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For 10 days in the Philippines, environmental advocates from across the world moved through neighbourhoods before sunrise with waste pickers, sorted discarded plastics by hand, observed community composting systems, and studied how ordinary residents are helping to build functioning zero-waste communities. 

This included six environmental organisations from Africa (Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana and Togo.) The experience, participants from Africa say, challenged long-held assumptions about waste management and offered practical lessons that could help African communities confront the growing crisis of plastic pollution.

The Asia-Pacific Zero Waste Academy, co-organised by the Mother Earth Foundation and GAIA Asia Pacific, brought together 36 participants from 12 countries for an intensive training programme on community-level zero-waste implementation. Through workshops, field visits and study tours, participants were exposed to waste segregation systems, reuse and refill models, composting initiatives and material recovery facilities operating across communities in the Philippines.

The programme sought to demonstrate that zero waste “is not just a concept, it is a system we can build”.

Participants engaged directly with waste pickers and community waste workers in barangays such as San Agustin, where they participated in waste collection exercises, monitoring activities, and community education campaigns. They also conducted baseline surveys and observed how local governments and residents collaborate to sustain waste management systems.

Visits to material recovery facilities in Dampalit, Malabon City, San Fernando, and Barangay Malpitic in Pampanga offered practical insights into waste-sorting, recycling, and reduction systems. Attendees later travelled to Dumaguete City for dialogues with members of the Dumaguete Waste Workers Association and the Philippines National Waste Pickers Alliance, where discussions focused on the social and economic dimensions of zero-waste systems.

For End Plastic Pollution, Mazingira Plus, Up Cycle It Ghana, NGO Jeunes Verts Togo, and CODAF, the experience challenged assumptions about what is required to build sustainable waste systems.

Abdalla Mikulu, executive director of Mazingira Plus in Tanzania, said the academy deepened his understanding of how women-led community systems are addressing plastic pollution and organic waste challenges.

“I was especially inspired by the adaptability of reuse and refill models across different local contexts and their role in reducing single-use plastics,” he said. “It reinforced that zero waste systems can be designed to fit both low- and high-income communities through context-specific approaches.”

Participants also undertook Waste Assessment and Brand Audits (Waba), sorting through discarded packaging to trace patterns of production and consumption. The exercise examined how single-use packaging travels across borders into local communities and highlighted the structural systems driving plastic pollution.

The academy concluded with “The Great Challenge”, during which participants designed practical zero waste implementation plans. The African participants presented a model for implementing a zero waste system in a community in Togo, focusing on reuse, refill systems and organic waste management.

Nirere Sadrach, founder of End Plastic Pollution Uganda, described the programme as an opportunity to gain practical knowledge that could strengthen zero-waste projects in Uganda.

“It was an opportunity to experience the practice of waste segregation, reuse, refill and composting, and to work with waste pickers and community leaders to ensure the functionality of the zero waste model,” he said.

For Melody Enyinnaya of CODAF Nigeria, the academy marked “a paradigm shift”.

“Witnessing communities in Malabon, San Fernando and Siquijor living proof that zero waste is not a distant ideal but an achievable, everyday reality, powered by strong legislation, community ownership and remarkably simple infrastructure, has completely transformed how I approach our work in Nigeria,” she said.

She argued that African countries require “stronger political will, better data, and communities that are trusted and empowered to lead” rather than expensive technologies.

Frank Sekyere of Upcycle It Ghana said the programme demonstrated that adopting zero waste approaches was “a necessary step towards a sustainable future”.

“The hands-on experience, particularly with the 10 steps to zero waste implementation, was truly eye-opening,” he said. “Every effort, no matter how small, plays a vital role in creating a cleaner, more sustainable world.”

Raissa Oureya of the NGO Jeunes Verts Togo said the academy demonstrated that zero-waste communities can be built with locally available resources and strong local leadership.

“I am returning motivated and full of energy to implement the zero waste project in my municipality, Golfe 4,” she said. “Zero waste is not perfect, but it’s possible.”

ENDS.

The post “Zero waste is possible”: GAIA Africa Members return from Philippines with lessons for tackling waste pollution first appeared on GAIA.

Among a flurry of posts on social media last weekend, US president Donald Trump declared “good riddance” to a specific emissions scenario used in global climate projections.

The “RCP8.5” scenario, which envisages a future of very high carbon emissions, was “wrong, wrong, wrong”, the president wrote in block capitals.

This was “just admitted” by the UN’s “top climate committee”, he falsely claimed, referring to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The post was quickly picked up by right-leaning media, amplifying Trump’s misrepresentation of emissions scenarios and the role of the IPCC.

His claim follows the publication of a new set of emissions scenarios that will feed into the next IPCC reports. 

While the new scenarios no longer include such high emissions as in RCP8.5, they also show it is “not possible” to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels without significant “overshoot”, one of the authors tells Carbon Brief.

Moreover, projections suggest that the world is still on course for between 2.5C and 3C of warming, another author says.

This level of warming was previously described as “catastrophic” by the UN.

In this factcheck, Carbon Brief looks at Trump’s comments, the debate around RCP8.5 and the “good” and “bad” news within the latest scenarios.

• What did Trump say?
• What is RCP8.5?
• Why is RCP8.5 so hotly debated?
• How has RCP8.5 been replaced?
• How is the IPCC involved?

What did Trump say?

In the late evening of Saturday 16 May, Trump posted the following message on his Truth Social social-media platform:

“Dumocrats” is a derogatory nickname for Democrat politicians, debuted by the president in a televised Fox News interview on Thursday 14 May, according to the Independent.

By “top climate committee”, the president was presumably referring to the IPCC, the UN body responsible for assessing science about human-caused climate change. 

However, the IPCC does not develop, control or own climate scenarios. Moreover, it has not published anything stating that any climate scenario is “wrong”. (For more, see: How is the IPCC involved?)

Nevertheless, right-leaning media outlets have reported on Trump’s comments, in many instances repeating his false assertion that the RCP8.5 climate scenario had been developed by the IPCC. 

The New York Post misleadingly claimed that the IPCC “had quietly adjusted” its framework of emission scenarios. The Daily Caller, a pro-Trump conspiratorial US outlet, adds its own falsehoods stating that “IPCC researchers revised their modelling approach last month, swapping the extreme pathway for seven alternative scenarios”. The climate-sceptic Australian claimed that scientists had “quietly scrapped the apocalyptic forecasts that have terrified policymakers and the public”.

With Fox News also covering Trump’s comments, along with an earlier article by the Times, much of the reporting around RCP8.5 in recent days has been driven by media controlled by the climate-sceptic mogul Rupert Murdoch.

It is not the first time the Trump administration has attacked RCP8.5. In an executive order  issued in May 2025 – entitled, “Restoring gold-standard science” – the White House included the climate scenario in a list of examples of how the previous government had “used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner”.

Excerpt from White House executive order, issued in May 2025.

Federal agencies, it claimed, had been using RCP8.5 to “assess the potential effects of climate change in a higher warming scenario”, despite scientists warning that “presenting RCP8.5 as a likely outcome is misleading”.

The executive order came after Project 2025 – a policy wishlist for Trump’s second term published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing, climate-sceptic thinktank in the US  – criticised the climate scenario.

The manifesto said a “day-one” priority for the new government should be to “eliminate” the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “use of unauthorised regulatory inputs”, such as “unrealistic climate scenarios, including those based on RCP8.5”.

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What is RCP8.5?

Scientists use emissions scenarios to explore potential future climates, based on how global energy and land use could change in the decades to come. 

These scenarios are not predictions or forecasts of what will happen in the future. Therefore, Trump’s declaration that projections under RCP8.5 were “wrong, wrong, wrong” misrepresents the purpose of emissions scenarios.

Different modelling groups have produced thousands of different scenarios over the years. RCP8.5 was developed by scientists back in the early 2010s as one of a set of four consistent “representative concentration pathways”, or RCPs, for climate modellers to use. 

As their name suggests, the RCPs were representative of the vast array of scenarios in the scientific literature.

Their corresponding numbers – 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5 – do not describe temperature rise (as some mistakenly assume), but the level of “radiative forcing” that each pathway reaches by 2100. This forcing level is a measure of the change in the Earth’s “energy balance” (in watts per square metre) caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

As the highest forcing of the set, RCP8.5 was a scenario of very high emissions and extensive global warming. 

When it was originally published in 2011, RCP8.5 was intended to reflect the high end – roughly the 90th percentile – of the baseline scenarios available in the scientific literature at the time. 

A “baseline” scenario is one that assumes no climate mitigation, explains Dr Chris Smith, senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. He tells Carbon Brief:

“RCP8.5 was developed as a no-climate-policy scenario, often called ‘reference’ or ‘baseline’ scenarios. These are used to benchmark the actions of climate policy.”

