News Feeds

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 26, 2026 thru Sat, May 2, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (8 articles)

• Why delaying climate action now means higher seas by 2100 The Conversation, Helen Millman, Martin Siegert, Richard Alley, Apr 24, 2026.
• Next El Niño could be tipping point for a hotter climate Pacific heat pulse is temporary, but scientists warn that its climate impacts are not. Ars Technica, Bob Berwyn, Apr 27, 2026.
• The world is getting too hot to feed itself A new UN report maps how extreme heat is tearing through every layer of the global food system — and mostly overlooks the people at the heart of it. Grist, Ayurella Horn-Muller, Apr 27, 2026.
• Red Alert: India Heat Index Turns Dangerous As Viral Reddit Post Shows 42-44°C Glow Red Amidst Urban Heat Crisis Record-breaking heat and urban heat islands intensify India's heatwave crisis, posing severe health risks International Business Times, Rohit David, Apr 27, 2026.
• Europe is warming more than TWICE as fast as the global average, report reveals - as scientists warn 'climate change is not a future threat, it is our present reality' Experts say that Europe's rapid warming is driving a wave of extreme weather, heat-related deaths, and devastating wildfires. Daily Mail UK, editorial@mailonline.co.uk (Editor), Apr 29, 2026.
• Major hurricanes in the Northeast are rare. Could climate change make them common? Nuanced analysis of possible changes in hurricane behavior by expert Jeff Masters Yale Climate Connections, Jeff Masters, Apr 29, 2026.
• Surgeon warns that climate change can disrupt cancer care Wildfires, storms, and floods can lead to missed appointments and hospital closures – with life-and-death consequences. Yale Climate Connections, YCC Team, Apr 30, 2026.
• Climate Change is Destroying Lives... Now ClimateAdam on Youtube, Adam Levy, Apr 30. 2026.

Miscellaneous (5 articles)

• China`s solar exports reach "gigantic" record in March as energy crisis bites China exported a record amount of solar components and photovoltaic panels last month, as the Iran war drives stronger demand for clean energy technologies. Climate Home News, Chloé Farand, Apr 22, 2026.
• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #17 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 19, 2026 thru Sat, April 25, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler, John Hartz & Doug Bostrom, Apr 26, 2026.
• World `will not see significant return to coal` in 2026 - despite Iran crisis A much-discussed ''return to coal'' by some countries in the wake of the Iran war is likely to be far more limited than thought, amounting to a global rise of no more than 1.8% in coal power output this year. Carbon Brief, Josh Gabbatiss, Apr 28, 2026.
• What fossil fuels really cost us in a world at war 'Governments are under pressure to respond to rising fuel and food costs and deepening energy poverty. It’s time for a power shift'' Climate Home News, Megan Rowling, Apr 29, 2026.
• `A study showed…` isn`t enough - scientific knowledge builds incrementally as researchers investigate and revisit questions A professor of geography offers tips on how to make skepticism genuine and useful. The Conversation, Jeffrey A. Lee, Apr 30, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (4 articles)

• Rivers worldwide reveal greenhouse gas rise that's been overlooked for decades Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) quantify how rivers worldwide are under severe stress as they warm, losing oxygen and as a result emitting increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. Phys.org, KIT press office, Apr 27, 2026.
• Antarctica`s ice shelves are vulnerable to melting from below - knowing how far ocean heat reaches is crucial A rare dataset collected by instruments at the point where Antarctica’s largest ice shelf begins to float reveals ocean processes that drive melting at this critical part of the continent. The Conversation, Craig Stevens, Apr 28, 2026.
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #18 2026 Skeptical Science's latest survey of climate research includes 114 academic research articles in 55 journals by 1150 contributing authors, and 14 government and NGO reports. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Apr 30, 2026.
• Higher warming predictions for 2026 and 2027 An update to my December estimates of global temperatures over the next two years The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather, Apr 30, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (3 articles)

• Climate policy isn`t partisan - research suggests more on the right support it than oppose it The Conversation, Emily Huddart, Tony Silva, Apr 28, 2026.
• If it feels like the world is rejecting science and truth, here are five ways to fight back | Helen Pearson All of us can choose to consider facts, not vibes, in our next decision. One simple hack is go and look up some easily accessible peer-reviewed studies The Guardian, Helen Pearson, Apr 28, 2026.
• How an army of volunteers is fighting climate misinformation online Instead of arguing with trolls, they’re amplifying the truth. Yale Climate Connections, YCC Team, May 01, 2026.

International Climate Conferences and Agreements (3 articles)

• Colombia hosts talks on exiting fossil fuels as global energy crisis deepens More than 50 countries, including oil producers and major consumers, are converging in Colombia for a fossil-fuel exit conference. Los Angeles Times, Fabiano Maisonnave, Apr 26, 2026.
• Six nations at Santa Marta could shape fossil fuel futures A small but critical handful of countries attending the conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels remain deeply committed to expanding their fossil fuel output. Climate Home News, Megan Rowling, Apr 29, 2026.
• Santa Marta: Key outcomes from first summit on `transitioning away` from fossil fuels Countries attending a first-of-its-kind summit have walked away with plans to develop national roadmaps away from fossil fuels, along with new tools to address harmful subsidies and carbon-intensive trade. Carbon Brief, Daisy Dunne, Apr 30, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (2 articles)

• How better weather forecasts could save lives New research finds improved weather forecasts could reduce heat deaths as the climate warms. Futurity, U. Arizona, Apr 26, 2026.
• Peatlands are vital for tackling climate change, yet scientists still haven`t found them all English - The Conversation, Alice Milner, Apr 28, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (2 articles)

• Fossil-Fuel Funded GOP Leaders Claim a Renowned Scientific Institution Has `Potential Conflicts of Interest` Republican allies of the oil and gas industry question the objectivity of an independent report from the nation’s top science advisers on the harms of human-caused climate change. Inside Climate News, Liza Gross, Apr 24, 2026.
• Germany`s climate U-turn is the worst possible response to the oil shock 'Prices at the pump have leapt since the start of the conflict – but clinging to fossil fuels will only prolong the pain.'' The Guardian, Tania Roettger, May 01, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

• Climate Science Under Siege: Dr. Michael Mann on Fighting Fossil Fuel Disinformation Youtube, David Fenton, Apr 19, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

The new data center proposed for a quiet city about 115 miles east of San Diego came across people’s radars in different ways.

For patrons of the deli on West Aten Road, it was the white “Not In My Backyard” signs jutting out of lawns.  

For local irrigation district workers, it was something called an “electric service application.” 

For Margie Padilla, it was a rant on Facebook.

The 43-year-old mom came across a post online while she had a few minutes to scan social media last spring after a day spent tending her garden and taking care of her two boys.

“Somebody was complaining about this center,” Padilla said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’” 

What’s going on is the second-largest new data center being considered statewide, which would be less than half a mile from Padilla’s stucco home in the center of Imperial Valley. If finished by 2028, as the developer expects, the at least 950,000-square-foot, two-story data center could be the largest operating statewide, taking up 17 football fields’ worth of land. 

The roughly $10 billion, 330-megawatt data center would require 750,000 gallons of water a day to operate, said developer Sebastian Rucci, who insists electricity and water costs won’t rise due to the data center. 

The proposed 330-megawatt data center in Imperial, Calif., is slated to take up 17 football fields of land and needs 750,000 gallons of water a day. Courtesy of Sebastian Rucci

“We have studies on the air. We have studies on the water. The electricity could be handled,” Rucci said. “We did our homework.” 

Imperial officials haven’t quelled local concerns, only noting that the project is facing litigation and that the center’s long-term impacts on utilities haven’t been determined. 

On top of the financial burden of maintaining her family’s health, gas and grocery expenses strain Padilla’s budget, and she’s worried a new data center will only increase water and power costs. Padilla, who first heard of the data center a year ago, has only grown more concerned, and she’s not alone. 

Some residents would see it from their backyards.

“I can only imagine the rates going up once that data center is up and running,” she said, shading her eyes from the beaming sun.

This is one of two dozen data centers expected to open in California in the next few years.

Growing concern and regulatory gaps

A majority of respondents to a nationwide poll by the US Water Alliance’s Value of Water campaign share Padilla’s worries, with 54 percent extremely or very concerned about the effect data centers will have on water quality, water supply, and costs in their area. 

In its first question about data centers since the poll began in 2016, two-thirds of voters said it was important for their state to have a plan for the effects of data centers on water in the coming years.

“I suspect that as data centers continue to be part of the broad conversation, then these numbers will probably continue to go up as people are more concerned about the impacts they have on the things that affect them and their communities, like supply, quality and cost,” said Scott Berry, the senior advisor on policy and external affairs at the US Water Alliance, from Water Week in Washington D.C. this month.

More than 90 percent of data centers in the U.S. get most of the water they need for cooling from municipal systems, estimated Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. 

During the hottest summer days, a large 100-megawatt facility can use about 1 million gallons of water for evaporative cooling. That amount is the same as about 10,000 people’s daily water use at home, Ren said. 

But those centers require “zero water for many days of the year when it’s cool outside,” he said.

Some data centers are exploring alternatives like treated wastewater or graywater for cooling instead of drinkable water, providing residents and officials with options that could reduce strain on local water supplies.

California doesn’t require AI data centers to report water usage, and the state’s Water Resources Control Board does not maintain a specific list of water rights held by data centers. Although residents are working to require more transparency about water use from data centers, recent efforts to require the facilities’ owners to report how much water they use to the state have faltered.

On top of the data center boom in California, the hundreds of water districts, a deepening Southwestern megadrought and the diminishing of the Colorado River increasingly complicate water issues. 

Also, while data centers can take as little as two to three years to build, developing new water sources can take as long as 20 years, said Ren.

Plans for the steep increase in water demand from California data centers inevitably focus on infrastructure, experts said.

“Water is not purely an environmental issue,” Ren noted. “In many places, it is fundamentally an infrastructure challenge.”

Across the country, water infrastructure upgrades are estimated to cost between $10 billion to $58 billion, Ren’s research team found. How many more facilities are built and where will be a big factor in future infrastructure costs.

