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Center for Food Safety, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network North America have sued the Trump administration over the registration of trifludimoxazin, a potent PFAS pesticide that breaks down into long-lived, PFAS byproducts.

PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of chemicals characterized by ultra-strong carbon-fluorine bonds that are highly resistant to break down. Trifludimoxazin takes years to decades to break down. The groups’ lawsuit was filed Friday in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Environmental Protection Agency has approved the use of trifludimoxazin on many crops, including corn, wheat, oats, soybeans, oranges, apples, peanuts and almonds, despite acknowledging the chemical’s potential harms to wildlife and human health.

“Trifludimoxazin is a likely human carcinogen that belongs to a family of weedkillers that also causes reproductive harm, birth defects and neurological deficits in animal studies,” said Bill Freese, science director at Center for Food Safety. “As if the health threats weren’t enough, this incredibly potent herbicide can drift to stunt crops and wild plants hundreds of yards from a sprayed field, while runoff threatens wetland plants. Potent biocides like this have no business on the American landscape.”

The EPA acknowledges that trifludimoxazin causes thyroid tumors in rodent studies but did not assess the cancer risk to farmworkers who use the pesticide or to people exposed to trifludimoxazin-contaminated food or water.

Spray drift is likely to result in widespread harm to native plants and crops grown for food. Trifludimoxazin is 10 times more toxic to plants than dicamba, the herbicide whose rampant drift and runoff has caused unprecedented damage across many millions of acres of crops since 2017.

“While everyone’s distracted by the Trump administration’s erratic actions on the world stage, it keeps approving dangerous forever pesticides right here on our own soil,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s unconscionable, immoral and illegal. Our kids and grandkids deserve better than to be saddled with pollution that never goes away.”

“Continuing to register new herbicides like trifludimoxazin keeps farmers on the pesticide treadmill and perpetuates the problem of herbicide resistance in weeds,” said Emily Marquez, Ph.D, staff scientist with Petitioner Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network North America. “The potential for PFAS pesticides to contaminate water and soil wherever they are used is highly concerning for the health and livelihoods of people in farming communities.”

Trifludimoxazin is one of many currently registered herbicides that kill plants by shutting down an enzyme (protoporpyhyrinogen oxidase, or PPO) that is also present in people. Even though animal research demonstrates these “PPO inhibitors” have common adverse effects on the liver and cause birth defects in fetuses exposed in utero, the EPA has refused to conduct a cumulative risk assessment of trifludimoxazin and other PPO inhibitors as required by law. This is especially concerning because two of the products approved by the EPA contain trifludimoxazin combined with saflufenacil, a second PPO inhibitor, meaning simultaneous exposure to both for workers.

Background

Trifludimoxazin was originally approved by the EPA in 2021 for nationwide use on corn, soy, fruit and nut crops. Center for Food Safety and the Center for Biological Diversity sued, saying this approval violated the federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and the Endangered Species Act. That lawsuit noted the EPA’s finding that the herbicide had the potential to cause cancer, and that it would “likely cause severe harm" to many threatened and endangered fish, including endangered populations of Chinook salmon and steelhead trout, Atlantic sturgeon and smalltooth sawfish.

In response to the lawsuit, the pesticide company voluntarily agreed to stop the manufacture and sale of the pesticide in 2022. Despite these harms, Trump’s EPA proposed registering trifludimoxazin again for widespread use in 2025 and issued the approval in June 2026. Trifludimoxazin is the fifth PFAS pesticide approved under the second Trump administration.

The change of seasons gives us a chance to reflect on the environmental issues that affect us all.

Here are several new books about wildlife, climate change, and biological diversity that offer intriguing insights into the transformations occurring in our world and ways we can enjoy, protect, and observe the transformation from summer to autumn.

We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You can also find any of these titles through your local bookseller and library.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness

by Cal Flyn

From the black sand beaches of Iceland and rivers of the Amazon to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wildernesses make up some of the world’s more alluring natural landscapes. Flyn sees a powerful, ancient concept at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. For thousands of years, people have sought out uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from daily life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans.

This book takes us into the breathtaking wilds — dark forests, mountaintops, and the hearts of deserts — asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.

Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change

by Kyle Devine

Can music save the world? We’re witnessing a climate-oriented transformation of what music is and how it comes to be. Recomposed shows how musicians around the world are using the cultural power of music to link climate awareness to climate action.

Award-winning author and academic Kyle Devine profiles EarthPercent, founded by Brian Eno and others to help funnel money from the music business to climate causes. Devine enrolls in a course led by ClimateEQ, which teaches carbon literacy for the music industry. He investigates a platform to help musicians finance solar energy and embeds himself in a dynamic cast of manufacturers and inventors seeking ways to make records more sustainable, from recycling old vinyl to making discs from bioplastic. At the center of this multifaceted story is the climate impact of music festivals and touring musicians.