Under RCP8.5, the IPCC’s fifth assessment report (AR5) in 2013 projected a best estimate of 4.3C of temperature rise by 2081-2100, compared to the pre-industrial period, with a “likely” range of 3.2C to 5.4C.

The RCPs were succeeded in 2017 by the “shared socioeconomic pathways”, or SSPs. The SSPs included a set of five socioeconomic “narratives”, which described factors such as population change, economic growth and the rate of technological development.

The SSPs were then used in the IPCC’s sixth assessment (AR6) cycle, which ran over 2015-23. The upper end of the AR6 temperature projections was provided by the successor to RCP8.5, known as SSP5-8.5, which indicated warming of 4.4C by 2081-2100, with a “very likely” range of 3.3C to 5.7C.

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Why is RCP8.5 so hotly debated?

Prof Detlef van Vuuren from Utrecht University, a leading figure in the development of emissions scenarios for many years, tells Carbon Brief that RCP8.5 is a “low-probability, high-risk scenario and it was always meant like that”.

The scenario assumed a world without climate policy and was designed to explore the consequences of high levels of greenhouse gases and global warming. It was not, van Vueren says, a “best-guess scenario” of what the future held in store.

However, in some research papers, RCP8.5 was characterised as “business as usual”, suggesting that it was the likely outcome if society did not pursue climate action.

This was “incorrect”, says van Vuuren, noting that RCP8.5 “is not a likely outcome”. He adds: “It’s never been a likely outcome.”

Over time, RCP8.5 became hotly debated in academic circles, with some scientists arguing that such high emissions were becoming increasingly unlikely and others claiming that RCP8.5 was still consistent with historical cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. 

Carbon Brief unpacked the arguments in this debate in a detailed explainer in 2019.

The charts below, originally included in a 2012 Nature commentary and then updated each year by the authors, shows how projected CO2 emissions under RCP8.5 (red line) compares with the other RCPs (bold coloured lines) and observations (black line).

The left-hand chart shows total CO2 emissions, including land-use change, while the right-hand chart shows CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and producing cement – the dominant drivers of 21st century emissions. 

Global total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use (left) and global fossil CO2 emissions (left) for historical observations (black lines) and the four RCP (coloured bold lines) for 1980-2050. Originally produced as part of Peters et al. (2012) and since updated by Glen Peters and Robbie Andrew.

While emission trends up to the early 2010s approximately tracked RCP8.5, a flattening of emissions growth in the years since has meant they have not kept pace with the sustained rises that were assumed in the scenario.

Over the past decade, global emissions have more closely tracked RCP4.5, one of the two “medium stabilisation scenarios” of the original four RCPs.

The debate around RCP8.5 has not just focused on current emissions, but also on the scenario’s underlying assumptions for the future. 

When it was published in 2011, the world had just seen unprecedented growth in global CO2 emissions, which had increased by 30% over the previous decade. Global coal use had increased by nearly 50% over the same period. Cleaner alternatives remained expensive in most countries and the idea of continued rapid growth in coal use seemed realistic.

Critics of RCP8.5 point to its assumptions for a dramatic expansion of coal use in the future, as well as high growth in global population.

For example, in a 2017 paper, two scientists argued that the “return to coal” envisaged in RCP8.5 would require an unprecedented five-fold increase in global coal use by the end of the century. Such an outcome was “exceptionally unlikely”, the authors wrote.

However, others have argued that while high-emissions scenarios are becoming increasingly unlikely, they still have an important role to play. For example, they highlight risks that only emerge under higher levels of warming. 

In addition, research has shown that feedbacks in the climate system – where warming triggers the release of more CO2 and methane, which warms the planet further – could mean that human-caused emissions lead to a higher radiative forcing and have a greater climate impact than initially assumed.

In a post on the RealClimate website, Dr Gavin Schmidt – director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies – unpacks why scenarios are updated and “why high-end scenarios are important”.

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How has RCP8.5 been replaced?

As the IPCC heads into its seventh assessment cycle (AR7), scientists have been developing the emissions scenarios and climate model projections that will – eventually – feed into its reports.

For the emissions scenarios, that process – known as ScenarioMIP – started back in 2023 at a meeting in Reading, UK. This involved scientists representing “different climate research communities”, explains van Vuuren.

This “brainstorming” session devised the outlines for the new scenarios, he says. After more meetings, these were subsequently developed into a proposal that was – after review – translated into a journal paper. After review from scientists and the public, the final paper was published in April. 

The paper sets out seven all-new emissions scenarios, replacing the SSPs (and its predecessors, the RCPs). For simplicity, the new scenarios are named according to their levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

The figures below show the emissions (left) and the estimated global temperature changes (right) under the proposed scenarios, from the “low-to-negative” emissions scenario (turquoise) up to a “high-emissions” scenario (brown). 

The greenhouse gas emissions for each of the CMIP7 climate scenarios (left) and the associated estimated average temperature change over 2000-2150 from a 1850-1900 baseline (right) using the FaIR emulator. Source: Adapted from Van Vuuren et al. (2026)

(It should be noted that, while the ScenarioMIP paper has been published, there remains an embargo on using the scenario data produced by integrated assessment models – often referred to as IAMs – to publish academic papers, analysis or even social media posts until 1 September this year. Carbon Brief will publish a detailed explainer on the new scenarios once the embargo lifts.)

When compared to the SSPs that came before, the range in future emissions in the new scenarios “will be smaller”, the authors say in the paper:

“On the high-end of the range, the…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…At the low end, many…emission trajectories have become inconsistent with observed trends during the 2020-30 period.”

In other words, the combination of technological progress and action on climate change that, to date, remains insufficient, means that scenarios of very high or very low emissions are now not considered plausible. 

Another way of looking at it is that the “range of potential futures has narrowed”, explains Smith, one of the authors on the paper.

If you “draw a fan or plume of potential future emissions that start in 2025”, it lies entirely within the spread of scenarios from a decade ago, he says:

“So you’ve ruled out futures at the high end. You’ve also ruled out futures at the low end – so it’s now not possible to limit warming to 1.5C, at least in the short term or the medium term.” 

This is a mix of “good” and “bad” news, Smith adds. 

“In the latest set of scenarios, the lowest [scenario sees] peaking at about 1.7C, so we’ve also lost that low end, but the good news is we’ve lost the high end…Back in 2010, RCP8.5 wasn’t an implausible future, we’ve now made it an implausible future, because we’ve actually bent the curve [on emissions] enough to eliminate that possibility.”

The new “high” scenario projects warming in 2100 of closer to 3.3C (with a range of 2.5C to 4.4C).

To be clear, this “high” scenario would still come with catastrophic climate impacts, even if the level of warming would remain slightly below what was set out in RCP8.5.

Van Vuuren adds that the world is “now on a trajectory to 2.5-3C of warming”. As a result, “we don’t have any scenario anymore that can reach 1.5C with limited overshoot – we will have a significant overshoot”. 

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How is the IPCC involved?

Contrary to Trump’s claims, the common set of future emissions scenarios used by climate scientists are not developed by the IPCC, the UN climate-science body that produces landmark reports about climate change.

Instead, the development process described above is driven by a group of Earth system modelling experts convened by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP).

CMIP – an initiative of another UN body, the World Climate Research Programme – coordinates the work of dozens of climate modelling centres around the world.

Working in six-to-eight year cycles, CMIP asks modelling centres around the world to run a common set of climate-model experiments – simulations that use the same inputs and conditions – that allows for results to be collected together and more easily compared. 

For experiments that explore how the climate might change in the future, modelling centres are instructed to run simulations against a fixed set of future climate scenarios, each with different levels of concentrations of greenhouse gases, aerosols and other drivers of climate change. 

These future emissions scenarios are revisited each time CMIP embarks on a new “phase” of climate-modelling coordination, to reflect advances in scientific understanding and the pace of real-world climate action. 

The group tasked with producing the design of future scenarios, as well as the “input files” for climate models, is the “scenario model intercomparison project”, or ScenarioMIP.

CMIP aligns its work with the schedule of the IPCC, coordinating a new set of model runs for each IPCC assessment cycle. 

For example, the IPCC’s AR5 in 2013 featured climate models from the fifth phase of CMIP (CMIP5), whereas AR6 in 2021 used climate models from CMIP’s sixth phase (CMIP6).

AR7 will feature models from CMIP’s ongoing seventh phase (CMIP7). The first results from CMIP7 model runs are expected later this year. 

The IPCC is consulted during the CMIP process, van Vuuren tells Carbon Brief, but its input is “no different from any other review comment” that the ScenarioMIP team received. 

Thus, while the IPCC relies on model runs coordinated by CMIP in its landmark reports, it does not play a role in designing future emissions scenarios, nor in deciding when they should be retired. 