The site of the proposed data center in Imperial, California. Steven Rodas / Inside Climate News

The amount of electricity a data center uses, to some degree, determines how much heat it produces, and consequently how much cooling it requires and, in turn, how much water it needs.

The Imperial County data center is one of 24 planned for completion across California by 2030, according to the latest information gathered by analysts at Cleanview, a market intelligence platform. 

Based on the about 1.7 GW of electricity the proposed data centers would use, with at least two projects for which there aren’t energy consumption figures, water infrastructure upgrade costs just for the demands of the centers in the state could run from about $200 million to $800 million, Ren said.

“This number assumes that California data centers’ water use intensity is the same as the national average,” he explained.

There is no central permitting authority for data centers in California, and most are overseen by city and county governments, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Data Center Map shows 286 of the facilities currently operating in California.

While California’s size and tech focus lead some to expect many more data centers here, the cost and availability of power and land, as well as the general tax and regulatory climate, have been hurdles to building them out, according to the Data Center Coalition, which represents big corporations like Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

Read Next Texas is giving data centers more than $1 billion in tax breaks each year Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune

Nonetheless, California trails only Virginia and Texas in the number of individual data center locations, but its centers have much lower total new electricity capacity, which may also indicate lower water demand.

A research team at the University of California, Riverside, recently found that data centers could collectively require 697 to 1,451 million gallons per day (MGD) of new water capacity nationally through 2030. New York City’s average daily supply is about 1,000 MGD.

Currently, data centers are estimated to use about 39 billion gallons of water nationally each year, Khara Boender, the senior manager for state policy at the Data Center Coalition, said, citing market research from Bluefield. 

“I know when we start to talk about billions of gallons of water in a year, that sounds absolutely crazy,” Boender said. “Looking at how that falls into context with some of these other large water users, I think that that kind of contextualization could be surprising to folks.”

Alfalfa irrigation in California’s Imperial Valley alone uses more than 800 billion gallons a year, an April essay in Outside highlighted. The beverage industry uses 533 billion gallons of water a year, and the semiconductor industry uses 59 billion gallons, Boender noted.

But spikes in water needs for data centers can lead to bottlenecks in small community water systems, Ren, at the University of California, Riverside, noted. “Only comparing the annual totals can obscure the real water challenge,” he said.

There is no single fix for the pressure data centers are placing on water supplies across the state, which will be different depending on the location and water systems where each facility is built, said Shivaji Deshmukh, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — the largest supplier of treated water in the U.S. The district serves 19 million people in six California counties.

“Every community — even within our service area — is different in terms of costs, what type of supply they have. Some regions have access to groundwater. Some have access to treated wastewater or recycled water somewhere along the coast,” Deshmukh said.

So industries, most of which require water for cooling, will look to satisfy that thirst from different sources, depending on their location. 

“Imperial Irrigation District is one where I know they’re discussing … installation of data centers in their area,” Deshmukh said.

The Imperial dilemma

The plot of dirt on West Aton Road betrays nothing of the colossal data center that could one day sit on the land. Owner Sebastian Rucci hopes to have the facility up and running by the summer of 2028, he said.

Rucci, who is also a lawyer, has purchased 235 acres for his data center so far. He says the data center will allow Google to train its Gemini artificial intelligence, although Google denies any involvement “in a data center project in Imperial County.”

Before he can begin building on the site, a judge will weigh in on the city of Imperial’s lawsuit against the project, which demands that it clear higher environmental hurdles, including the California Environmental Quality Act — which often draws ire from developers who claim it can needlessly stall proposals. The local water district also has to complete its review of the project.

Rucci is determined, though, citing a series of studies conducted by survey and consulting groups, and by the district itself, which manages water and provides power. He posted those reports online to show the data center made sense — in part because water and power could be effectively provided to the data center, and the land was permitted for industrial use. 

Margie Padilla tours her garden on April 16, where she holds a carrot that she thinks hasn’t grown well due to drier temperatures in the Imperial Valley. Steven Rodas / Inside Climate News

The debate between supporters and opponents of the facility has escalated, with the next court date set for the end of April.

With that date in mind, Padilla, the Imperial mother, set out to work in her garden on a balmy Thursday morning. 

Donning a green, short-sleeved shirt and flip-flops, she checked on her squash, poked at her cherry tomatoes, and dug in her spade to move periwinkle to a better spot for watering. And through it all, she wondered what the thirst of the proposed data center would do to her garden. And her monthly water bill.

Her payment for water, sewer, and trash services currently ranges from $90 to $130 a month — more than double what she paid six years ago. 

“I’m also afraid they’re going to put [water] restrictions for us, for the residents,” said Padilla, who estimates her family of four uses about 300 gallons of water a day. “That’s going to be harsh on me, particularly, because of my garden. I grow my own food, my own vegetables.” 

Worries over power and water price surges are misguided, Rucci said. He has been considering power and water needs for the 18 months he has worked on the project, he said, and outlined how it would bring various economic benefits to the region, including about 100 permanent jobs post-construction. 

Read Next Data centers are straining the grid. Can they be forced to pay for it? Naveena Sadasivam

Still, Padilla is thinking about other things. She says her two sons were anemic when they were younger, requiring them to eat fresh produce to supplement the iron their bodies needed. Even after treating the condition, the Imperial mom keeps her sons’ diet filled with veggies and fruits. She needs her garden for that.

The Imperial Irrigation District declined to be interviewed for this story but, in a written statement, noted that it has yet to receive a formal request for water for the project.

The District, which provides water and power to all of Imperial County as well as parts of Riverside and San Diego counties, did not have specific estimates of how demand from the data center could impact its costs.

“Water was very concerning to us from the beginning,” Rucci said.

He’s spoken with city officials in Imperial and El Centro to arrange a water deal for the facility, he said, and proposed getting 6 million gallons per day of reclaimed water from both cities.

“Our plan was we would do all the municipal upgrades at our cost, and then we would take the excess water and run it clean to the Salton Sea,” he said. 

Those conversations have not paid off, although Rucci said he remains hopeful municipal officials will help him get water for his facility. 

“We first tried to do reclaimed water. I still prefer that, but that seems to be taking months, and I don’t know if that … will happen,” Rucci said. “Probably we’ll just get it from the [Imperial Irrigation District]” by purchasing it for industrial use.

How the center obtains its water may change as its plans are updated, he added. 

Through it all, he remains confident the data center will be built in Imperial County and be good for the area.

Carolina Paez disagrees.

The 46-year-old mother’s backyard abuts the data center site. She says she’d be able to hit it with a rock from her property. 

Both she and her son have asthma, and she’s worried about the construction dust, potential pollution, and noise from the data center. And higher bills.

“I’m not just thinking about the expenses that are going to increase, but also about the things that are going to lose value — for instance, my house,” Paez said in Spanish.

“What am I going to do with this property? Who would even want to live here?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California will soon have more than 300 data centers. Where will they get their water? on May 3, 2026.

Headline News:

• “Maritime Decarbonization Is Closer, Cheaper, And More Practical Than It Looks” • The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework came out of the latest meeting bruised, delayed, but still alive. That is not victory. The US has not been passive. Formal adoption is now scheduled for November 30 to December 3, 2026, after the US midterm elections. [CleanTechnica]

Ships in the Port of Singapore (Shawn, Unsplash, cropped)

• “Lessons from Chernobyl, 40 Years Later” • The Chernobyl Disaster had seismic political consequences. No less an authority than General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev speculated that Chernobyl, not his policy of perestroika, or economic reform, was the “real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.” [The National Interest]
• “New NASA Satellite Is Watching Mexico City Sink In Real Time” • Mexico City has long been recognized as one of the fastest sinking sites in the world, but researchers didn’t have the ability to track the movement from space continuously until now. It is sinking at a rate of 0.5 inches (12.7 mm) each month, as water is removed from groundwater. [ABC News]
• “Solar Power Shields Farmers From Energy Crisis” • Times are bad for farmers in Bangladesh. Right when they needed a steady diesel supply to irrigate vast swathes of cropland – Boro paddies, seasonal vegetables, maize – the world entered what the head of the International Energy Agency has called “the biggest energy security threat in history.” [The Daily Star]
• “Meta Platforms Enters Solar-Power Pact” • Meta Platforms wants to get some of its solar power from space. The Facebook parent has agreed to purchase up to 1 GW of solar power from Overview Energy, a startup that aims to deploy satellites to provide power to customers on Earth’s surface. Overview plans for an in-space demonstration in 2028. [MSN]

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

Originally published on New Politics, 29 April 2026

Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation

By Hafsa Kanjwal

Stanford University Press, 2023

This is an excellent book by historian Hafsa Kanjwal about the colonization of Kashmir that the Indian State has carried out since gaining independence from the British Empire and undergoing the tragedy of Partition. As the British overlords withdrew in August 1947, the subcontinent was split into India and Pakistan according to senseless imperial design—a tumultuous event that exploded in sectarian mass-violence, with an estimated million people killed. The Partition crisis immediately gripped the princely northern state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), too, which had been dominated for a century by the Hindu Dogra dynasty operating under indirect British rule.

Professor Kanjwal explains that, prior to the Dogra Maharaja Hari Singh’s infamous decision to accede to India rather than Pakistan in October 1947—despite the fact that J&K was majority-Muslim—his army joined forces with militants from the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and troops from another princely state to kill an estimated 250,000 Muslims in Jammu, displacing several hundred thousand more to Pakistan in the process. These oppressive policies of the maharaja sparked the first India-Pakistan War (1947–48), which established the “line of control” that currently divides Kashmir between the hostile neighbors.

Aptly defying the simplistic scholarly narrative that “see[s] colonialism as emerging only from the West to the Global South,” Professor Kanjwal in Colonizing Kashmir chronicles the “third world imperialism” that has been practiced by the Indian ruling class in this mountainous occupied territory over the past eighty years (13–14 [emphasis in original], 22). The unwilling host to up to 750,000 Indian troops who have been engaged in “massacres, human rights violations, and war crimes” for decades, Kashmir has widely been considered the world’s most-militarized region since an indigenous armed uprising began in the late 1980’s (273). To date, the Indian State continues to systematically deny millions of Kashmiris—the majority of whom are Muslim—their right to self-determination. As such, it is in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 47 (1948), which mandates a plebiscite to decide the territory’s fate: namely, whether it is to become independent, merge with Pakistan, or remain with India.

