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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies are seeping into the lives of small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples and the general population, becoming acceptable, unquestioned, normalized, and seemingly inevitable. 

But what are the costs – to society, to the environment, to self-determination, to national and food sovereignty, to the future of humanity? How do we address the contradictions that arise in regards to the known risks and the potential benefits? And can these technologies be used to advance food sovereignty and agroecology? If so, under what conditions and with which regulations and governance frameworks?

Join us to unpack these questions! 

The CSIPM webinar cycle on digitalization, artificial intelligence and data governance is a space for exchange and collective reflection among social movements, civil society organizations, Indigenous Peoples, researchers, and allies. It will bring together diverse experiences and perspectives to explore key questions related to digitalization and its implications across different contexts. You can find more information below. 

All webinars will have simultaneous interpretation to Spanish, English and French, and will take place from 3:00 to 5:00 pm CEST (Rome time). 

Join the conversation & register in advance! ​ Webinar 1: Impacts on people's territories and self-determined use of technologies

• Date & time:  June 1st 2026, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm CEST (Rome time) 
• Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/O6e5Yl6URBmNRUIcJk7KfA

Speakers:

• David Otieno, Kenyan Peasant League (Kenya)

• Dorn Cox, Farm Hack (USA)

• Natalia Lobo, World March of Women and IARAA – Artificial Intelligence for Agrarian Reform and Agroecology (Brazil)

• Soledad Vogliano, ETC Group (Argentina)

• Jim Thomas, AI and market Power Fellow – European AI and society Fund (Canada)

• Afsar Jafri, GRAIN (India)

Webinar 2: Processes, trends and regulation

• Date & time: June 24, 2026 | 3:00 to 5:00 pm CEST (Rome time) 
• Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/GGu1n9RnT86TaRtEn9hqQQ 

Webinar 3: Our vision and strategy for the Committee on World Food Security (CFS)

More information coming soon 

The post CSIPM webinar cycle on digitalization, AI and data governance appeared first on CSIPM.

Bowen says data centre demand could be key in getting struggling wind projects over line, but new report fears "energy vampires" will boost fossil fuels without firm rules.

The post Bowen says data centres could get struggling wind projects over the line, as new report warns of “energy vampires” appeared first on Renew Economy.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, and Piers Forster

With the release of the new van Vuuren et al 2026 paper on the emissions scenarios that will be used in the upcoming IPCC 7th Assessment Report, the internet has been abuzz with debate over the implications of the formal retirement of the RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 scenario. The president of the United States even weighed in over the weekend in his own unique style, posting that “the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”.

van Vuuren et al justify this move by noting that “the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends,” citing the paper that we published in Nature back in 2020.

Actual global CO2 emissions (black) compared to different generations of emissions scenarios featured in IPCC reports. Updated by Glen Peters through 2025.

Others have pointed out that RCP8.5 was never particularly plausible, and have criticized claims that the move away from using these scenarios reflects actual progress on reducing emissions.

So what actually happened here? It turns out that two things can be true at the same time:

• RCP8.5 (and its successor SSP5-8.5) were designed to be a worst case emissions scenario, not the most likely outcome even in a world that did nothing to address climate change. We were probably never headed to a tripling of global emissions by 2100 (to say nothing of a five-fold increase in coal use), even in the absence of climate policy.

• Rapid declines in clean energy costs have bent the curve of future emissions downward, with new scenarios designed to reflect current policies notably lower than most baseline scenarios in the literature. The 21st century is now unlikely to see a continued expansion of fossil fuel use globally, with current policy scenarios reflecting relatively flat global emissions going forward.

Beyond business as usual

Emissions scenarios can broadly be categorized as “baseline” scenarios or “mitigation” scenarios. Baselines represent worlds where there are no additional efforts to address climate change (or in some cases turn back the clock to some earlier period and assume no policy after that point), while mitigation scenarios explore concerted efforts to reduce global emissions.

When RCP8.5 was first published global emissions were skyrocketing, having increased 30% in just the past decade. Clean energy sources were quite expensive, electric vehicles largely non-existent, and the idea that we would continue to increase our use of coal, oil, and gas through the end of the century was not seen as far-fetched.