Dr Robert Vautard, co-chair of IPCC AR7 Working Group I, tells Carbon Brief that the IPCC does not “do or coordinate research”. Its role, he says, is to “synthesise existing knowledge” and produce “regular” reviews of climate-science literature. 

He adds that ScenarioMIP is just one set of scenarios the climate-science body assesses in its reports:

“IPCC assesses all scenarios, or sets of scenarios, that the scientific community produces. IPCC does not produce scenarios. CMIP7 will be [one] set of scenarios assessed by IPCC [for AR7] – but there will be many others.”

The IPCC has also released a statement in response to the recent reporting, reiterating that the paper on the new scenarios “belongs to the broader body of scientific literature produced by the international research community, under the coordination of the WCRP, not the IPCC”. It adds:

“The IPCC does not conduct its own research, run models or make measurements. It does not own the scenarios described in the mentioned paper, nor does it own any of the scenarios assessed in the sixth assessment report.”

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The post Factcheck: Trump’s false claims about the IPCC and ‘RCP8.5’ climate scenario appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Editor's note: Conservation along the Platte River is a collaborative effort, and Rowe Sanctuary works closely with many partners to work towards our habitat and landscape goals.  This month, we...

Nebraska is the home of Arbor Day, established in 1874 to promote tree-planting; an effort that has since spread across the country with great success.  It is ironic, then, land managers along...

On Monday and Tuesday, Paris hosted the G7 Finance Ministers’ meeting, bringing together finance ministers and central bank governors from some of the world’s most powerful economies, alongside counterparts from Brazil, India, Kenya, South Korea, Ukraine, Syria, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But behind the diplomatic pageantry,and despite the G7’s call for innovative financial instruments to urgently address overlapping crises,French host Roland Lescure squandered a major opportunity.

While fossil fuel companies raked in billions in profits in the first quarter of 2026 amid the South-West Asia conflict, campaigners at 350.org condemn the French G7 presidency’s glaring inaction on windfall and excess profits taxes targeting the oil and gas industry.

Fanny Petitbon, 350 France Country Manager, said:

“France has built its G7 presidency on the bold promise to use this forum as a lever to reinforce economic security in times of crisis and to respond to the legitimate concerns of citizens. But fine words ring hollow. When it comes to taxing the obscene profits recently made by oil and gas corporations, Paris chose complete silence. Not a single word appeared in the final communiqué.

Once again, the interests of a powerful minority are being protected. Companies like TotalEnergies, which boast of their so-called foresight while doing little more than speculating on war and human suffering, have cashed in billions,while families around the world pay the price at the pump and on their energy bills.

The G7’s initiative to expand insurance coverage for people and countries experiencing extreme weather events is welcome. But without turning off the fossil fuel tap and forcing the biggest polluters to foot the bill, climate finance risks becoming little more than taxpayers cleaning up a mess that oil giants are still being paid to create.

President Macron has positioned himself as a global leader on climate and economic justice. Yet this silence tells a very different story. Is this really the legacy he wants to leave in his final G7 presidency? The Leaders' Summit, to be held in Évian from June 15 to 17, is the last chance to course-correct and finally choose people over profit.”

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Does electromagnetic radiation from wind turbines pose a threat to human health?

Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from wind turbines are well below international exposure safety limits.

Wind turbines produce EMFs mainly from their electrical equipment. Multiple studies have found their strength to be lower than everyday exposure to many common household appliances, such as microwaves and vacuum cleaners.  

In a field study at a Canadian wind farm, average magnetic fields at the base of operating turbines were around 0.1 microtesla (µT) and dropped to background levels within 2 meters. Turbines under high wind and low wind conditions emitted equivalent levels of radiation. Another 2020 study found wind turbines produced under 0.1 µT at 4 meters distance.

For comparison, an electric can opener measures about 60 µT at 6 inches but 0.2 µT at 4 feet. International guidelines set a safety reference level of 100 µT at 50 Hz, far above the turbine measurements reported in field studies.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

Environmental Health Measuring electromagnetic fields (EMF) around wind turbines in Canada: is there a human health concern?

Radiation Protection Dosimetry EXTREMELY LOW FREQUENCY ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD EXPOSURE MEASUREMENT IN THE VICINITY OF WIND TURBINES

World Health Organization Radiation: Electromagnetic fields

Frontiers in Human Health Wind Turbines and Human Health

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

Please use this form to provide feedback about this fact brief. This will help us to better gauge its impact and usability. Thank you!

About fact briefs published on Gigafact

Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer "yes/no" answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

This article Automatic draft registration undoes a victory decades in the making was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Young people in the U.S. have won a major unsung victory: Starting in December, they will no longer be required to register or report their addresses for a possible military draft. But Congress has given the agency tasked with “readiness” for a draft a second chance to find a way to sign young men up for a future draft involuntarily and “automatically.”

To understand how this victory was won and how young people and their allies can fight the plan for “automatic” registration, we need to look at 45 years of forgotten history of draft registration and resistance during a time when there was no active draft.

In December 2025, Congress finally voted to end the requirement in effect since 1980 for male U.S. citizens and residents to register with the agency that would administer any military draft — the Selective Service System, or SSS — within 30 days of their 18th birthday and report to the SSS within 10 days of any change of address until their 26th birthday.

This is an extraordinary and largely unrecognized victory for pervasive noncompliance with the registration law. This spontaneous, silent resistance has been sustained by generations of young people for 45 years, during which there has been essentially no visible or organized anti-draft movement. 

But Congress remains so unwilling to admit to failure in the face of popular resistance, and so intent on preserving the fiction of readiness to activate a draft, that it included a provision in this year’s annual “defense” bill, at the urging of the SSS, that gives the SSS a second chance. The agency is instructed to try to register potential draftees “automatically” by using information from other federal agencies. 

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The SSS has already drafted regulations for “automatic” registration that are currently under review by the White House. The change in the law will take effect in December 2026 unless Congress takes action before then to repeal the Military Selective Service Act. 

“Automatic” registration will be a fiasco. Mining data collected by other federal agencies for other purposes won’t produce a list of young men and their mailing addresses that’s any more accurate or complete than self-registration. But it will enable continued planning for endless, unlimited wars without the need to consider whether enough Americans will be willing to fight them, and will create a database that can be weaponized against vulnerable young people. 

Because only men are subject to the draft, the SSS must track gender, and because the agency interprets “male” to mean “as assigned at birth” for the purposes of the draft, it may seek to obtain information on the sex assigned at birth of all young people. And since U.S. residents are subject to being drafted regardless of citizenship, the SSS will have a mandate to try to compile a list of the names and addresses of all male immigrants ages 18-25, including undocumented immigrants. Those lists will likely be available to ICE, DOGE and other agencies.

Why, though, is the SSS getting a do-over from Congress despite such abject failure? And if there’s been such widespread resistance to draft registration, why haven’t we heard about it? 

The power of silent resistance

The dynamics of draft resistance and anti-draft activism since 1980 follow a pattern that was articulated perhaps most clearly by the late James C. Scott. Scott was a political scientist and ethnographer who backed into anarchism through his fieldwork on the forms of subaltern resistance to authority and oppression. Scott situated his work within the “subaltern studies” movement, which seeks to center and uplift the voices, actions and interests of those who make up the underclasses in structures of domination and subordination.

Throughout his work on the forms of resistance, Scott took it for granted — as have many others — that resistance is a phenomenon defined by actions, not by ideology or organizational affiliation. As Joan Baez described it while introducing her band at Woodstock, “We … are members of the Resistance, which simply means that you have to turn your [draft] card in, or put ketchup on it and eat it, or burn it or flush it or whatever you want. … So, that’s what it takes to be in the Resistance.”

Acts of resistance are sometimes open, organized and accompanied by protest — but not always. One of Scott’s key points is that too narrow a focus on elite organizations and open defiance can blind us to the underlying phenomenon of quiet resistance, its subaltern character, and its power. 

“Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organizations, escapes notice,” Scott notes in “Two Cheers for Anarchism”. “[But] more regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by … the silent, dogged resistance … of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

Scott describes as typical a symbiosis between a small, visible, vocal, organized, largely elite “movement” and a vast, mostly silent, largely subaltern phenomenon of mass resistance. And he defends the meaning and significance of “self-serving” acts of resistance, such as desertion from the military or draft “evasion,” that may have no explicitly political intent.

How this played out with draft registration is a case study in the effectiveness of quiet, passive direct action, and of the need for organized solidarity and allyship to realize the full potential of that otherwise invisible undercurrent of insubordination.

The response to  draft registration

When President Carter proposed resuming draft registration in 1980, the response was an immediate wave of public protest. There were rallies on campuses across the country within days, and tens of thousands of people took part in marches against the draft in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco just two months later — a remarkably rapid mobilization in the pre-Internet era.

