOKU University in Vienna has also shown that Czech agricultural policy is primarily shaped by large agricultural enterprises and their profit-driven interests, while alternative food movements or small-scale farmers with more diverse and sustainable production have only a marginal influence.

Instead of tackling the structural problems of Czech agriculture, such as stagnating rural development, barriers faced by people who want to start their own farm, or the lack of support for more diverse forms of food production, the proposed preferential purchase right for farmers leasing agricultural land risks reinforcing the already dominant model based on the concentration of land, subsidies, and political influence by the domestic agricultural oligarchy and powerful agrifood enterprises.

Speculation as progress

If the agricultural land reform uses the language of food sovereignty to justify a further concentration of land ownership, the amendment to the Building Act recently approved by the Parliament performs a very similar trick in the urban space. In this case, the crisis language focuses on housing unaffordability. It is now an almost undisputed fact that Czechia, and Prague in particular, suffers from the worst housing crisis in the EU. Home ownership, so popular and normalised in a country where many were able to privatise their dwellings during the post-socialist transformation – creating what some scholars call a “super-homeownership” housing regime – is now increasingly out of reach.

As journalist Táňa Zabloudilová noted, young people facing housing insecurity are now increasingly being told by mainstream media that renting is the best option, and that tenancy is a widespread housing option in Western European countries. What they are being told less often is that those countries also have a strong tradition of social housing and tenants’ rights. Meanwhile, rents continue to rise in Czech cities, with average prices reaching approximately 19 euros per square metre in Prague this year. Moreover, affordable public housing is still a rarity, and the few affordable options on offer are often occupied by people with good connections and political influence, regardless of their income. For example, a recent investigation revealed that Minister for Regional Development Zuzana Mrázová of the ANO movement lived in affordable municipal housing while serving as mayor of Bílina.

Instead of building a robust social housing sector or taming housing financialisation through higher property taxes, the government recently passed an amendment to the building code, blaming expensive housing on slow construction due to long planning procedures, annoying regulations, pointless environmental reviews, and activists getting in the way – a mantra many Czechs have learned to repeat.

While accelerated construction will not deliver affordable housing and is a problem in itself, especially from the perspective of environmental and heritage protection, legal experts, planning specialists, environmental organisations, and municipal representatives also highlighted the amendment’s potential to reduce public oversight and participation, and to strengthen the position of developers and investors. The “Lex Developer” would benefit large corporate projects specifically, as permission procedures will not be sped up for small-scale projects.

As critics of the reform have pointed out, the housing crisis is a result of decades of commodification, speculative investment, the retreat of public housing, and successive governments’ unwillingness to seriously treat housing as a social right rather than a market commodity.1 While politicians promise that building more will eventually make housing affordable, a growing share of newly built homes is acquired by investors, institutional landlords, and people who already own property. Moreover, developers can slow down or halt construction when the costs of labour and materials rise, undermining the argument that faster permitting procedures can address the housing crisis.

In Czechia, the housing crisis also causes a generational divide. Many older Czechs bought homes during the post-socialist transformation or before prices spiralled out of reach. Rising property values have since given them assets that younger generations can only dream of, and for some, investing in real estate has become a substitute for a pension system they no longer trust. Young people without family wealth, stable incomes, or access to credit often have no such option and remain trapped in an increasingly expensive rental market.

Yet these inequalities rarely decide elections. Homeowners still form a majority of the electorate, and in a country with some of Europe’s lowest property taxes, many directly benefit from rising property value. This helps explain why the mainstream debate largely avoids framing the housing crisis as a political question of wealth, inequality, and redistribution, and why the narrative of a technical problem of slow permitting has far greater appeal.

A certain paradox also transpires in the way power holders abuse Czech antipathies for communism and activists. In my earlier research on urban activism, I found that people in Czechia rarely mobilise because they oppose development itself. More often, they do so because decisions are made without them, in a top-down manner. In other words, participation, transparency, and public scrutiny emerge as responses to democratic deficits, not as their cause. Promoters of the “Lex Developer”, however, often frame civil society as a source of problems and public engagement against pragmatic market solutions as ultimately antidemocratic – a remnant of communist times.

The building code reform thus epitomises a peculiar Czech version of democratic deficit in which democracy is invoked to defend markets, while citizens attempting to exercise democratic influence and protect values such as heritage and a healthy environment are dismissed as enemies of progress.

Democratic erosion does not always arrive through spectacular attacks on democratic institutions. It also advances in more inconspicuous ways: through planning amendments, property law, and other reforms which the public may perceive as too technical to warrant their attention

Organising resistance

Both the agricultural land and the housing reforms assist the further concentration of power and capital in the hands of a few, aggravating structural problems at the heart of housing unaffordability and fragile food security. They also try to silence and delegitimise the opposition, represented by activists, civil society, and smallholders of farmland. According to Gabriela Svárovská, a Green member of the Czech parliament, the government’s project is “a peculiar form of corporate communism: costs, subsidies, and risks are distributed across society as a whole, while profits, assets, and decision-making power are concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporate groups.”

Under Babiš’s far-right government, democratic infrastructures in Czechia are facing a serious threat. But the backlash against both reforms also reveals these infrastructures’ resilience and determination in increasingly hostile conditions. The “Lex Developer” has long been challenged by the association of environmental organisations Zelený kruh (“Green circle”), heritage protection organisations, local activist groups, and some municipalities. The land reform has been challenged by the Association of Private Farming of the Czech Republic, which forms the most important opposition to the large agroindustrial lobby, advocating instead for a more decentralised and sustainable agricultural model based on family farms. Other critics include smaller agroecological initiatives promoting soil care, such as the Živá půda (“Living soil”) project, promoting more equitable access to farmland, and the Nadace pro půdu (“Foundation for the land”), focused on acquiring agricultural land for smallholder, organic, and beginning farmers.

In both cases, awareness-raising has been the main tactic, and civic associations are increasingly aware that cooperation and alliances across civil society and social movements are essential when facing a powerful opponent – a state captured by corporate and oligarchic interests. The concerns of private farmers in particular have often been amplified at mass protest events organised by Milion chvilek pro demokracii (“Million moments for democracy”), a grassroots movement able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of citizens through public campaigns, demonstrations, and community organising.

Still, many on the Czech Left view these anti-government protests and the civic organisations opposing the reforms as politically toothless, understanding democracy primarily in apolitical terms, as a matter of political culture, ethics, corruption, populism, and institutional integrity. Despite focusing on a variety of critical issues, the narratives put forward by Czech civic organisations tend to be only vaguely linked to questions of social inequality and economic power. In this polarised context, many professional civic organisations and pro-democratic mobilisations are regularly framed by both Left and Right as elitist, foreign-funded, disconnected from ordinary citizens’ everyday problems, and as supporters of liberal ideologies dictated by the EU.

Meanwhile, MPs of ODS, the main opposition force, representing the neoliberal orthodoxy, voted in favour of the “Lex Developer” in the name of economic growth and market efficiency. In doing so, they exposed a contradiction at the heart of Czech liberalism: attachment to property rights and individual freedom can easily evaporate when confronted with concentrated corporate power.

The situation is dire from a democratic perspective, but it also offers an opening for a real shift in Czech politics, which increasingly suffers from the absence of a strong Left. It is also an opportunity to build a truly grassroots counter-hegemony that translates dispersed experiences of insecurity, exclusion, and ecological crisis into a shared political project capable of challenging dominant economic and political arrangements. Some of this emancipatory work is being pioneered by Re-set: The Platform for Social-Ecological Transformation, particularly through its efforts to directly confront Czech fossil oligarchy and state capture by corporate interests, and by promoting decentralised economic power and organising solidarity struggles from below.