Even in that context, RCP8.5 was chosen to represent the high end of the baseline scenario range available to the researchers at the time – around the 90th percentile. It was never a likely outcome even in a world that did not address climate change; rather it was always intended to represent a worst case scenario that pushed fossil fuel expansion to the max.

There are many other baseline scenarios with lower emissions, which were equally plausible as RCP8.5, even in the absence of climate policy. The original article that published the baselines, shows total CO2 emissions can be as low as RCP4.5 depending on the socioeconomic assumptions and the model used.

However, in part due to a breakdown in communication between the energy modeling community that develops the scenarios and the climate science community that uses them, RCP8.5 came to be incorrectly portrayed by many as the most likely “business as usual” scenario.

Around a decade ago the scenario started to garner more criticism. Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi published a paper in 2017 questioning whether the extremely high use of coal in RCP8.5 – which envisioned things like turning coal to oil for vehicles when oil reserves ran dry later in the century – was even possible given the world’s recoverable coal reserves. Ritchie and I (Zeke) wrote in 2019 that a 3C world was now “business as usual”, reflecting that:

Our business-as-usual projection of 3C of warming – rather than 4 or 5C – is a testament to the progress in global decarbonization over the last few decades. It also reflects the fact that rapid growth in coal use during the 2000s was not necessarily characteristic of longer-term energy use trends. The world has taken concrete steps to move away from coal in the past decade, and this progress should be reflected in our assessment of likely emissions pathways – and their resulting climate impacts – going forward.

In 2020 we published our Nature piece, arguing that we should “stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome”, and that outcomes like RCP8.5 had become increasingly implausible with every passing year as clean energy costs fell and coal use plateaued.

Identifying real progress

So if we were likely never heading for a world of RCP8.5, with its tripling of global CO2 emissions by 2100 (and five-fold increase in coal use), where were we actually headed? How much has the energy transition to-date (which has grown to over $2 trillion annual global spending) actually changed our future trajectories?

This is an impossible question to precisely answer given that it relies on an inherently unknowable counterfactual scenario. It is not correct to state or assume that RCP8.5 was the baseline; we simply do not know the baseline and can only estimate it. But one way to approach the question is to look at where the scenario literature thought we were headed – what the actual range of baseline scenarios were.

The figure below show the CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2100 in the old RCP8.5 scenario, the full range of baseline scenarios published in the IPCC AR6 WG3 scenario database,1 and the new CMIP7 medium illustrative scenario published by van Vuuren et al 2026.2

Global CO2 emissions (left) and 2100 warming relative to preindustrial (right) for RCP8.5, the range of IPCC AR6 WG3 baseline scenarios, and the new CMIP7 medium illustrative scenario from van Vuuren et al. Future warming ranges based on FaIR model calculations.

We don’t actually know where in the baseline range (or outside of it!) we might have been heading in this counterfactual world. But the average of the baseline range – with its approximately 3.5C warming by 2100 – is a much more justifiable counterfactual than the high-end RCP8.5 baseline. This suggests that progress on policy and technology has reduced expected 2100 warming by around 0.7C, rather than the full 1.7C difference between RCP8.5 and the new medium scenario. A plausible reduction of ~0.7C warming represents enormous progress and a large reduction in future damages, even as a 2.8C world under current policies remains far from acceptable.

The mid-range of the baseline scenarios back in the late 2010s when most of those scenarios were developed is roughly analogous with the CMIP7 high illustrative scenario today (~3.3C), which envisions a roll back of policies that have been enacted over the past decade as well as slower technological progress on clean energy going forward.

The mid-range baseline scenario warming is also consistent with baseline warming estimates published by both the IEA (3.5C) and Climate Action Tracker (3.6C) prior to the signing of the Paris Agreement. Climate Action Tracker has also tracked the changes in its “policies and action” scenario over time, which has declined from 3.6C in 2015 to 2.6C in 2026, finding a similar ~1C decline in expected future warming.

Climate Action Tracker’s evolution of 2100 warming projections under different policy assumptions between 2009 and 2025.

It is hard to gauge the “impact of the Paris Agreement” or any other specific climate policy intervention in isolation. In a world without Paris we would still likely have seen a reduction of future emissions projections associated with continued cost declines of clean energy technologies. Similarly, even if coal use did continue to grow, it is not at all obvious it would have grown at the scale and rate as in RCP8.5. But this does not mean that these declines are divorced from other policy decisions made by countries over the past few decades.