Besides the devastating effects this unresolved international crisis has on healthcare access and women’s rights in Kashmir, it has led to multiple wars between India and Pakistan since decolonization. One of these conflicts—the Kargil War (1999)—broke out after both countries had acquired nuclear weapons, thus coming dangerously close to the nuclear threshold. The threat of regional escalation to nuclear war is ever-present now, as the brief armed conflict that broke out between the neighboring countries in May 2025 after a militant attack on Hindu pilgrims in occupied Kashmir—a war that President Trump has wrongly credited himself with ending—reminds us.

In this sense, Colonizing Kashmir is a courageous challenge to “the sovereignty claims of the (post)colonial nation-state,” and to the triumphalist idea that decolonization has necessarily been a liberatory process (22). It is a call “for the creation of a historiography of states that do not exist, have not been allowed to exist, and peoples who have been denied self-determination and the right to exercise their sovereignty” (20). Beyond Kashmir and Kashmiris, these include “Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Palestine, Hong Kong, Tibet, East Turkestan, Chechnya, and Western Sahara,” indigenous peoples of the U.S., Canada, and Australia, plus “the Kurds, Papuans, and Oromo and Tigray people” (20). Likely as retaliation to its author’s principled truth-telling and apt criticisms, the Indian State outright banned the book in August 2025, mandating all its possessors to forfeit their copies!

In this review, we will examine Professor Kanjwal’s brilliant elucidation of state-building in Kashmir, before concluding by considering some of the parallels between Kashmir and Palestine.

Colonizing Kashmir

During the initial rule of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah (1947–53), the first prime minister of occupied J&K, Articles 35A and 370 were added to the Indian Constitution. These articles authorized local authorities to restrict land ownership to Kashmiris, and granted them uniquely autonomous powers, respectively. However, by ordering the ouster of Sheikh Abdullah over concerns about his loyalty and replacing him with a client regime led by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and leader of the Congress Party, showed his true interest in intensifying India’s colonization of Kashmir. It is on Bakshi’s controversial rule (1953–63), which advanced capitalist modernization, normalization of relations with India, and “emotional integration” to distract Kashmiris from their right to self-determination, that Professor Kanjwal focuses her book (9, 32, 130–1).

Despite Nehru’s proclamation of a secular-democratic political orientation (while hailing from a Kashmiri Pandit [Brahmin, or upper-caste Hindu] background), his centralist subjugation of Muslim-majority Kashmir arguably anticipated the current Hindu-fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brazen 2019 abrogation of Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy. (Modi is a long-term member of the RSS, and as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he oversaw pogroms orchestrated by Hindu mobs in 2002 that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Indian Muslims.) As Professor Kanjwal notes in an article written after the sudden cancellation of Articles 35A and 370, not only does Modi’s unilateral action effectively serve to annex Kashmir, but it also “enables people from India to buy land and property in Kashmir,” thus raising fears that direct rule by New Delhi will “change the demographics of the Muslim-majority region.”

As Colonizing Kashmir elucidates, Naya (“New”) Kashmir refers to a progressive manifesto written in 1944 by leaders of Kashmir’s National Conference about the region’s post-independence future. Affiliated with the Congress Party, the National Conference was a political formation to which both Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi belonged. By contrast with the despotism of contemporary Dogra rule (and of Hindu nationalism), Naya Kashmir envisioned a voice for J&K’s Muslim majority, pluralistic respect for its religious minorities (Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists), equality before the law, decentralized parliamentary governance, the abolition of feudalism, and cooperativism.

In this vein, Sheikh Abdullah actually avoided forging closer ties with Pakistan after Partition, partly out of fear that its feudal elites would block the implementation of Naya Kashmir, and he opted for continued accession to India instead. (While not necessarily committed to Naya Kashmir, the Communist Party of India and the Soviet Union appear to have shared similar views about the feudal character of Pakistan, which soon became a close U.S. Cold-War ally.) In 1950, Sheikh Abdullah’s government successfully passed reforms that redistributed lands without compensation to their former owners, in a move that empowered Kashmiri Muslim peasants while antagonizing Hindu landlords.

In their leadership style, both Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi were authoritarian: they banned opposition parties and wielded a great deal of control over press and radio coverage in and about Kashmir. Foreign journalists exaggerated Kashmiri Muslims’ support of Bakshi, in line with the local and central governments’ self-presentation as advancing secular and pluralistic politics. Tourism revolving around Kashmir’s natural beauty and supposed exoticism, the promotion of Hindu pilgrimages, the production of superficial films, large-scale infrastructure projects, economic modernization, and corruption were all utilized by Bakshi to further bind occupied Kashmir to India. Moreover, Bakshi personally directed Kashmir’s police and associated paramilitaries while clamping down on dissent.

Furthermore, Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi’s regimes mobilized an artistic vanguard to promote Kashmiri cultural nationalism and deepen ties with the Indian State. This ended up being a dialectical process that backfired to some extent, given the call’s resonance among Indian and Kashmiri leftists alike, together with its indirect encouragement of satirical and subversive commentary. For instance, Kashmiri literature entered a “decade of despair” following Sheikh Abdullah’s ouster, and several Kashmiri writers focused on “themes of corruption, greed, obsession with money, loss of moral values, and lack of loyalty” during Bakshi’s reign (210, 222).

While the vision of Naya Kashmir and the implementation of land reforms may have been progressive, they ultimately served to integrate Kashmir into India and derail fundamental questions about popular self-determination. In fact, Sheikh Abdullah conspired with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 to drop his demand for a plebiscite, in return for his being re-installed as Kashmir’s political boss.1 This fraught history set the stage for the present.

Parallels with Palestine

Tragically, the ongoing genocide carried out in Gaza by Israel and the U.S. since October 2023 may preview the fate of Kashmiri and Indian Muslims at the hands of the Hindu-fascist State. Especially following the revocation of J&K’s special status in 2019, the risk of genocide in Kashmir has been escalating, as Professor Kanjwal and Farhan Mujahid Chak have warned. Indeed, in the context of Hindu-supremacists wantonly lynching Muslims in Indian cities, many of Kashmir’s Pandits have welcomed the abrogation of Articles 35A and 370, while many Muslims have opposed it—in an alarming dynamic that ominously recalls Partition. As Azad Essa explains, the cancellation of Article 370 has been a long-term goal of the now-hegemonic Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Modi.2

In 2019, the Indian diplomat Sandeep Chakravorty blatantly called for the implementation of the “Israeli model” in Kashmir, by which he presumably meant dispossessing and ethnically cleansing Kashmiri Muslims to make way for settlement by India’s Hindu majority. Moreover, in 2021, Hindu nationalists publicly endorsed the genocide of Rohingya Muslims carried out in 2016 by the Burmese military and affiliated paramilitaries as inspirational.3

On its own, then, Hindu nationalism is toxic enough: its main theorist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) openly supported Nazism, and sought to rid post-independence India entirely of its Muslim minority.4 Yet, when India, which has long been Israel’s largest arms importer, is emboldened by the utter disregard evinced by its ally for international humanitarian law in its prosecution of genocide against Muslim-majority Palestinians (as well as its success to date in ensuring impunity for the same), the stage is set for a synergistic effect that could prepare the ground for genocide against Kashmiris—just as the unjust settlement of the Russo-Ukrainian War being pushed by the Trump and Putin regimes arguably encourages Xi Jinping to invade Taiwan.

1 Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel (London: Pluto, 2023), 150–1.

2 Ibid 98.

3 Ibid 141.

4 Ibid 74–83.

California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer and California Nurses Association (CNA), will hold a press conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, May 5. Speakers from the elected leadership of CNA will outline why Steyer is registered nurses’ top choice to lead the state in progressive reform, as well as  the nurses’ “get out the vote” mobilization of its 125,000 members.

The future of the global shipping industry – and its 3% share of global emissions – will be decided in three weeks of talks in the third quarter of this year, after a decision taken in London on Friday.

At the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) headquarters this week, governments largely failed to substantively negotiate a controversial set of measures to penalise polluting ships and reward vessels running on clean fuels known as the Net-Zero Framework. The green shipping plan has been aggressively opposed by fossil fuel-producing nations, in particular by the US and Saudi Arabia.

This week, countries  delivered statements outlining their views on the measures in a session that ran from Wednesday into Thursday. Then, late on Friday afternoon, they discussed when to negotiate these measures and what proposals they should discuss.

After a lengthy debate, which the talks’ chair Harry Conway joked was confusing, governments agreed to hold a week of behind-closed-door talks from 1 September to 4 September and from 23 November to 27 November.

Following these meetings, which are intended to negotiate disagreements on the NZF and rival watered-down measures proposed by the US and its allies, there will be public talks from November 30 to December 4.

• Oct 17, 2025 Politics US-led alliance wins a year’s delay in adoption of green shipping deal The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework will be up for approval again in October 2026, after the US and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to vote on it as planned Read more
• Apr 23, 2026 Energy Prospects for global green shipping deal boosted by US tariff ruling, analysts say While divisions remain over the international shipping’s Net Zero Framework, the US’s main threat may now have been partly neutered Read more
• Jan 23, 2026 Politics IMO head: Shipping decarbonisation “has started” despite green deal delay Arsenio Dominguez said the shipping industry’s net zero emissions goal is not in dispute although countries have stalled on adopting a framework to reach it Read more

Last October, talks intended to adopt the NZF provisionally agreed in April 2025 were derailed by the US and Saudi Arabia, who successfully persuaded a majority of countries to vote to postpone the talks by a year. 

Those talks, known as an extraordinary session, are now scheduled to resume on Friday December 4 unless governments decide otherwise in the preceding weeks. While this Friday session will be in the same building with the same participants as the rest of the week’s talks, calling it the extraordinary session is significant as it means the NZF can be voted on.

Em Fenton, senior director of climate diplomacy at Opportunity Green said that the NZF “has survived but survival is not a victory” and called for it to be adopted later this year “in a way that maintains urgency and ambition, and delivers justice and equity for countries on the frontlines of climate impacts”.

