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File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

Sure, trees and flowers are great, but tucked between them is another plant just as crucial for birds and worthy of your yard space: The humble and life-giving shrub.But what exactly is a shrub...

Senators are looking toward the Capitol doors as they prepare to head home and campaign for the midterms. Meanwhile, a group of them has been scrambling to reach a deal that some analysts believe is critical to meet the country’s energy needs. 

A bipartisan group of senators says it has come closer than ever before to reaching a long-desired permitting reform bill, which would make it easier to build new energy projects. Many consider the issue urgent as electricity demand surges across the country, partly because of the tech industry’s massive build-out of data centers. 

“America’s energy demand is surging due to advanced technology and manufacturing, but our outdated federal permitting process remains a massive barrier to building the infrastructure we need to stay competitive,” said Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, in an August press release.

But the bill’s reception among the public is uncertain due in part to a PR problem: Data centers are a “toxic” subject for voters, according to Alex Lundry, president of D.C.-based public opinion research firm Redbud Consulting. In recent polls, Democrats, Republicans, and independents strongly oppose data centers being built in their communities. 

“If you phrase permitting reform as serving data centers, the polling results get way worse,” Lundry said. This is putting legislators, many of whom are up for reelection in November, in a bind: They want to make it easier to build more electrical infrastructure, which facilitates the data center boom, but don’t want voters to think it’s about data centers. 

The potential bill represents one of the few points of agreement for Republicans and Democrats in Washington, which is that energy permitting is broken.

Complicated studies on project impacts, lengthy reviews by different federal agencies, and legal battles from environmental groups and project opponents constantly delay all kinds of energy projects, industry leaders say.

Lawmakers have tried for years to reform the permitting process, most recently with the failed Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, which made it out of committee but never got a full Senate vote. Now, lawmakers from both parties say growing power demand has given the new attempt more momentum than any previous effort. The highest-ranking members of both parties in the Senate’s two energy-related committees are negotiating the bill’s language.

President Donald Trump has signaled he would stop blocking renewable energy projects in order to entice Democrats toward a deal on the bill. Democrats have worried that even if they make it easier to build renewables in law, the White House could continue making it impossible in practice, with some Democrats indicating that these worries have stalled the bill’s progress. 

“I appreciate very much what the Trump administration has done to move in this direction, but in order to brief colleagues on what this really means, we need just a bit more clarity on exactly what return to regular order for wind and solar projects looks like,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told reporters this week. “So that’s still to be done, but that I think can happen in fairly short order,” 

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, is one of four primary negotiators on a long-sought permitting reform bill in the Senate. Tom Williams / Getty

Politico reported that the senators intend to finish hammering out the bill after the midterm elections, when it could compete with other legislation for attention, especially if Republicans lose control of Congress.

The draft bill’s contents are not public, but stakeholders expect it would make building energy projects easier by reducing the potential environmental and social effects of a project that government agencies must consider when issuing a permit; loosening Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act requirements that slow down transmission line and pipeline permits; and making successfully obtained permits less vulnerable to lawsuits after they’re issued. 

Such a bill would ease the path to construction for renewable and fossil fuel projects alike — especially solar and natural gas, the power sources with the most momentum. Solar power and batteries account for almost 80 percent of the new power generation expected to be built in the United States in 2026, while natural gas was the largest single source of electricity used in 2025, with projections for continued growth. Natural gas in particular has become a go-to power source for data centers, which are projected to use a lot of it in the next decade. 

Unsurprisingly, both the solar and the gas industries support permitting reform. Tim Pawlenty, president of the Solar Energy Industry Association, has said the country would be “constipated” without it.

A colossal surge in electricity demand has long been expected in the United States, even before Big Tech started its data center build-out. Americans are “electrifying” their lives with heat pumps, electrical appliances, and electric vehicles, all important for reducing emissions. The country has also squeezed most of the benefits out of energy-saving lightbulbs and other fixtures, which had kept electricity use flat by reducing power needs as they spread during the 2010s. Added to all that, the United States aims to draw more manufacturing to its shores, which requires electricity if successful. But data centers are accelerating and intensifying the power-demand spike, and straining grids and supply chains. Data center developers like Google have helped lobby for permitting reform.

Environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council want to speed up renewable energy development without weakening bedrock environmental laws; NRDC executives have called for land-use plans that make it easier to site renewable energy projects while protecting local ecosystems. But Democratic legislators are considering compromising on environmental protections to support renewable energy and keep grids reliable. Meanwhile, Republicans, many of whom deny the severity of climate change, want to power new economic growth.

There is another reason legislators in both parties are keen to build, build, build: Many are anxious that hobbling data centers, and the AI systems they enable, will allow China to become economically and militarily stronger than the United States. Trump administration officials, legislators from both parties, and energy industry leaders speaking at the Clean Energy Week conference in Washington, D.C., in mid-September called on America to be “competitive” and “dominant” through energy build-out. 

“While Communist China cuts corners to get ahead, a mountain of red tape has America fighting the energy war with one hand tied behind our backs,” said Senator Rick Scott, a Republican, in a statement last month.

But Lundry, the pollster, warned that these sentiments are losing popularity among voters. “Being competitive with China used to be an effective message, but it isn’t anymore,” Lundry said. 

Instead, Lundry recommended framing permitting reform as a boost for clean power. Lundry’s firm, Redbud, found in a September poll that 71 percent of respondents agreed that “making renewable energy a bigger part of the country’s energy supply is the right move.” Bringing down energy costs is also likely a big win with voters, the survey showed, with 70 percent of respondents saying their energy bills have gone up in the last year.

Action in the other house of Congress makes it clear that lawmakers are well aware of the public’s antipathy toward data centers and fear about rising energy costs. A few days before senators said they were nearly finished with their permitting draft, the House of Representatives passed a bill calling on states (but not requiring them) to force data centers to pay for their own electricity generation. The bill is meant to help shield regular people from rising bills as data centers gobble up power. That bill is now stalled in the Senate, where some Democrats say it’s too soft-handed.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gas, solar, and tech companies all want this bill. Will Congress pass it? on Sep 24, 2026.

Open access notables

The Increasing Incidence of Boreal and Western U.S. Forest Wildfires and Its Causes: An Overview, Wallace et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

This overview of the voluminous wildfire literature addresses the following questions: “How seriously is the current spate of wildfires impacting the boreal forests and the forests of the western United States? Is the current rate of burning of these forests unprecedented? Has it been systematically increasing over the past few decades and, if so, is it in response to human-induced global warming?” The article contains diagrams and tables based on a suite of fire-related datasets: satellite measurements of burned area, fire-related carbon emissions, aerosol optical depth, dating back to around the year 2000, and longer ground-based records of area burned by fires in the western United States. The graphics and tables reveal the remarkable extent of the forested area burned. The average area burned per year has increased by roughly a factor of three since the year 2000. The area burned by severe fires with areas > 100 km2 has been increasing more rapidly than the area burned by smaller fires. Wildfire smoke has also increased appreciably over much of North America. Forested burned area and fire-related carbon emissions are highly sensitive to measures of aridity on time scales ranging from days to decades. Aridity has increased, mainly in response to the warming trend, which is comparable in magnitude to that in climate model simulations of the response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. The evidence presented herein supports the widely held belief that the recent increase in wildfires is mainly due to human-induced global warming.

Net Groundwater Recharge in California Occurs Primarily During Above-Average Snowpack Years, Reager et al., Geophysical Research Letters

In a new application of GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite observations, we estimate basin-scale net groundwater recharge rates for the combined Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Tulare basins encompassing California's Central Valley aquifer. Net recharge is calculated as the temporal derivative of groundwater storage anomalies and compared with precipitation and snow water equivalent over a fixed study area. Net positive recharge is rare, occurring in only six water years since 2004, and is consistently associated with years of above-average Sierra Nevada snowpack. Across the observational record, net positive recharge is observed only in years when snow water equivalent exceeds approximately 21 km3 (17 MAF; ∼121% of the 20-year mean value), with the largest recharge event coinciding with the exceptionally wet winter of water year 2023. These results suggest that above-average snowpack conditions, rather than rainfall alone, are an important enabling condition for basin-scale groundwater recharge under a warming climate.

Concurrent Eurasian Heatwaves Will Intensify Beyond the Mean Warming, Xu et al., Geophysical Research Letters

Heatwaves occurring at the same time over Europe and North China are among the most common simultaneous climate extremes in the Northern Hemisphere. These events are linked by a large-scale atmospheric circulation pattern, the British–Baikal Corridor pattern, which produces high-pressure systems over both regions simultaneously. Using a large ensemble of climate model simulations, we find that these concurrent heatwaves will become much more severe in the future. Importantly, they intensify faster than average temperature increases due to global warming. Even after accounting for background warming, temperatures during these events exceed the regional mean warming by about 0.3°C on average and by more than 0.5°C locally. Surprisingly, the reasons for this additional intensification differ between the two regions. Over North China, the atmospheric circulation pattern strengthens, bringing clearer skies and greater solar heating. Over Europe, however, the circulation pattern weakens, but heatwaves still intensify because drier soils provide less evaporative cooling. These findings challenge the common assumption that the same weather pattern amplifies heat equally wherever it occurs. They also suggest that future heat risks may be underestimated if assessments rely only on average warming, particularly when heatwaves strike multiple regions simultaneously.

Defending the status quo: The role of system justification in public opposition to ambitious climate policy and energy system change, Lloyd et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology

In recent years, environmental psychologists have argued that our field must conduct more solutions-focussed and system-level research if we want to contribute to ambitious and effective climate action. In this paper, we propose that system justification offers a promising pathway towards achieving both of these goals, and investigate its influence on three societally-impactful outcomes: support for climate policy, support for a just energy transition, and endorsement of climate delay discourses. We also test whether experimentally inducing hope could offer a solution to these proposed deleterious effects. We conduct this research in small-to-medium sized communities in Western Canada, many of which are dependent upon fossil-fuels for their continued existence, and thus strongly oppose decarbonization. Using an online survey of these communities (N = 3,400) we find that system justification consistently predicts lower support for climate policies, greater endorsement of climate delay discourses, and lower support for a just energy transition. Additionally, moderation analyses reveal that this relationship is stronger for those with greater proximity to the fossil-fuel industry, and that our hope manipulation had no effect. We explore the policy implications of these findings, arguing that policymakers should (1) aim to narratively detach the status quo from the economic system, and (2) design just transitions policies which act to maintain fossil-fuel communities’ current way of life, rather than trying to improve it. These findings extend system justification theory to three new societally-impactful outcomes; demonstrate its utility for policymaking; and highlight its potential to contribute to transformation-oriented research in environmental psychology.