Technology is, after all, not exogenous; it does not arise solely from spontaneous innovations. Rather, it reflects an interplay between the government and the private sector over cycles of research and development, early stage deployment, and eventual economies of scale.

Let’s take the example of solar energy, which is covered in depth in Greg Nemet’s excellent book “How Solar Energy Became Cheap”. Here formative R&D work done by Bell Labs in the 1950s and by the US DOE in the 1970s helped develop and commercialize the technology, while subsidies in Germany and Japan helped drive down costs with larger scale deployments in the 1990s and 2000s. More recently, dramatic cost declines have been driven at least in part by enormous investments in both domestic and export markets by China.

High warming outcomes can still occur

When we try to estimate how much the world will warm this century and beyond, we run into three fundamental uncertainties: our future emissions, the sensitivity of the climate to increasing forcings, and the carbon cycle feedbacks that determine the portion of our emissions that remain in the atmosphere.

While we tend to give the central estimate of future warming in 2100 associated with a given emissions scenario (e.g. 2.8C), this single number hides a pretty wide range of actual possible climate responses. For example, the figure below shows probability of reaching different temperature outcomes under the CMIP7 medium illustrative scenario. While the median is 2.8C, the 5th to 95th percentiles span 2.1C to 3.7C, and there is even a small (~2%) chance of 4C or more warming.

Likelihood of different 2100 warming outcomes in the CMIP7 medium illustrative scenario based on 841 different FaIR climate model runs that include both climate sensitivity and carbon cycle feedback uncertainties.

The new medium scenario is designed to be in-line to current policy scenarios in the literature. But current policies represent neither a ceiling nor a floor on future emissions. Future emissions are in society’s hands. Indeed, it is ironic to see President Trump criticizing climate science for its past use of high emissions scenarios when his administration actively supports a roll back of existing climate policy, the restriction of new clean energy development, and mandating that coal plants remain operating despite their high costs.

The new CMIP7 scenarios include a “High” emissions scenario that explores a more Trumpian future where current policy is rolled back and clean energy deployment slows. The high illustrative scenario finds 2100 warming of closer to 3.3C (with a range of 2.5C to 4.4C).

It is important to emphasize that the world doesn’t end in 2100, even if many of our past emissions scenarios and climate model simulations did. One of the major advances in the IPCC AR7 is a plan to extend scenarios through 2150, since 2100 is not nearly as far away as it used to be.

Illustrative CMIP7 emissions scenarios and modeled 33rd-67th percentile of warming outcomes, 2000-2150, from van Vuuren et al 2026.

The brutal math of climate change is this: as long as CO2 emissions remain above zero, the world will continue to warm. The medium scenario ends up closer to 3.7C by 2150, while the high scenario ends up more or less matching the warming in the old RCP8.5 scenario despite an assumption of flattening or modestly declining emissions after 2100.

It is also wrong to say that the worst predictions of climate impacts this century can now be ruled out by this revision. High-end temperature projections for the end of the century are reduced compared to earlier IPCC assessments. Yet, the IPCC WGII report found that risks across the five “reasons for concern” it examines have all risen for a given level of global warming. So, even if the high-end emissions in RCP8.5 won’t materialize, the damages projected in these earlier climate simulations remain very much in play.

A tripling of global CO2 emissions by 2100 may never have been particularly plausible even back in 2011 when RCP8.5 was originally published. But a 21st century of increasing fossil fuel use leading to a doubling of emissions was within the realm of the possible. The fact that we are no longer heading toward that is a sign of progress, rather than somehow undermining the edifice of all of climate science as both President Trump and some overly excited internet pundits claim. And of course, we still have a long way to go to get emissions down to (net) zero and stabilize global temperatures.

After all, as we wrote back in 2020, “This admission does not make climate action less urgent. The need to limit warming to [well below 2C]3… does not depend on having a 5C counterpoint.”

1. This will likely slightly underestimate emissions in baseline scenarios when the RCPs were published in 2011, as the WG3 scenario database was published in 2022 (though many of the scenarios were run much earlier, with the SSP baselines dating back to before 2017) and at least some clean energy cost declines since 2011 are baked in.