End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World

by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

As the planet burns and shared reality melts, a new iteration of the far right is on the march. How can we understand this dangerous new development, and what resources can we draw on to resist it? In their assessment of the contemporary scene, activists and authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explore how the religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists, and ethno-nationalists who make up this apocalyptic alliance share more than one might think: They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, whether through the manifestation of messianic prophecy, the rampages of a resource- and job-consuming artificial intelligence, or the purported existential threat of immigration and cultural replacement. Rather than avoiding this conflagration, they welcome it, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side.

End Times Fascism is the ideology of the actors who strive to make the world unlivable and then seek to protect themselves from the fallout — whether by repairing to luxurious private islands, rocketing off to Mars, or bunkering the nation to keep their enemies at bay. The new survivalists have accumulated power, but they are far from impregnable. As Klein and Taylor show via original reporting and analysis, their many internal conflicts and contradictions and their nihilistic inability to envision a shared future, even for their ostensible allies, leave them vulnerable to a new kind of “pro-life” politics — rooted in reverence for our shared existence and regard for the earth we inhabit and must protect.

Water Lines: A Life on Marshes, Rivers, Seas and In the Rain

by Riverhorse Nakadate

A collection of essays from Riverhorse Nakadate — angler, musician, conservationist, and lifelong nomad — whose devotion to wild places and the healing power of water pulses through every page. For readers of Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, and Jim Harrison, this book is a soulful invitation to step off the grid and into the current.

Across 32 essays Nakadate paddles, hikes, casts, surfs, and canoes through landscapes as varied as the alpine lakes of Colorado, the salt marshes of his native Texas, the trout streams of Minnesota, and the mangrove swamps of the Yucatán. Whether he’s chasing redfish in a hurricane, rescuing baby squirrels or migrating monarch butterflies, or honoring his mother’s legacy with a canoe ride and a slice of sweet potato pie, Nakadate reflects on solitude, friendship, loss, and the quiet heroism of those who strive to protect our wild spaces. A celebration of living deliberately and listening deeply to the rhythms of the earth.

The Shell Seeker: Encounters With Thirty Seashells

by Juli Berwald

Seashells are marvels; beachcombing adults and children alike are transfixed by their natural beauty and striking architecture. Discover all the incredible details of these stunning homes for mollusks and other marine life. Renowned science writer Juli Berwald draws on her passion for the ocean and its great treasures to reveal the remarkable and surprising features of 30 shells found on the shorelines of North America and oceans around the worl

Books for kids and young readers, including titles that can be paired with several of the selections above.

The Green Kids Club Books

Kids will love this collection of engaging wildlife-centered stories that help them understand the importance of nurturing our planet and its animal inhabitants. Founder Sylvia M. Medina saw a need to introduce kids to a range of animal species from around the world, exploring real issues related to habitat protection, wildlife survival, and the people working to help them.

This eye-opening book collection features stories from the wolf matriarchs of Yellowstone to a family of red foxes in the San Juan Islands to a baby elephant in Botswana and lion cubs in the African savanna. Many of the books are based on true stories, including the popular Grizzly 399 titles, one of the most famous and heavily reported-on bears in the world. All Green Kids Club titles include a science section in the back with photos and animal facts. Many have documentary films for kids to watch in synch with reading the books. The company also offers books that use Noah Text® to help make the stories accessible to all kids, including those with dyslexia as well as young English language learners.

This Book Will Make You a Scientist

by Dr. Sheila Kanani, with Ellen Surrey (Illustrator)

This book encourages kids to get excited about and become scientists by exploring 25 different scientific concepts inspired by ground-breaking scientists through history.

Children can learn to measure the speed of light like Albert Einstein, or train to be an astronaut like Mae Jemison and communicate with chimpanzees like Jane Goodall. This fact-filled book of step-by-step science experiments for kids are easy to try at home so children can explore subjects like DNA, electricity, evolution and gravity. This imaginative book is jam-packed with ideas for aspiring scientists everywhere.

Felix Powell, Boy Squirrel

by Erin Entrada Kelly and illustrated by Erin Entrada Kelly

Felix Powell loves to climb trees. He loves to run and jump and hide. But he’s never shoved acorns into his cheeks. He’s never gnawed at twigs to build a nest. And he’s certainly never worried about being eaten by hawks. Until now.

When his magic blanket turns Felix from an eight-year-old aspiring zoologist into a squirrel, Felix discovers that there’s more to squirrelhood than meets the eye. Will Felix triumph, avoiding predators and helping his new squirrel friend? Will he learn to jump and leap and climb? And will he turn back into a boy in time for dinner with his grandmother?