For understandable reasons, only a few thousand young people publicly announced that they wouldn’t register. (I was among them.)

Protesters mobilize against the draft and draft registration in San Francisco on March 22, 1980. (Chris Booth for Resistance News)

The erroneous impressions this gave were that 1) opposition to the draft could be equated with protest or complaint, and 2) most of those who opposed the draft would, despite their objections, comply with the law.

The reality, though, is that most of those who didn’t want to be drafted stayed home. They didn’t protest or publicly confess to a crime, but neither did they sign up for the draft. Most remained uncommitted, taking a wait-and-see attitude toward whether they would register. 

There were many exceptions, but the broad pattern was what Scott has described as typical: Those with the least financial or social capital to lose were generally those least likely to register. Those with more privilege were more likely to decide that they could afford to take the risk of publicly refusing. The press looked for visible anti-draft protest — and found it, initially, in the early 1980s — among the most privileged potential draftees at elite colleges. But few observers looked for, noticed, or recognized the significance of the passive resistance of much larger numbers of marginalized youth.

Registration began in July 1980. At the start of the school year that September, The Boston Globe — in the first independent attempt to collect compliance statistics — reported that perhaps a million men, a quarter of the initial cohort, hadn’t registered. By June 1982, even the SSS admitted that at least half a million potential draftees had failed to register.

Faced with an unexpected crisis of noncompliance, the Department of Justice had little choice but to make examples of a few of those whose public statements could be used to prove in court that our refusal to register was “knowing and willful,” as the law required. One DOJ strategist expressed the hope that “an initial round of well-publicized prosecutions” might “yield sufficient registrations to maintain the credibility of the system”. 

That didn’t happen. I was one of just 20 non-registrants who were prosecuted in the early 1980s (perhaps 1 percent of those who had publicly announced our refusal to register). Those of the 20 who didn’t register after being indicted were all convicted, and nine of us were eventually imprisoned. But these show trials called attention to the extent of the resistance and the inability of the government to enforce the law against those who stayed home, stayed quiet, and didn’t publicly confess to criminal intent.

These trials were highly publicized, as the government wanted to achieve maximum intimidation. But the legal issue that dominated press coverage for the next several years was whether the government could constitutionally prosecute only those who had publicized their refusal to register.

In 1985 the Supreme Court, in a poorly-reasoned decision over a dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall, upheld this selective prosecution scheme. For the government, this was a legal victory but a practical loss. The silent majority of non-registrants got the message loud and clear that there was safety in silence as well as safety in numbers. The risk was in speaking out, not in skipping registration.

Decades of noncompliance

After this brief and counterproductive experiment, the DOJ abandoned any attempt to enforce the registration law against even the most flagrant violators. Nobody has been prosecuted since 1986, and nobody could be prosecuted without proof that their noncompliance is “knowing and willful.” The SSS sends a hundred thousand or more threatening letters every year to names and addresses obtained from data brokers and others sources. As decades passed, however, these empty threats were less and less effective.

In the aftermath of the test cases, fewer and fewer people either registered with the SSS or spoke publicly about their refusal. This was a rational response to the government’s pattern of selective prosecution. Organized opposition to the registration requirement also faded away. Why would activists prioritize organizing against a law that isn’t being enforced?

The public and most of those who could have been allies to the resistance wrongly interpreted the disappearance of public proclamations of resistance and visible anti-draft protests as indicating that the vast majority of potential draftees had been cowed into compliance.

This misimpression was heightened by measures to require registration with the SSS as a condition of eligibility for federal student loans (a requirement that was quietly repealed in 2020) and, in some states, driver’s licenses.

These laws were less effective than most people thought, especially because not all states have enacted laws like this. “California does not share driver’s license [information with the Selective Service System] — so, hey, move to California and you’re basically exempted from being drafted,” as a former director of the SSS testified in 2019. 

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Nevertheless, these laws helped prop up the myth of compliance as the norm, even while compliance continued to fall. By 2023, fewer than 40 percent of men turning 18 had registered by the end of the year, much less within 30 days of their 18th birthday. “Absolutely nobody” tells the SSS when they move, as the chair of the House Armed Services Committee noted at a hearing in 2021.

The failure of draft registration was obvious to anyone who scrutinized the program. Yet in the absence of a movement shouting, “The emperor has no clothes!”, it took another 40 years for Congress to seriously consider admitting failure. It was only a misguided push to expand draft registration to include women as well as men (prioritizing a false notion of “equality” in war over real equality in peace and freedom) that drew enough attention to the issue to prompt Congress to seriously consider action. The bipartisan Selective Service Repeal Act to abolish the SSS was introduced in 2019 and reintroduced in each session of Congress since.

In response to this existential threat to their own jobs, the staff of the SSS — not the Pentagon or anyone in Congress — came up with the idea of trying to “automatically” register potential draftees.

Congress approved the SSS proposal without any hearings or debate. Most Republicans and most Democrats in Congress want the draft available as a “fallback” when their party is in power, just as most of them want to keep nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal of threats. The availability of a draft enables planning for larger, longer wars, without having to consider whether enough people will be willing to fight them. This, of course, is why it would be so significant a constraint on “forever” wars to take the draft off the table as an option for any president.

Stopping “automatic” registration

Well-meaning but ageist older people often conceptualize anti-draft activism as protecting weak and vulnerable young people against being drafted. In reality, it’s the young people on whom the government depends to fight its wars who hold the power. They are wielding their power of noncooperation to protect us all against military adventurism. We should thank them for their service.

Previous Coverage

Uncovering Americans’ long history of hostility to conscription

More concretely, if we want to be allies to young people in their struggle against conscription and war and for youth liberation, we should work to expose the dangers of “automatic” draft registration and its inevitable failure.

In the event of a draft, the government will have the same difficulty enforcing induction orders that it has had enforcing registration. But if young people are registered involuntarily, their unwillingness to fight old people’s wars won’t become visible until after the country is militarily overcommitted and a draft is activated. That’s a dangerous scenario, even if you support U.S. plans for wars and a draft.  

“Automatic” draft registration is a bad idea, and it won’t work. But it’s not yet a done deal. We still have a chance to get Congress to repeal the draft law before the attempt at “automatic” registration begins in December. On May 14, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Sens. Ron Paul of Kentucky and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming reintroduced the Selective Service Repeal Act.

A diverse coalition of anti-war, religious, feminist and civil liberties organizations has already announced its opposition to “automatic” registration and its support for the Selective Service Repeal Act. Much more educational outreach and organizing is needed to get this issue on the agenda and into the demands of antiwar organizations and activists.

Young people have done the heavy lifting. They have brought us to the brink of victory over the draft and the threat it poses to everyone around the world against whom draftees would be weaponized. Our task as older allies is to amplify their continued resistance, whether it takes public or quiet forms, and to pressure Congress to include the Selective Service Repeal Act in this year’s defense bill.

This article Automatic draft registration undoes a victory decades in the making was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

“Who remembers the four rules?” I ask, holding up my ready-to-count fist to the group of toddlers, preschoolers, and parents gathered for this week's Nature Playgroup. “Scoop them!” one...

By: Green Knowledge Foundation

Every morning in Nigeria’s Benin City, before traffic builds up and markets awaken, faint plumes of smoke rise from heaps of waste scattered across open spaces. In Jos, plastic bags cling to drainage channels after heavy rains. On the outskirts of Abuja, government-approved dumpsites quietly ferment under the sun. In Lagos, Africa’s most populous city, towering landfills on the city’s fringes swell daily as trucks unload tons of mixed waste, while clogged canals and lagoons trap floating debris beneath the humid coastal air.

What appears to be ordinary waste is, in reality, an invisible climate threat: Methane.

Across Nigeria’s rapidly growing cities, unmanaged organic waste is releasing one of the most potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Multi-Solving Action to Methane Reduction in Nigeria (MAMRN) Project was conceived in response to this urgent environmental challenge.

When organic waste, food scraps, green waste, and agricultural residues decompose in oxygen-deprived conditions, such as open dumpsites, they produce methane (CH₄). Methane is not just another greenhouse gas. It is over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term, responsible for nearly half of the global warming already experienced, and the second-most-important anthropogenic greenhouse gas after Carbon dioxide (CO₂).

Municipal solid waste landfills globally account for approximately 11% of anthropogenic methane emissions. For every tonne of waste sent to landfill, an estimated 50–100 kg of methane may be released; equivalent to roughly 1,610 kg of Carbon dioxide (CO₂) per tonne due to methane’s high global warming potential.

Nigeria generates over 32 million tons of municipal solid waste annually, yet only about 20–30% is formally collected. More than 90% of waste in many developing regions ends up in open dumpsites, waterways, unused land, or is openly burned. 