2. Note that these are illustrative placeholder scenarios; the final CMIP7 emissions scenarios will be published in September 2026 (and we will have much more discussion of them then!). That being said, van Vuuren et al are clear in the paper that “the final emission trajectories will depend on the finalized IAM runs but are expected to be roughly consistent with the illustrations provided here.”

3. We had originally said “limit warming to 1.5C”, but that ship has unfortunately sailed. In addition to lowering the high emissions scenarios, the new van Vuuren et al paper also more or less eliminates scenarios that keep warming to 1.5C without overshoot and subsequent drawdown.

Food & SNAP When: June 24, 10:00 A.M. – 2:00 P.M.Where: First Christian Church of Wilson, NC Explore the history of the Food Stamp Act and SNAP, what is happening to the SNAP program right now, and how communities can prepare, respond, and act in light of these significant changes. Free workshop.

The post Come to the Table 2026 Events appeared first on RAFI.

The clean energy trade group projects 613 GWh of deployment by 2030 thanks to robust data center demand. But federal policy gridlock threatens the industry’s trajectory, it said.

LOS ANGELES, CA — Conservation groups, bird organizations, and community scientists across California are preparing for the inaugural California Bird Atlas Big Weekend, a four-day effort taking...

American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley issued the following statement in response to a proposed rule by the Office of Personnel Management, to be published tomorrow in the Federal Register, that would require current and prospective employees at participating agencies to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of employment:

“OPM continues its efforts to silence federal employees. This proposed NDA is another attempt by the administration to purge the civil service of nonpartisan career employees and replace them with loyalists who won’t speak out against waste, fraud, and abuse. Federal employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they accept federal employment, and the public has a right to know about this administration’s abuses.

“OPM claims the form will be ‘optional’ for agencies to use and merely restates existing law. We know that will not be true. OPM will pressure agencies to make the NDA mandatory and then fire employees who refuse to sign it.

“Moreover, federal agencies already have extensive policies and procedures in place for preventing the unauthorized release of classified or privileged information. This proposed rule sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information, extending restrictions to the very material the public relies on to learn when an administration is causing harm. AFGE will submit comments on the proposed rule and urges OPM to withdraw it.”

3 ways the House farm bill threatens your health Anthony Lacey May 26, 2026

The farm bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation most of us have never heard of – and Congress is negotiating it right now.

This sweeping bill affects everyone, even those who have never stepped foot on a farm. A good farm bill would help families buy groceries, support the farmers growing our food, guide agricultural practices protecting our water supply, even expand access to infrastructure like broadband internet. 

But the Republicans’ House farm bill, the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2026, passed last month with a focus on slashing many beneficial programs.

The Senate is soon to follow with its farm bill. If the final legislation looks anything like the House bill, it would lead to far-reaching public health harms, from pesticide exposure to longer food pantry lines to widespread water pollution. 

How? Here are three ways the House farm bill may be harmful to your health.

1. Increasing exposure to toxic pesticides 

Exposure to pesticides like glyphosate and paraquat can be devastating to a person’s health, leading to cancer and Parkinson’s disease, among other harms. 

The federal government has the power to protect us – but it hasn’t done so. Instead, the Trump administration signed an executive order to support companies in producing a steady supply of glyphosate-based herbicides, rolled back regulations intended to keep our water safe from the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS and even approved new pesticides containing PFAS.

So states and local governments are enacting their own pesticide protections. 

Some of these safeguards would limit the use of these harmful chemicals on fields near schools and public parks, where children – who are most vulnerable to toxic chemical exposure – spend their time. 

But the Senate farm bill could include a provision to replace, or “preempt,” strong state or local pesticide protections with far weaker federal rules. 

A similar provision in the House bill – removed at the 11th hour – would have erased dozens of state laws and given pesticide chemical companies sweeping immunity from liability for the illnesses linked to their products.

Even with the defeat of that troublesome language, there are still several provisions in the House farm bill that favor pesticide makers, not public health, by:

• Excluding many hazardous agricultural chemicals from existing health and safety reviews
• Making it easier for polluters to ignore health and environmental safeguards
• Delaying new reviews of certain potentially harmful pesticides until 2031
• Failing to protect people from PFAS in pesticides and biosolids.