Current developments in Czechia offer a broader lesson for Europe and for green politics. Democratic erosion does not always arrive through spectacular attacks on democratic institutions. It also advances in more inconspicuous ways: through planning amendments, property law, and other reforms which the public may perceive as too technical to warrant their attention. The Czech government’s approach to housing and food sovereignty and security reveals a dangerous approach that does not just ignore the causes of crises but actively reproduces them, exploiting urgency to expand corporate power at the cost of democratic participation.

While we need to mobilise solutions to the multitude of crises we face today, we must also pay attention to how these crises are framed, who gets to define the solutions, and who is left out of the debate. In the face of a democratic deficit becoming institutionalised via concentrated corporate power, we must also ask how cleavages in a polarised society can be mended, particularly through finding common ground for solidarity, nurturing collective capacities for democratic participation, and rebuilding the social power needed to confront interconnected crises in just and inclusive ways.

1. For scientific publications about housing in Czechia see especially the research by the Socioeconomics of Housing department of the Czech Academy of Sciences: https://www.soc.cas.cz/cz/oddeleni/socioekonomie-bydleni
   ︎

• Bad press about the threat of e-motorbikes is threatening the broader mobility movement in general, with the fast vehicles getting lumped in with e-scooters and ordinary e-bikes. While some regulation is needed, over-regulation could put the brakes on a fast-growing mobility mode that often replaces driving. Meanwhile, the real threat — cars — gets less media attention. (The Guardian)
• The Federal Transit Administration awarded Amtrak $5.3 billion for 43 projects, including bridge and track repairs, new trains, locomotives, double-tracking in Massachusetts, North Carolina and San Diego, and a Chicago maintenance facility. (Trains)
• NPR‘s “All Things Considered” explored the U.S. DOT’s war on “DEI” bike lanes.
• Air quality in Manhattan improved slightly since congestion pricing started, and it didn’t get any worse in the outer boroughs. (New York Times)
• Oren Hadar writes about how Los Angeles caters to drivers, to the point that pedestrians have to wait a frustratingly long time for a crosswalk signal so that cars don’t have to stop. (The Future Is L.A.)
• California rideshare drivers are on the verge of forming a union. Now can they negotiate a contract? (L.A. Progressive)
• Light rail service to West Seattle has been delayed for another three years. (KIRO)
• Jarrett Walker is encouraged that a transit referendum passed in a right-leaning town like Spokane. (Human Transit)
• Doubts are growing in Charleston that the Federal Transit Administration will come through a $374 million grant for a bus rapid transit line. (Post and Courier)
• The Utah Transit Authority is expanding its microtransit service area. (KSL)
• Public comment on Utah’s new five-year transportation plan overwhelmingly favored rail over highways. (Salt Lake City Weekly)
• Pittsburgh closed a loophole in its longstanding law banning parking on sidewalks and in bike lanes. (USA Today)
• Joe Cortwright argues that the Rose Quarter Freeway widening project in Portland is turning into a fiscal black hole. (City Commentary)
• The Cincinnati Enquirer profiled a mother who’s been advocating for safer streets since losing her daughter in a hit-and-run eight years ago.
• A Daily Tar Heel column in favor of light rail also gets in a few digs at Duke.
• The Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that Premier Doug Ford can rip up Toronto bike lanes, overturning a previous ruling. (National Newswatch)
• Bus trips in Ho Chi Minh City are up 44% since 134 routes went fare-free. (Vietnam Plus)

Registered nurses and healthcare professionals at Santa Paula Hospital in Santa Paula, Calif. and Ventura County Medical Center (VCMC) in Ventura, Calif., will hold a speak out at Ventura County's Board of Supervisors hearing on Tuesday, Aug. 18, to protest changes in services and possible closure.

09-10 * 13:00 - FT meeting (Bea)

08-21 * 13:00 - Radical Democracy Meeting (Bea)

More than two dozen Texas families are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their challenge to a state law that requires public schools to post a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The request, filed today, urges the court to protect students’ and parents’ religious freedom by blocking Texas Senate Bill 10, ensuring that families — not politicians — have the right to decide what role religion plays in their lives.

The Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Baha'i, Unitarian Universalist, and nonreligious families challenging the Texas law attend 22 school districts across the state and are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP serving as pro bono counsel. Today’s petition seeks review of lower court rulings in two separate but similar cases: Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District and Cribbs Ringer v. Comal Independent School District.

Under S.B. 10, Texas public schools must permanently display a state-mandated version of the Ten Commandments, drawn from the Protestant King James Bible, in a “conspicuous” place in each classroom, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The families challenging S.B. 10 object to the law because the displays will pressure children to conform to the state’s favored religious beliefs and interfere with parents’ right to guide their children’s religious instruction.

Today’s Supreme Court filing, a joint petition for a writ of certiorari in both cases, follows an April decision by the en banc U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit allowing the state-selected version of the Ten Commandments to go up in the plaintiffs’ classrooms. By a narrowly decided vote, the 5th Circuit ruled that S.B. 10 does not violate either the Establishment or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment — despite a 1980 Supreme Court case striking down a nearly identical Kentucky law.

“As a rabbi and parent, forcing a Christian version of the Ten Commandments on children in every classroom is particularly upsetting,” said plaintiff Rabbi Joshua Fixler (he/him) of Houston. “I am not only worried about my own kids, but I’m deeply concerned about all the children in my congregation. These displays put children in the position of having to defend themselves and their families’ religious beliefs against a government mandate that makes them feel different and separate from their classmates.”

“Texas politicians shouldn’t have a seat at the table in deciding how our children receive their religious education. That decision belongs to our family,” said plaintiffs Rebekah (she/her) and Ted Lowe (he/him), an Austin-based interfaith couple who are raising their children in the Christian and Jewish traditions. “This law puts one version of religious beliefs above all others in our public schools and sends a message to our children that what we teach them about religion at home is somehow wrong.”

“By requiring displays of religious doctrine in every classroom, the state is interfering with our family’s decisions about how our children engage with religion,” said plaintiff Nichole Manning (she/her), a Dallas-area atheist who is raising her children in a nonreligious tradition that gives them the space and autonomy to develop their own beliefs about religion. “As a parent, I intentionally choose to have my children attend public school because I prefer an educational environment without any religious affiliation. In a diverse public school environment, all students should be treated with equal respect, regardless of their religious beliefs, or lack thereof.”

“The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected this kind of government-imposed religion before, and it should do so again,” said Chloe Kempf (she/her), staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “Having these posters in Texas classrooms puts students at risk of bullying, stigmatization, and religious coercion. Our nation’s bedrock principle of separating church and state means that families and faith communities — not politicians — get to decide what role religion plays in children’s lives. Texas students deserve public schools that welcome them for who they are, respect their religious or nonreligious backgrounds, and give them the high-quality education they need to build their futures.”

“Fifty years ago, the ACLU won a Supreme Court victory against a nearly identical Kentucky law — and we aim to do it again,” said Cecillia Wang (she/her), national legal director of the ACLU. “In our country, no legislature can force its preferred scripture on public school students and families.”

“Families – not politicians or public school officials – get to decide how, if, and when children engage with religion,” said Rachel Laser (she/her), president and CEO of Americans United. “We urge the Supreme Court to make clear that these Ten Commandments mandates violate students’ and families’ religious freedom as promised by the U.S. Constitution. With ever more states attempting to force one version of religion into public school classrooms, our nation must recommit to our foundational promise of church-state separation, the lynchpin of religious liberty.”