Nigeria’s waste composition is particularly significant: approximately 50–60% of municipal solid waste is organic. This means that a large proportion of waste entering dumpsites is actively generating methane. In 2021, methane accounted for 44.6% of Nigeria’s total greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the country’s most critical climate pollutants.

With Nigeria’s population estimated at over 223 million and projected to rise significantly by 2050, urban centres such as Benin City, Jos, Lagos, and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) are expanding rapidly. Urbanisation, rising consumption patterns, and limited infrastructure have widened the gap between waste generation and effective management.

Globally, about 2.01 billion metric tonnes of municipal solid waste are produced annually, and this is expected to increase by 70% by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is projected to reach 269 million tonnes of waste per year by 2030. Nigeria mirrors this trajectory.

Nigeria is already experiencing the effects of climate change, including increased flooding and stormwater runoff, coastal erosion and sea-level rise, rising temperatures and heat waves, agricultural productivity losses, food insecurity and water scarcity, and increased disease outbreaks. Open dumpsites worsen these impacts. During heavy rainfall, flooding dislodges waste, spreading pollutants into homes, schools, and water bodies. Methane buildup within dumpsites also presents explosion hazards.

Rather than treating waste as a burden, the MAMRN project reimagines it as a resource. Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are being established to divert organic waste from dumpsites, process it into compost, sort recyclables such as plastics, glass, paper, and e-waste, integrate and strengthen the role of waste pickers, and reduce methane emissions at the source. Each facility is initially designed to manage approximately 260 tons of waste annually.

By converting organic waste into compost, the project improves soil health, reduces dependence on petroleum-based fertilisers, supports climate-smart agriculture, and minimises methane emissions from decomposition. Farmers are trained through the My Zero Waste Farm Project, with at least 20 farmers per state serving as trainers to expand adoption across communities. Organic waste is also processed through Black Soldier Fly (BSF) farming to produce high-protein animal feed, organic fertiliser, and new livelihood opportunities. This model strengthens local food systems while reducing methane emissions from landfills.

Methane reduction through improved waste management delivers multiple benefits, including lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduced flooding and pollution, improved public health outcomes, job creation for waste pickers and farmers, strengthened urban food systems, and contributions to SDGs 1, 2, 6, 7, and 13. The project aligns with Nigeria’s long-term low-emission development strategy, aiming to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050 and to transition to a circular economy.

Methane may be invisible, but its impacts are not. The rising temperatures, flooded streets, polluted waterways, and strained agricultural systems across Nigeria tell a visible story of climate vulnerability. The MAMRN Project represents a shift from open dumping to resource recovery, from unmanaged emissions to data-driven reductions, and from environmental degradation to circular-economy solutions.

By diverting organic waste, empowering communities, integrating informal waste workers, and influencing policy, Nigeria takes a practical step toward reducing methane emissions and building climate resilience. The future of Nigerian cities depends not only on how much waste is produced, but on how wisely it is managed. 

The path forward requires action from everyone.  Policymakers can strengthen regulatory frameworks that recognise waste pickers as formal climate workers and prioritise waste-sector investments in national climate plans. Development partners and funders can direct climate finance toward community-led Material Recovery Facilities and methane monitoring infrastructure. 

Businesses can adopt circular procurement practices, reducing organic waste across supply chains and supporting compost markets. Farmers can integrate compost and Black Soldier Fly products into their practices, improving soil health while cutting dependence on chemical fertilisers. And as a reader, you can start where you are: composting at home, supporting local waste initiatives, or simply sharing this blog post to grow awareness. 

In that transformation lies the power to slow global warming, protect communities, and build a cleaner, more sustainable future.

This article is the second in a series on the Methane Reduction in Nigeria (MAMRN) Project, implemented in collaboration with CfEW Jos, SraDev Lagos, Pave Lagos, CODAF Epe Lagos, and SEDI Benin City.

The post Nigeria’s 32 Million Tonnes of Annual Waste Is Doing Something Far Worse Than Polluting Streets first appeared on GAIA.

Most discussions of plastic pollution say the problem is that plastic never breaks down. A new study turns that assumption on its head, arguing the problem is that it always does – at least to some degree.

In the study, researchers introduce the concept of the “plastic particle footprint,” the mass of plastic micro- and nanoparticles that will eventually enter the environment when a given item disintegrates. Mounting evidence indicates that these plastic particles pose a risk to human and environmental health, but until now there has been no way to incorporate those concerns into standard study methodologies.

Applying their concept to four everyday manufactured objects, the researchers demonstrate how the plastic particle footprint can radically change our understanding of the sustainability of different consumer choices. “The carbon footprint only tells part of the story,” says study team member Valérie Guillard, a researcher at the University of Montpellier in France.

The plastic particle footprint is the mass of virgin plastic required to produce a given item, minus the amount of plastic that will be molecularly destroyed (such as by incineration or in the rare case of truly biodegradable plastics, by microbes) at the end of the item’s lifetime.

No one has ever proven that macro-plastics won’t crumble into micro-plastics in the medium to long term, so we must assume that they will, the researchers argue. In the long run, in other words, all plastic becomes microplastics. “The irreversibility of this pollution requires a precautionary approach,” Guillard argues.

The researchers analyzed data from published life cycle analyses of four common objects: kettles (one made of 30% plastic and another made of 50% plastic), beverage containers (glass, plastic, or aluminum with plastic liner), crates (wood or plastic), and T-shirts (cotton or polyester—a form of plastic).

 

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When carbon footprints are comparable as in the case of the two kettles, different plastic footprints can help guide consumer choices, the researchers suggest.

The item with the smallest carbon footprint does not always have the smallest plastic footprint. A cotton T-shirt has a slightly larger carbon footprint than a polyester one—but virtually no plastic footprint. Plastic bottles and aluminum cans have smaller carbon footprints than glass bottles because they take less energy to manufacture. But glass bottles and aluminum cans have smaller plastic particle footprints. And the plastic lining inside aluminum cans can leach into beverages and be ingested by consumers – making glass bottles look better and better in the final reckoning.

Sometimes the tradeoffs are not so clear. A reusable plastic crate saves 280 grams of greenhouse gas emissions compared to a wooden one, but results in 21 additional grams of plastic particle pollution. Which is worse in the big picture? How many grams of carbon dioxide is a gram of plastic pollution worth?

In order to weigh up the choices quantitatively, future research will need to link a given mass of plastic particles to a given cost to society from health impacts and so on. The time scale of impact also requires careful thought. While the carbon footprint of items is often concentrated during the manufacture and use phases, for plastic bottles and polyester clothing more than 90% of the plastic particle footprint comes after an item is discarded. “We are building a reservoir of plastic, with a toxicity debt that future generations will inherit,” Guillard says.

Source: Guillard V. et al. “A pioneering plastic particle footprint concept for addressing the challenges posed by plastic pollution.” Science Advances 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine. AI-gnerated.

By Gracia Ramirez and David Vergara-Moreno

This photo essay looks at Isla Grande, the largest coralline island of Nuestra Señora del Rosario Archipelago, which is part of the Parque Nacional Natural Corales del Rosario y de San Bernardo, in the Colombian Caribbean. The essay considers the environmental beauty and the violence that underpin Black lives on the island, and the ways in which they have resisted as a community to go forward into the future.

DOCKS

La Bodeguita dock in Cartagena de Indias is the tourists’ gateway to the promised paradise of white-sand beaches and turquoise waters of the Rosario Islands. The docks and other hard boundaries of the port witness an encounter with the polluted waters around Cartagena. This port is responsible for 70% of the country’s maritime trade and has been categorized as the third most efficient port in the world.

Although rarely mentioned by the early chroniclers, it is reasonable to infer that —prior to and during the early centuries of colonization— Cartagena’s Bay was a lush mosaic of abundant coral reefs, dense mangrove forests, and towering tropical dry forest trees.

Today, however, the bay reveals another face: murky waters, laden with sediments, polluted by centuries of maritime traffic, urban and industrial waste, and dredging works that have radically transformed its ecological cycles.

While the departure of tourism to the islands is mainly managed from La Bodeguita dock, the journey out of the bay and into the sea allows visual contact with other docks along the coast.

This is a layered cartography of memories, economies, and spatial regimes: tourist piers, logistical cargo yards, shipyards, naval bases, and private marinas. The bay is not merely a coastal landscape, it is a friction zone between multiple socio-economic and political logics: tourism, military operations, goods trade, and the communities whose ways of life are subordinated to those regimes. This is a liquid frontier: a place of circulation, exclusion, and resistance.

LOGISTICS

The archipelago of the Rosario Islands is connected not just to the Atlantic but also to another body of water, the Canal del Dique. The Spanish colonizers began its construction in the 16th century using enslaved Indigenous and African labor, with the goal of linking the Magdalena River —the nation’s main fluvial artery— with the Cartagena Bay.