2. Erecting barriers to healthy eating 

There are already many barriers to eating healthy in the U.S. Our food system is flooded with ultra-processed food, a leading cause of chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression and multiple forms of cancer. Recent research shows that foods that cost less often contain more food additives and higher amounts of sugar and sodium.

More than half of adults in the U.S. say they worry about affording food for their families, and about one in seven households can’t always get enough food for everyone at home.  

Study after study has linked food insecurity and lack of healthy food access to a greater risk of diet-related diseases and poorer health outcomes.

Rather than taking action to help people eat healthier diets, the partisan House farm bill could make these problems far worse. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act included large cuts to funding for vital nutrition programs, and the House farm bill would make those cuts permanent.

The House farm bill would kneecap nutrition programs that more than 40 million people rely on, almost 40% of whom are kids. These cuts will cause an estimated 5 million people to lose access to food assistance over the coming years and could spell trouble for small grocers who rely on their spending. 

3. Failing to protect food safety and a clean water supply

The House farm bill would cut funding to a popular Department of Agriculture conservation program that supports practices that help reduce water pollution.

Our drinking water is being polluted by factory farms – large-scale animal production facilities where about 90% of U.S. farm animals are raised – which produce enormous amounts of manure. 

This manure can harbor a lot of bacteria, including a strain of E. coli that is particularly dangerous for humans. When bacteria from animal waste spread to nearby fruit and vegetable crops, the people who eat that produce can get seriously sick.

Manure can also pollute the water with nitrogen and phosphorus, as can runoff from commercial fertilizer. Nitrogen can become nitrate in water, and nitrate in drinking water poses serious public health risks. A recent EWG analysis found nitrate in the drinking water of 1 in 5 U.S. households. Exposure to nitrate increases the risk of cancer, including colorectal and bladder cancer, thyroid disease and birth defects in infants.

Decreasing funding for the USDA’s program and other conservation programs would increase farming-related pollution of drinking water and air, putting families at risk downstream. 

The farm bill should promote public health

Americans deserve a better farm bill – one that would:

• Protect farmworkers, families and children from toxic chemicals, including PFAS forever chemicals, present in the pesticides and fertilizers used to grow our food
• Ensure all families have access to the safe and nutritious foods they need to live healthy lives
• Help farmers protect the critical natural resources we all rely on, like clean water and air 
• Prevent foodborne illnesses caused by bacteria that come from factory farms.

What you can do

While Congress debates the farm bill, consumers can use EWG tools to make informed choices. You can: 

• Follow EWG to get the latest updates about farm bill negotiations
• Consult our Tap Water Database to find out about the quality of your drinking water. If necessary, learn what type of water filter will work best in your home
• Choose organic produce when possible. Non-organic fruit and vegetables are typically grown with toxic pesticides that organic farmers are not permitted to use
• Check our Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce™, which identifies the non-organic fruit and vegetables that have the most and least pesticide residues
• And tell your representatives in Congress not to cave to corporations like Bayer-Monsanto, which are trying to strip state and local pesticide protections in the 2026 Farm Bill. Preserving these powerful state and local safeguards means protecting our farmworkers, families and children. 

Areas of Focus Food & Water Farming & Agriculture Family Health Pesticides Authors Ketura Persellin Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN May 26, 2026

At General Motors’ annual shareholder meeting on June 2, 2026, shareholders will have the opportunity to vote on whether the company should report on the effectiveness of its policies and processes related to Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

General Motors has made commitments to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Now the company needs to show how it is following through. The controversies and harms associated with the Thacker Pass lithium mine are just one example of how General Motors is not adequately implementing its policies on respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

The shareholders who presented the proposal, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, say that not respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights exposes General Motors and its investors to material risk. Project delays, higher costs, damage to a company’s reputation, loss of public trust, and more can all result when mining projects violate Indigenous Peoples’ rights. 

The Thacker Pass Mine raises concerns

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is just one example of a project that raises concerns about the significant risks associated with sourcing materials from projects that violate Indigenous Peoples’ rights. General Motors invested $650 million in Lithium Americans Corp in 2023 and became a joint owner of the mine in 2024. 

The mine is located in a landscape that is sacred to the Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock peoples in Nevada in the United States, who have cared for it since time immemorial.

In 1865, the US Cavalry massacred dozens of people when they attacked families in a Paiute camp now known as Peehee Mu’huh or Rotten Moon. The attack took place during the so-called “Snake Wars,” when settlers came into Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock lands and took land, water, game, and gold. 