From this week's government/NGO section:

Findings from a 2026 Survey of Adults Age 18 and Older, Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research

The authors found that 53% of Americans are extremely or very concerned about the environmental effects of AI, up from 41% who said the same in 2025. Younger adults ages 18-29 have become particularly concerned, increasing from 38% last year to 60% today and moving from levels similar to other age groups to the highest level of concern. Forty-seven percent of Americans think AI will do more to hurt rather than help the environment, up from 33% who said the same in 2025. The authors also explored attitudes toward climate change, energy policy, and electric vehicles (EVs). Most Americans agree that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity, a trend that has remained stable in recent years. There is a large partisan divide in these attitudes, however, with Democrats more likely than Republicans to believe climate change is occurring (92% vs. 55%) and is caused mostly by human activity (68% vs. 34%). About 2 in 3 believe that oil and gas companies, the federal government, and large businesses and corporations have a lot of responsibility to address climate change, while just 4 in 10 say the same about developing countries and individual people.

In Hottest Summer on Record, 2 in 3 Americans Say Climate Change Is Increasing Heat-Related Illnesses, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania

Nearly two-thirds of the American public say climate change is increasing the risk of respiratory diseases and heat- and insect-related illnesses. The author's survey, which was conducted Aug. 4-17, 2026, among 1,904 empaneled U.S. adults, found that 76% report that extreme outdoor heat affected their daily activities at least sometimes in the past year and 38% say poor air quality resulting from wildfire smoke did so. Extreme heat is affecting the everyday lives of most Americans. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say that climate change is increasing the risk of heat-related illnesses, respiratory diseases, and insect-borne diseases. This is unchanged from August 2025 (65%) and July 2024 (67%) but is significantly higher than 58% in November 2023. Americans generally recognize that heat waves are on the rise. Nearly two-thirds (62%) say U.S. heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense than in the past, statistically unchanged from 61% in August 2025, 65% in July 2024, and 58% in November 2023. Of the four extreme weather events measured in the survey, more Americans report that their daily activities were impacted at least sometimes by extreme outdoor heat (76%) and poor air quality resulting from wildfire smoke (38%). As one would expect, fewer say they were impacted at least sometimes by flooding (20%) and tornadoes/hurricanes (11%), since these events are less frequent. 87 articles in 46 journals by 618 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Amplified Cloud-Phase Responses Over Global Mountain Regions Under Climate Warming, Zhang et al., AGU Advances Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026av002380

Anthropogenic Warming Weakens Mild Offshore Winds in Southern California but Not the Extreme Fire-Weather Winds, Madakumbura et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026ef008422

Emerging Divergence Between Dry- and Humid-Heat in China Under Weakening Temperature-Humidity Coupling, Zhu et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd046959

Future Reduction of North Pacific Subtropical Mode Water: Its Impacts on Physical and Biogeochemical Conditions in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, Sugimoto, Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans Open Access 10.1029/2026jc024776

On the Timescales of Atmospheric Adjustments to Contrail Cirrus Formation, Quarroz et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl125935

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
A holistic platform for accelerating sorbent-based carbon capture, Nature, 10.1038/s41586-024-07683-8 95 cites.

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Observations of climate change, effects

Earthquake-triggered cascading hazards under Arctic amplification, Melo et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2617210123

Long-term weakening of extreme cold stress in eastern China, Li et al., Weather and Climate Extremes Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2026.100960

Observational Evidence for Accelerated Warming and Salinification Propagating Into the Deep Mediterranean, Terzi? & Vilibi?, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl124518

Spatiotemporal variations in snowline altitude across the High Mountain Asia from 1990 to 2024 Based on Landsat Data, Wang et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.09.007

The Increasing Incidence of Boreal and Western U.S. Forest Wildfires and Its Causes: An Overview, Wallace et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 10.1175/bams-d-25-0193.1

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Sketching the spatial disparities in heatwave trends by changing atmospheric teleconnections in the Northern Hemisphere, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52254-0 42 cites.

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Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

A deep learning framework for gridding daily climate variables from a sparse station network, Dumitrescu, Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-8895-2026

Attribution estimates for similar extremes are robust across event definitions, Otto et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-04053-2

Improving global and regional ocean heat content by consistently combining GRACE gravity, satellite altimetry and Argo profile observations in a joint inversion framework, Uebbing et al., Earth system science data Open Access 10.5194/essd-18-6945-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Are Our Climate Data Fit for Your Purpose?, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 10.1175/bams-d-23-0295.1 10 cites.

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Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

Concurrent Eurasian Heatwaves Will Intensify Beyond the Mean Warming, Xu et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl123850

Future Redistribution of North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Risk in Two Contrasting CMIP6 Scenarios, Lele et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl123424

Projected Changes in Reference Evapotranspiration Across Indian Climate Regimes Using Bias-Corrected CMIP6 Simulations, Nayak et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70603

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Abrupt increase in Arctic-Subarctic wildfires caused by future permafrost thaw, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-51471-x 42 cites.

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Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

A new Earth Observation–based WRF configuration for urban regional climate simulations over Paris, Kyriakidis et al., Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-8709-2026

Downscaling of Temperatures Over the Eastern Mediterranean for the 21st Century, Gelman et al., International Journal of Climatology Open Access pdf 10.1002/joc.70519

New Constraint on Future Ocean Heat Uptake Revealed by Considering Model Spread of Radiative Forcing, Wu & Gregory, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl123530

The Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project (CFMIP) contribution to CMIP7, Ceppi et al., Geoscientific model development Open Access pdf 10.5194/gmd-19-8693-2026

Using Rapid Temperature Falls to Estimate Future Strong Cold Front Frequency in CMIP6 Climate Projections, Corrales et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl124031

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Mean and Extreme Climate for the Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM), Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 10.1175/jamc-d-24-0004.1 16 cites.

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Cryosphere & climate change

Accelerated mass loss of glaciers across Alaska since the Little Ice Age, Carrivick et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-70307-w

Cross-Basin Synergistic Effects Stall Summer Sea Ice Decline in the Chukchi Sea, Dong et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd047482

Enhanced Erosion Across a Transition From Continuous to Discontinuous Permafrost in Alaska, Özpolat et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007889

Feedbacks and timescales in the modelled transient response of debris-covered glaciers, Hardmeier et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-5365-2026

Modelling climate-induced instability of ice-rich permafrost slopes, Aga et al., cryosphere Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-20-5225-2026

Net Groundwater Recharge in California Occurs Primarily During Above-Average Snowpack Years, Reager et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl122396

Parameterizing tidal-water intrusions in long-term Antarctic ice-sheet projections, Juárez-Martínez et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-5345-2026

Seasonal Response of the Arctic Sea Ice to Meltwater Runoff from the Greenland Ice Sheet, Liang et al., Journal of Physical Oceanography 10.1175/jpo-d-26-0025.1

Spatiotemporal variations in snowline altitude across the High Mountain Asia from 1990 to 2024 Based on Landsat Data, Wang et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.09.007

Temporal evolution of the Petermann Ice Shelf estuary constrained by satellite remote sensing observations, Savignano et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-5247-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Lake ice quality in a warming world, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 10.1038/s43017-024-00590-6 33 cites.

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Sea level & climate change

Anatomy of Interannual to Decadal Sea Level Changes in the GECCO3 Ocean Synthesis, Stammer et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans Open Access 10.1029/2026jc024340

Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature, Science, 10.1126/science.adk3705 242 cites.

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Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Climate change affects the distribution of cacti species of the genus Melocactus in the Brazilian Caatinga, Cavalcante et al., Tropical Ecology Open Access 10.1007/s42965-026-00444-w

Detection of emergent multiple predator effects in a warming world, Davidson et al., Biology Letters Open Access 10.1098/rsbl.2026.0257

Escalating Ecological Droughts Driven by Compound Soil and Atmospheric Dryness, Song et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71102

Global Projections of Coral Reef Sediment Dissolution in the 21st Century, Yan et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl125720

GROWTH RESPONSES OF CHIHUAHUA PINE (PINUS LEIOPHYLLA) OVER 128 YEARS OF WARMING AND PRECIPITATION REGIME SHIFTS, Todd et al., Dendrochronologia Open Access 10.1016/j.dendro.2026.126614

Identifying future climate refugia in central European mountain forests, Berre et al., Journal of Ecology Open Access 10.1111/1365-2745.70439

Increasingly synchronous water limitation portends resilience declines for whitebark pine, Friedman & Germain, Dendrochronologia 10.1016/j.dendro.2026.126615

Reforestation Under Climate Change—A Cross-Regional Deadwood Retention Experiment to Develop Multifunctional Forests on Disturbed Norway Spruce Areas, Putzenlechner et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access pdf 10.1002/ece3.74357

Spatial Variability in Phytoplankton Response to Projected Increases in Iron and Temperature in the Ross Sea, Cristi et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026jc024364

Summer Heat Stress Downregulates Photochemistry in Coast Redwoods, Klinek et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access 10.1029/2026jg010052

Synthesis of scale-dependent plant biodiversity change in climate warming experiments, Korell et al., Ecology Open Access 10.1002/ecy.70486

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Nonanthropocentric climate ethics, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change, 10.1002/wcc.131 72 cites.

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GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

Abundance of Fe/Al Oxides Governs Soil Organic Carbon Stability in Wetlands Under Drying Conditions, Yao et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.71109

Climate and penguin-mediated carbon burial hotspots in coastal lakes of East Antarctica, Zhao et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105730

Forest Carbon Exchange Dynamics and Integrated Carbon Budget of a Subtropical Island Ecosystem, Han et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences 10.1029/2026jg010032

Heterogeneity in Permafrost Organic Matter Molecular Composition With Depth and Ramifications Upon Thaw in the Western Siberian Lowlands, Anderson et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences 10.1029/2026jg010169

Modeling forest soil organic carbon dynamics under seasonal freeze–thaw cycles: implications for carbon sequestration in cold-region forest ecosystems, Gao et al., Frontiers in Forests and Global Change Open Access pdf 10.3389/ffgc.2026.1939588

Natural wetland methane emissions simulated by ICON-XPP, Wilkenskjeld et al., Biogeosciences Open Access 10.5194/bg-23-6583-2026

Net carbon losses in Central African forests revealed by high-resolution biomass change maps, Wan et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77531-y

Nonlinear thermal responses of soil respiration temperature sensitivity under climate change, Yang et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105727

Seven-year continuous measurement of CO2 and CH4 at Atlas Mohammed V atmospheric research station in Northwest Africa, Ouchen et al., Atmospheric Environment Open Access 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122365

Structural Diversity Amplifies the Effects of Functional Diversity on Forest Carbon Storage Across Stand Development, Wang et al., Global Ecology and Biogeography Open Access pdf 10.1111/geb.70309

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Emerging multiscale insights on microbial carbon use efficiency in the land carbon cycle, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52160-5 119 cites.