NZF’s supporters

The NZF would penalise the owners of particularly polluting ships and use the revenues to fund cleaner fuels, support affected workers and help developing countries manage the transition.

Many governments – particularly in Europe, the Pacific and some Latin American and African nations – spoke in favour of it this week.

South Africa said the fund it would create is “the key enabler of a just transition” and its removal would take away predictable revenues from African countries. Vanuatu said that “we are not here to sink the ship but to man it”.

Australia’s representative called it a “carefully balanced compromise”, as it was provisionally agreed by a large majority after years of negotiations, and warned that failing to adopt it would harm the shipping industry by failing to provide certainty.

Santa Marta summit kick-starts work on key steps for fossil fuel transition

Canada’s negotiator said that if it was weakened to appease its critics like the US and Saudi Arabia, this would disappoint those who think it is too weak already like the Pacific islands.

A large group of mainly big developing countries like Nigeria and Indonesia did not rule out supporting the framework but called for adjustments to help developing countries deal with the changes. Nigeria called for developing countries to be given more time to implement the measures, a minimum share of the fund’s revenues and discounts for ships bringing them food and energy.

According to analysis from the University of College London’s Energy Institute, the countries speaking in support of the NZF include five countries which voted with the US to postpone talks in October and a further ten countries which did not take a clear position at that time. Most governments support the NZF as the basis for further talks, the institute said.

Opposition remains

But a small group of mainly oil-producing nations said they are opposed to any financial penalties for particularly polluting ships.

They support a proposal submitted by Liberia, Argentina and Panama which has proposed weakening emission targets and ditching any funding mechanism for the framework involving “direct revenue collection and disbursement”.

Argentina argued that the NZF would harm countries which are far from their export markets and said concerns over that cannot be solved “by magic with guidelines”. They added that, as a result, the NZF itself needs to be fundamentally re-negotiated.

The UCL Energy Institute said that just 24 countries – less than a quarter of those who spoke – said they supported Argentina’s proposal.

Despite this, the US State Department issued a statement saying that the decision to hold more talks incorporating alternative proposals signalled “a total collapse in support for the original NZF proposal”.

While this week’s talks did not see the kind of US threats reported in October, their delegation did leave personalised flyers on every delegate’s desk which were described by academics, negotiators and climate campaigners as misleading.

One witness told Climate Home News that junior US delegates arrived early on Wednesday and placed flyers behind governments’ name plates warning each country of the costs they would incur if the NZF is adopted.

The figures on a selection of leaflets seen by Climate Home News ranged from $100 million for Panama to $3.5 billion for the Netherlands. “They are trying to scare countries away from supporting climate action with one-sided information”, one negotiator told Climate Home News. 

A flyer left on Pakistan’s desk, shared by a witness with Climate Home News

They added that the calculations, by the US State Department’s Office of the Chief Economist, ignore the fact that the money raised would be shared to help poorer countries’ transition as well as ignoring the economic costs of failing to address climate change.

Tristan Smith, an academic representing the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology, told the meeting that the calculations were “opaque” and flawed as they overstate the contribution of fuel cost to trade costs.

A US State Department Spokesperson said in a statement that they “firmly stand behind our estimates” which were shared “in good faith” and to “provide an additional tool to policymakers as they contemplate the true economic burden over the NZF”.

This article was updated on 5/5/2026 to include the US State Department’s statement

The post Key green shipping talks to be held in late 2026 appeared first on Climate Home News.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, May 1, 2026

The eight-hour workday. Voting rights. Desegregated buses and schools. Every hard-won right Californians depend on today came from people who organized, refused to accept the status quo, and fought back.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions made a declaration: in five years, workers across the country would strike on May 1 for an eight-hour workday.  No guarantee of success—and no central command to make it happen. The idea spread anyway, city to city, carried by ordinary workers who organized locally and walked off of the job together. At Haymarket Square in Chicago, workers paid for that defiance with their lives. The movement grew anyway. They won, and May 1 became the international workers’ celebration, May Day.

That is the spirit that drives Public Advocates. For 55 years, we have combined civil rights litigation, policy advocacy, and deep partnership with grassroots communities to challenge the laws and power structures that lock low-income communities and communities of color out of good schools, stable housing, and reliable transit. We do this because rights declared on paper mean nothing without power behind them—and power is built through sustained organizing and coordinated struggle over time. That is how we win resourced schools, renter protections, and transit systems that serve the people who need these most.

That work has never been more urgent.

California is the fourth-largest economy in the world. The people who built it—teachers, nurses, farmworkers, transit workers, essential workers of every kind—are being pushed out of it. The Tenant Protection Act, the state’s primary shield against extreme rent hikes and unjust evictions, expires in 2030. Tens of thousands of affordable homes sit approved but unfinanced. Students in under-resourced school facilities are still denied what the law guarantees. This is not a series of policy failures. It is a system working exactly as it was designed—to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few rather than spreading it to include the people who make this state run.

We know it can be different today because we have seen it. In Minnesota years of cross-racial organizing produced the 2023“Minnesota Miracle,”— a single legislative session that delivered a billion dollars in affordable housing, free school meals for every child, expanded voting rights, paid family leave, and protections for workers and immigrant communities. This past January 23, that same coalition drove a massive ICE presence out of Minneapolis through peaceful community action. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people built power—across race, across issues, across years—together.

That is the work of May Day. That is the work of Public Advocates.

This May Day we recommit to the California that should exist—where the people who built this economy can afford to stay here, where every child has a school worthy of their potential, and where no community’s future depends on the goodwill of those in power.

Power isn’t given. It’s built. We’re building it.

###

Public Advocates Inc. is a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy and achieving tangible legal victories advancing education, housing, transportation equity, and climate justice.

The post Statement: Public Advocates Stands with Workers and Communities Fighting For a Just California on May Day appeared first on Public Advocates.

Here is a repost of our May Day episode from 2021. In it, we talk about the history of May Day from pagan rituals to the Haymarket Affair to International…

When Doug Burgum appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee as President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Interior department last year, he was extended the traditional benefit of the doubt, with senators chummily reminiscing about North Dakota, lobbing softballs, and avoiding tough questions on the way to voting to confirm Burgum as Interior secretary. If Burgum got the idea that this is how all hearings would go, he was mistaken. A year later, as the Interior secretary who has overseen a multi-pronged effort to dismantle the agency and sell off or sell out our national public lands, Burgum seemed totally unprepared to handle difficult questions from members of Congress, not to mention the decidedly different vibe of a budget hearing where elected representatives demanded accountability for how their constituents’ resources are being stewarded and tax dollars are being spent.

In appearances before three congressional committees so far, Burgum struggled to defend President Trump’s proposed Interior department budget and explain the administration’s chaotic, destructive, and unpopular agenda for America’s public lands. Below are five of the most head-scratching exchanges between Burgum and lawmakers—along with some useful information Secretary Burgum might want to bookmark for his next Hill appearance.

Burgum can’t provide details on the $10 billion request for ‘beautification’ in Washington, D.C.

President Trump’s budget proposal includes a $10 billion request for a new Presidential Capital Stewardship Program which would “carry out priority construction and rehabilitation projects in the Washington, D.C. area.” According to the Interior department’s own website, the deferred maintenance backlog for Washington, D.C. is just over $2 billion. When asked by Senator Angus King of Maine what the extra $8 billion is for, Burgum’s bumbling explanation was that “D.C. is like a state. It’s not just, like, the National Mall. It’s for the greater capital region. That’s a region.” But again, according to the Interior department, adding in the deferred maintenance backlog for the entire states of Maryland and Virginia—far beyond the D.C. area— would bring the total to $4 billion, still leaving more than half of Burgum’s $10 billion request unaccounted for. Meanwhile, last year’s budget for the entire National Park Service was just $4.6 billion.

During the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Senator Jeff Merkeley of Oregon also asked about the $10 billion request for the Presidential Capital Stewardship Program and if Burgum could provide a specific list of what the funds would be used for, as required by law. Burgum said he would “get you all the information you need according to law” but stopped short of agreeing to provide a detailed list. “As long as we don’t have the details, it’s a slush fund,” Merkeley responded. “You can call it something else if you want.”

Burgum learns about batteries and fossil fuel subsidies

Burgum struggled to hold his own against the expertise of Senator King—a former energy executive—on energy issues. In response to questions from King about the Trump administration’s actions to block renewable energy projects, Burgum fell back on a well-worn intermittency argument. “We have no ability to dispatch wind and solar,” Burgum claimed, and followed up with, “There are times in North Dakota when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.” But King pointed out, “That’s where batteries and storage come in.” Burgum argued that worldwide battery storage would only provide one hour’s worth of energy. However, in the United States where Burgum is Interior secretary, battery storage has been increasing rapidly, with a new record set in 2025 for energy storage installations, and is expected to reach at least 600 gigawatt hours of installed energy storage by 2030. This is the equivalent of 300 Hoover Dams, according to the Department of Energy, which offers other comparisons Burgum may find helpful. In California, 44 percent of evening peak energy is now being delivered via batteries.

Burgum also complained that he doesn’t understand “why we had to have massive taxpayer subsidies to produce” renewable energy. King pointed out that the U.S. currently pays $30 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas industry. The International Monetary Fund put this figure at $3 billion in explicit subsidies in 2022 alone, with an additional $754 billion in implicit subsidies. A 2025 analysis found that even without taxpayer subsidies, renewable energy sources are still the most cost-effective source of energy.

Burgum defends 24 percent of National Park Service staff coincidentally choosing to quit at the exact same time

Senator Patty Murray of Washington pressed Burgum about unacceptable cuts to on-the-ground staff at national parks in Washington and a budget that proposes to eliminate even more park staff. Arguing with the characterization that staff had been “forced out,” Burgum insisted, “There’s been no forcing of anything. These are all voluntary.” Murray wasn’t buying it: “However you want to put it, a quarter of them left over the last 15 months.” According to the National Parks Conservation Association, 4,000 staff, nearly 25 percent of the National Park Service workforce, left their jobs since January 2025 as a result of “pressured resignations and early retirements” along with hiring freezes that prevented vacancies from being filled. That’s an awful lot of people who somehow all voluntarily left their jobs at the same time.