Now, the Thacker Pass lithium mine is making permanent changes to this sacred landscape. Ranchers, environmental nonprofit organizations, and local Tribes opposed the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) approval of the mine. They raised concerns about inadequate consultation with Indigenous Peoples, inadequate analysis of mining claims, and impacts to water. The entire permitting process for the fast-tracked project lasted approximately one year.

Despite these shortcomings, the BLM approved the project in 2021. Courts concluded that the BLM had violated the law by not properly validating the mine’s claims, but the courts did not take away the mine’s permit. 

A 2025 report by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch concluded that by permitting the mine, the US government had violated Indigenous Peoples’ rights. A new report from Amnesty International on lithium mining in Nevada held up the mine as an example of a “business model that systematically prioritizes speed, scale and profit at the expense of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and the environment.”

The federal government invested in Lithium Americas and the Thacker Pass mine last year, diluting GM’s shares and posing potential political risks.

The litigation delays, alongside higher exploration, administrative, and investment costs related to the problematic mine resulted in a net loss of $42.6 million and increased liabilities, according to analysis by the US Sustainable Investment Forum.

A gap between commitments and actions

This is not the first time concerns about GM’s investment in Thacker Pass and its impact on Indigenous Peoples’ rights have come up. In a report published by Mighty Earth in 2023, civil society and Indigenous-led groups highlighted an important gap. The report revealed that although GM has made ambitious commitments to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, the company does not have adequate mechanisms to ensure these commitments were put into practice.

The Lead the Charge Leaderboard is an annual ranking of 18 of the world’s leading automakers and their commitment to building fossil-fuel-free supply chains that respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights and human rights and protect the environment. It shows a poor track record of respect for the rights of Indigenous People affected by mining for the materials used to build GM vehicles. Since the Leaderboard began in 2023, GM has only received 11 out of 100 points on its respect for Indigenous Peoples’ rights, with no improvement in three years. 

According to the latest report, “Despite having commitments [to Indigenous Peoples’ rights in its supply chain], the company fails to disclose tangible evidence of how they are being effectively operationalized and enforced in practice.”

A look at next steps

A more sustainable future can only be built by recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights, leadership, and stewardship of land and water. Auto manufacturers that demand that their materials come from mines that respect these rights can help shape the future and build public confidence that their dollars are buying a product that is sustainably made. 

Investors deserve more transparency and information on General Motors’ risk management and human and Indigenous Peoples’ rights due diligence processes. The shareholder proposal requesting a report on GM’s practices regarding Indigenous Peoples’ rights is an important step in ensuring General Motors upholds its own Indigenous Peoples’ rights commitments.

The post Investors Call for Report on General Motor’s Commitment to Indigenous Peoples’ Rights appeared first on Earthworks.

An investor in the Wressle and West Newton fields warned today that government policy has made its UK business “increasingly difficult to progress”.

In annual accounts, Union Jack Oil blamed successive governments for:

“complex planning, regulatory burden and high taxation, resulting in unpredictable approval timeframes bringing additional uncertainty, significant cash costs and lost opportunities”.

Union Jack’s executive chairman, David Bramhill, said:

“the cost of maintaining a number of our non-producing UK licence interests has become increasingly difficult to justify regardless of their potential future value”.

The company, which recently invested in the US, gave up interests in 2025 at Biscathorpe and North Kelsey in Lincolnshire and at Dukes Wood and Kirklington in Nottinghamshire, the accounts said. They added that Union Jack was also in the process of relinquishing its stake in the Laughton licence in Lincolnshire.

Mr Bramhill said:

“During the remainder of 2026 and beyond, the Company intends to continue to review the merits of its UK non-production licence interests while prioritising asset allocation in favour of growing its hydrocarbon exploration, development and production enterprise in Oklahoma.”

The accounts also said Union Jack “believes investors will only wish to provide finance to companies and projects that support a transition to a low-carbon economy. As part of the Company’s ongoing strategy in respect of the environment, Union Jack commits to be totally transparent in respect of its projects and on how its carbon management practice is implemented”.

Union Jack said it remained focussed on interests at the Wressle oil site, in North Lincolnshire, where the operator has just published estimates on emissions resulting from a proposed site expansion.