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CO2 capture, sequestration science & engineering

Carbon sequestration potential of tree planting under future climate scenarios in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, China, Zhao et al., Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103128

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Feasible deployment of carbon capture and storage and the requirements of climate targets, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02104-0 170 cites.

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Decarbonization

Flash energy droughts in solar and wind resources under climate change, Lin et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02753-3

Hydrogen Storage Technologies: Materials Innovation and System-Level Challenges for a Carbon-Neutral Future, Pranto et al., Advanced Energy and Sustainability Research Open Access 10.1002/aesr.70256

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Diverse decarbonization pathways under near cost-optimal futures, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52433-z 43 cites.

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Geoengineering climate

Mapping justice claims for solar geoengineering, Jinnah et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001054

Uneven Responses of Regional Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Turnover Time to Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, Park et al., Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.21390921

Black carbon
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The politics of knowledge in black carbon mitigation: Policy entrepreneurship of Finnish actors and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, Environmental Science & Policy, 10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103881 3 cites.

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Aerosols
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Global aerosol retrieval over land from Landsat imagery integrating Transformer and Google Earth Engine, Remote Sensing of Environment, 10.1016/j.rse.2024.114404 45 cites.

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Climate change communications & cognition

Affective divisions and climate policy polarization, Bäck et al., Environmental Politics Open Access pdf 10.1080/09644016.2026.2731596

Future Before My Eyes: How Psychological Distance and Immersive Presentations Relate to Climate Emotions, Schroeder et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103213

Simple logic warnings improve climate argument evaluation across beliefs and partisanship, Bagó & Purcell, Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02754-2

Simple logic warnings improve climate argument evaluation across beliefs and partisanship, Bagó & Purcell, Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02754-2

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI, Science, 10.1126/science.adq1814 305 cites.

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Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

Genetically engineered crops increase climate resilience of US fields, [authors did not process], Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02750-6

Historical dynamics of agricultural carbon emissions in the North China plain over the past 300 years, Ye et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1831579

Long-Term Sustainability of Direct Straw Return Challenged by Soil Carbon Saturation and Emission Trade-Offs, Liu et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71120

Stage-Specific Associations Between Extreme Climate Events and Crop Failures Across China, Huang et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008789

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Nexus among climate change, food systems, and human health: An interdisciplinary research framework in the Global South, Environmental Science & Policy, 10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103885 23 cites.

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Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Future changes and drivers of socioeconomic exposure to extreme precipitation in the Huai River Basin, Jiang et al., Natural Hazards 10.1007/s11069-026-08417-x

Governance barriers to climate change adaptation in regional catchment management, Kennedy et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104491

Net Groundwater Recharge in California Occurs Primarily During Above-Average Snowpack Years, Reager et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl122396

The 2025–2026 Iberian Atmospheric Rivers Exhibited Moisture Transport Resembling the Early SSP5-8.5 Climate Response, Fernández-Alvarez et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl123799

Variability and response to climate change of precipitation recycling ratio in the water source conservation area of the upper Yellow River, Yang et al., Atmospheric Research 10.1016/j.atmosres.2026.109333

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Spatiotemporal patterns in persistent precipitation extremes of the Chinese mainland (1961–2022) and association with the dynamic factors, Atmospheric Research, 10.1016/j.atmosres.2024.107600 14 cites.

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Climate change economics
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The ocean carbon sink enhances countries’ inclusive wealth and reduces the cost of national climate policies, Communications Earth & Environment, 10.1038/s43247-024-01674-3 9 cites.

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Climate change mitigation public policy research

Affective divisions and climate policy polarization, Bäck et al., Environmental Politics Open Access pdf 10.1080/09644016.2026.2731596

Australian Elected Representatives Underestimate Public Support for Climate Action, Wilkinson & Klebl, Journal of Environmental Psychology Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103217

Climate action disclosure among companies: Implications for achieving global efforts to limit average global temperature rise to below 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, Shimwela et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000951

Defending the status quo: The role of system justification in public opposition to ambitious climate policy and energy system change, Lloyd et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology Open Access 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103214

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Progress from Chicken Genetics to the Chicken Genome, Poultry Science, 10.1093/ps/85.12.2050 55 cites.

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Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

Adapting the emergency management Enterprise to manage the climate emergency: a critical review, Preston et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100885

Cross-sectoral perspectives on strategies to address climate adaptation and health in cyclone-prone Sofala province, Mozambique, Marrufo et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1912968

Governance barriers to climate change adaptation in regional catchment management, Kennedy et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104491

Mapping the urban heat island and climate risk in Padua (Italy): Trends in extremes and perspectives for climate justice in adaptation planning, Ceppi et al., Urban Climate Open Access 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103143

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Elevated urban energy risks due to climate-driven biophysical feedbacks, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02108-w 37 cites.

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Climate change impacts on human health

Beyond resolution: An integrated framework for selecting climate data for urban heat-risk assessment, Shin et al., Urban Climate Open Access 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103150

Climate Informed Dengue Prediction and Future Risk Under a Changing Monsoon Climate in Kerala, India, Yacob & Koll, Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.20096919

Heatstroke in Japan: current status, future risks, and prevention measures under a changing climate, Oka, Climate Risk Management Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100887

Long-term weakening of extreme cold stress in eastern China, Li et al., Weather and Climate Extremes Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2026.100960

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Rising cause-specific mortality risk and burden of compound heatwaves amid climate change, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02137-5 100 cites.

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Climate change & geopolitics

Mapping and quantifying engagement levels of governments in IPCC approval meetings by topic from text, Bayer et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001057

Other

Climate urgency enables political alignment for Latin American power integration, Ramírez et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77772-x

Dialogue framework for climate justice: bridging social and environmental justice, Thiele, Environmental Sociology 10.1080/23251042.2026.2732173

Extreme North American heatwaves in 1941 and 2021 drove widespread but contrasting impacts, Anderson & Chartrand, Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-04055-0

Internal Variability Dominates the Spatial Heterogeneity of Recent Trends in Eurasian Winter Cold Extremes, Liu et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl124591

Kinetic study of global-scale O3 pollution under 2060s climate and emission scenarios, Hata et al., Atmospheric Environment Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122367

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climatic controls of fire activity in the red pine forests of eastern North America, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 10.1016/j.agrformet.2024.110219 7 cites.

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Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

A global safety net for climate-risk intelligence is urgently needed, Bashir & Adil, Nature 10.1038/d41586-026-02995-3

Adaptation as a catalyst for social change, Adams et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001052

Protecting tropical forests is more cost-effective for biodiversity and climate than restoration, Miranda et al., Science 10.1126/science.adx9928

Research Priorities for Robust Climate Assessments in the United States, Kenney et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007336

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations, The Lancet Planetary Health, 10.1016/s2542-5196(24)00042-1 173 cites.

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

Making California’s Electricity Cheaper: An Affordability Agenda for the Golden State, Boyle et al., Grid Lab and Energy Innovation

More than 80% of Californians rank lowering bills as a top or important priority for state leaders, and the state’s elected officials have a duty to address these intertwined problems for their constituents. In response, the authors participated in a workshop of more than 20 California electricity experts to diagnose what is causing rising costs and develop actionable policy solutions that address the scale of the challenge. The authors were informed by but not limited by that workshop; they define a policy roadmap to stabilize and ultimately reduce electricity rates for California’s incoming governor, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the legislature, utilities, and other stakeholders, that will allow California to sustain its clean energy leadership.

Understanding the linkage between transmission deliverability and resource adequacy, Stenclik et al., GridLab and Telos Energy

The authors wanted to bridge the gap between interconnection studies and resource adequacy assessments, two processes that are deeply interrelated, but have historically been treated as separate analytical exercises. Most of the recent attention on generator interconnection has focused on interconnection costs, queue timelines, and transmission cost allocation, while the resource adequacy implications have remained largely unexamined. Despite the central role of deliverability assumptions in resource adequacy assessments, there has been limited research into whether they accurately reflect how resources perform during periods of elevated resource adequacy risk outside of narrowly defined peak-load windows. Inaccurately assumed generator deliverability can have a large affect on resource adequacy outcomes.

Assessing Electricity Resource Adequacy in Pennsylvania and PJM, Knight et al., Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission

The authors developed load projections and evaluated resource adequacy under a set of likely possible futures for PJM's grid and its' Pennsylvania service area. The authors used capacity expansion and resource adequacy scenario modeling to (a) develop projections of future resources through the long term (2040) in light of different load projections and (b) assess system reliability performance through the near term (2030) to better understand the kinds of stresses Pennsylvania’s electric system and the wider PJM grid face. Three scenarios were used. In both the Reference scenario and the High Load And Low Supply scenario, the authors found that from 2027 through 2030, the PJM planning criterion for resource adequacy (loss of load expectation or “LOLE” of 0.1) is not met by PJM. Meanwhile, in the No New Data Centers scenario, LOLE is below this 0.1 threshold.

State of Mind: Mapping Values and Climate Perceptions, Maharashtra Edition, Ek Kutumb Solutions

If technical infrastructure enables the delivery of climate solutions, relational infrastructure enables their acceptance, adoption, and endurance. It comprises the social foundations that shape whether people engage with transitions: the values they hold, the degree of agency they feel, the priorities they seek to protect, the institutions they trust, and the ways in which they make sense of change. To address this missing layer, Ek Kutumb is building the first and largest state-by-state, values-based segmentation of citizens in India. The research seeks to surface the deeply held values and perceptions of climate change, along with experiences of agency, priorities, and trust factors that shape how people respond to climate-related issues and interventions. The first state examined is Maharashtra. Four themes emerge from the Maharashtra findings including the primacy of everyday economic pressures, a deep but locally rooted relationship with nature, broad acceptance of climate change expressed in the language of lived experience rather than scientific terminology, and a trust vacuum in which no institution has yet earned the mandate to lead on climate. The authors segment the population into seven value-based groups, each defined by a distinct configuration of core values. For each segment, they examined their relationship to family and community, as well as their understanding of the environment, climate, and institutions.