Burgum, who voted to condemn the Rice’s whale to extinction, worries about the impact of wind turbine installation on whale populations

In response to questions from Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, Burgum complained about the impacts to whales and other marine life from pounding pylons into the sea floor to install offshore wind turbines. Pingree immediately pointed out the disconnect between Burgum’s sudden whale-based arguments against offshore wind and his vote to remove Endangered Species Act protections for the endangered Rice’s whale in order to clear the way for more offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico: “If you’re going to be talking about pounding and those kinds of things, then we can’t have offshore drilling, and you want to re-permit the entire East Coast for offshore drilling. If you want to talk about danger to marine mammals and danger to fisheries, my next question is going to be about what happened with Deepwater Horizon, and you want to reduce the permitting standards there. There’s just a lot of hypocrisy in your arguments.”

Burgum denies erasure of history on national park signs

Burgum awkwardly tried to dodge a question from Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii about the removal of exhibits about slavery at the President’s House site in Philadelphia and other actions to erase history from national park sites across the country.

“Some of these examples that are floating around in the media saying some of these things have been removed, they haven’t been removed. In the case of Philadelphia, there’s a weird injunction where we can’t put the new signage up. And what is on the new signage, which is not hiding any points of our history, is available for anyone to read.”

Burgum referred Hirono to the President’s House Site website, where images of new panels—including information about slavery—are indeed available to view online. New physical panels at the site itself, however, are not yet in place, depriving visitors of the opportunity to learn from these interpretive materials in context during their time at the site.

Hirono also asked Burgum about the removal of signs referring to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Burgum responded, “I don’t believe that any of that information has been removed.” However, signage related to slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans, was removed from signs at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York City following an executive order signed by President Trump in March 2025 ordering the removal of materials that contain “improper partisan ideology.”

The post Highlight reel: The five most bewildering moments from Doug Burgum’s congressional hearings appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Maine Medical Center registered nurses will hold a press conference on Friday, May 1 in Portland to demand Maine Health cancel its contract with Palantir Technologies. Joined by their allies in the Purge Palantir campaign, nurses will detail why leaders of Maine’s public institutions and health care organizations should refuse collaborations with the surveillance software giant.

In the second part of our series on the borderlands, Aaron and Lilly are joined by Bob Krumenaker, former superintendent of Big Bend National Park and current chair of Keep Big Bend Wild. They discuss the proposal for a border wall through one of America’s national treasures, the bipartisan coalition rallying to stop it, and what’s at stake for the park, communities, and local economy. Plus, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum struggles to defend a 38% cut to the National Park Service maintenance budget while making a $10 billion request for D.C.-based projects.

News

• Fact Check: Burgum claims $10 billion Trump slush fund request is for NPS deferred maintenance only — Center for Western Priorities
• Senate ENR committee tussles with Burgum over permitting  — E&E News
• Trump used Park Service to funnel millions to ballroom construction firm — New York Times
• President’s Budget Proposal Slashes National Park Service Funding Amid Ongoing Attacks on National Parks — National Parks Conservation Association
• Border wall map disappears from government website — Big Bend Sentinel
• Land acquisition expands popular Jeffco park adjacent to Red Rocks — Denver Post

Resources

• Borderlands part 1: The threats to public lands at the border
• Keep Big Bend Wild
• Mission Creep: How Trump is using the border to militarize our public lands — Westwise blog
• Watch this episode on YouTube 

Produced by Aaron Weiss, Lauren Bogard, and Lilly Bock-Brownstein
Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
Music: Purple Planet
Featured image: U.S.-Mexico border within Big Bend National Park, NPS photo

The post Borderlands part 2: The fight against a border wall at Big Bend appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

April 30, 2026—LAist reporter Mariana Dale spoke with Senior Staff Attorney Alicia Virani about Miliani Rodriguez v. California, Public Advocates’ lawsuit challenging California’s inequitable distribution of Prop 2 school modernization funds. Virani explains why the firm filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in March—and why low-wealth districts facing asbestos, leaks, and toxic mold can’t afford to wait for the next bond measure. A hearing is scheduled for May 20.

Read the Story

The post LAIST: California voters greenlit billions of dollars to fix schools. How much has it helped? As schools age, the requests for modernization funding exceed the funding available.As schools age, the requests for modernization funding exceed the funding available. appeared first on Public Advocates.

Kursk II is one of Rosatom’s most important nuclear construction projects within Russia. Four of the most advanced and powerful units in Rosatom’s history—VVER-TOI reactors with capacities of up to 1,250 MW each—are being built there.

But this site is also the Russian nuclear power plant closest to the border with Ukraine. Likely for this reason, Rosatom is carrying out construction under conditions of limited transparency—either not publicly disclosing key construction milestones or doing so with significant delays and inconsistencies. This has led to confusion even at the level of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

To read the rest of this article, click here.

The post The curious, secretive case of the Kursk II nuclear power plant’s weird data appeared first on Bellona.org.

African leaders have intensified calls for governments to stop exporting raw minerals and step up efforts to align their policies, share infrastructure and coordinate investment to add value to their resources and bring economic prosperity to the continent.

In a speech to the inaugural Kenya Mining Investment Conference & Expo in Nairobi this week, Kenyan President William Ruto became the latest African leader to confirm the country will end exports of raw mineral ore. The East African nation has deposits of gold, iron ore and copper and recently launched a tender for global investors to develop a deposit of rare earths, which are used in EV motors and wind turbines, valued at $62 billion.

Kenya is among more than a dozen African nations that have either banned or imposed export curbs on their mineral resources as they seek to process minerals domestically to boost revenues, create jobs and capture a slice of the industries that are producing high-value clean tech for the energy transition.

• Mar 11, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Africa needs more than export bans to cash in on critical minerals, experts say Restricting raw materials exports is well-intentioned but without other policies to foster domestic processing, they can backfire Read more
• Mar 6, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier South African rare earths project aims to rival Chinese with low-cost model The EU-backed Zandkopsdrift project plans to offset the high cost of rare earths production with another mineral in hot demand for use in batteries Read more
• Feb 3, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier West Africa’s first lithium mine awaits go-ahead as Ghana seeks better deal  Ghana wants to benefit from the scramble for lithium but its reliance on mining firms for revenue and expertise weakens its ability to negotiate preferential terms, experts say Read more

“For too long we have extracted and exported raw materials at the bottom of the value chain, while others have processed, refined, manufactured and captured the greater share of economic value,” Ruto told African ministers and stakeholders gathered at the mining investment conference in Nairobi.

As a result, Africa currently captures less than 1% of the value generated from global clean energy technologies, he said. To address this, Kenya, in collaboration with other African nations, “will process our minerals here in the continent, we will refine them here and we will manufacture them here”, he added.

Mineral export restrictions on the rise

Africa is a major supplier of minerals needed for the global energy transition. The continent holds an estimated 30% of the world’s critical mineral reserves, including lithium, cobalt and copper. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces roughly 70% of global cobalt, a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, while countries such as Guinea dominate bauxite production, and Mozambique and Tanzania hold significant graphite deposits.

But African governments have struggled to attract the investment needed to turn their vast mineral wealth into a green industrial powerhouse. Recently Burundi, Malawi, Nigeria and Zimbabwe are among those that have resorted to banning the export of unrefined minerals to incentivise foreign companies to invest in value addition locally.

Outdated geological data limits Africa’s push to benefit from its mineral wealth

This week, Zimbabwe exported its first shipments of lithium sulphate, an intermediate form of processed lithium that can be further refined into battery-grade material, from a mine and processing plant operated by Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt.

After freezing all exports of lithium concentrate – the first stage of processing – earlier this year, the government introduced export quotas and will ban all exports from January 2027.

Export restrictions on critical raw materials have grown more than five-fold since 2009, found a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published this week. In 2024, a more diverse group of countries, including many resource-rich developing economies in Africa and Asia, introduced restrictions, including Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Angola.

Artisanal miners look for copper in mining waste Artisanal miners look for copper in mining waste

This is “a structural shift in the wrong direction,” Mathias Cormann, the OECD’s secretary-general, told the organisation’s Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul, Turkey, this week.

“We understand the motivations: building local industries, managing environmental impacts, capturing greater value domestically. But our research is quite clear. Export restrictions distort investment, reduce volumes and undermine supply security often while delivering limited gains in value added,” he said.

In-country barriers to success

Thomas Scurfield, Africa senior economic analyst at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, told Climate Home News that export restrictions “can look like a promising route to local value addition” for cash-strapped African mineral producers but have “rarely worked” unless countries already have reliable energy, infrastructure and competitive costs for processing.

“Without those conditions, bans may simply push companies to scale back mining rather than scale up processing,” he said.

Alaka Lugonzo, partnerships lead for Africa at Global Witness, said plentiful and stable energy supplies are vital, adding that while Kenya has relatively robust road networks, they are insufficient for industrial-scale operations.

“Meaningful value addition and real industrialisation requires heavy machinery… and you will need better infrastructure,” she said, highlighting persistent last-mile challenges in mining regions where “there’s no railway, there’s no electricity, there’s no water”.

Export capacity is another concern, she noted, particularly whether existing port systems could handle increased volumes of processed minerals.

Regional approach recommended

Scurfield said that through regional cooperation – including pooling supplies, specialising across different stages of refining and manufacturing, and building larger regional markets – “African countries could overcome many domestic constraints that make going alone difficult”.

That’s what close to 20 African governments are working to deliver as part of the Africa Minerals Strategy Group, which was set up by African ministers and is dedicated to foster cooperation among African nations to build mineral value chains and better benefit from the energy transition.

Africa urged to unite on minerals as US strikes bilateral deals

Nigerian Minister of Solid Minerals Dele Alake, who chairs the group, said “true collaboration” between countries, including aligning mining policies, sharing infrastructure, coordinating investment strategies and promoting trade across the continent, will create the conditions for long-term investments that could turn Africa into “a formidable and competitive force within the global mineral supply chain”.