“This case concerns decisions about personal belief and religious instruction, and whether under our Constitution they remain with families and faith communities or are commandeered by the state,” said Jon Youngwood (he/him), global co-chair of the Litigation Department at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. “The First Amendment has long protected the freedom of individuals to determine for themselves how they engage with spirituality and religion. Those protections are especially important in the public-school setting.”

“The First Commandment, dictating which god must be worshipped, is the antithesis of our First Amendment,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor (she/her), co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. “It is not the government’s role to daily expose young children to a coercive display of one religion’s set of religious edicts in our public schools. Our public schools exist to educate, not to proselytize.”

The Lowe and Fixler families share more about how they will be impacted by these Ten Commandments displays and why they oppose them in newly released, heartfelt videos that can be viewed here; transcripts are available here.

Access the U.S. Supreme Court certiorari filing here: https://www.aclutx.org/app/uploads/2026/08/10C-SCOTUS-Petition.pdf

As a teenager, I would ride the public bus from the corner of my block to my high school each morning, watching the neighborhood of West Brighton blur behind the gossamer of dew suspended in the air as mist. On the foggiest mornings, I’d peer over the top of Grimes Hill to find the Verrazzano Bridge shrouded, the air thick enough to obscure it entirely, and the edifice all but vanished beneath an opaque sky. “I guess they forgot to put the bridge out today,” my friend would joke. We’d giggle and move on to more pressing matters: midterms, crushes, who saw whom with whom at the mall. The mist was a natural backdrop, turning the world crystalline, a million minuscule jewels refracting the sunlight and diffusing the morning into a languid, rolling onset. As the bus groaned along, the droplets would part to let it pass, and there was an elegance in its cordial shifting aside to accommodate our movements, a symbiosis.

It has been many years since I watched a foggy dawn envelope the Verrazzano. And yet today the bridge still disappears, though under more precarious circumstances. Today, wildfire smog flattens buildings into vague silhouettes. New York City is an amber ghost. The smog, graceless, abides by none of mist’s boundaries; it sticks to my skin, to my face, clings to my eyelashes, and embeds itself between the threads of my clothes. And I am haunted by the image of young girls on the S66 bus in West Brighton, joking to one another about a government employee forgetting to put the bridge out today. A new generation of teens might make the same quips now: “Someone’s getting fired,” one might joke. The other coughs in response. They should have masks on, but they do not, because they are teenagers, and for them, masks faded from normalcy three years ago. This—squinting through a neighborhood mired in murk, hacking through school gossip, heads fuzzy with carbon monoxide and Instagram reels—this is their normalcy.

Today, wildfire smog flattens buildings into vague silhouettes. New York City is an amber ghost.

For much of the northeastern United States, the return of smoke from Canada’s wildfires has become an unwelcome summer ritual. Air quality alerts have stretched across more than twenty states as nearly nine hundred active fires continue to burn across Canada, sending dangerous levels of fine particulate pollution thousands of miles from their source. The fires are expected to continue burning interminably, unquenchable. Residents of New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and dozens of other U.S. cities find themselves locked indoors, watching an air quality index map on their phone screens display infrared globs of red and purple wading across the pinpoints of their homes.

Three years ago, when wildfire smoke from Canada suffocated New York’s skies, some people here assumed it was a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. The effects of climate change were still contested, or even ignored. This was by capitalist design: fossil fuel-funded misinformation has manufactured political uncertainty. That strategy, however, had a time limit, only capable of existing in the space between the general public’s secondarily informed understanding of the issue and their lived experience of it. This year in New York, back-to-back snowstorms pummeled the city this winter, and repeated heat waves have already ravaged the first half of the summer. The polluted air has returned quickly enough to be recognized as patternistic. People can no longer argue whether climate change is coming when the smoke is at our door. We simply look around and know it is the inverse: we are in climate change’s house, built upon the bones of capitalism, adorned with the gilt extracts of imperialism, and ornamented with a novelty rug fashioned out of a taxidermied extinct species.

Yet the extreme quickly becomes the ordinary. This phenomenon is well-documented, coined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine as “disaster capitalism.” Klein writes: What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up. This is precisely the case in the instance of the wildfires, demonstrated furthermore in the current overall narrative shift from climate denial to acceptance. Canada’s boreal forests have always burned, though the scale, frequency, and intensity of these fires have increased undeniably due to rising temperatures from anthropogenic climate change. The climate crisis can thus no longer be credibly disputed, yet the economic system to which it is intrinsically tied has not changed. So the narrative has adapted in order to create another market to exploit.

From private insurers withdrawing from disaster-prone regions while charging higher premiums elsewhere, to investment firms marketing climate-risk portfolios, to the tech promise that artificial intelligence will optimize energy use even as it drives a massive expansion of electricity demand through new data centers, capital profits from both producing climate instability and managing its consequences.

Rather than mitigating environmental collapse, the perspective of inevitability allows for commercially viable solutions. Entire industries have emerged around the adaptation to a less livable world, so long as the drivers of the livability loss are not questioned. From private insurers withdrawing from disaster-prone regions while charging higher premiums elsewhere, to investment firms marketing climate-risk portfolios, to the tech promise that artificial intelligence will optimize energy use even as it drives a massive expansion of electricity demand through new data centers, capital profits from both producing climate instability and managing its consequences. These industries are bought into upon the urging of governments to prepare for disasters rather than prevent them. Today’s teenagers on the bus, unequipped to process urgency without a solution, may instead respond with resignation. The thing some of them feel most equipped to do, the only resource they know at their disposal, is to click ‘add to cart.’ For others, however, these experiences are radicalizing, and the electricity of their adolescence is channeled into climate action.

Meanwhile, exposure to wildfire smoke is profoundly unequal. Wealthier households can remain indoors with central air conditioning and high-quality filtration systems. Many can work remotely. Working-class people, by contrast, often have little choice but to labor outdoors or in poorly ventilated buildings. Delivery drivers, agricultural workers, construction crews, warehouse workers, sanitation workers, teachers in disinvested and poorly maintained school buildings, and countless others continue producing value while inhaling dangerous concentrations of particulate matter. Research following the historic 2023 smoke event found that exposure to wildfire pollution also followed familiar patterns of environmental injustice, disproportionately affecting communities already burdened by poor air quality, inadequate healthcare access, and economic inequality. The working class bears the brunt of the various, well-documented health impacts of exposure, which in 2023 resulted in 82,100 premature deaths worldwide. And to stay safe this time around, the onus has been placed back onto the suffering individual rather than those driving the crisis

Exposure to wildfire smoke is profoundly unequal…. Working-class people, by contrast, often have little choice but to labor outdoors or in poorly ventilated buildings.

Local governments have largely responded with adaptation rather than transformation. In New York and elsewhere, citizens are advised to monitor the Air Quality Index, remain indoors, purchase air filters, wear respirators, and reduce strenuous outdoor activity. New York State Governor Hochul’s air quality advisory listed recommendations for a variety of groups, directing outdoor workers to “stay hydrated,” and for outdoor camps, schools, and childcare providers to, vaguely, “watch for symptoms and take action as needed.” These recommendations reveal the limits of capitalist climate policy and explain why neoliberal solutions are so disconnected from the scale of the crisis: safety must not disrupt profitability, and that contradiction is resolved by placing the burden back onto the workers.