State of Global Water Resources 2025, World Meteorological Organization

The authors provide a comprehensive quantitative overview of global water resources, with a focus on hydrological variability and trends. The report's information supports countries, decision makers and stakeholders in understanding the current state of water resources, identifying areas with significant anomalies and supporting effective water management strategies. The authors found that 2025 was one of driest years for river discharge in 35 years. The past seven years have seen abnormal river flows. Water storage on Earth’s land surface has decreased in past 10 years. Widespread glacier loss occurred across all regions for the fourth consecutive year. Asia and Africa are the regions most affected by water-related disasters. Water data availability has improved, but gaps remain in hard hit areas.

State-Led Planning, Development, and Procurement, Spokas et al., Clean Air Task Force

The authors identify how establishing state-led planning and procurement can help state governments in deregulated electricity markets meet their power sector decarbonization goals and lays out the components needed to put that planning in action.

Findings from a 2026 Survey of Adults Age 18 and Older, Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research

The authors found that 53% of Americans are extremely or very concerned about the environmental effects of AI, up from 41% who said the same in 2025. Younger adults ages 18-29 have become particularly concerned, increasing from 38% last year to 60% today and moving from levels similar to other age groups to the highest level of concern. Forty-seven percent of Americans think AI will do more to hurt rather than help the environment, up from 33% who said the same in 2025. The authors also explored attitudes toward climate change, energy policy, and electric vehicles (EVs). Most Americans agree that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity, a trend that has remained stable in recent years. There is a large partisan divide in these attitudes, however, with Democrats more likely than Republicans to believe climate change is occurring (92% vs. 55%) and is caused mostly by human activity (68% vs. 34%). About 2 in 3 believe that oil and gas companies, the federal government, and large businesses and corporations have a lot of responsibility to address climate change, while just 4 in 10 say the same about developing countries and individual people.

In Hottest Summer on Record, 2 in 3 Americans Say Climate Change Is Increasing Heat-Related Illnesses, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania

Nearly two-thirds of the American public say climate change is increasing the risk of respiratory diseases and heat- and insect-related illnesses. The author's survey, which was conducted Aug. 4-17, 2026, among 1,904 empaneled U.S. adults, found that 76% report that extreme outdoor heat affected their daily activities at least sometimes in the past year and 38% say poor air quality resulting from wildfire smoke did so. Extreme heat is affecting the everyday lives of most Americans. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say that climate change is increasing the risk of heat-related illnesses, respiratory diseases, and insect-borne diseases. This is unchanged from August 2025 (65%) and July 2024 (67%) but is significantly higher than 58% in November 2023. Americans generally recognize that heat waves are on the rise. Nearly two-thirds (62%) say U.S. heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense than in the past, statistically unchanged from 61% in August 2025, 65% in July 2024, and 58% in November 2023. Of the four extreme weather events measured in the survey, more Americans report that their daily activities were impacted at least sometimes by extreme outdoor heat (76%) and poor air quality resulting from wildfire smoke (38%). As one would expect, fewer say they were impacted at least sometimes by flooding (20%) and tornadoes/hurricanes (11%), since these events are less frequent.

Energy Crossroads: Why managing fossil fuel decline is key to Australia’s green export future, Malbrain et al., WWF-Australia

The authors warn that the Australia's bid to be both a renewable energy superpower and a major fossil fuel exporter is putting its economic future at risk. This dual energy strategy is sending mixed signals to investors and trading partners just as countries across the Indo-Pacific accelerate clean energy investments. Australia could lose up to $70 billion in fossil fuel export value by 2035 as global demand shifts. Yet, findings show Australian governments still provide an estimated $20.1 billion a year in support to fossil fuels, compared with just $4.6 billion for renewable energy.

Understanding Oregon’s Data Center Industry, Wirkkala et al., Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Insight at ECOnorthwest and the University of Virginia

The authors establishes a common foundation for understanding Oregon’s data center industry. They examine the location, scale, and characteristics of existing and planned facilities; electricity and water implications; workforce and economic contributions; property taxes and incentive programs; land use and host-community characteristics; and Oregon’s position relative to selected peer markets. The analysis draws on facility-level data, confidential employment records, economic modeling, county property tax records, geospatial analysis, public utility and water-resource information, and other state, federal, and industry sources. The authors also identify areas where data are insufficient to understand impacts, and further research or reporting is needed. Electricity demand is one of the industry’s most significant infrastructure considerations. Water use depends heavily on facility technology and local conditions. Data centers have a distinct economic profile; relatively few operational jobs, but substantial economic activity. Land-use effects are small statewide, but can be more significant locally.

From Opportunity To Infrastructure: Scaling Rooftop Solar In Commercial Real Estate (UK), Cush and Wakefield, Real Estate:UK, Forsters, and Push Power

The authors found that the UK’s untapped commercial rooftops could become a major new source of solar energy generation with enough output to match that of 20 Hinkley Point C nuclear power stations. This, if used correctly, could massively increase UK renewable energy production, fast-track the UK’s path to net zero, improve national energy security, reduce the need for solar deployment on agricultural land, and drastically reduce energy costs for occupiers amid ongoing energy price uncertainty. The authors used data and responses from 70 real estate organizations with combined assets under management of over £500bn. The authors found that less than 10% of suitable commercial building roof space has been used for solar generation to date, providing just 3-5GW of solar capacity. While solar technology is widely championed in principle, its deployment remains significantly below its technical potential, particularly across the industrial and logistics real estate sector.

The Dirty Truth. They promised you clean energy, but there's a Dirty Truth behind your rising utility bills, Ver Beek et al., Sierra Club

The authors studied the 50 parent companies that own the most fossil fuel generation, comprised of 76 operating companies, which collectively own half of all remaining coal and gas generation in the U.S. They analyzed their plans to retire coal by 2030, not build new gas plants through 2035, and build clean energy to replace fossil generation and serve new load by 2035. The utilities studied scored 7/100, earning an F, worsening their overall score by 11 points since 2021.

Stored Potential. The impacts of utility-scale battery energy storage systems on communities and the grid, Draklellis et al., RMI

The authors examine large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) projects across the United States, drawing on available data to assess their reliability contributions, economic impacts, community benefits, and improving safety performance. Batteries help keep the lights on during grid stress. Battery storage can lower electricity costs during high-demand periods. BESS projects can provide meaningful local economic benefits. About New Research

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President Donald Trump’s second term has been a nightmare for global cooperation on climate change. Trump has yanked the United States from the Paris climate agreement, attacked a global agreement on a carbon tax for cargo ships, and threatened countries with tariffs if they get too vocal about climate. 

This week brought a notable exception. World leaders at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday approved a unanimous resolution on how to handle sea level rise, and the United States did not block it from moving forward. The passage of the accord represents a rare win for multilateralism, made all the more notable by the fact that the agreement includes references to climate change and climate aid for developing countries. 

The declaration could bring new momentum to efforts to help small island states, said Philip Davis, the prime minister of the Bahamas, in an interview with Grist.

“Our landmass is less than 3 meters above sea level, we are already seeing our land being swallowed by water, and the global effort to stem the carbon footprint has stalled,” he said. “I think this declaration will perhaps heighten the flow of action.”

For many low-lying countries, the implications of this agreement could be profound. Some island nations, like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, face almost total inundation over the next century as rising temperatures melt the world’s ice sheets and glaciers. It had never been clear what would happen to those sovereign nations. Under the agreement, those states will continue to exist as political actors even if their landmass disappears. They’ll also retain control over their old maritime borders, the stretch of sea extending from the coastline over which a country has exclusive control for fishing, energy development, and other military and economic activity. 

An aerial view of a strip of land between the Pacific Ocean and a lagoon in Funafuti, Tuvalu. The island nation of around 11,000 people is facing total inundation as sea levels rise. Mario Tama / Getty Images

The declaration is the result of a campaign by the Alliance of Small Island States, an influential bloc of low-lying island nations. Recent rulings from international legal bodies have helped affirm countries’ continued rights in the face of sea level rise, but the world’s leaders had never endorsed those rulings. 

“What was long treated as a legal ‘presumption’ is now an affirmation,” said Kamal Amakrane, the managing director of the Global Center for Climate Mobility and the climate envoy for Trinidad and Tobago, which helped initiate talks toward a global declaration. He noted that the world has agreed to preserve small islands “by consensus, in a year when consensus has been hard to come by.”

The document enshrines strong protections for states at risk of losing land. It holds that countries “can … maintain their maritime zones in the face of physical changes resulting from sea level rise,” a principle that the document calls a “presumption in favor of continued statehood.” That echoes a landmark climate ruling from the International Court of Justice last year, which held that “once a State is established, the disappearance of one of its constituent elements would not necessarily entail the loss of its statehood,” and which affirmed that international law requires countries to respect one another’s established borders.

The declaration will go a long way toward helping secure the future of small island states. For the Bahamas, protecting pristine ocean territory is essential to its tourism-driven economy. Davis said that the legal protections will safeguard his country and others against efforts to claim ocean territory for industries like deep-sea mining.

“This cannot be a free-for-all,” he said. “This cannot be might is right, and might takes what is there.”

The agreement also includes strong language recognizing that developed countries and historic emitters have an “urgent” obligation to provide “expanded access” to adaptation funds for small island states. This money could build seawalls or restore mangrove forests to protect coastlines from rising water, or it could help relocate populations from flood-prone areas. 

Prime Minister Philip Davis of the Bahamas addresses the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025. The Bahamas is seeking to protect its ocean territory from exploitation as its land disappears. Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images

The declaration on its own won’t do anything to increase the money available to states like the Marshall Islands. Wealthy countries are currently giving poor ones about $130 billion a year in grants and low-interest loans for clean energy and adaptation, well below the level that experts believe is necessary to avoid catastrophic impacts. The world agreed in 2024 to reach $300 billion in annual aid by 2035, but it’s too early to gauge progress toward that target. Even then, much of that finance is in the form of loans, which are hard for many island states to afford — the Bahamas has billions of dollars of debt already, much of it stemming from damages after 2019’s Hurricane Dorian.

Even so, the mention of adaptation was welcome for island nations. Language about climate aid has been much contested at recent United Nations climate talks, with wealthy nations rejecting calls for trillions that could build flood walls and elevate sinking islands. Trump has gone further and rejected almost all international aid obligations, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and pulling out of dozens of treaties. Yet neither the State Department nor other finance-averse countries rejected the language in the sea level rise declaration. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment by publication.)