The Wressle development would “support the company with revenues for at least another decade”, Union Jack said.

The company said it also continued to invest in the oil site at Keddington in Lincolnshire, where production resumed in mid-2025 after site upgrades. Planning consent is already in place for a sidetrack to one of the existing wells. The location has been finalised and the well would be drilled “when the operator deems appropriate”, Union Jack said.

At West Newton, in East Yorkshire, Union Jack said the partners had been “evaluating ways of generating additional value through early production schemes, ahead of any longer-term full gas field development”.

Last year, one of the investors at West Newton proposed using the sites for cryptocurrency mining.

Earlier this year, the Environment Agency approved plans for lower-volume fracking at West Newton. The approval is being challenged by a local campaigner (details here and here), whose crowdfunder has so far raised more than £1,800.

Key figures for year ending 31 December 2025

Gross profit: £691,001 (2024: £1,968,101)

Net loss (including impairment of Biscathorpe and North Kelsey): £7,029,350 (2024: £649,213)

Basic loss per share: 5.68p (2024: 0.61p earnings)

Admin expenses (excluding impairment): £2,477,222 (2024: £1,878,089)

Total assets: £19,083,850 (2024: £23,846,105)

Total liabilities: £2,251,878 (2024: £1,975,354)

Net assets: £16,831,972 (2024: £21,870,751)

Net current assets: £1,365,622 (2024: £3,172,066)

Understanding how ecosystems work is a crucial first step in protecting the things people value most: clean air, clean water, and a healthy, resilient environment for future generations. But the...

• Many transit agencies are unlikely to fully recover from the pandemic anytime soon, particularly since remote work appears here to stay, at least for white-collar workers who used to ride commuter rail to their downtown office. The long-term trend looks better, though, as long as young people keep flocking to cities. (Governing)
• Amtrak is an exception, with ridership up almost 6% between October and April, and smaller operating losses than projected. (Trains)
• Speeding kills 12,000 a people a year in the U.S., leading some states to mandate devices on repeat offenders’ cars that limit how fast they can go. (Jalopnik)
• After testing cargo e-bikes for deliveries in New York, Amazon is expanding their use to other cities. (NY Times)
• The Texas Supreme Court sent a lawsuit challenging Austin transit expansion Project Connect back to a lower court to rule on a jurisdictional issue. (KVUE)
• Texas transportation officials are negotiating potential routes for high-speed rail between Dallas and Fort Worth and Dallas and Houston (Fort Worth Report). The attorney general’s lawsuit is one reason why costs keep rising and Project Connect’s centerpiece, a downtown light rail line, keeps shrinking (Texas Tribune).
• Transit ridership in Atlanta almost doubled in March to 4 million, after MARTA changed how it collects ridership data (11 Alive). GoTriangle ridership in the Raleigh area was up by a third in April, which officials attributed to high gas prices (ABC 11).
• The chairman of Atlanta Journal-Constitution owner Cox Enterprises, who comes from generational wealth and has probably never ridden transit in his life, came out against Beltline light rail, even though it’s been part of the plan going back to the Beltline’s inception in the late 1990s.
• Seattle Bike Blog challenged a nonsensical op-ed in the Seattle Times that claimed bike lanes make drivers “fatigued” and blamed safety projects for sending drivers into road rage.
• It wasn’t a surprise that Oregon Democrats’ proposal for small hikes to the gas tax and payroll tax to fund transportation failed, but the fact that 83% of voters rejected it was a shock. What does that mean for November elections? (KGW 8)
• Downtown Phoenix has hundreds of broken parking meters. (AZ Family)
• San Diego residents took advantage of Amtrak to avoid crowded roads over Memorial Day weekend. (KSBY)
• Toronto’s frequent bus service, even in relatively low-density neighborhoods, made it the only North American transit system where ridership rose in the decades following World War II, showing that suburbanites will ride the bus if it’s convenient. (Infrastory)
• A European human rights court ruled that a food courier’s viral TikTok rant against bus-only lanes in Tbilisi, Georgia crossed the line between free speech and personal abuse. (Courthouse News Service)

At a time when other public officials and the media are talking less about climate change, Sheldon Whitehouse remains fiercely outspoken. He delivered his 307th climate speech on the Senate floor this month and is pushing back against the recent trend of “climate hushing.”