This assessment is not to disregard the absolute necessity of adaptation and climate resilience measures. The most under-resourced and those that contribute the least to climate change bear the largest brunt of its effects. Working-class communities need cooling centers, flood protection, public health infrastructure, and disaster preparedness immediately. But adaptation under capitalism means adapting workers to conditions with no intention to improve those conditions. Climate change is often presented as a universal threat: we are all in this together. Yet we are not all exposed to it in the same way, and we certainly do not possess equal power to respond to it. The climate crisis is therefore also a crisis of class power, and adaptation without transformation is, in reality, an accommodation of the class divide.

The climate crisis is therefore also a crisis of class power, and adaptation without transformation is, in reality, an accommodation of the class divide.

The wildfire smoke wafting from the north is noxious to our bodies as well as our expectations. The characterization of the climate crisis as inevitable obscures the fact that it is socially produced and therefore contestable. We must reject the separation between the worker and the environment, the absorption of climate politics as capitalist “common sense,” and the notion that the goal is to survive disasters more efficiently. We must push forward the thing that shatters the sedative of perceived normalcy: an alternative.

I traveled back to Staten Island, where I no longer live, one night during the height of the smog. The streetlights on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway undulated in a gloomy haze until the mouth of the bridge opened and the bus slipped down the throat of the outer borough. Through the soot-stained window, I expected to see what I usually see on this oft-traversed route: the glittering city melting back and the inky waves washing up against a vast, dark beach ahead. But now, as I peered through the shifting slats of stringers, I found… nothing. I looked across to the windows on the other side of the aisle, and the view was identical: beyond the layer of grime clinging to the glass, a wall of blackness, as if we were suspended in a void. The residue in the air had congealed in my lungs, and my chest began to convulse in protest. I coughed and coughed, and the spit in my mouth tasted almost nostalgic, like a fine morning mist.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; modified by Tempest.

The post The smoke is at our door appeared first on Tempest.

A new investigation by Public Citizen reveals that 57 individuals within the Trump administration, excluding President Trump, are individually worth as much as $100 million, eight of whom are billionaires. The analysis underscores the growing economic divide between the average American worker, who earns $65,000 a year, and the politically-connected individuals who hold the power to address the economic strain facing the general populace.

Of the 57 ultra-wealthy individuals identified, 31 have personal assets exceeding $100 million, while the remainder have assets reaching $100 million. Forty of them are running federal agencies and institutions, including the Department of Commerce, Treasure and Education, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, NASA, Social Security Administration and Office of Personnel Management. The other 17 are serving as U.S. ambassadors.

The concentration of wealth is striking compared with previous administrations:

• Donald Trump: 57 individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including eight billionaires, excluding Trump.
• Joe Biden: Five individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including two individuals whose assets reached $1 billion or more.
• George W. Bush: Five individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including one billionaire.
• Barack Obama: Three individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including one billionaire.

“It is deeply concerning to see people with extraordinary wealth controlling the levers of power in our government,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “The Trump administration is putting an unprecedented number of multi-millionaires and billionaires in charge of institutions that are supposed to serve all Americans. When the people holding the reins of government are drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the ultra-rich, it leads to misplaced incentives and corruption, and begs the question whose interests they are truly serving.”

“The breadth and depth of the economic divide we quantified in this report, identifying 57 ultra-millionaires in key positions in our government and leading at least ten critical federal agencies, should be deeply troubling to anyone concerned about the welfare of our democracy,” said Douglas Pasternak, Public Citizen researcher. “These individuals have sweeping financial conflicts and are more likely to govern based on their own personal monetary interests than the vital interests of the American public.”

Public Citizen’s analysis comes amid growing concerns about the influence of wealthy donors and corporate interests in the Trump administration and the corruption that this is contributing to. While financial success should not disqualify anyone from public service, the unprecedented concentration of extreme wealth among administration officials warrants scrutiny. This is especially true when wealthy political supporters are rewarded with positions overseeing institutions responsible for regulating markets, distributing public resources, and protecting the public interest.

Read more about Trump’s wealthy administration here.

Print article Share

The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record. 

Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River. 

They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.

The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.

Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.

Record lows

At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.

The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August. 

The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres. 

While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.

Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:

“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.” 

Compounding factors

The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief. 

Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change. 

Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah. 