The reason for the cooperation by the United States is that legal protections against sea level rise are in every country’s interest, said Bryce Rudyk, a law professor at New York University who also serves as a legal advisor to the Alliance of Small Island States. The United States and other rich nations could lose land to sea level rise, and in some countries a shifting maritime border might jeopardize sovereign control over natural resources like oil, minerals, or offshore wind. 

“Everyone will lose land, and no one wants to lose ocean territory,” he said. “I think that’s why they were fine with making these relatively strong statements. … It’s in everyone’s interest to say, ‘We don’t want states just disappearing.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UN passes first declaration on sea level rise, protecting island nations’ sovereignty on Sep 24, 2026.

Just before I left for Tasmania, I watched Short-tailed Shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostris) passing Washington's coast, headed the same direction I was about to go. Around 18 million of these...

Anna Vallery, Coastal Program Manager for Audubon Washington, has long been interested in improving methods used for monitoring seabird and waterbird colonies. She is excited to keep pushing this...

President William Ruto of Kenya has called for COP31’s electrification agenda – a flagship initiative to accelerate the electrification of the global economy – to include a push for electric cookers to replace polluting firewood and charcoal.

The Turkish and Australian co-hosts of the November summit want governments to sign up to a pledge to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35% globally by 2035 and 50% by 2050. It is currently around 23%.

“We should arrive at COP31 with clean cooking firmly embedded in that electrification and efficiency agenda,” Ruto said during an event on clean cooking organised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the governments of Kenya, Norway and the US at the ongoing UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.

“The kitchen is where the energy transition enters daily lives for nearly one billion people,” the Kenyan president said. He added that schools, hospitals and prisons – as well as homes – need to switch to clean cooking fuels.

COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment

Ruto said that – as well as the climate, health and gender equality benefits of clean cooking – electric cooking can make investment in electricity generation and networks more profitable and ensure households get more value from electricity connections.

LPG or electricity?

According to the IEA, about 6% of sub-Saharan African households – overwhelmingly in southern Africa – used electricity to cook in 2024 – while just under a fifth used liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).

Despite being a fossil fuel and worse for indoor air quality than electric cookers, LPG is widely regarded as a clean-cooking fuel as the damage it does to the climate and to health is far less than the firewood and charcoal on which most sub-Saharan Africans rely on.

A new IEA report on electrification found that electric cookstoves are 10% cheaper over their lifetimes than LPG stoves. But they are more expensive upfront so restricted access to finance holds back their adoption, as do power cuts, a lack of access to electricity and cultural preferences.

At the event in New York, some speakers promoted electric cookers while others stressed “technology neutrality”, implying that LPG should be used where appropriate.

People gather near a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder distribution agency as they wait for a supply to be delivered on March 19, 2026 in Lucknow, India (Photo: Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images)

UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte was more in the former camp, saying that “clean cooking must be fit for the modern age of energy transitions and the age of electricity” and “genuinely clean and future-facing”, adding that countries can “ride the trends of electrification” to roll out clean cooking.

As disruptions to oil and gas supply chains push up the cost of cooking gas, Kyte asked: “Why should households and governments be locked into solutions that are simply going to be a victim to fossil fuel and price volatility”.

Alexander De Croo, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, said that renewable energy offers the best potential to achieve clean cooking because decentralised clean power can get to everywhere on the African continent. 

Echoing Kyte, he added that “[renewables] detaches you from the volatility of fossil fuel that you see today, very often”, adding that it poses a very low level of risk compared with other energy systems and is one of the easiest ways of reducing emissions throughout the world.

But Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said that country realities are different and so the pathways to achieving clean cooking will require different combinations of LPG, electricity, bioenergy and other solutions.

Technology neutrality

With half of the about two billion people lacking access to clean cooking globally living in Africa, the African Union’s commissioner for infrastructure and energy Lerato Mataboge said the continent prioritises “technology neutrality” and does not have a preference for electricity or LPG if either would help achieve clean cooking. 

She said national circumstances of African countries must be respected, adding that the continent needs a range of affordable, reliable and safe cooking solutions as well as approaches that allow countries to select technologies that are “appropriate to their resources, infrastructure and household needs”. 

She added that financing decisions should not exclude viable solutions “solely because of the energy source from whence they come”. Whatever clean-cooking technology is used, she said that “affordability must extend beyond the purchase of a stove. We must ask if a household can afford the next cylinder refill or the next electricity payment”, she said.

• Sep 23, 2026 News UN Climate Summit: UN chief says world has tools to end fossil fuel age At the UN Secretary-General’s climate summit in New York, countries shared their energy transition plans while Nepal and island nations advocated for more international support Read more
• Sep 23, 2026 News UN backs push to upgrade grids slowing clean power uptake in Africa and SE Asia The Global Grids Accelerator will help turn national and regional plans to expand electricity infrastructure into viable projects on the ground Read more
• Sep 23, 2026 Justice Despite “real progress”, third of countries still lack early warning systems About 60 nations have yet to put in place a multi-hazard early warning system to protect people from disasters before they happen, the UN says Read more

Dola Oluteye, senior fellow in energy and transport policy at the UCL Energy Institute, agreed, telling Climate Home News that – while electric cooking is viable in parts of Africa where reliable electricity, affordable appliances and suitable infrastructure already exist – those conditions remain out of reach for much of the continent.

She warned that making electric cooking the only measure of a clean cooking transition could slow progress in countries where other technologies offer a more immediate solution. “My concern is a purity trap,” Oluteye said.

She pointed to an IEA scenario forecasting that, with clean cooking rolled out quickly, over 60% of people gaining access to clean cooking in Africa from 2024 to 2040 would do so through LPG, compared with 17% through electricity. Bioethanol and biogas combined would account for 11% while advanced biomass cookstoves make up 10%.

Burn Clean-stoves client Loise Wanjiku cooks inside her house at Kachoroba village in Kiambu County, Kenya, August 16, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi)

“The intermediate solutions cannot be abandoned while the grid catches up,” she said, but added that if handled well, cooking could be “one of the best things that could happen to African electrification”, providing the predictable demand that gives utilities a reason to invest in electricity networks and reliability.

Amina Mohammed, UN deputy secretary-general and former Nigerian environment minister, warned at the New York event against repeating the experience of programmes that supplied cooking technologies without adequately considering whether they actually worked for the women expected to use them.

Speaking after Birol, Ruto, US energy secretary Chris Wright and Norwegian international development minister Åsmund Aukrust, Mohammed joked that she was responding to “four men for whom this is a big women’s problem”.

After Birol said that the IEA had been working on the issue for 25 years, Mohammed said the fact that the problem had not been solved in that time was “probably an indictment of the international community on what is supposed to be a huge problem for women and a billion of them”.

The post Push for cooking to be part of COP31’s electrification agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.

Almost three-quarters of the 72 five-year plans published by China this year include policies or targets related to climate change and energy, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

Five-year plans are an important part of China’s policymaking process, signalling key priorities and setting targets for the coming years.

The post Interactive: What China’s dozens of ‘five-year plans’ say about climate and energy appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Increasing use of AI systems to manage public utilities creates new risks for critical infrastructure, regulators said.

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The latest surge in fossil-fuel prices means it is now up to nine times cheaper in the UK to drive an electric vehicle (EV) than a petrol or diesel car, shows Carbon Brief analysis.

Since February, when the US first attacked Iran, the average price of diesel has increased by 38% to £1.96 a litre, according to Carbon Brief analysis of government figures. 

Following the attack on the Kapotnya oil refinery in Russia on 20 September and with tensions in the Middle East growing, this is expected to pass a record £2 a litre. 

(Russia was the second-largest exporter of diesel in the world, but its refineries have been hit every three days on average in the first six months of 2026.)

Similarly, petrol prices have surged by 31% since February to £1.72, based on government figures, with some locations reaching nearly £2 per litre, according to BBC News.

These increases have been driven by oil prices jumping to more than $100 per barrel as the conflict between Yemen’s Houthis and Saudi Arabia escalates – a roughly 50% increase from June. 

As such, it now costs an estimated 21p per mile to drive a diesel car and 20.1p per mile for petrol, according to Carbon Brief analysis of the latest figures from the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).

In contrast, it is currently nine times cheaper to drive an EV charged using an off-peak tariff, at 2.3p per mile, as shown in the chart below. 

Even if charging with electricity bought at the domestic price cap – the maximum amount a supplier can charge for a unit of energy and standing charge, set by the regulator Ofgem every three months – it still only costs around 7p per mile to drive an EV, three times cheaper than the price for petrol or diesel cars. 

The price cap is set to increase in October, but almost all of the increase is for gas, with the unit rate of electricity only expected to rise by less than 1% from 26.1p per unit to 26.3p.

A larger 20% increase in electricity unit rates under the price cap is expected in January 2027, as higher gas costs filter through to an increase in wholesale electricity prices. Nevertheless, EVs would still remain far cheaper to drive than petrol or diesel cars.

UK drivers could save around £80 by charging an EV at home, in comparison with filling up a petrol car at the pump, as shown in the figure below. This is based on comparing the cost of an average full tank of petrol with the cost of enough electricity to drive the same distance.

Despite their much higher running costs, petrol still dominates the UK’s roads, making up 55% of all cars on the road. Only 6% of the roughly 35m cars on the road are fully electric battery EVs, with a further 3% being plug-in hybrids that can run on fuel or electricity.

However, sales of EVs are continuing to increase, with around 30% of new cars sold in August being battery EVs, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders (SMMT). This is up from 26.5% in August 2025.

Separate analysis from Carbon Brief in June suggested that the UK’s EV drivers were saving £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared to petrol car drivers. Following the latest hike in fuel prices, these savings would now be even higher at £1,200 a year.

Compared with average pump prices of £1.72 per litre of petrol or £1.96 per litre of diesel, it would cost as little as 20p – around nine times cheaper than petrol – for an equivalent amount of electricity using off-peak charging.

As shown in the figure below, even charging at the household price cap would only cost the equivalent of 60p per litre, making EVs still significantly cheaper to drive.

Public charging points remain significantly more expensive than domestic rates. However, the UK government estimates that around 90% of electric car charging takes place at home.