Map of the Northern part of Bolívar Department, Republic of Colombia 1886-1903 (Edward Stanford, 1899, cropped). It is possible to see Cartagena de Indias, Barú island below, the Canal del Dique and the Calamar-Cartagena Railway (red line). Source: Mapoteca Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

Since then, the Canal has played a strategic role in both domestic and foreign transport and trade, evolving from wooden barges in the 17th century, to the advent of steam-powered boats in the 19th century.

For over three centuries, the Magdalena River and its canal were the only connection between Colombia’s Caribbean and its Andean provinces, linking a nation divided by three mountain ranges and a wide variety of thermal floors and ecosystems. Socially, the Canal became the route to freedom, as many runaway enslaved people (cimarrones) followed its waterways and founded Maroons communities (palenques) in the surrounding wetlands and hills during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Until the late 19th century, the Dique was merely a narrow, shallow ditch less than 15 meters wide, which was impossible to navigate during droughts. But throughout the 20th century, the canal was radically transformed. U.S. companies carried out major dredging and straightening projects that widened it to 100 meters, reducing its original 270 meanders to only 55, dramatically increasing its flow and sediment loads, altering the ecological balance of Cartagena and Barbacoas Bays and surroundings.

Despite these efforts, the canal became almost obsolete after the construction of two major highways that linked the Caribbean to the Andean region of the country in the 1950s. However, around the same time, Colombia’s largest oil refineries were established in Barrancabermeja and Cartagena.

As human geographer Austin Zeiderman argues, such infrastructures articulate geo-racial regimes and hierarchies of white and black, urban and peripheral, central and insular, that become sedimented into both Cartagenian landscapes and bodies.

MATERIALS

Excavations on the ground reveal the coralline stone, compacted after centuries of pressure and erosion. Isla Grande is a coral reef fossil itself. Coral reefs are vital ecosystems: they protect shorelines from storms, sustain local fisheries, support biodiversity, and form the ecological backbone of a tourism industry that underpins much of Cartagena city’s economy. Yet their very skeletons have been quarried and consumed. Entire islets were built for elite leisure by filling the sea with broken coral, the moneyed class literally manufacturing new islands from the bones of the reef.

Coral grounds. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

The Canal del Dique continues this slow and silent violence. Each rainy season, it expels plumes of sediment-laden freshwater that spread across several square kilometers, covering turquoise waters with brown stains. These pulses reduce salinity and block light, suffocating photosynthesis and interrupting coral reproduction cycles that coincide with the wet months. In fact, the deposits of sediment have turned the formerly island of Barú into a peninsula, following the interventions of USA engineering companies in the twentieth century.

The history of Isla Grande is intimately linked to that of Barú. Around the time of the Spanish colonization, these territories were called Bahaire after the indigenous chief that ruled them before the conquest. The Spaniards used enslaved labour to excavate quarries in Barú and Tierra Bomba, extracting coralline stone used in Cartagena’s colonial architecture. They also built kilns to burn coral stone, producing mortar for the city’s fortifications and lime for its characteristics whitewashed walls.

In the eighteenth century, the nearby island of Barú became a strategic point for cimarrones and Dutch and English smugglers who used enslaved workforce for the logistics related to trafficking. Some enslaved workers, in turn, were secretly saving money to buy their freedom to their masters –mostly Spaniards–.

Over the nineteenth century, with the crisis of slavery and the independence wars, Barú became an instance of a horizontal community formed mostly by cimarrones, freed slaves and mestizos. Their economy was based on subsistence agriculture, fishing, bartering and mutual support.

Wooden house. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

On June 7 of 1850, groups of neighbours from Barú bought an old hacienda to its then owner for 1.200 COP and finished their payment on May 19, 1851. Just two days later, the abolition of slavery was signed in the country. Thus, Barú become a Black community with collective property before the establishment of the modern-day Republican State. Coconut became the main crop and some families from Barú moved to the neighbouring Rosario Islands to extend the plantations.

Islander dwellings echo this layered material history. Traditional houses rely on wooden boards and palm-thatched roofs, fragile yet renewable. Modern constructions import thin red bricks and cement from the mainland, materials that, as they degrade, seep into the calcareous soil and alter its composition.

Seashell. Photo by David Vergara.

Cement itself is ambivalent: it raises luxury resorts that displace the community, yet it also fortifies schools and homes through collective labor. In their very texture, these materials tell two stories at once—of extraction and restriction, but also of resilience and re-creation.

ORIKA

Right at the centre of Isla Grande is now the town of Orika. An old rubber tree guards the town’s square and provides shelter from the sun. The Cultural House is the gathering place where local council meetings (juntas) take place. The story of Orika is one of socioecological struggle and resistance.

Over the twentieth century, Barú started supplying agricultural goods to the growing Cartagena population, shifting toward intensive production of coconut, fish and mangrove charcoal. Up until the 1950s –when roads were constructed to connect Cartagena with other inland cities– the Rosario islands and Barú were the main providers of food sold at the city’s Getsemani market.

Rubber Tree in Benkos Biohó Square, Orika, Isla Grande, PNNCRSB. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

The first tourists were members of Cartagena’s urban elite. They arrived at the Rosario Islands between the 1930s and 1940s and started building recreational homes. While tourist infrastructure was consolidating around Cartagena and the islands, a beetle plague destroyed the coconut plantations in the 1950s.

In order to “protect” the islands, the government declared them National Natural Park in 1977, but the National Park mainly considered the sea, not the ground islands themselves. The decree sought to “conserve flora, fauna, landscapes, and historical and cultural manifestations with scientific, recreative or aesthetic goals”, but omitted any mention of the Blacks communities that already inhabited the territory (Rosario Islands, Barú, Santa Ana and Ararca).

New prohibitionist environmental policies, coupled with the rise of tourism, relegated local families to the hinterlands of Isla Grande and to the backs of hotels and resorts, where they worked as subordinate labor.

In the 1980s, the government declared the Rosario Islands to be State-owned vacant lands, unrecognising the community as a “organized population” for the use of land but allowing other economical uses such as tourism and recreation. This enabled a wave of land grabs by private investors that further marginalised the community. However, the 1991 Constitution and the ensuing law 70 of Black Communities of 1993 provided legal tools to transform the memory of dispossession into a fight for recognition.

The community used environmental education programs to strengthen social organizations and articulate their historical demands into a juridical argument. In 2001, after years of legal limbo, the Colombian state began the land restitution process.

Fearing expulsion from the territory, the families decided to establish a new village in the center of Isla Grande: Orika, in honor of the daughter of Benkos Biohó, a cimarron leader and hero of San Basilio de Palenque, the first Black free village in the Americas (1714). In just two months, the community cleared the land and built their houses, a gesture of dignity and memory, affirming their right to exist as a Black community in their ancestral territory. After collecting evidence and going through endless administrative hurdles, in 2014 the Constitutional Court recognized the collective deed title for the Black community of Isla Grande, becoming the only community having achieved that so far within the national park.

UNBOUNDEDNESS

Sunset horizons and native trees may meet the tourist’s gaze as landscapes ready for easy consumption— postcards of “untouched nature.” Yet the town of Orika unsettles this commodified view. Its soundscape resists containment: sound systems (picós) blasting loud music reverberates from the main square, echoing through every coralline ground cavity, vibrating as much in bodies as in stone.

In language, too, survival leaves its trace. The word Dios circulates as the name of the Christian god, but within it hides the untranslatable presence of African spirits, invoked yet unconfined by letters. This is not syncretism as tourist folklore, but the deep mimicry of African cosmologies that persisted beneath colonial surveillance.

In the Colombian Caribbean, enslaved Africans lived not in the vast monocultures of the sugar plantations of Brazil or Cuba, but in smaller, multiethnic communities tied to haciendas, cattle ranches, mines, and urban centres under the close watch of the Inquisition tribunal of Cartagena.

Cut off early from eighteen century renewed arrivals of African captives, these populations developed distinctive spiritual practices, an instance of what Sylvia Wynter called “black indigenization”— that in intertwining African, indigenous, and Christian forms, found ways of being human when colonial hegemony ruled otherwise.

Orika inhabits this layered spiritual geography. It is not simply a village bounded by its streets, but a porous space where music, light, and faith exceed enclosure—an unlimited terrain of survival, memory, and reinvention.

ROOTS

Mangrove forests form the living roots of Isla Grande. They are among the most resilient trees on Earth—thriving where others would perish. Their bodies adapt to saline soils and shifting tides, standing firm where land is not yet land.

Propagules germinate while still attached to the parent tree, dropping into the water as living seedlings that drift across lagoons and channels, anchoring themselves wherever conditions allow. Each root is a promise of survival, each forest a nursery that shelters fish, crabs, and birds in any of their stages of life. Mangroves breathe through aerial roots that rise above the mud, searching for oxygen in conditions too harsh for most species. Always green, they embody endurance.