“The time has come for Africa to redefine its place within the global mineral economy and that transformation must begin with regional integration and regional cooperation,” he told the mining investment conference in Nairobi.

Lugonzo of Global Witness agreed, saying that value-addition would benefit from adopting a continental perspective. “Why should Kenya build another smelter when we can export our gold to Tanzania for smelting, and then we use the pipeline through Uganda to take it to the port and we export it?” she asked.

To facilitate that, there is a need to operationalise the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), she added. “That agreement is the only way Africa is going to move from point A to point B.”

The post Kenya seeks regional coordination to build African mineral value chains appeared first on Climate Home News.

Fear and division have become defining forces in the lives of many immigrant communities — but they are not the whole story. Cristina Jiménez Moreta has spent her life working to transform that reality, drawing on her own experience growing up undocumented and her years of organizing to build collective power.

A co-founder of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country, she has helped lead some of the most influential campaigns for immigrant justice in recent history. In this keynote, she reflects on the role of community, courage, and organizing in shaping a more inclusive future.

This is an edited transcript from Bioneers 2026.

Cristina Jiménez Moreta:

I am proud to be here as someone who was formerly undocumented. My parents, Fausto and Ligia, immigrated from Ecuador, fleeing poverty and political turmoil — like so many others in our country’s history — in search of a better life for our family. We settled in Queens, New York, in 1998. 

I’m a community organizer, and right now I lead Shared Future, a new initiative building a movement in support of immigrants and a shared vision of what unites us as Americans.

Before this, and before becoming a mom, I was a young organizer working alongside high school and college students to build the immigrant youth movement. Together, we helped grow United We Dream into a catalyst for one of the most powerful and inspiring movements of the past 20 years.

But even before I could build a movement, lead an organization, or call myself a community organizer, I’ll tell you the truth: I was a young undocumented person growing up in Queens, in a small studio apartment, living with the constant fear that one day my parents, my brother, or I could be taken by deportation agents and disappear.

Today, that same fear, uncertainty, and division are gripping millions of people across this country. What once felt normal has been turned upside down. And all around us, it can feel overwhelming — like it’s too much, and like there’s not much we can do about it.

I don’t need to remind you what’s happening. We’ve seen it on our phones, on TV, in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and communities across the country. We’re seeing aggressive immigration enforcement, families living in fear, and people afraid to go to work or send their kids to school. At the same time, everyday Americans are making courageous choices to stand up for their neighbors.

This is a new level of fear spreading around us. But I invite you to be clear-eyed about it, because without facing the truth of what’s happening, we won’t be able to find a way forward together.

And I want to remind you of this: despite all the pain and all the harm we’ve witnessed, history — and my own experience organizing in communities across the country — shows that the way through is by building community and collective power. 

I’ll share why I believe this, because I grew up knowing what home felt like. Home was in Ecuador, with my abuela, making noodle soup in Quito on chilly evenings in the Andes.

But when I was 13, my family had to flee political turmoil. I left behind not just a place, but a sense of belonging. My parents didn’t have much, but they had love and courage. Guided by that, they did something incredibly hard: They left everything behind and came to this country in 1998.

Growing up in New York City, in a place where I didn’t know the language or the culture, I quickly learned to feel ashamed — ashamed of not speaking English, ashamed of being an immigrant, ashamed of my skin, my Indigenous features, ashamed of who I was.

I was undocumented, living in fear, and still trying to fulfill my parents’ dream that I would be the first in our family to go to college. I did everything I was told to do: worked hard in school, did community service, checked all the boxes.

Then 9/11 happened. And in that painful moment for our country, everything changed for families like mine, and for Muslim and immigrant communities across the country. Policies shifted. Immigrants were treated as threats to national security. In many places, including New York, undocumented students lost the ability to access higher education. People like my dad, who worked in construction, lost the right to drive.

One day, my dad was traveling between New York and New Jersey for work, crossing the George Washington Bridge. He was given the wrong change at the toll booth and tried to go back to fix it — an ordinary, honest mistake. But when you’re an immigrant, even something small can make you a target. As he turned back, a police car pulled him over. The officer asked for his license. My dad told him it was expired. That was enough. He was asked to step out of the car and taken to a local police station.

I got a call from him. He said, “I’m allowed one phone call. Mija, ayúdame.” Help me.

I told him to stay calm, to remember his rights — to remain silent, to not sign anything. Then I asked to speak to the officer and told him we knew my dad’s rights and that a lawyer was on the way. Right after that, I texted a network of organizers: “My dad needs help. This is where he is.” Within minutes, people responded. A lawyer was already on the way.

I share this story because I don’t know what happened to that police officer. What I do know is that he released my dad with a $150 ticket for driving without a license. And the only reason that happened is because we had a community behind us — people who had my back, who taught me my rights, and who gave me the courage to speak up in that moment.

That’s the kind of courage I want to share with you today. Because courage is a choice.

Undocumented people like me take real risks when we speak out and share our stories. So imagine what’s possible for those who aren’t in that same vulnerable position. Across the country, young people found courage in each other — fighting deportations, supporting one another through school, and committing to build something bigger than ourselves.

That’s how we built United We Dream. And that’s how I learned that in isolation, we lose. Alone, any one of us can be targeted, silenced, or pushed aside. But in community, we show up for each other. In community, no one has to face it alone.

I want to share this: The way we won DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was by building community. We reminded each other we weren’t alone. We helped each other find our voices. And we took action together to fight for what was right.

I never imagined we would build a movement. I never imagined that years later we would be sitting across from policymakers and people in the White House, winning protections for more than 600,000 people. But we kept organizing.

I know that right now can feel uncertain. It can feel like we don’t know what comes next, or whether change is even possible. But I’m here to tell you that it is.

We’ve seen what’s possible in places like Minneapolis, where people believed in solidarity and built power together. We’re seeing it in Los Angeles and in communities across the country responding to increased immigration enforcement.

And there is a role for everyone here. This is not just about undocumented people or immigrants. All of us have a role, especially those of us with protections that others don’t have.

What’s inspiring is that people are already showing what that looks like. In some places, people are putting their bodies on the line. In others, they’re supporting neighbors in quieter but just as meaningful ways — buying groceries for families who are afraid to leave their homes, driving children to and from school, stepping in wherever help is needed.

In cities like New York and Chicago, people are building community defense networks through group chats, text chains, and rapid response systems. There are so many ways to show up.

There is a role for all of us.

I want you to see that our organizing isn’t just building hope, it’s also shifting public opinion. It’s making ICE and deportation deeply unpopular. Together, we built a mass movement that says no to ICE.

And I want to be clear: This administration wants us to believe they’re targeting people who pose a threat to our communities. But they are the ones creating fear in our communities. And people know that.

Look at what people are actually worried about: the cost of living, paying their bills, taking care of their families. Not these manufactured fears about immigrants. More and more, people are recognizing that the chaos we’re seeing is part of a strategy.

It’s a strategy to divide us. To use immigration as a scapegoat so we don’t pay attention to the real sources of harm: corporations exploiting workers and the planet, and an administration using immigrants to advance a more authoritarian vision of this country.

But people are waking up. They’re seeing through the lies. We know that lack of healthcare, underfunded schools, and economic struggle are not caused by immigrants. And even some who once supported this administration are starting to question what they’ve been told.

I’ll share one brief story. I’ve spoken with evangelical communities across the country who have told me, “We were raised conservative. We even supported this administration. But now we see what’s happening.” In fact, this week, many of them are launching a fast for immigrants and justice.

Across the country, communities — including U.S. citizens — are recognizing that this is not the future we want. And they’ve shared this message:

We are people connected by family, community, and faith. We refuse to turn away from injustice. We show up for one another. We organize with courage and compassion. And we turn our pain into power to build a future where dignity is the norm.

We won’t be divided. We have an opportunity to build a shared future — a multiracial democracy that includes all of us.

Sí se puede. Yes, we can.

The post From Fear to Power: Building a Movement for Immigrant Justice appeared first on Bioneers.

Türkiye’s COP31 presidency has struck a “strategic” partnership with the International Energy Agency (IEA), aiming to speed up the global clean energy transition amid “the biggest energy crisis in history” triggered by the Iran war.

The Paris-based watchdog will work with the host nation of this year’s UN climate summit on areas including energy supply and security, electrification and green industrialisation, Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s climate minister, said at a high-level summit hosted by the IEA on Thursday.

“We all have to act together and make sure that we transform the crisis into an opportunity,” the COP31 president said, adding that the “most critical step” is to accelerate the transition to clean energy.

The IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol, said the agency is closely watching how governments are reacting to what he described as “the biggest energy crisis in history” and whether those national responses will push climate-heating emissions up or down.

The Paris gathering came hot on the heels of the first global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Colombia, where many governments pointed to fossil fuel volatility as a risk for energy security and economic growth, and used it as an argument to move away from oil and gas towards renewables.

Clean cooking and waste emissions in focus

Though details of how the partnership will operate in practice remain limited, Kurum said one of its most important pillars will be finding solutions to expand clean cooking in developing countries, which the COP31 president promised to bring “to the centre of the global agenda”.

The IEA has been leading global discussions on helping the 2.3 billion people across the world – mainly in the Global South – using highly-polluting fuels like charcoal, firewood and waste switch to cleaner and more efficient cooking solutions to reduce emissions and damaging health impacts.

• Apr 30, 2026 News Santa Marta summit kick-starts work on key steps for fossil fuel transition The conference offers some 60 nations help to develop roadmaps to shift their economies away from coal, oil and gas, and make international trade green Read more
• Apr 29, 2026 Comment Six nations at Santa Marta could shape fossil fuel futures A small but critical handful of countries attending the conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels remain deeply committed to expanding their output Read more

The agency is organising a summit to improve clean cooking access for Africans this July, alongside the Kenyan, US and Norwegian governments. Clean cooking solutions set to be promoted include fossil gas, alongside electric and solar-powered stoves.

Kurum also added that the IEA will carry out special research on the impact of waste recycling on climate change, which will inform the COP31 presidency’s agenda on cutting emissions from garbage, one of Türkiye’s priorities which is spearheaded by the president’s wife.