In addition, the government plans to introduce a pay-per-mile tax on EVs from April 2028. This would add 3p per mile to the cost of driving an EV. Yet the considerably lower fuel costs mean they will remain far cheaper to drive than petrol or diesel cars.

related Analysis: Global fossil-fuel emissions set to fall in 2026 amid Hormuz crisis 16.09.2026 Emissions CCC: Heathrow expansion could push flights to ‘80% of UK emissions by 2050’ 16.09.2026 Emissions El Niño: Indonesia fire emissions in 2026 ‘on track’ to match record for this century 11.09.2026 El Niño and La Niña UK aviation emissions to be 50% higher than thought by 2050, government admits 10.09.2026 Aviation and shipping

The post Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in the UK  appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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• “Senator Sanders Has Introduced A Bill To Ban Artificial Superintelligence And Create Deptartment Of AI” • Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced legislation that would ban artificial superintelligence, pause development of advanced AI systems, and create a Department of Artificial Intelligence. [ABC News]

Bernie Sanders (Anderseidesvik, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped)

• “OECD Lifts 2026 Global Economic Growth Forecast To 2.9% Despite Iran War” • In its interim outlook, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development raised its growth projection for 2026 by 0.1% from June. It says the world economy “has weathered the energy supply shock triggered by the conflict in the Middle East better than expected.” [Euronews]
• “OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs At UN Call For Global Cooperation On AI: ‘We Are At A Crossroads” • The leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic delivered a clear message to the UN Security Council: the threat of AI is real and the time to act is now. Addressing high-level foreign ministers, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “this moment calls for extreme care.” [ABC News]
• “Gulf Nations Have Found Ways To Keep Oil Flowing” • When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the war, to choke off sea passage for 15 million barrels of oil a day, many feared that rising prices would crater the world economy. But oil exporters and the US military found multi-layered workarounds in a clandestine game of whack-a-mole. [ABC News]
• “NYSERDA Approves State Renewable Energy Projects” • The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority is initiating eight new bulk energy storage projects and thirteen large-scale renewable energy projects in the state. Combined, these projects are expected to provide 1.7 GW of new large-scale energy resources. [Solar Power World]

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'Bartolina Sisa' reaffirms their commitment to continuing the struggle as socio-economic and political challenges persist, rejecting the IMF loan, which they argue is plunging Bolivians deeper into debt.

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This law marks a new chapter and brings new hope for the implementation of agrarian reform - a long-awaited step toward achieving a fairer restructuring of agrarian relations that favors farmers and the people

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Leevin Camacho was brushing his teeth one day last fall when his mother called. The water is contaminated, she said. Moments later she texted him a photo of a flyer issued by the local water authority. “Cancer risk,” it warned. “Increased likelihood of adverse impacts on the liver.” And in bold capital letters, “DO NOT DRINK.”

Camacho stared at the message. Water flowed from the faucets as his children, who were 10 and 12, gulped and spit, their faces reflected in the mirrors above the two bathroom sinks.  

Thumbing at his phone, Camacho googled dieldrin. The results included words like “organochlorine” and “insecticide” and “persistent environmental pollutant” that the United States had banned in 1987. Worse, high levels had been detected in his community’s water since at least 2008. “Our kids have been drinking the water,” he realized. “They’ve been cooking with the water for almost their entire lives at this point.” 

Camacho lives in Yigo, a northern village on the island of Guam. In time, he would learn that the U.S. Air Force base next to the well serving his house had reported “very high levels” of the pesticide, which it had listed as a “chemical of concern” since at least 1993. The Pentagon’s investigation, led by officials at Joint Region Marianas, is in its early stages. Local officials caution that although they suspect the base is a source of the pollution, there may be others because dieldrin was once widely used.

Leevin Camacho stands before the well serving his home in Yigo, which was found to have been contaminated with high levels of dieldrin. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

For Camacho, the news felt like the unfolding of a familiar story — one both predictable and infuriating.

Camacho had grown up as an Army brat, raised to think of the United States as Guam’s liberator from Japan during World War II. But over the past two decades, his understanding of that legacy has changed. 

“There are certain actions that the military takes that are contrary to the interests of the people who are from Guam and who live in Guam,” said Camacho, whose measured tone rarely changes, even when discussing something as emotional as what his children have been drinking. 

To Camacho, dieldrin is the latest reminder that the people of Guam continue to bear the costs of militarization. Unexploded ordnance litters jungles and lagoons. PCBs contaminate the fish. Pollutants taint the groundwater. The island and its people, who are U.S. citizens, have been inalterably changed by more than a century of American military presence.

Rear Admiral Brett Mietus, the head of Joint Region Marianas, the U.S. Navy’s regional command for Guam and neighboring islands, said he can’t speak to past pollution but the command is committed to protecting the environment and the people of Guam. 

“We spend a lot of time and we spend a lot of money making sure that we meet every U.S. regulation when it comes to anything that we’re going to do here,” he told Grist. “We’re meeting every letter of every law for environmental regulations and rules, and we’re doing that while we’re spending a ton of money to defend this island from the most advanced missiles in the world.”

A sign warns passersby not to enter a live-fire range in northern Guam. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

Today, Guam sits at the center of an ongoing military buildup, one that is reshaping the island even as it spreads across the Pacific. On Yap, more than 1,000 graves could be disturbed to make way for an American seaport and airfield. Indigenous leaders on Palau are suing to protect their lands. Less visible but just as impactful are the climate impacts of this expansion. The Pentagon is already the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, and its buildup will do more than contribute to the destruction of the region’s reefs, forests, and Indigenous sacred sites. It will accelerate the climate crisis that threatens the survival of Pacific islands.

The Pentagon often cites growing geopolitical tensions to justify the buildup. “The security environment in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more dangerous and defined by an increasing risk of confrontation and crisis,” Navy Admiral Sam Paparo, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told Congress in April while seeking $122 billion for new weaponry to counter China, including offensive missiles on Guam. Three months later, a ballistic missile launched from a Chinese submarine flew near the island, underscoring why many on the island see America’s military presence as both a source of vulnerability and protection.

Sometimes it can be too much to think about. “I need to compartmentalize these things,” Camacho said. “That’s sometimes the only way that you can do this, because otherwise you will just be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that are out there, the amount of injustice that is out there.”

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Those injustices collide in Yigo. Neighbors lost their homes earlier this year to typhoons fueled by warming seas. The Army Corps of Engineers will soon begin clearing bombs from a nearby dump site created in 1945. A new machine gun range just opened alongside a federal wildlife refuge to support the arrival of 5,000 Marines from Okinawa.

Then there’s the dieldrin contamination. “At some point,” Camacho said, “someone has to force them to do what’s right.”

Years before he became one of Guam’s leading critics of the military buildup sweeping over the island, Leevin Camacho was a young lawyer who liked to run before work. As his sneakers hit the pavement, the sun rose over Yigo. Roosters crowed and streaks of pink lightened the sky. The road, little used and lined with jungle brush, was one of the few places he could run without encountering stray dogs or morning traffic. He always ran at first light, before oppressive heat would reflect off the asphalt and the concrete buildings. It was the perfect start to what was often a day spent listening to depositions and wading through case law.

It was 2009. Camacho had returned to Guam after law school and was making more money than he ever had as a school teacher. “You dream of going to law school to provide services and to fight for people who don’t have the ability to fight, right? I’ll be honest with you, I lost my way,” Camacho said. “I had a bunch of student debt and I was satisfied just kind of going by day to day and just focusing on myself and my family.” 

The U.S. military was the backdrop to Camacho’s life but not something he worried about. He didn’t think much about the invasive tangan-tangan trees lining his running route, or the fact they had spread across Guam after the U.S. scattered their seeds to reforest the island following the war. On his morning runs, he was more likely to hear a military jet overhead than a native bird song. 

Leevin Camacho gestures at photos of his family in his home in Yigo. His grandparents lived through the brutal Japanese occupation of Guam and rarely talked about it. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

It hadn’t always been that way. Guam was among the first Pacific islands settled by seafarers from what is now the Philippines, who navigated by the stars and waves an estimated 3,500 years ago. The CHamoru people built a thriving island society known for its towering latte stones and swift outrigger sailing canoes.

That changed when Magellan landed on Guam in 1521. Spain claimed the island and the rest of the archipelago, beginning more than 500 years of ongoing colonization. The Spanish forced the Indigenous people to embrace Catholicism and banned their canoes. The United States took over the island from Spain in 1898 and imposed military rule. Naval governors burned CHamoru language books and blocked Indigenous efforts to gain U.S. citizenship. 

Then came Japan. Its invasion in 1941, on the same day it attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t unexpected. The U.S. Navy evacuated sailors’ dependents but left 20,000 CHamorus to endure nearly three years of forced marches and labor, malnutrition, and sexual servitude. More than 1,000 would die. When American forces retook Guam in 1944, they were welcomed as liberators. The island still celebrates Liberation Day every July. “I can’t remember a single discouraging remark that my maternal grandmother would have made about the U.S.,” Camacho said. But he does remember her saying of the Americans, “They saved us.’”

Nearly 18,000 CHamoru were relocated to Manenggon and other concentration camps before the Battle of Guam. Joe Rosenthal / AP Photo

That was the narrative that Camacho grew up with. Even the military taking his family’s land — part of a massive military land grab after World War II —  was accepted by his grandparents as the price of freedom from Japanese oppression. It wasn’t until Camacho learned that the Pentagon’s expansion plans would close his running route that he began to question what it meant for Guam to be an American military outpost. He pored over the buildup’s planning documents and was struck by the disconnect between how the military described its plans and the reality as he knew it. “They paid consultants a bunch of money. The comment was, ‘We drove by and we didn’t see any cars, so there’s no impact,’” he said of the running route. “And that was it.”

As Camacho read thousands of pages of documents, he saw the same pattern again and again. Proposals for bombing and machine-gun ranges, expanded undersea explosives, and projects that threatened forests and ancient latte stones were accompanied by detailed assessments that minimized what they would mean for the islands.

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On a flight home from Honolulu, Camacho was reviewing the environmental analysis of the buildup on his laptop when one passage stopped him. The proposed influx of 80,000 people would leave too little water for fire suppression, particularly in Yigo. The solution, according to the document, was to send surplus water from Andersen Air Force base to civilian communities. “That was the first time I just kind of lost it, just how stark it was,” he said. “The aquifer is our aquifer, right? Like, you’re taking our water for your people and then we don’t have enough and they’re going to divert whatever you’re taking from us that is extra.” 

Camacho and other concerned residents started We Are Guåhan, a community group focused on raising awareness about what was happening. (Guåhan is the CHamoru word for Guam.) He sued to stop a machine-gun range from being built at Pågat, an ancestral village that’s home to millennia-old latte stones. Their campaign protected the site and helped persuade the Navy not to expand its landholdings on Guam. The Department of Defense also reduced the planned transfer of Marines from Okinawa from 9,000 to 5,000. 