var gform;gform||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",function(){gform.scriptsLoaded=!0}),document.addEventListener("gform/theme/scripts_loaded",function(){gform.themeScriptsLoaded=!0}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){gform.domLoaded=!0}),gform={domLoaded:!1,scriptsLoaded:!1,themeScriptsLoaded:!1,isFormEditor:()=>"function"==typeof InitializeEditor,callIfLoaded:function(o){return!(!gform.domLoaded||!gform.scriptsLoaded||!gform.themeScriptsLoaded&&!gform.isFormEditor()||(gform.isFormEditor()&&console.warn("The use of gform.initializeOnLoaded() is deprecated in the form editor context and will be removed in Gravity Forms 3.1."),o(),0))},initializeOnLoaded:function(o){gform.callIfLoaded(o)||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",()=>{gform.scriptsLoaded=!0,gform.callIfLoaded(o)}),document.addEventListener("gform/theme/scripts_loaded",()=>{gform.themeScriptsLoaded=!0,gform.callIfLoaded(o)}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",()=>{gform.domLoaded=!0,gform.callIfLoaded(o)}))},hooks:{action:{},filter:{}},addAction:function(o,r,e,t){gform.addHook("action",o,r,e,t)},addFilter:function(o,r,e,t){gform.addHook("filter",o,r,e,t)},doAction:function(o){gform.doHook("action",o,arguments)},applyFilters:function(o){return gform.doHook("filter",o,arguments)},removeAction:function(o,r){gform.removeHook("action",o,r)},removeFilter:function(o,r,e){gform.removeHook("filter",o,r,e)},addHook:function(o,r,e,t,n){null==gform.hooks[o][r]&&(gform.hooks[o][r]=[]);var d=gform.hooks[o][r];null==n&&(n=r+"_"+d.length),gform.hooks[o][r].push({tag:n,callable:e,priority:t=null==t?10:t})},doHook:function(r,o,e){var t;if(e=Array.prototype.slice.call(e,1),null!=gform.hooks[r][o]&&((o=gform.hooks[r][o]).sort(function(o,r){return o.priority-r.priority}),o.forEach(function(o){"function"!=typeof(t=o.callable)&&(t=window[t]),"action"==r?t.apply(null,e):e[0]=t.apply(null,e)})),"filter"==r)return e[0]},removeHook:function(o,r,t,n){var e;null!=gform.hooks[o][r]&&(e=(e=gform.hooks[o][r]).filter(function(o,r,e){return!!(null!=n&&n!=o.tag||null!=t&&t!=o.priority)}),gform.hooks[o][r]=e)}}); #gform_wrapper_5[data-form-index="0"].gform-theme,[data-parent-form="5_0"]{--gf-color-primary: #204ce5;--gf-color-primary-rgb: 32, 76, 229;--gf-color-primary-contrast: #fff;--gf-color-primary-contrast-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-primary-darker: #001AB3;--gf-color-primary-lighter: #527EFF;--gf-color-secondary: #fff;--gf-color-secondary-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-secondary-contrast: #112337;--gf-color-secondary-contrast-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-secondary-darker: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-secondary-lighter: #FFFFFF;--gf-color-out-ctrl-light: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.1);--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-darker: rgba(104, 110, 119, 0.35);--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-lighter: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark: #585e6a;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-rgb: 88, 94, 106;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-darker: #112337;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-lighter: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65);--gf-color-in-ctrl: #fff;--gf-color-in-ctrl-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-in-ctrl-contrast: #112337;--gf-color-in-ctrl-contrast-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-in-ctrl-darker: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-lighter: #FFFFFF;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary: #204ce5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-rgb: 32, 76, 229;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-contrast: #fff;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-contrast-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-darker: #001AB3;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-lighter: #527EFF;--gf-color-in-ctrl-light: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.1);--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-darker: rgba(104, 110, 119, 0.35);--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-lighter: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark: #585e6a;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-rgb: 88, 94, 106;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-darker: #112337;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-lighter: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65);--gf-radius: 3px;--gf-font-size-secondary: 14px;--gf-font-size-tertiary: 13px;--gf-icon-ctrl-number: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='8' height='14' viewBox='0 0 8 14' fill='none' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath fill-rule='evenodd' clip-rule='evenodd' d='M4 0C4.26522 5.96046e-08 4.51957 0.105357 4.70711 0.292893L7.70711 3.29289C8.09763 3.68342 8.09763 4.31658 7.70711 4.70711C7.31658 5.09763 6.68342 5.09763 6.29289 4.70711L4 2.41421L1.70711 4.70711C1.31658 5.09763 0.683417 5.09763 0.292893 4.70711C-0.0976311 4.31658 -0.097631 3.68342 0.292893 3.29289L3.29289 0.292893C3.48043 0.105357 3.73478 0 4 0ZM0.292893 9.29289C0.683417 8.90237 1.31658 8.90237 1.70711 9.29289L4 11.5858L6.29289 9.29289C6.68342 8.90237 7.31658 8.90237 7.70711 9.29289C8.09763 9.68342 8.09763 10.3166 7.70711 10.7071L4.70711 13.7071C4.31658 14.0976 3.68342 14.0976 3.29289 13.7071L0.292893 10.7071C-0.0976311 10.3166 -0.0976311 9.68342 0.292893 9.29289Z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-icon-ctrl-select: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='10' height='6' viewBox='0 0 10 6' fill='none' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath fill-rule='evenodd' clip-rule='evenodd' d='M0.292893 0.292893C0.683417 -0.097631 1.31658 -0.097631 1.70711 0.292893L5 3.58579L8.29289 0.292893C8.68342 -0.0976311 9.31658 -0.0976311 9.70711 0.292893C10.0976 0.683417 10.0976 1.31658 9.70711 1.70711L5.70711 5.70711C5.31658 6.09763 4.68342 6.09763 4.29289 5.70711L0.292893 1.70711C-0.0976311 1.31658 -0.0976311 0.683418 0.292893 0.292893Z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-icon-ctrl-search: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='640' height='640' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath d='M256 128c-70.692 0-128 57.308-128 128 0 70.691 57.308 128 128 128 70.691 0 128-57.309 128-128 0-70.692-57.309-128-128-128zM64 256c0-106.039 85.961-192 192-192s192 85.961 192 192c0 41.466-13.146 79.863-35.498 111.248l154.125 154.125c12.496 12.496 12.496 32.758 0 45.254s-32.758 12.496-45.254 0L367.248 412.502C335.862 434.854 297.467 448 256 448c-106.039 0-192-85.962-192-192z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-label-space-y-secondary: var(--gf-label-space-y-md-secondary);--gf-ctrl-border-color: #686e77;--gf-ctrl-size: var(--gf-ctrl-size-md);--gf-ctrl-label-color-primary: #112337;--gf-ctrl-label-color-secondary: #112337;--gf-ctrl-choice-size: var(--gf-ctrl-choice-size-md);--gf-ctrl-checkbox-check-size: var(--gf-ctrl-checkbox-check-size-md);--gf-ctrl-radio-check-size: var(--gf-ctrl-radio-check-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-font-size: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-font-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-padding-x: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-padding-x-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-size: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-border-color-secondary: #686e77;--gf-ctrl-file-btn-bg-color-hover: #EBEBEB;--gf-field-img-choice-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-size-md);--gf-field-img-choice-card-space: var(--gf-field-img-choice-card-space-md);--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-size-md);--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-icon-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-icon-size-md);--gf-field-pg-steps-number-color: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.8);}

FacebookThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Free fortnightly newsletter

.preheader p{ margin-top: 0; font-family: 'PT Sans', sans-serif; font-weight: var(--type--3--font-weight--bold); color: var(--button--color); font-size: var(--button--font-size, inherit); } .newsletter-inline{ display: flex; border: solid 1px #333333; padding: 1em; background: #ffffff; } .inline-email{ display:inline-block; margin-right:1em; margin-top:0 !important; margin-bottom:0.5em; } #field_submit{ display:inline-block; margin-top:0 !important; } .gform_wrapper .gfield+.gfield{ margin-top:0 } Email gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 5, 'http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', false );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_5').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_5');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_5').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ jQuery(document).scrollTop(jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').offset().top - mt); }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_5').val();gformInitSpinner( 5, 'http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', false );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [5, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_5'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).scrollTop(jQuery('#gf_5').offset().top - mt);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [5]);window['gf_submitting_5'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_5').text());}else{jQuery('#gform_5').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger("gform_pre_post_render", [{ formId: "5", currentPage: "current_page", abort: function() { this.preventDefault(); } }]); if (event && event.defaultPrevented) { return; } const gformWrapperDiv = document.getElementById( "gform_wrapper_5" ); if ( gformWrapperDiv ) { const visibilitySpan = document.createElement( "span" ); visibilitySpan.id = "gform_visibility_test_5"; gformWrapperDiv.insertAdjacentElement( "afterend", visibilitySpan ); } const visibilityTestDiv = document.getElementById( "gform_visibility_test_5" ); let postRenderFired = false; function triggerPostRender() { if ( postRenderFired ) { return; } postRenderFired = true; gform.core.triggerPostRenderEvents( 5, current_page ); if ( visibilityTestDiv ) { visibilityTestDiv.parentNode.removeChild( visibilityTestDiv ); } } function debounce( func, wait, immediate ) { var timeout; return function() { var context = this, args = arguments; var later = function() { timeout = null; if ( !immediate ) func.apply( context, args ); }; var callNow = immediate && !timeout; clearTimeout( timeout ); timeout = setTimeout( later, wait ); if ( callNow ) func.apply( context, args ); }; } const debouncedTriggerPostRender = debounce( function() { triggerPostRender(); }, 200 ); if ( visibilityTestDiv && visibilityTestDiv.offsetParent === null ) { const observer = new MutationObserver( ( mutations ) => { mutations.forEach( ( mutation ) => { if ( mutation.type === 'attributes' && visibilityTestDiv.offsetParent !== null ) { debouncedTriggerPostRender(); observer.disconnect(); } }); }); observer.observe( document.body, { attributes: true, childList: false, subtree: true, attributeFilter: [ 'style', 'class' ], }); } else { triggerPostRender(); } } );} );

This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.

At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992. 

Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:

“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.

“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”

On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.

Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:

“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

Related Mapped: How climate change affects extreme weather around the world 19.03.2026 Attribution Guest post: Is climate change making UK droughts worse? 26.08.2025 Drought Global soil moisture in ‘permanent’ decline due to climate change 27.03.2025 Drought West Africa’s deadly rainfall in 2022 made ‘80 times more likely’ by climate change 16.11.2022 Attribution

The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.