COP28 chief missing

The IEA convened representatives from over 50 governments, together with business leaders, on Thursday for the first in a series of dialogues aimed at advancing energy discussions ahead of the UN climate summit in November, where Australia will lead the negotiations.

They were joined by previous COP presidents, including veteran French diplomat Laurent Fabius, one of the key architects of the Paris Agreement, and Britain’s COP26 chief, Alok Sharma.

Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE’s COP28 president, was “very sorry” for not being able to join the meeting, Birol said. As the UAE announced its exit from the OPEC oil cartel this week, Al Jaber, who heads up the Emirati oil company Adnoc, said the firm’s ambition was “to deliver more…across oil, gas, chemicals, and low carbon and renewable energy”.

‘Bleaker’ outlook

Sharma said the current trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions is “much bleaker” than what it looked like when he presided over negotiations in Glasgow in 2021.

At that time, the IEA calculated that if all new commitments made at the summit were met, global warming could be limited to 1.8C above pre-industrialised levels, offering an optimistic outlook. Today, the UN says the world has already failed to hold warming to 1.5C and is on course for a rise of 2.6-3.1C.

Santa Marta marks a new chapter in climate diplomacy

Sharma said he didn’t “want to be the skunk at the party”, but pointed out that little money is yet flowing to decarbonise hard-to-abate industries and to support clean energy development anywhere outside China, Europe and the US. “If you want to transition away from fossil fuels, you need to provide the finance,” he added.

New finance mechanism promised

Echoing his remarks, COP21 president Fabius said “not easy” subjects like finance will need to be tackled at this year’s climate summit if countries want to make progress on putting into practice what’s been agreed at previous talks.

“Without financial, concrete steps there’s no implementation and it’s all talk,” he added.

COP31’s Kurum promised the presidency would “follow up” on the UN climate finance goal negotiated at COP29, when rich countries agreed to provide at least $300 billion annually by 2035 to developing nations to help them lower emissions and adapt to a warming world.

“We are working on a new mechanism to match the right projects with the right financing and make access to financing as easy as possible,” Kurum said.

The post Türkiye’s COP31 presidency and IEA join forces on clean energy push appeared first on Climate Home News.

As oil prices spike due to the Iran war, a new diplomatic process launched in Colombia will support a group of around 60 countries – among them large fossil-fuel producers – interested in designing national roadmaps and a new financial architecture to wean their economies off coal, oil and gas, as well as building a trade system that favours clean energy.

The first global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels wrapped up on Wednesday in the coal-port city of Santa Marta after several days of discussions bringing together ministers, academics, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, green groups, trade unions and business representatives.

It offered a space for governments frustrated by last year’s failed attempt at COP30 to develop a global roadmap away from fossil fuels to make progress on how to reduce their reliance on hydrocarbons in a fair and carefully planned way, in line with a commitment made at COP28 in Dubai. Large fossil fuel-producing countries have since blocked concrete advances at the UN talks on putting that into practice.

The Santa Marta outcomes will feed into a voluntary roadmap being crafted by COP30 hosts Brazil based on inputs from countries and civil society.

Santa Marta: Ministers grapple with practicalities of fossil fuel phase-out

At Wednesday’s closing plenary, Colombian environment minister Irene Vélez Torres announced that a second conference will be held early next year in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, co-chaired by Ireland, marking the start of a new policy-making process to run alongside the slower-paced climate COPs.

“For the first time, it demonstrates that it is possible to make a different type of environmental democracy,” Vélez Torres said, adding that improvements can be made to the methodology.

Colombia and the Netherlands, which jointly hosted the Santa Marta conference, said three workstreams had been set up to identify concrete ways to reduce fossil fuel dependence and strengthen co-operation between the 59 countries that attended, along with the European Union.

These workstreams are focused on designing national and regional roadmaps away from fossil fuels including coordinating support for implementation; reforming economic and financial architecture by reducing fossil fuel subsidies, unlocking investment and managing debt constraints; and connecting fossil fuel-producing and consuming nations to reshape the international trade system towards decarbonisation and green commerce.

A summary report of the conference said governments would receive policy support from a new panel of top scientists specialised in the energy transition, which will help countries develop roadmaps and align them with their national climate action plans (NDCs).

During two days of ministerial meetings, France was the first country to announce its own roadmap, which includes targets to end the consumption of coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and fossil gas by 2050 for energy purposes.

Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said that, while “nobody is gonna force” governments to implement the anticipated roadmaps, “these countries came together because they want to transition to a different economy”, adding that the conference provides “safe space for dialogue”.

“The fact that we don’t have negotiations here gave us such different dynamics, so the psychology of the Santa Marta conference is something that we will definitely make sure to carry forward,” she told the plenary. Later she said at a press conference that the key was not to negotiate but to “collaborate”.

Call for a fossil fuel treaty

Countries gave mostly positive reactions to the conference proceedings and said the general mood had been uplifting. One government delegate from the Dominican Republic even had to fight back tears in the plenary as she thanked the hosts for inspiring the group of assembled countries.

While supportive of the Santa Marta discussions, oil-rich Nigeria advocated strongly for a “managed, just, orderly and equitable” transition away from fossil fuels, warning against any “sudden closures”. This stance was reflected in the summary report which notes that fossil fuels should “decline in a managed, fair, and politically viable way”.

• Apr 25, 2026 Energy Climate scientists call for fossil fuel transition roadmaps A set of scientific policy recommendations and a new expert panel launched in Santa Marta will help governments plot a path away from oil, gas and coal Read more
• Apr 24, 2026 Comment Why the transition beyond fossil fuels depends on cities and collective action Cities will help identify concrete pathways for an equitable shift to clean energy at the Santa Marta conference, with C40 members aiming to halve their fossil fuel use by 2030 Read more

Ghana, another fossil fuel-producing country, said oil and gas remain deeply tied to government revenues which fund public services. Nonetheless, the West African country urged others to join an initiative to negotiate a global “Fossil Fuel Treaty”, which a group of 18 nations called on the conference to endorse. The effort was not included in the Santa Marta workstreams.

Felix Wertli, Switzerland’s ambassador for the environment, said countries had found potential areas for collaboration around improving electricity grids, energy storage and green investments ahead of this year’s COP31 UN climate summit in Türkiye. “We are confident that this COP could support such a call,” he added.

“Groundbreaking” talks

Delegates said Santa Marta had offered a “more relaxed” and inclusive process than UN negotiations. Government officials met face-to-face in hours-long conversations and interacted with representatives of different social sectors, including Indigenous peoples, cities and academics in closed-door breakout sessions.

Panama’s climate envoy, Juan Carlos Monterrey, told Climate Home News that, while he had been sceptical of the process at first, it allowed for discussions to “flow” in a way that COPs do not. “That is groundbreaking – it is a massive change in how we deal with environmental diplomacy,” he said.

EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra told journalists that the fact that the conference had happened at all just a few months after a tense COP30 was an achievement in itself. UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte also noted that the Santa Marta dialogue “is a proof of point that we can talk maturely about a really difficult issue”.

Comment: Santa Marta marks a new chapter in climate diplomacy

Observers also largely praised the conference. Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub, called it a “productive space” for discussing the “stickiest issues” in the energy transition. WWF’s Manuel Pulgar Vidal, also a former COP president for Peru, said Santa Marta made “hope swell into momentum”, adding that its urgency must be sustained beyond this one summit.

Patricia Suárez, from the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC), said Indigenous peoples were optimistic that the conference had placed “the urgency of moving away from fossil fuels on the table”. But more concrete measures must follow, she noted, including declaring key rainforest ecosystems as “fossil fuel exclusion zones”.

One area the conference was criticised for overlooking was the health harms caused by fossil fuels through air pollution, extreme heat and other impacts. Jeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, which unites 250 health organisations, said leaders in Santa Marta “did not address the importance of protecting people’s health”, which should be put at the centre of the conversation.

Influencing UN negotiations

Most government officials at the conference recognised the need to grow the “coalition of the willing” cemented in Santa Marta into a larger network that can influence other spaces such as UN climate negotiations – and its organisers reiterated that the door is open for others countries to join.

Dutch minister van Veldhoven told the final plenary that while “we are here with an immense group in Santa Marta, it is still too small” to fully disentangle the world from fossil fuels. Colombia and the Netherlands did not invite some powerful fossil fuel-producing countries like Russia and the US to the gathering because of their “openly extractivist” views, and major players in the clean energy sector like China were also left off the list.

Comment: Six nations at Santa Marta could shape fossil fuel futures

Tuvalu’s climate minister, Maina Vakafua Talia, told Climate Home News that big actors like China should be at the table, saying the criteria for invitations could change for the second fossil fuel phase-out conference his country will organise in April 2027.

“If we are missing out the main players in the discussion, then we are moving in a loop,” he said. “We need to find somehow how we can engage with [them] because there is no point in talking to ourselves.”

Claudio Angelo, head of international politics at Brazilian NGO Observatório do Clima, said countries could decide to keep the ball rolling within the UN climate negotiations by presenting formal agenda items on roadmaps away from fossil fuels at the annual Bonn talks in June which set the scene for COPs.

Tina Stege, climate envoy from the Marshall Islands, argued “there is a strong recognition that what we’re doing here can complement the COP process and needs to inform that process” – a view backed by other Pacific islands.

This story was updated after publication to clarify the final number of countries that attended the Santa Marta conference.

The post Santa Marta summit kick-starts work on key steps for fossil fuel transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Morgan Ody, a small-scale farmer and the general coordinator of La Via Campesina, a global organisation of food and land workers and small farmers, said the lives of working people were increasingly at risk.

The post World food systems ‘pushed to the brink’ by extreme heat, UN warns appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Europe’s climate movement is often portrayed as the domain of younger generations. Yet from landmark legal victories to everyday practices of sustainability, a different picture is emerging: older Europeans are proving to be among the most committed and effective climate actors. As the continent continues to age, could this overlooked demographic reshape how climate action is understood and mobilised across Europe?

In April 2024, a group of Swiss women, most of them in their 70s and 80s, stood on the steps of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, surrounded by a wall of microphones and cameras from around the world. They had just heard the verdict in one of the most significant climate cases in European legal history. The KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz had won.