But it didn’t stop the buildup. The Pentagon activated Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz six years ago, and opened a new machine-gun range alongside a federal wildlife refuge just north of Yigo. “It’s so heartbreaking,” said Lola Leon Guerrero, another member of We Are Guåhan. (She is not related to Governor Lou Leon Guerrero.) “All of that effort and it still happened.”

The yellow excavator scraped away at the pale rock that lies beneath Camp Blaz under the hot May sun. A limestone forest had already been bulldozed to make way for a new machine-gun training range. A sign next to the fence read, “Guam National Wildlife Refuge” with an arrow pointing to the left and a picture of a turtle. 

“Wow,” said Moneaka Flores, one of Camacho’s clients in the lawsuit he filed against the Navy to protect the island’s endangered species. She stopped at the side of the road to watch the digger work. It had been months since she’d been here, and they’d cleared so much more forest than she realized. 

Busy construction vehicles are the most obvious sign of the Pentagon’s buildup. Beyond the new Marine Corps base, the Department of Defense is upgrading the island’s port and strengthening its infrastructure to support docked nuclear submarines. The agency is also pouring $8 billion into 16 new missile defense sites. After World War II, the Navy took two-thirds of the island. “Whatever made most sense for the military, the island was theirs for the taking,” said Michael Clement, a historian at the University of Guam. “Everyone was in refugee camps. They had the bulldozers. They built where they wanted to build. And then a year or two later, they started saying, ‘OK, where are we going to put the natives?’”

Construction on Camp Blaz proceeds in May 2026. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

The military later relinquished some land but still owns at least a quarter of the island. “If you look at where the villages were set out in 1946 and ’47, it’s the land the military didn’t need. So that’s why Guam is kind of weird to drive around, right?” Clement said. “To go across from Tumon to Mangilao, you’ve got to go around Tiyan and the airport. It wasn’t redesigned for civilians. It was redesigned for military purposes.” 

Even the island’s main highway, the six-lane Marine Corps Drive, was designed for the military, not the people. It connects Andersen in the north and Naval Base Guam in the south.

Governor Lou Leon Guerrero is among the many who welcome the financial boost that comes with the military’s investments. “They’re spending billions on their readiness plan,” she said. 

One in nine Guam residents joins the armed forces. Last year, a local economist told the Legislature that every dollar the Pentagon spends adds 75 cents to the island’s GDP and called the buildup an “unprecedented economic opportunity.” The funding infusions have helped Guam become far more commercialized than other Pacific islands, with multiple shopping malls, numerous high-rise hotels, and a growing real estate sector. 

Leon Guerrero thinks activists should pursue political self-determination instead of resisting the buildup. “These guys can yell and scream all they can,” she said. “They’re going to do the military buildup regardless, right? So why don’t we work with them and see how we can benefit?” She wants the Department of Defense to help harden local power lines and fund a hospital. “Our hospital cannot absorb mass casualties,” she said.

There are about 20,600 military personnel on Guam, a figure that’s expected to reach 29,400 by 2037. While the military is investing in additional housing both on and off base, the population influx will almost certainly continue pushing up construction and housing costs. The median home price on Guam was $216,100 in 2010, when Camacho sued the military to protect Pågat. Today it is approaching half a million dollars.

Andersen Air Force base in northern Guam is among the sites of an ongoing U.S. military buildup that stretches across the Pacific. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

Fear of another war also fuels support for the buildup. “We’ve always been a target regardless, because of where we are geographically located,” Leon Guerrero said. Guam is the largest island in the Micronesian region of the Pacific. It’s just north of the equator, a three-hour flight from Tokyo, and has a deep-water harbor that supports naval submarines. “We were a target for Spain. We were a target for the U.S. We were a target for Japan.” She worries about China, which has a ballistic missile nicknamed the “Guam Killer.” “If I’m going to have a choice, I’d rather be under the U.S. than China.”

To Flores, more military presence on Guam heightens the risk of war. In March, President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran prompted military bases on the island to raise their threat level. She feels that, as in World War II, the Indigenous people of Guam are expendable in a broader contest between empires. “What are they really here to protect if there’s so much harm taking place? Are we just collateral damage?” she said. “Because just looking at our history of being occupied by war, being used for weapons testing, it feels like the message is that we don’t matter. Our future doesn’t matter. Our survival doesn’t matter.”

Rear Admiral Brett Mietus, at Joint Region Marianas, said he understands such skepticism. “If I was born and raised on Guam, I would have similar concerns,” he said. But he believes the militaryʻs investment proves the opposite of what Flores fears. “Choice A is not to defend Guam against ballistic and hypersonic missiles,” he said. “Or the other choice, which is the one that we’ve made, is to spend billions of dollars to defend Guam from hypersonic and ballistic missiles. And so from my perspective, that shows a commitment not just to the military things that are on Guam, but also to the people of Guam.”

Yet Flores is far from the only Guam resident who feels expendable. When Pedro Blas, the vice mayor of Yigo, first learned about the dieldrin in his village’s water, his first thought was of his autistic sister. “All of us growing up, all our lives, our water bottles, we fill it up with the tap water, put it in the fridge: That’s our cold water,” he said. “Because we were instilled in our heads our whole lives: Tap water is OK.”

Pedro Blas, the vice-mayor of Yigo, has been hearing from many constituents who are concerned that long-term exposure to dieldrin could have caused cancer in their families. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

So far, Camacho’s firm has helped file more than 700 claims, worth $360 million, against local authorities on behalf of village residents. He hopes that pressures the island to seek compensation from the Department of Defense. “I’m so glad [Camacho] got involved,” Blas said. “We’re not letting it get swept up under the rug.” Mietus noted that Joint Region Marianas has not found high levels of dieldrin in military wells, and the Pentagon is working with local officials to determine the source of Yigoʻs pollution.

Still, Blas wonders why the investigations at Andersen Air Force base are occurring quietly behind the fence, while he hasn’t seen anyone in uniform hand out water to his constituents. “It’s beautiful to be a U.S. citizen, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But if you really take a step back and look at exactly the impacts that [the military] brought to us over the years, we should have a say in whether or not these practices are going to happen to our island. Even just being called the ‘tip of the spear’ —  we’re susceptible to any war that they’re going fight, and we just have to be OK with it.

“This contamination they bring to our island, it kind of just shows how much they really care about our people,” Blas continued. “And frankly, I think they look at Guam as real estate rather than, ‘Those are our U.S. citizens. Those are our people. Those are Americans.’”

The men and women gathered in the p’ebay, the traditional open-air Yapese meeting house with a triangular tin roof, and settled quietly on the tiled floor along each wall to listen to Camacho speak. A projector, perched above a cardboard box stacked on top of a red cooler, cast his PowerPoint presentation onto a screen. Slide after slide described the American military’s plans. A cool breeze fluttered the fronds on the palm trees surrounding the p’ebay.

It was April in the village of Tamil on Yap, one of four states in the Federated States of Micronesia. Camacho’s dieldrin work was far from over, but he’d put that aside when the island state’s government asked him to help dissect a Navy proposal to expand the seaport and airport. Tamil was one of several villages he visited to explain the plan. 

Over the past decade, Camacho has become one of Guam’s leading environmental lawyers. “The one thing about Leevin is he shows up. Again and again,” said Julian Aguon, a human rights lawyer on the island. “And he brings with him not only deep competence but a deep sense of responsibility to the people and places he serves.”

“Regulatory agencies will bend over backwards to not pick a fight with the military because of the mission and the protection and all of that,” Camacho told Grist. “And ultimately, it’s people who aren’t lawyers who end up paying the price.”

He was elected attorney general in 2018 for one term and led a historic lawsuit to force the Navy to clean up a hazardous landfill it had abandoned in the 1940s. A lower court dismissed the suit, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2021 that it could proceed — a decision that eventually prompted the federal government to pay Guam $48.9 million.

The newly opened U.S. Marine Corps Camp Blaz in northern Guam is expecting an influx of 5,000 Marines from Okinawa. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

He has sued the Navy to protect endangered species harmed by the construction of Camp Blaz. “For too long, our island has been treated as a sacrifice zone,” he said.

The risk of Guam falling into enemy hands, as it did in World War II, is so tangible that America’s Pacific military strategy involves spending billions of dollars to spread airfields, seaports, and training ranges across the region to remain competitive in case Guam is once again occupied by enemy forces. The U.S. is invoking decades-old agreements with the peoples of the Republic of Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia to expand its presence on those islands and upgrade World War II-era seaports and airfields. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. even signed a new agreement with Papua New Guinea to use its seaports. 

On Yap, the U.S. military wants to dredge the lagoon, including two-thirds of an acre in a marine protected area, to create a seaport. The plan would remove enough sediment to fill 334 40-foot shipping containers and impact sea life, Indigenous fishers, and divers. “Plume spreads up to 800 m from disposal sites,” Camacho’s presentation noted. “Long-term reef decline and impact on reef species (fish, clams, sharks, turtles) not assessed.”  

The Navy also plans to expand the airfield to facilitate two military exercises, each two weeks long and involving up to 200 personnel, per year. The project could disturb more than 1,000 graves, including the 19th-century tombs of Chief Orothin and Chief Yaloth. Camacho noted that the military’s draft plan acknowledges a “significant adverse impact” to these cultural sites and doesn’t commit to rebury the dead or preserve ancestral sites.

Yap has a population of just about 11,500, compared to Guam’s 170,000. Although Yap is less than a 90-minute flight from Guam, it has none of the military bases, six-lane highways, or big-box stores that define the American territory. “In some ways, this will be more transformative for Yap State than the buildup was for Guam because there’s no military presence there today,” Camacho said. On Guam, he said, “It’s normal to hear a fighter jet flying over. It’s normal to see a bomber or C130. They don’t have any of that there. So this would be such a radical change.” 

One month after Camacho visited Yap, dignitaries from across the Pacific gathered in an air-conditioned conference room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Guam. The hotel sits on a long stretch of white sand beach and looks out over Tumon Bay, where high levels of dieldrin have also been found in fish samples. 

Once everyone had taken a seat, the lights dimmed and the glow of a projector filled the room. A screen showed a map of military activity across the western Pacific: not just bases, but training exercises and the routes of research vessels searching the sea floor for the critical minerals essential to many military technologies.

Political leaders from across the Pacific listen to presentations on the growing military presence in their region at a conference in Tumon, Guam. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

“We’re faced with the reality that we’re part of a larger strategic vision,” conference organizer and former Guam congressman Robert Underwood said. “All of you are in someone’s strategic plans whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. All of us are in someone’s strategic plan.” 