The mangrove is never alone. Its leaves, roots, and fallen branches decompose into nutrients that sustain fish and crustaceans; its tangled roots interlace with seagrass meadows and coral reefs in a single inter-ecosystemic web. Together, these systems form the ecological triangle of the Caribbean coast: corals buffer waves, seagrasses filter and stabilize sediments, mangroves hold the shoreline while feeding both sea and land. In Isla Grande, these roots not only prevent erosion but also connect the island’s fragile ecology to Cartagena’s coastal mangroves, weaving life across waters.

For Orika, the mangrove is more than ecology—it is a metaphor for community. Like the red mangrove that elevates itself above its roots, the people rise from centuries of exclusion, rooted yet expansive. Their history drifts like propagules, carried by tides of resistance until finding ground to grow.

The mangrove teaches resilience, interconnection, and renewal: lessons for a community that continues to defend its territory while imagining futures where culture and ecology flourish together. Roots here are not only in soil, but in memory and struggle, anchoring Orika to both the Caribbean Sea and to its own unfolding horizon.

DRIFT

There are no roads in Isla Grande, only sandy footpaths weaving through the tropical dry forest and the mangroves. No motorized vehicles circulate within the island, people walk or ride bicycles, while boats and yachts, arriving from Cartagena, leave trails of oil shimmering over the turquoise surface.

Caribbean Sea water around Isla Grande. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Plastic bottles and rubbish drift ashore, carried by tides that remember more than the islanders would wish. Drift here is both material and historical: traces of empire, slavery, tourism, and extraction wash against the reef, staining waters once clear. The islands themselves are a coral body in constant erosion and recomposition, a living drift of stone, memory, and survival.

Plastic and vegetable waste. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Yet drift is not only decline—it is also possibility. Orika, born out of dispossession, has become a node of reorganization and creativity. The community council anchors collective life, negotiating with agencies and hotels that now contribute resources for communal projects.

Every weekend, and on national and local holidays, happiness brightens the whole town in shared spaces like the main Plaza (Benkos Biohó Plaza), the picós, the cockpits, houses and the Casa Cultural. A new foundation works with children and youth, teaching them to stage traditional dances and music, reweaving ancestral ties to the palenques and to African rhythms long suppressed.

Ecotourism initiatives, led by younger generations, form alliances with older community projects, offering alternatives that value culture and ecology together.

Buildings around Benkos Biohó Square in Orika. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Drift, then, also gestures toward a different horizon. In Orika, the tides carry not only the weight of history but also the seeds of futures yet to come. The Rosario Islands are a historical drift still evolving—where coral, memory, and community recombine into new forms of life.

 

The post Notes on Isla Grande: Figurations of Environmental Violence and Beauty in the Colombian Caribbean appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

A decade ago, illicit gold miners in the Brazilian Amazon began invading the lands of the Yanomami people. New research finds a clear link between the rush of illegal mining and a surge of malaria among the Yanomami.

Read more on E360 →

Washington, D.C. | May 18, 2026— Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a proposed rollback, removing 4 PFAS from their 2024 national, legally enforceable, and scientifically supported Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) drinking water standards while also proposing a two year delay, until 2031, for drinking water systems to comply with the enforceable limits.

The four PFAS slated for removal from the drinking water regulations include “GenX,” the forever chemical that replaced PFOA, which is widely used and has contaminated the drinking water source of 500,000 people in North Carolina and the Ohio River; PFHxS and PFNA, which are found in the blood of more than 95 percent of people living in the U.S., and PFBS which is a replacement for PFOS and still actively being produced and used in the U.S. These four PFAS have been linked to adverse effects on the liver, kidneys, and immune system, developmental and reproductive harm, and hormone disruption. 

In response to the announcement of today’s standard, the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments Executive Director Katie Huffling, DNP, RN, CNM, FAAN issued the following statement: 

“PFAS chemicals are associated with many expensive, harmful chronic diseases and there are a myriad of PFAS in drinking water besides PFOA and PFOS, including the 4 PFAS whose standards EPA is proposing to repeal. There are thousands of additional PFAS that could be contaminating our drinking water that EPA does not currently monitor for. The EPA cannot be confident that simply monitoring and treating for only PFOA and PFOS will be sufficient as this is not supported by the evidence. With the Administration simultaneously proposing a 52% cut in EPA’s budget and the Drinking Water State Revolving Funds receiving an 87% cut, these actions will result in a huge step backwards and will not make America healthy again. Nurses will continue to fight for health protective science-based regulations.”

Most people are exposed to mixtures of PFAS and there is sufficient evidence that certain PFAS are associated with negative health outcomes including decreased antibody responses and dyslipidemia in both adults and children as well as decreased infant and fetal growth and increased risk of kidney cancer in adults. There will be a 60-day public comment period, and EPA will hold a public hearing on July 7, 2026. 

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Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments (ANHE) is the leading global nursing organization focused on the intersection of human and planetary health.  ANHE champions nurses as critical to promoting and protecting human health from environmental harm associated with degradation and disruption of Earth’s natural systems, especially for populations that are disproportionately exposed and overburdened. ANHE leads in engaging, educating, and mobilizing nurses in support of environmental health equity and justice.

http://enviRN.org

The post Nurses Oppose EPA’s Proposal to Rollback and Delay PFAS Drinking Water Protections appeared first on ANHE.

A new company YumLit is working to bring joy to family mealtimes through interactive light-up plates. As a social venture, they plan to share proceeds with nonprofit organizations committed to tackling food and nutrition insecurity in their communities and around the world.

The inspiration for the company came to Janet Lawson and her husband Seth Coan during a family dinner. After finishing his meal, their three-year-old son expressed excitement when he discovered the cartoon lion on his plate.

“It was a fun reward,” Lawson tells Food Tank. She and Coan wondered if they could inspire that same joy in other children by making plates come to life in some way.

This question led to the development of colorful, screen-free dishes that light up when a child reveals the design underneath. Lawson and Coan hope that the plates encourage children to build healthy eating habits while reducing stress at mealtimes.

“We created YumLit to make meals feel more fun and encouraging for kids,” Lawson says.

The launch of YumLit is a pivot for the couple, who recently moved to Washington State after living in Morocco. Lawson worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where she focused on building more resilient food and agriculture systems. Coan, an environmental engineer, was focused on climate solutions and sustainability.

Funding cuts and the dismantling of USAID led to job losses and big transitions for the family. But even as she moves into the world of entrepreneurship, Lawson says that she is still driven by the same goals she’s always had: ending food and nutrition insecurity and advancing climate resilience.

“I was very interested in how…we could have some type of social impact,” Lawson says.

YumLit created the YumLit Luminaries Program, which allows organizations to convert the sale of a plate into a donation for their community. When anyone purchases a plate through a luminary’s unique link, 10 percent of proceeds will go to a nonprofit focusing on food access, hunger relief, or nutrition support. They are also planning to donate US$1 from every plate sold to nonprofit partners working to tackle childhood hunger.

“We know that a lot of organizations are experiencing the fallout not just from USAID grants, but other federal funding that has been reduced, and they are really struggling as well,” Lawson tells Food Tank.

The reception to the plates has been positive, says Lawson, with pediatric nutritionists and feeding specialists excited by the idea.

YumLit just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help the company scale and she expects plates will be in supporters’ hands toward the end of this year.

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 YumLit

The post YumLit Combines Playful Mealtimes With a Mission to End Food Insecurity appeared first on Food Tank.

3 June | Online | 16:00 London | 11:00 New York | 11:00 Boston | 8:00 San Francisco

Automotive companies are widely positioned as transition leaders. But new analysis suggests investors may be significantly underestimating their exposure to oil demand and carbon risk.

Join Carbon Tracker and InfluenceMap for a 45-minute investor briefing on our forthcoming Oil Companies in Disguise – 2026 Edition report.

Our research finds that:

• Across major global automakers, reported Scope 3 emissions may underestimate real-world emissions by 33% on average.
• This “Carbon Gap” is driven by optimistic assumptions on vehicle lifetime, hybrid usage, and emissions boundaries.
• When adjusted for real-world conditions, some automakers exhibit carbon intensity levels comparable to, or exceeding, oil and gas companies.
• Hybrid-heavy strategies may be prolonging oil demand and increasing long-term stranded asset risk.
• Diverging electrification strategies are creating clear winners and laggards in the transition.

For investors, this raises a critical question: Are automotive portfolios carrying hidden oil exposure that is not being priced in?

What this webinar will give you:

This session is designed to provide practical, decision-relevant insights for investors, including:

• How to identify hidden carbon liabilities in automaker disclosures.
• What the “Carbon Gap” means for risk and portfolio alignment.
• Which OEM strategies are reducing vs extending exposure to oil-linked revenues.
• How to incorporate BEV sales share and emissions realism into investment analysis.
• Key questions for engagement, stewardship, and voting decisions.
• What evolving carbon accounting debates could mean for future disclosure reliability.