The post ANHE’s Fall Toxics Workshop: Toxic Chemicals 101 appeared first on ANHE.

Researchers at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya are using advanced satellite imaging data to improve food security. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, East Africa currently faces the greatest burden of acute food insecurity globally. Across the continent, nations continue to face substantial food crises driven by climatic fluctuations including drought and flooding as well as economic pressures like high food and fertilizer prices.

“Accessibility is the first step towards governance,” Tobias Landmann, Senior Research Scientist at icipe, tells Food Tank. “If you want to be independent of the Global North, you must have control over that analysis-ready data.”

icipe recently assumed full ownership and operation of the geospatial observation platform Digital Earth Africa (DEA). “This transition represents a powerful step toward sustained African ownership, ensuring the program continues to deliver critical Earth observation data and insights for the continent,” remarks Lisa-Maria Rebelo, Managing Director of DEA.

“icipe has an African mandate, working in all 54 countries to provide bio-efficient, biological solutions to farmers,” Landmann tells Food Tank. “[DEA] coming to icipe underpins that concept because now we can use big data that’s co-developed in Africa for Africa.” Digital Earth Africa’s technical advisory committee has included organizations such as the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa as well as the African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology.

By working with entirely Africa-led data, the platform completely changes how continental trends are studied. Containing some of the most ecologically diverse regions on Earth, Africa offers an unparalleled frontier for geospatial and topographic analysis, providing food system researchers and actors with the comprehensive data needed to safeguard community ecosystem health.

The Waterbodies Continental Service, for example, monitors over 750,000 water bodies across the continent with a minimum spatial resolution of 10 meters. As a part of DEA, this high-resolution imaging data allows researchers to track variables including nutrient enrichment across streams, rivers, and lakes as well as the proliferation of invasive plant species.

“Prosopis juliflora is an invasive shrub that we are mapping in Kenya and Ethiopian drylands. The shrub is basically invading all the water bodies, impeding biodiversity, aggravating drought… we don’t know where the intervention areas are,” explains Landmann. He notes that the platform’s analysis-ready data is designed directly to improve policy reporting. But because the African continent is dominated by small farms, the degree to which satellite imaging can improve agricultural productivity is context-dependent.

An FAO report finds that nearly 75 percent of all farm holdings in sub-Saharan Africa are two hectares or less—with just over half of all farms less than a single hectare. “We run a procedure based on Earth observation satellite data to see the deficiencies unique to certain [crop] fields,” states Landmann. “And that is a challenge because very often the fields are very small, smaller than the minimum mapping unit.”

“The most important stressor [icipe] can map is actually drought, water deficiency, or in irrigation terms, ‘water use inefficiency’ or deficits,” says Landmann. Extreme weather events such as El Niño can exacerbate drought and flooding across different parts of Africa, meaning that having up-to-date, accurate satellite imaging is crucial to analyze the spatiotemporal effects of such events on African farms.

“We scaled a very unique concept that was actually developed by Digital Earth Australia and then transferred to Africa called ‘geo-medians.’ So, our geo-medians are legendary. It’s a game changer,” says Landmann.

Geo-medians work by stitching together images captured by satellites at different times. This means that even when cloud cover obstructs a single photo, researchers still have a clear view of the entire landscape.

According to Landmann, policy frameworks and regional actors can immediately ingest this perfectly harmonized, long-term historical data into their systems. This allows them to bypass complex pre-processing and efficiently track macro-trends like deforestation, crop intensification, or changing water cycles over several years to inform long-term climate legislation.

Beyond agriculture, satellite data can also help researchers monitor water quality, air quality, urbanization trends, biodiversity loss, carbon neutrality, and value chains, Landmann adds. “There are so many kinds of use cases that you wouldn’t necessarily think about. There’s always a bias towards agriculture and food systems, which is understandable, but multiple thematic areas can benefit from this great data set.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey

The post Big Data for Food and Climate Resilience in Africa: Digital Earth Africa Moves to icipe appeared first on Food Tank.

Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump dramatically reduced the size of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, mining interests began staking claims on lands stripped of protections.

At least nine mining claims have been filed on land formerly included in the two monuments since Trump cut each by around 90 percent in July. Seven claims were filed by Kimmerle Mining on land removed from Bears Ears, and two were filed by Craig Rosequist on land removed from Grand Staircase-Escalante. Kimmerle Mining filed claims in Bears Ears after Trump’s 2017 rollback and opened a small uranium and vanadium exploration site.

The claims do not authorize immediate mining, and they may not be honored because they were filed before monument protections officially expire on September 11, but they can be easily refiled after that date. Also, the Trump administration is currently considering allowing claim holders to do exploratory work like digging and clearing on Forest Service land without notifying the agency or receiving any type of permit.

Trump job cuts and changes are making wildfires harder to fight

A combination of larger and more numerous fires and changes by the Trump administration are making it harder for officials to deploy and manage firefighters effectively this year, veteran firefighters and union officials told the New York Times.

The administration has so far cut more than 5,800 jobs from the Forest Service, as well as stood up a new Wildland Fire Service. The result is confusion, supply problems and slower responses, according to former Forest Service officials and the union representing the agency’s workers.

“We just don’t have enough people in the system, not for this kind of fire season,” Mike Dudley, who retired in 2018 as a Forest Service regional director, told the Times. “We’re paying the price for it right now.”

Quick hits Lake Powell hits record low, another sign of crisis on the Colorado River

Los Angeles Times | USA Today

Opinion: Why the Reflecting Pool matters

RE:PUBLIC

Mining executives bought stock in their own firm days before Trump shrank Bears Ears

Grist

Heat waves are melting western snowpack twice as fast, study finds

CPR News

Trump appointee Michael Boren asked aircraft to fight small wildfire near his Idaho ranch as Utah burned

Salt Lake Tribune

Inside the bitter war over cows and wilderness at Point Reyes

Los Angeles Times

Column: Public lands are our shared legacy

WyoFile

US Attorney General Blanche backs Pirro after Trump criticism over Reflecting Pool

Reuters

Quote of the day

This is why the Reflecting Pool matters. It’s all about trust. Yes, it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of Interior’s 640 million acres and hundreds of responsibilities. But if Burgum’s department will fabricate or claim they have evidence to prosecute citizens for crimes they didn’t commit—and allegedly withhold information from federal prosecutors—what does that mean for the decisions Interior makes that we can’t see?”

—Christopher Keyes, RE:PUBLIC

Picture This

@LaikenJordahl

NEW: drone footage shows just how far contractors are tearing into Big Bend’s Mariscal Mountain. All of this destruction has been inflicted in just two days. You can’t pick a flower or take home a rock you find in a national park. But somehow, for no justifiable reason, in a place where nobody crosses the border, CBP contractors are gouging their way deeper into this great American national park.

Governor @GregAbbott_TX, you’ll forever be remembered as the one who let the feds tread all over your state’s sovereignty and natural heritage. Your silence is a rubber stamp on this destruction.

Feature image: Indian Creek, an area removed from Bears Ears National Monument by President Donald Trump; Photo by Bob Wick, BLM

The post Mining claims filed on land removed from Utah monuments appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Ahead of the White House’s planned cryptocurrency and prediction markets roundtable on Wednesday, The Revolving Door Project released the following statement:

“Donald Trump is not content with the billions of dollars in corrupt crypto wealth he has amassed since winning the 2024 election. On Wednesday, he’ll turn the White House into a hub for his crypto and prediction markets cronies to lean on independent agencies and a gridlocked Congress for a more permissive regulatory environment for these predatory corporations. The event will serve as a reminder to Congress of crypto’s deep ties to the president, and of their willingness to spend unprecedented sums in campaign efforts. But the fusion of Trump and crypto’s interests should not dictate federal law, especially when voters are broadly disgusted by the corrupting influence of these industries.” said RDP senior researcher Henry Burke.