The ruling found Switzerland in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights for failing to adequately protect its citizens from the effects of climate change. The judgment, formally known as Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v. Switzerland, now sets binding legal precedent across all 46 Council of Europe member states. Switzerland has since pushed hard for the case to be closed, but the Committee of Ministers, which monitors its implementation, has refused the request twice.

The story of how about 3,000 Swiss women forced their country to one of the highest courts in Europe is striking in its own right. Yet it also points to something broader: a growing, largely invisible force within the climate movement that Europe’s ageing democracies might not be able to overlook for much longer.

Beyond the generational divide

The climate movement’s most visible faces – such as activists Greta Thunberg in Sweden or Féris Barkat in France – tend to be on the younger (if not much younger) side, and it has become common to identify Gen Z as its most fervent defender. But researchers who study the intersection of ageing and environmental engagement argue that the mainstream perception of generations within the climate movement may be flawed.

“There is a slight tendency for younger generations to have opinions that are more favourable towards climate policy,” said Jan Rosset, a sociologist at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland who has studied climate engagement across age groups in Switzerland alongside political scientist Jasmine Lorenzini. “But all generations are very favourable to climate policies. There is no real generational divide.”

That finding echoes the conclusions of a 2025 study published by Parlons Climat, a French research organisation, which found that older adults take climate change and environmental degradation just as seriously as the rest of the population. The myth of a disengaged older generation does not seem to hold up to scrutiny.

What differs across generations, Rosset and Lorenzini found, is not the level of concern but the form that engagement takes. Older adults are significantly more likely to buy local and seasonal produce for environmental reasons, to renounce air travel on ecological grounds, and to practice unglamorous household sustainability: buying second-hand, reducing electricity use, cooking from scratch. Younger people, on the other hand, might be more likely to adopt plant-based diets and participate in public protests. It should, however, be noted that the data is mixed.

Researchers who study the intersection of ageing and environmental engagement argue that the mainstream perception of generations within the climate movement may be flawed.

“On almost every indicator, it is people in mid-life, those between roughly 35 and 60, who engage the least,” Rosset says. “But that is not an ideological position. It’s a question of time and capacity; they have demanding jobs and family responsibilities. It is a life-cycle issue, not a generational one.”

Rosset and Lorenzini also found a consistent gender gap: across all age groups, but especially among older adults, women showed significantly more favourable attitudes toward climate action and higher levels of engagement than men.

“This gap was almost stronger than other socioeconomic factors, like income or education level,” Rosset said.

The case that set a precedent

When Greenpeace Switzerland began exploring the possibility of legal climate action in the mid-2010s, it ran into an obstacle: Swiss law does not allow class actions. Any case would need to be brought by individuals who could demonstrate they were personally and particularly affected. The research pointed to one group. Studies following the 2003 European heatwave – which killed an estimated 70,000 people across the continent, with the elderly among the hardest hit – had shown that older women died in disproportionate numbers. More recent research has confirmed this vulnerability: a 2024 study by Penn State researchers found that older women reach dangerous heat thresholds at lower temperature and humidity levels than older men and that middle-aged women are as heat-vulnerable as men over 65.

Heatwaves increase illnesses, causing heat stroke, heart and lung problems, diabetes complications, mental health issues, and trouble with daily activities. The vulnerability of older generations is not just physical: many live alone, have limited mobility, or cannot easily access emergency services. People in cities face “heat island” effects, where concrete and asphalt trap heat, while rural residents often have fewer cooling centres or medical resources. Climate change also worsens air quality, raising levels of ozone, fine particulate matter, and other pollutants, which worsen respiratory and heart conditions. These combined factors make ageing populations especially vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change.

One senior activist who committed herself to the Swiss climate fight is Elisabeth Stern, a cultural anthropologist and board member of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz. “It was clear that when I got retired, I would use my time in a climate group,” she said. “I tried a few that were not the right fit for me until I found the KlimaSeniorinnen, who I sort of met on the same eye level.”

Stern’s fellow activist, Anne Mahrer, KlimaSeniorinnen’s co-president, had spent years watching climate policy stall in parliament as a member of the Swiss National Council. When a colleague reminded her of the Urgenda case in the Netherlands, where a court had ordered the Dutch government in 2015 to cut emissions, the question became: could something similar be done in Switzerland? In August 2016, KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz was formally established to achieve that goal.

The Swiss courts, however, were not moved. At every level, the association was told it lacked standing. One court noted that the women were concerned not only about Swiss emissions but wanted to reduce them worldwide. Another placed winter tourism in the same category of climate-affected interests as the health of women threatened by heatwaves. The most striking argument, Stern recounts, was that the women might not still be alive by the time global warming reached 1.5 degrees and therefore could not complain. “If you follow their reasoning, climate action in court would only be possible when it’s already too late,” Mahrer said.

The European Court of Human Rights took a different view. It declared the application a priority case, engaged seriously with reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and referred the case to its Grand Chamber of 17 judges. “Unlike politicians, who do not listen to scientists, the judges listened to the scientists, and they took into account the third-party interventions in support of the case,” Mahrer explained.

The court delivered its verdict on 9 April, 2024. It found Switzerland in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to respect for private and family life – which the court ruled encompasses a right to effective state protection against the severe effects of climate change on life, health, wellbeing, and quality of life. Switzerland was also found to have violated Article 6 – the right to a fair trial – for its domestic courts’ refusal to hear the case on its merits.

The ripple effects spread quickly and travelled farther than anyone had anticipated. The ruling is now cited in climate litigation across Europe. In South Korea, groups of young activists successfully pursued a similar case. In the Netherlands, residents of the island of Bonaire have taken legal action against the Dutch state, drawing on the KlimaSeniorinnen precedent. The International Court of Justice, prompted by the small island nation of Vanuatu, issued an advisory opinion in July 2025 stating that governments which fail to protect their populations from climate harm are acting unlawfully, reinforcing the Strasbourg ruling and opening new avenues for litigation worldwide.

Across Europe, a generation of older activists has been following a similar model. European Grandparents for Climate, active in Belgium and Norway, and Omas for Future in Germany and Austria, are building on the same instinct: that people who have watched the world change across six or seven decades have both a particular stake in the future and a special capacity to act.

European Grandparents for Climate participates in demonstrations, writes letters to ministers, and monitors parliamentary votes on climate at both the Belgian and European levels. In Germany, Omas for Future joins Fridays for Future strikes, runs climate workshops in schools, and has organised nationwide campaigns such as the “Klimabänder” initiative, in which thousands of handwritten climate messages were bicycled to Berlin ahead of the 2021 federal election.

Sustainability by habit

Beyond courts and campaigns, there is a quieter dimension to older adults’ climate engagement, rooted not in ideology but in force of habit and the practical knowledge of generations who lived before the age of mass consumption.

Serge Guérin, a French sociologist and author of Et si les vieux aussi sauvaient la planète? (“And what if the Elderly Also Saved the Planet?”), points to a kind of practical sustainability that older generations carry without naming it as such. They grew up returning glass bottles for a deposit, cooking whatever was in season, and mending rather than replacing. A startup working on bottle recycling, he recalls, found it far easier to explain the concept to older people because “When they were young, they used to return the milk bottle, the wine bottle, and get a few cents back. For them, it was totally normal,” he says.

Helene Blasquiet-Revol, a geographer whose research examines civic engagement among seniors in rural France, describes what she calls “ordinary” forms of climate engagement: practices so ingrained they are not even labelled as activism. For instance, she found that community gardens established by older residents in the Allier region gradually opened up to schools and youth workshops, transmitting practical knowledge in ways that were rarely planned or publicised.

There is a quieter dimension to older adults’ climate engagement, rooted not in ideology but in force of habit and the practical knowledge of generations who lived before the age of mass consumption.

Researchers are increasingly identifying the potential for a form of intergenerational knowledge transfer that is already happening informally, and which could be deliberately cultivated. Rosset, for instance, found that among older climate activists, there was no statistically significant relationship between having children or grandchildren and the propensity to get involved, meaning people were not fighting for their own descendants. “It is really universal,” Rosset said. “It is a solidarity expressed towards future generations, towards all of humanity. We did not expect that result at all.”

Renewal needs the old

Europe is ageing fast. According to projections from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the share of older adults across EU member states is growing steadily and will continue to do so for decades, driven by declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy. This demographic shift also increases the need for climate-adapted healthcare, adequate urban planning, and social support systems for vulnerable seniors.

“There is a widespread idea that with generational renewal, the problem will be solved, that new generations will be more environmentally conscious,” Rosset said. “Our research shows this is not the case. And in addition, there will be more and more older people.”

Guérin also notes that designing urban environments, housing, and transport for ageing populations often produces outcomes that are better for both people and the planet. Accessible public transport means more people leave their cars behind. Shared housing models reduce per-capita energy consumption. Local services cut down the need for long-distance travel. And when older people are less isolated, they are in better health.

“When you reduce isolation, people use fewer resources, they are less at risk and share more,” Guérin said, adding that these shifts can lower both land use and carbon footprints. “When you take vulnerability into account, you very often improve things for everyone. And it’s really when people feel their capacity to act, especially at the local level, that things begin to move.”

Stern sees the perception gap playing out in real time in media coverage. “There are certain media and certain politicians who want us to believe that interest in the climate has vanished,” she says. “It is in their interest to tell people: ‘It has vanished anyway, so you don’t have to get involved, just enjoy life.’ But the truth is, when you ask people what concerns them a lot, the climate crisis comes up either first or second.”

The KlimaSeniorinnen continue to monitor Switzerland’s compliance with the Strasbourg judgment, sending observations to the Committee of Ministers, lobbying ambassadors, and speaking at universities across the country. For Stern, meaningful compliance means confronting Switzerland’s financial sector, which through continued investment in fossil fuels generates emissions many times greater than those in the country itself. A documentary about the association’s decade-long legal journey recently toured cinemas.

Whatever the future of the climate movement and its coverage, it is clear that the generational conflict narrative is not accurate. The evidence from researchers points to something more complicated and more hopeful: a Europe where different generations, engaged in different ways, with different tools and different knowledge, are already working on the same problem.