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The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) recently published a special report warning that rising food prices will persist alongside global geopolitical instability. They call for nations to build “resilient self-reliance” across global food and agriculture systems to ensure greater food security and economic sovereignty.

In an increasingly interconnected global market, food commodities are exposed to supply chain volatility risk caused by geopolitical instability, the report says. Retaliatory tariffs, military conflict, and the recent reduction in foreign food aid packages have exacerbated economic issues facing farmers today. The report notes that attacks in the Gulf region threaten global food security due to volatile energy markets: “Over one-third of global urea and sulfur exports—key ingredients for nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, respectively—pass through the Strait of Hormuz.” Such disruptions “will likely have global consequences due to rising oil prices that could spill over into food and fertilizer prices,” the report asserts.

“The impact of high energy prices will likely drive up the cost of food more than fertilizer alone because our food systems are so fossil fuel-dependent,” says Jennifer Clapp, a member of the IPES-Food panel and lead author of the special report. In places like the United States, these additional costs come as farmers are projected to experience an approximate 2.6 percent loss in real income (inflation-adjusted dollars) relative to last year.

The report discusses the efficacy of supply management policies—market intervention strategies including quotas and importation limits—in high-income nations like Canada. “The food system has become so volatile, and we are so vulnerable to food price inflation that we feel like we need to do something,” says Clapp. In Canada, for example, public management of dairy products helps to insulate local farmers from global market volatility by allowing them to sell their commodities at profit-generating prices.

But rising food insecurity rates in Canada indicate that diversifying the range of supply-managed commodities can help improve local resilience. Clapp, who serves as a Professor and Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, Canada, tells Food Tank that “as one in four [Canadians] face food insecurity, diversification is a really important policy for us to ensure access to more fresh fruits and vegetables.”

The report highlights public food stockholding programs as pragmatic policy options for nations at risk of food insecurity. By pooling agronomic resources from primarily small producers, West African nations are able to collaboratively store food to quickly disseminate based on the needs of municipalities within the region.

To decouple local food production systems from global markets, nations must reconcile the demand of consumers with systemic policy transitions. “Thinking about diversity of diets is important because it can change those demand patterns. If people were eating more beans, tofu [etc.], there’s a way in which we can envision dietary change helping to facilitate more diverse production systems,” Clapp tells Food Tank.

For example, U.S. livestock production depends on corn and soybeans as inputs, two crops that currently serve as the largest users of nitrogen fertilizers and herbicides. Because of this structural reliance, Clapp argues that a diverse, plant-based diet puts eaters “already way ahead” in terms of both ecological impact and resilience to energy shocks.

This need for resilient self-reliance is even more urgent in the global South. As the special report notes, “The impacts of rising food prices are highly uneven. Net food-importing countries in the Global South have been hit the hardest, with inflation peaks reaching up to 30% in May 2023.”

While these nations have a massive opportunity to insulate themselves from global market turmoil by pioneering localized, self-reliant food strategies, doing so effectively requires international debt relief. Ultimately, as the report emphasizes, “the most vulnerable countries have the most to lose from the way the current system is organized, they also have the most to gain from leading the transition towards self-reliance and protection from dependency.”

Central to this transition is a food sovereignty approach that prioritizes equity, diversity, and local agency. By using market management tools to protect smallholders, nations can transition away from cash-crop dependence and cultivate traditional crops. The report highlights that these mechanisms “act as stabilizing buffers, support smaller-scale and more diverse producers, and improve access to food for marginalized and vulnerable people,” building deep ecological and economic resilience against future global shocks.

Meanwhile, recent U.S. dietary guidelines recommend increased protein intake for healthy adults, which many interpret as a push for greater meat and animal product consumption. This focus on animal protein runs counter to calls for the diverse, plant-based systems needed to build global food resilience.

While geopolitics remain complicated and uncertain, structural shifts in consumption patterns could redefine agricultural dependency. As Clapp emphasizes to Food Tank, modifying these foundational demand patterns is essential: “If it’s going to be protein, it needs to be more plant-based protein.”

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Photo courtesy of Jim Niakaris, Unsplash

The post A New World Order: How Nations Can Tackle the New Geopolitics of Food appeared first on Food Tank.

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