RDP assistant director Timi Iwayemi added, “The cryptocurrency industry is eager to establish a financial system where scams and money laundering flourish. Their prediction market partners envision a society where gambling is venerated as a legitimate investment strategy. Their well-heeled political operation might have brought them significant influence in Washington, but it has come at a cost. Trump’s blatant corruption has eroded public trust, and prediction markets have jeopardized the legitimacy of our markets. This should be a tough pill for lawmakers to swallow. Wednesday’s meeting is a last-ditch effort to bring Congress onside and hand a victory to two of the most brazenly corrupt entities in the country: Trump and the crypto industry. But regulators and legislators should not be cowed. As recent election results have shown, crypto’s millions can only go so far, and voters are tired of their attempts to buy our democracy.”

The Revolving Door Project has been tracking Trump’s corruption closely, as well as the efforts by the crypto and prediction market industries to purchase influence in Washington. Below is a sample of relevant work on the topic:

Who’s in Crypto’s Corner?

Prediction Markets Are Learning From The Addiction Industry

Crypto Bill Offers Potentially Huge Tax Benefits To Trump Family

Why Are Any Democrats Supporting a Bill That Was Championed by the Crypto Industry?

RDP Condemns the Blockchain Association’s Deceitful Letter From “Law Enforcement Officials”

Trump’s ability to set crypto rules makes $TRUMP coin even more problematic

We Can’t Count on Trump’s SEC to Tell Us If He Is Manipulating the Market

Sean Patrick Maloney’s Vanishing Ethics Pledge

How Crypto Is Buying DC One Revolver At A Time

Print article Share

Emissions from land-use change – including deforestation, loss of peatland and forest degradation – have been falling over the course of the 21st century.

The latest Global Carbon Budget report, formally published in May in the journal Earth System Science Data, notes a “statistically significant decrease” in land-use change emissions since the late 1990s.

The 21st-century decline in land-use emissions has accelerated in recent years, with the report highlighting a “steep drop” after 2015.

Writing for Carbon Brief in November 2025, climate scientists Dr Zeke Hausfather and Prof Pierre Friedlingstein noted that land-use emissions in 2025 had decreased by “around 32% compared to their average in the 2000s”. 

Via six charts, Carbon Brief explores how – and why – land-use emissions have fallen over the past quarter of a century as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to climb.

• How have land-use emissions changed?
• Why have land-use emissions fallen?
• Which countries are behind falling land-use emissions?
• Which countries are leading on forest regrowth?
• Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?

Article Contents Expand menu

• How have land-use emissions changed?
• Why have land-use emissions fallen?
• Which countries are behind falling land-use emissions?
• Which countries are leading on forest regrowth?
• Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?

How have land-use emissions changed?

Deforestation, forest degradation, loss of peatlands and harvesting trees for wood all release carbon into the atmosphere.

Collectively, these emissions are known as land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) emissions, referred to here as land-use emissions. 

Each year, global land-use emission trends are analysed in the Global Carbon Budget report. The report, produced by dozens of scientists, documents how human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are changing over time.

Key findings from the annual report are released each year in the autumn, before being published formally in an academic journal the following year following a peer-review process.

(For more on the findings of the 2025 report, read Carbon Brief’s summary.)

The latest edition of the Global Carbon Budget report notes that, in the four decades to 1999, net CO2 emissions from land-use change remained “relatively constant”, sitting at around 6.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) per year.

However, since the late 1990s, global land-use emissions have been falling. 

The 2025 report estimates that land-use emissions over 2015-24 averaged at 5GtCO2 a year. This is around 23% lower than the average over 1995-2004 and 19% lower than 2005-14, it says.

In contrast, global emissions from fossil fuels and cement have increased every decade since 1959, rising from an average of 11GtCO2 in the 1960s to 35.9GtCO2 over 2015-24, it says. 

“Preliminary data” included in the report suggests that land-use emissions in 2025 clocked in lower than their 2014-25 average, at 4.1GtCO2, as fossil-fuel and cement emissions reached a new high of 38.1GtCO2. 

(For more on how land-use emissions are calculated, see: Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?)

The chart below shows how land-use emissions have been falling in the 21st century and have helped to temper the overall rise of human-caused emissions.

Global CO2 emissions separated out into fossil and land-use change components between 1980-2025. Data from Friedlingstein et al (2026). Chart by Carbon Brief. Why have land-use emissions fallen?

The Global Carbon Budget attributes falling land-use emissions since the late 1990s to decreasing emissions from deforestation, in particular “permanent deforestation”. 

Permanent deforestation refers to the complete removal of trees for the conversion of forest to another land use, such as agriculture, mining or the construction of towns and cities. This sets it apart from other forms of deforestation, such as logging and rotational farming, where the canopy is removed on a more temporary basis.

The Global Carbon Budget also points to “increasing [CO2] removals” from forest regrowth as a reason for falling land-use emissions since the turn of the century.

(For more on the countries and policies that have driven these changes, see: Which countries are behind falling land-use emissions? and: Which countries are leading on forest regrowth?) 

Looking at more recent trends, the report attributes a “steep drop” in land-use emissions in the decade since 2015 to the “combined effect” of a “peak” in peat fire emissions in 2015, as well as a “long-term decline” in deforestation emissions in many countries over 2010-20.

The chart below shows how deforestation and forest growth have been responsible for the bulk of change to land-use emissions over the 21st century.

Global deforestation and forest growth, 1980-2020, split into emissions from deforestation, including permanent deforestation and deforestation in shifting cultivation cycles; emissions from peat drainage and peat fires; removals from forest growth, including afforestation, reforestation and shifting cultivation cycles; fluxes from wood harvest and other forest management; and, finally, emissions and removals related to other land-use transitions. Data from Friedlingstein et al (2026). Chart by Carbon Brief.

Over 2015-24, the sequestration of CO2 through reforestation and afforestation efforts offset two-thirds of deforestation emissions, according to the Global Carbon Budget report.

Specifically, it notes that deforestation was responsible for an average of 6.96GtCO2 of emissions each year over 2015-24. Forest growth, on the other hand, removed 4.76GtCO2 a year. 

Just under half – 2.2GtCO2 – of carbon removals over 2015-24 was from afforestation and reforestation efforts and the remaining 2.56GtCO2 were driven by forest regrowth from shifting cultivation cycles, it says. 

Forest regrowth from shifting cultivation refers to the recovery of a forest after a plot has been farmed for a short period and then abandoned.

This is shown in the chart below below, which shows how carbon removals from forest regrowth have offset emissions from deforestation. 

Global deforestation and forest regrowth, 1980-2020, split into four sub-components. Data from Friedlingstein et al (2026). Chart by Carbon Brief.

In the near-term, the Global Carbon Budget attributes its projection of a drop in land-use emissions between 2024 and 2025 to the “end of El Niño conditions”. 

(The naturally occurring weather phenomenon typically leads to the drying out of peatlands in the tropics and causes more planned deforestation fires to burn out of control.)

Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, director of the Global Carbon Budget office and a professor at the University of Exeter, tells Carbon Brief there is “no indication” of what might happen in the future, but adds that land-use emissions trends over the 21st century are “going in the right direction”. He says:

“If you are optimistic, you hope the trend will not reverse and start increasing again. But we don’t know for sure. The assumption, given current land policies across the world, is that deforestation should continue to decline.”

Which countries are behind falling land-use emissions?

The countries that contributed the most to land-use emissions over 2015-24 were Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Indonesia, according to the Global Carbon Budget.

It notes that these three countries together contributed more than half – 57% – of global land-use emissions. 

Over the first quarter of the 21st century, falling land-use emissions in Brazil and Indonesia have combined with increased afforestation and reforestation in China to drive down overall land-use emissions, according to the Global Carbon Budget.

This is illustrated in the chart below, which shows how China’s land-use emissions have dropped below zero, as Brazil and Indonesia’s emissions have declined.

Land-use emissions by country, 1980-2025. Data from Friedlingstein et al (2026). Chart by Carbon Brief.

Friedlingstein says that the decline in land-use emissions since the 2000s has been “primarily driven by a decline in deforestation in Brazil”.

He tells Carbon Brief that tree clearance in the South American country rose in the 1990s then started to fall after a peak in the 2000s:

“There was a bit of up and down – mainly due to politics and who was in charge in Brazil – [whether the president] was [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] or [Jair] Bolsonaro. But the long-term trend in Brazil is a decline in deforestation due to forest protection policies.”

Rates of deforestation in Brazil’s “legal Amazon” states of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins, as well as more than half of Maranhão. Data from INPE / PRODES (TerraBrasilis). Chart by Carbon Brief.

These policies included a 2004 “action plan” for the prevention and control of deforestation in the Amazon, a 2006 soy moratorium, which banned the purchasing and financing of soya produced in deforested areas of the Amazon, as well as the expansion of protected areas across Brazil during the second half of the 2000s.

Prof Julia Pongratz, a professor of physical geography and land-use systems at the University of Munich and contributor to the Global Carbon Budget, says Brazil is the “single most important contributor to the early-2000s global land-use change emissions peak and subsequent decline”.

She says that the largest contributor to an “acceleration” in the decline of global land-use emissions in the past decade has been Indonesia, which she notes has “rewetted more peatland area since 2017 alone than Europe in its entire history”. 

Around the world, peatlands are exploited and damaged by humans for a range of purposes, including converting the land for agriculture and peat extraction for horticulture and fuel. Peatland wetting refers to the process of restoring water levels in drained peatlands in order to return them to their natural, waterlogged conditions, which allows for peat formation and carbon storage. 

Another reason for Indonesia’s downward trend in land-use emissions is that there have been fewer spikes in emissions caused by fires related to human land-use activities over the last decade, says Pongratz.

Emissions from ecosystem fires are not always counted towards national and regional land-use emissions budgets, which estimate the sum of human-caused emissions. Deforestation fires and those related to peatland drainage are included, whereas fires caused by droughts and heatwaves are not. 

Pongratz says it is “hard to separate natural and land-use drivers completely”, given that deforestation and peatland fires often “get out of control and cause spikes in emissions” during dry El Niño conditions. 

(For more on uncertainties in land-use emissions data, see: Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?)

Pongratz notes that international trade regulations that have helped to drive down land-use emissions in Brazil and Indonesia have had a lesser effect in the DRC, where the root drivers of deforestation are different:

“Emissions in the DRC have increased, then stayed high in the last two decades. This is partly related to population growth and expanding smallholder and subsistence farming. 

“The picture is different in Brazil and Indonesia, which are much more driven by export; international regulations aiming at curbing deforestation thus have larger effects in these countries.”

Which countries are leading on forest regrowth?

Reforestation and afforestation schemes that draw down carbon from the atmosphere have helped to reduce the overall emissions from land-use change over the course of the 21st century.

As noted above, the 2025 Global Carbon Budget report highlights how the removal of carbon from forests offset two-thirds of deforestation emissions over 2015-24. 

The report says that China, the EU and US account for the highest levels of carbon sequestration from reforestation and afforestation, collectively drawing 1.1GtCO2 per year over the 2015-24 period. 

This, it says, is “partly related to expanding forest area as a consequence of the forest transition in the 19th and 20th centuries and subsequent regrowth of forest”.

The chart below, which draws from the latest edition of the “state of carbon dioxide removal” report, shows how carbon uptake by forests has increased over the last 20 years in a number of countries, most notably in China.

Current levels of carbon dioxide removal from afforestation and reforestation
by country, 2005-24. Data from 3rd “state of carbon dioxide removal” report (2026). Chart by Carbon Brief.

In China, a raft of reforestation and improved land management policies were introduced in the 1990s which have led to the rehabilitation of tens of millions of hectares of forests. Research has shown the schemes have significantly increased the country’s uptake of carbon and switched its land from a carbon source to a carbon sink. 

The Global Carbon Budget highlights that substantial carbon removal from reforestation and afforestation occurred in other regions, such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia. However, in these regions, emissions from deforestation and other land-use changes “dominate”, it says.

Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?

Tallying the world’s emission from land-use change is complex.

The Global Carbon Budget estimates an uncertainty range of 2.6GtCO2 per year for its average annual global land-use emissions figure for 2015-24 – more than half the overall figure of 5GtCO2.

To calculate overall land-use emissions for the annual Global Carbon Budget report, researchers create an average from three land-use models: BLUE, OSCAR and LUCE.

These models combine satellite and statistical information on land cover and land-use changes from global and regional datasets.

Pongratz, who is involved in the LUCE model, explains that scientists can measure the exchange of CO2 between land and atmosphere, but are not able to determine whether CO2 is being released or sequestered from a managed area as a result of human activities or other climate or environmental factors. She continues: 

“For this, you need to turn to modelling, where you can isolate drivers – and, again, models are uncertain and the land-use input imperfect. This is why we use all available model estimates – three at the moment.”

The Global Carbon Budget highlights that its three different models treat different components of the land-use emissions “budget” differently. 

While models agree “relatively well” about emissions from permanent deforestation, they take different approaches in their approach to shifting cultivation patterns, which increases both emissions and removals, as well as wood harvesting, it says.

Moreover, it notes that land-use emissions and removals occur on different timelines. While carbon removals generated by forest growth and soil recovery are “slow”, there is an “instantaneous component” to emissions from deforestation, it says.

(For more on the challenges in analysing changes to the global carbon cycle, see Carbon Brief’s recent in-depth interview with Prof Philippe Ciais, one of the world’s leading experts on land-use emissions.)

The Global Carbon Budget notes that its confidence in its 2025 projection for overall land-use emissions remains “low” given that the figure is based on deforestation, degradation and peat fire emissions, which are “only a proxy” for land-use change.

The report notes that 2023 is the final year in which it calculates land-use emissions directly from land-use statistics across all three bookkeeping models. For more recent years, full statistics are not yet available across the models and scientists instead turn to short-term proxies.

related Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires 30.07.2026 Extreme weather World falling short on 22 of 23 nature targets for 2030, says draft UN report 29.07.2026 International policy Analysis: 84% of nations miss deadline to identify ‘nature-harming’ subsidies by 2025  28.07.2026 International policy COP30: Could Brazil’s ‘Tropical Forest Forever’ fund help tackle climate change? 05.11.2025 COP30 Belém

The post Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Monthly anti-Ford protest rallies across Ontario have been ongoing since February 2026. The province-wide actions, originally started after Ford changed freedom of information laws to...

The post Fight Ford and fight for public education on August 29 first appeared on Spring.