In Palau, Indigenous people are fighting the Pentagon’s expansion in local courts and international forums. Leaders of Angaur, one of 16 states there, filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. of violating environmental rules and its treaty with the island nation when it cleared land for a radar facility. Indigenous chiefs from Peleliu are suing to prevent a land transfer that would support American goals. Indigenous Palauan youth filed a complaint at the United Nations alleging the U.S. military violated their right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.

In the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands, the U.S. military presence that started with World War II is ramping up. On Tinian, the Marine Corps is building an airfield and two live-fire training ranges, one of them for explosives. The Navy is extending its undersea sonar and explosives training across half a million square nautical miles, along with bombing practice on the neighboring island of Farallon de Medinilla.

A U.S. Navy MH-60S Seahawk helicopter assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 25 refuels during forward arming and refueling point training at North Field, Tinian, Northern Mariana Islands, in 2013.
Lance Cpl. Antonio Rubio / U.S. Marine Corps / Department of Defense

Some hope the military’s regional expansion will enable other island nations and territories to experience the economic growth seen on Guam. But others worry about the pollution and cultural loss, and other risks that come with being a U.S. military stronghold. 

In public comments written in response to the Navy’s proposal, Jennifer Dugwen Chieng noted that Camacho’s fight to have the Navy address hazardous waste at Ordot Dump went all the way to the Supreme Court. “Additionally, there are sacred private lands and culturally significant ecosystems that no amount of money can ever replace,” she wrote. “The desecration of graves violates the general principles of respect for burial sites and human remains upheld in Yap’s traditional custom.”

She’s also worried about becoming a target in the next war. Like Palau, Yap was held by the Japanese during World War II and experienced heavy bombardment by the United States. Since then, the Pentagon hasn’t paid much attention to the island state — until now. 

“With rising tensions in the region between the U.S. and China, what does the DoD envision combat to look like?” Chieng wrote. “Will it be based on a WWII tactic of island hopping? What is the likelihood of the island becoming a battlefield if tensions were to escalate into war? Yap will be caught in the crossfire. Does the DoD intend to protect and defend the people of Yap, and if so, how does the DoD intend to do that?”

Mietus told Grist thereʻs always a level of risk in being allied with the U.S. during a conflict.

“Sometimes people believe it’s a plan to evacuate U.S. service members or family members if a war starts — there is not,” he said. “I’m in this, living in the same risk as every other person here.” He’s pushed back against Guam lawmakers’ calls for the Defense Department to fund bomb shelters for civilians, contending that the existing military projects like strengthening Guam’s harbor are a better investment. “Oftentimes people see this Department of War as kind of having an infinite amount of money, and we don’t.”

Unlike Guam, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are independent countries that have achieved the political self-determination that Indigenous CHamoru on Guam have been denied for centuries. 

Camacho wants a plebiscite to determine Guam’s political status. He believes the island’s status as a U.S. territory — without a vote for president or voting representation in Congress — isn’t working. But while some of his colleagues in We Are Guåhan have focused on independence, Camacho sees his own role as making the government answer for its actions.

“Unless someone’s forcing the issue,” he said, “the Department of War isn’t going to voluntarily agree to be held accountable and agree to do all the things that it’s supposed to do.”

That’s why he feels compelled to seek reparations for the dieldrin contamination. So often, toxic pollution lingers on Guam and no one takes responsibility. “As a lawyer, I don’t want to fall into this situation where we’re like [the village of] Malesso, and they show up every year and say you still can’t eat the fish. That’s just not satisfactory,” he said. 

One question that drives him is what Guam will be like when his kids are grown. Will they be able to afford living there? Will they want to, given how much the island is changing? It’s a constant effort to find the right balance between working toward their future and being there for them day to day.

“I’m going to try to do the best that I can to protect my island and to have a safe place for my kids to want to live on Guam,” Camacho said. “But also be there for them and help them get better dribbling with their left hand and be good human beings.” Even though Camacho moved a lot growing up, his family never considers leaving. “That is not a choice,” he said. “Guam is home — there is nowhere else we are going to be.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the Pentagon expands across the Pacific, Guam offers a warning on Sep 24, 2026.

Last year was a tough time for anyone who studies climate change for a living. The United States, once respected around the world for its sprawling investments in science, suddenly reversed course. Shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term in office, his administration set to work slashing funds for America’s scientific institutions, scrapping billions of dollars in research grants and firing thousands of federal employees at agencies ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

People were “in shock,” said Aparna Shrivastava, who was a senior climate official in the Biden administration. In private chats, she found herself in conversation with dozens of experts who had recently lost their jobs or funding, but who wanted to continue studying the rapidly warming planet or trying to prevent its worst effects. But the sudden cuts left many with few options. 

All of them were trying to figure out, “What could we possibly do to address this?” Shrivastava said. Eventually, the conversations started happening in person. At a workshop convened by the Aspen Global Change Institute in Colorado last July, a group of more than 30 climate experts landed on a possible solution — one that would help fund new jobs for laid-off colleagues across the country. Today that idea is a full-fledged initiative, backed by tens of millions of dollars, with Shrivastava at the helm. They call themselves the Climate Reserve, and they’re just now taking their operation public. 

Climate Reserve functions through a network of experts with a mission to identify the most critical climate work left in limbo and find a place where it can continue, even without federal support. Sometimes that means placing a climate researcher with an organization focused on the environment or climate; other times that means finding a new home for projects that the government cut from its budget, Shrivastava said.

So far, Climate Reserve has funded more than two dozen new positions for climate experts. These people, known as their fellows, are now working across the U.S. at nonprofits such as the Environmental Protection Network and institutions like the University of Minnesota. The group has also resuscitated a number of federal projects, such as EJScreen, an online map that shows which American communities experience the worst pollution. There’s international work happening too, such as a project mapping sea level rise on islands in Panama, and another measuring greenhouse gas emissions in five African countries. 

And there’s more that the group isn’t willing to share publicly. The hope is that a measure of secrecy will keep some of its fellows and projects out of the crosshairs of the Trump administration — which has been notably punitive with some of its funding cuts. After all, many of those working within the network still rely on federal funding in some capacity, or plan to apply for federal funding in the future. 

Now that Climate Reserve is making progress, its leaders are willing to take the risk of being more open about their efforts to attract more funding for fellows. So many people are still out of work, Shrivastava said. Even the Lyft driver in Washington, D.C., who drove her to the airport to meet potential funders this spring happened to be a laid-off climate and energy expert.

The name “Climate Reserve” is meant to evoke a nature reserve as well as the Army Reserve — “the emergency group that you can call up to bring people together,” said Brittany Janis, executive director at the nonprofit Open Environmental Data Project, who was involved in the group’s discussions from the start. Her organization recently partnered with Climate Reserve to hire a former senior advisor for environmental justice programs in the Biden administration to keep the now-independent EJScreen tool up to date.  

Funding these positions is meant to provide a kind of “parachute” that can help former federal workers, along with all their specialized knowledge and the relationships they’ve built, land in a safe place, Janis said. “How can we be really thoughtful about parachuting people to the right places so we aren’t losing all that institutional knowledge and that really critical basis for climate action in the U.S.?”

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Unlike a traditional hiring or grant-funding system, the group wants to emphasize collaboration rather than competition, according to Ben Poulter, who leads an emissions-monitoring program at Spark, a climate solutions nonprofit that is in the process of hiring two Climate Reserve fellows. “We realized early on that the changes that were happening could fragment the community even further as resources became scarcer,” he said. “The whole point of Climate Reserve is that we’re all in the same boat and we need to work together.”

This philosophy — dubbed “movement generosity” by several of the group’s founders — means focusing on the broader goals of the climate movement and trying to share resources and expertise across organizations to achieve them. For instance, a single expert funded by Climate Reserve could split their time between two organizations, allowing them to coordinate on similar projects and reduce redundancy. 

Poulter, who previously coordinated greenhouse gas monitoring efforts between federal agencies, now leads a program tracking how ecosystems that are especially sensitive to warming, like wetlands, will release more planet-warming emissions as temperatures rise — a feedback loop that is often overlooked by climate models. One of the fellows working at Spark will coordinate these measurements across five African countries, while another will translate that science into policy recommendations for those countries, Poulter said. 

There’s also a lot of vitally important but “unsexy” data-crunching projects being saved by Climate Reserve, said Sonia Wang, who leads the Center for Climate and Environmental Data at the Data Foundation, a nonprofit think tank. It’s an important, and often invisible, part of understanding the realities of climate change. For example, two groups using satellites to detect methane emissions might end up with different estimates if they aren’t using the same wind speed models. 

Sorting out these discrepancies is “not the flashiest thing, but when you look under the hood, this is really what’s necessary,” Wang said. Her organization has taken on four Climate Reserve-funded experts to help with these kinds of projects that make it easier for decision-makers and scientists to trust climate data, she said.

By the end of this month, Climate Reserve will have placed 50 climate experts in new roles, and it plans to triple its funding by the end of next year, Shrivastava said. And if federal support for climate research eventually returns, its organizers hope the network they are building can make the entire field more collaborative and resilient to political shifts in the future. “We are not at all looking to replace the government. We’re just stepping up to try and meet some of the needs here,” Shrivastava said.

Climate change may be politicized in the United States, but its impacts “affect us all,” said John Balbus, a Climate Reserve fellow who spent 15 years in the federal government. Most recently, he was a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services coordinating projects to address the health effects of climate change, such as seasonal forecasts for extreme heat and wildfire smoke. He is now continuing that work at the Federation of American Scientists and as an independent consultant.

The climate and health experts that Balbus once worked with would “do anything in their human power” to continue living a life of public service, even without a government job, he said. And the need for this kind of work, he added, isn’t going away. “The need is only going to get stronger every year.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump cut their climate jobs. This secretive network found them new ones. on Sep 24, 2026.

PRESS CONTACTS: NICE, France – Scores of billionaire private jet owners are flying into Nice this week to shop for new super- and mega-yachts at the Monaco Yacht Show, an annual event in the Principality of Monaco on the French Riviera. Tax Private Jets is tracking private jet flights – and the carbon emissions attached to these flights – into Nice, where many attendees will board…

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The climate movement needs the kind of leverage that comes from shutting down the economy — and it can only get there through deep organizing with workers.

Honestly, in this strange world of ours, what is there to write about except, of course, Donald Trump?