This webinar is a high-impact briefing for investors assessing climate risk, transition credibility, and capital allocation in the global automotive sector.

Speakers:

• Ben Scott, Head of Energy Demand, Carbon Tracker
• Ben Youriev, Director of LobbyMap Research on Energy, Mining and Transport, InfluenceMap

The post Oil Companies in Disguise: Are Investors Mispricing Automotive Climate Risk? (Americas Session) appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

3 June | Online | 9:00 London | 16:00 Hong Kong | 17:00 Tokyo | 18:00 Sydney

Automotive companies are widely positioned as transition leaders. But new analysis suggests investors may be significantly underestimating their exposure to oil demand and carbon risk.

Join Carbon Tracker and InfluenceMap for a 45-minute investor briefing on our forthcoming Oil Companies in Disguise – 2026 Edition report.

Our research finds that:

• Across major global automakers, reported Scope 3 emissions may underestimate real-world emissions by 33% on average.
• This “Carbon Gap” is driven by optimistic assumptions on vehicle lifetime, hybrid usage, and emissions boundaries.
• When adjusted for real-world conditions, some automakers exhibit carbon intensity levels comparable to, or exceeding, oil and gas companies.
• Hybrid-heavy strategies may be prolonging oil demand and increasing long-term stranded asset risk.
• Diverging electrification strategies are creating clear winners and laggards in the transition.

For investors, this raises a critical question: Are automotive portfolios carrying hidden oil exposure that is not being priced in?

What this webinar will give you:

This session is designed to provide practical, decision-relevant insights for investors, including:

• How to identify hidden carbon liabilities in automaker disclosures.
• What the “Carbon Gap” means for risk and portfolio alignment.
• Which OEM strategies are reducing vs extending exposure to oil-linked revenues.
• How to incorporate BEV sales share and emissions realism into investment analysis.
• Key questions for engagement, stewardship, and voting decisions.
• What evolving carbon accounting debates could mean for future disclosure reliability.

This webinar is a high-impact briefing for investors assessing climate risk, transition credibility, and capital allocation in the global automotive sector.

Speakers:

• Ben Scott, Head of Energy Demand, Carbon Tracker
• Ben Youriev, Director of LobbyMap Research on Energy, Mining and Transport, InfluenceMap

The post Oil Companies in Disguise: Are Investors Mispricing Automotive Climate Risk? (Asia-Pacific/Europe Session) appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

On 30th April, The Guardian published an article ‘Germany was largest exporter of plastic waste in 2025, sending 810,000 tonnes overseas, analysis finds’ based on a deep dive by Leana Hosea, of Watershed Investigations. It spotlights work by BFFP members, Basel Action Network and Jan Dell of The Last Beach Cleanup.

The headline is stark: Germany was the world’s largest exporter of plastic waste in 2025, shipping over 810,000 tonnes abroad, with the UK close behind at more than 675,000 tonnes. Much of this waste continues to flow to countries like Türkiye, Malaysia and Indonesia, where repeated investigations, like those conducted by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), link imports to environmental harm, illegal dumping and burning and wider social impacts.

This is exactly why sustained, evidence-based advocacy matters. It is encouraging to see the foundations laid by years of campaigning beginning to translate into policy shifts, particularly with tighter controls in Europe.

But the story doesn’t end with an export ban to non-OECD countries slated for  November 2026.

As export restrictions evolve, there is a very real risk of displacement rather than reduction. The EIA is already watching this closely in Türkiye, the UK and across eastern European countries, where capacity constraints and enforcement gaps could once again concentrate harm. The reality in Türkiye, despite its claim to be a "zero waste" champion and government-led greenwashing, is that many regions are overwhelmed by huge amounts of waste that far exceed recycling capacity, with shocking imagery and harm, and citizens bearing the brunt of this pollution.

https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WhatsApp-Video-2026-05-19-at-12.45.07-PM.mp4

At the same time, it is genuinely encouraging to see the proactive energy emerging from European enforcement authorities as they work collaboratively across borders to address illegal waste trade and strengthen oversight. That momentum will be critical in the transition away from exports.

Because ultimately, this is not just a waste management issue. It is a systemic failure in how we produce, use and externalise the costs of plastic. And it is one we can no longer afford to export.

Yet every time such a media story appears on the international plastic waste trade, a familiar pattern follows. A highly presentable, data-heavy, modelling-oriented academic voice appears and says, in essence: “Actually, this is not quite correct, because our calculations show something else.” Then comes the usual lecture: we need “accurate information”, we need to be “consistent”, we need to “look at the data properly”.

Of course, accuracy matters. Data matters. Consistency matters.

But there is a serious problem when this type of intervention systematically ignores the most important part of the story: the environmental harm, the human cost, the occupational deaths, the illegal practices, the invisible pollution, and the fact that plastic waste trade is not merely a technical trade-flow issue.

We saw this pattern again after The Guardian article. Our views were included in that article, specifically on the environmental pollution dimension. And that is exactly where we think the discussion must remain focused. Because this is not simply a matter of whether one database, model, or trade-flow estimate is more elegant than another.

The data landscape itself is already deeply problematic: Comtrade, Eurostat and WTO-related datasets do not always capture the full picture. 

In fact, in a recent presentation by officials from the Turkish Ministry of Trade, we saw figures indicating that Türkiye imported around 1.3 million tonnes of plastic waste from the EU in 2024. You cannot find these figures anywhere else, they are very unlikely to be fabricated. So when there are such major discrepancies between different datasets, it is not intellectually serious to dismiss investigative journalism by simply saying: “Your data are incomplete; our model is better.”

That is not scientific rigour. That is selective framing. And selective framing becomes especially problematic when it repeatedly comes from people who are very comfortable defending industry collaboration, while directing most of their criticism toward civil society, investigative journalists, and environmental advocates.

The plastic waste trade is not just an economic transaction. It is a pollution issue, a human rights issue and also a colonial issue.

Imported plastic waste washes up on beaches, thick as snowdrifts. Yet unlike snow, they break down into harmful microplastics and leach toxic chemicals into the water and soil. Image credits: Vedat Örüç.

Therefore, any commentary on this issue that reduces the debate to a technical dispute over datasets, while ignoring the environmental and human consequences, should be treated with caution. Science is not a decorative shield for political convenience. And “data” should not be used as a smoke screen to obscure pollution, injustice, and accountability. The real question is not only how many tonnes were traded. The real question is: who pays the environmental and human price for this trade?

These thoughts were originally shared as posts on LinkedIn.

Authors:

Amy Youngman (International Environmental Attorney, Environmental Investigation Agency)

Sedat Gündoğdu (Professor at Cukurova University | Head of Microplastic Research Group | Marine Pollution Researcher | Researcher at Istanbul Policy Center/Sabancı University)

The Stay Grounded Network has launched a new project: The Red Lines for Airports project aims to unite groups across Europe – and beyond – in their struggle against airport expansion projects. As part of this, we’re also running a European Tour, going directly to local struggles, building connections, and supporting with workshops and skillshares. Here, Charlène Fleury, explains how people came…

Source

Headline News:

• “Worst-Case Global Warming Projection Cut By 1°C” • The fall in the cost of solar and wind energy puts a high-fossil-fuel future increasingly out of reach, and climate policies are helping drive emissions down. Some top climate scientists reduced the upper limit of their worst-case global warming scenario to 3.5°C above pre-industrial levels, down from 4.5°C. [Euronews]

Nuuk Greenland (Aningaaq Rosing Carlsen, Unsplash)

• “Wind Leads Ireland Electricity Mix In April” • Wind was the largest contributor to Ireland’s electricity mix in April, making up 38% of total generation. EirGrid said renewables generated 48% of electricity during the month, including 6% from grid-scale solar, for the third consecutive month where renewables met around half of electricity demand. [reNews]
• “UPDATED: NextEra, Dominion To Form $420 Billion Power Giant” • NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy are set to merge, the two companies announced today. The move will create the world’s largest regulated electric utility, and one of the world’s largest energy infrastructure companies. The transaction creates a mammoth utility. [reNews]
• “NTPC adds 5,488 MW Renewable Energy Capacity In FY26” • NTPC Group has added 5,488 MW of renewable energy capacity in FY26, including solar, wind, and pumped storage projects, strengthening its clean energy portfolio. Beyond conventional generation, NTPC has also diversified into such emerging energy businesses as storage. [pv magazine India]
• “Electricity Generation From Solar Could Exceed Coal In ERCOT For The First Time In 2026” • In its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook, the US EIA forecast that annual electric power generation from utility-scale solar plants will surpass that from coal plants for the first time in 2026 within the electricity grid that covers most of Texas. [CleanTechnica]

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