We Are the Keystones: Animals That Hold Habitats Together

by Katy S. Duffield with Hannah Salyer (Illustrator)

Meet keystone species — the hidden heroes of the natural world — and learn about the ecosystems they support in this marvelous nonfiction picture book.

Keystone species are plants, animals, or other organisms that have a huge effect on the environments around them. From beavers to elephants, alligators to hummingbirds, keystones help themselves and other species survive. Whether it’s creating habitats for themselves and other animals, leaving behind leftovers that fertilize the soil, or clearing out harmful algae, keystones live up to their name in their essential contribution to the harmony of our natural world.

That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives to help make the end of summer fun and engaging for yourself and the young people around you.

And let us know what you’re reading: Drop us an email to ccrary@biologicaldiversity.org

The post New Environmental Books: Summer-to-Autumn Reads for the Whole Family appeared first on The Revelator.

A Lane County, Oregon initiative, part of a rising global movement, fundamentally reimagines humanity’s relationship with nature.

The post Oregon Humanities: Declaration of the Rights of Nature appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

Oklo asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to order the PJM Interconnection to reinstate its 750-MW, mixed-technology project. PJM reportedly told Oklo that it never showed the project could ride through a sudden drop in grid voltage.

Manufacturers say the changes would create a more predictable process to set appliance standards but should not “apply retroactively to standards already finalized.” Efficiency advocates say potential energy savings will be lost.

Five days after a calamitous flood washed through Rasuwa, Nepal, the death toll continues to climb. Authorities said Monday that 903 people have been confirmed dead, while another 4,247 are missing, as the country reels from a disaster that experts say may be linked to the melting of glacial ice. 

Read more on E360 →

Peta persaingan game digital tidak lagi dikuasai nama lama. Studio pendatang mulai membawa mekanisme berbeda, desain lebih ringan, tema spesifik, sampai antarmuka ramah perangkat mobile. Kondisi tersebut membuat Peringkat Slot Maxwin bergerak lebih dinamis. Posisi sebuah provider tidak cukup dipertahankan hanya melalui popularitas masa lalu, sebab pemain sekarang memiliki lebih banyak pilihan untuk dibandingkan. Provider Slot Maxwin juga menghadapi perubahan perilaku pengguna. Pemain dapat berpindah dari satu katalog ke katalog lain hanya dalam beberapa sentuhan. Akibatnya, kualitas visual, kemudahan memahami fitur, performa teknis, serta konsistensi rilisan ikut membentuk perhatian pasar.

Peringkat Slot Maxwin Tidak Hanya Bergantung pada Nama Besar

Popularitas provider memang memberikan keuntungan awal. Pengguna lebih mudah mengenali studio dengan katalog luas atau permainan ikonik. Namun reputasi tersebut bukan jaminan setiap rilisan baru langsung mendapat respons tinggi. Peringkat Slot Maxwin dapat berubah ketika pemain mulai tertarik pada mekanisme alternatif. Sistem cluster, cascading reel, multiplier bertingkat, format gulungan dinamis, serta fitur bonus interaktif membuat perbandingan tidak lagi terbatas pada tampilan. Situasi ini membuka ruang bagi provider baru. Mereka tidak perlu memiliki ratusan judul sejak awal. Beberapa permainan dengan identitas kuat sudah cukup untuk menarik perhatian jika mampu menawarkan pengalaman berbeda.

Peringkat Provider Slot Maxwin Dipengaruhi Banyak Indikator

Satu daftar peringkat dapat menghasilkan urutan berbeda tergantung indikator penilaiannya. Ranking berdasarkan jumlah permainan tentu tidak sama dengan ranking berdasarkan popularitas, performa mobile, variasi fitur, atau aktivitas rilisan. Karena itu, Peringkat provider Slot Maxwin sebaiknya memiliki dasar penilaian jelas. Jumlah pengguna, tren pencarian, variasi katalog, stabilitas permainan, desain antarmuka, serta pembaruan fitur dapat dipisahkan menjadi beberapa indikator. Pendekatan tersebut memberi gambaran lebih masuk akal daripada sekadar menempatkan provider terkenal pada posisi teratas tanpa konteks.

Provider Baru Muncul Membawa Identitas Lebih Spesifik

Studio pendatang sering memilih jalur berbeda untuk bersaing. Alih-alih membuat katalog sangat besar, sebagian fokus pada karakter visual tertentu atau mekanisme khusus. Ada provider dengan gaya ilustrasi sederhana untuk layar smartphone. Studio lain mengandalkan animasi sinematik, sementara beberapa pengembang lebih menonjolkan gameplay cepat dengan informasi ringkas. Ketika Provider Baru Muncul dengan karakter kuat, pemain mempunyai alasan untuk mencoba sesuatu di luar katalog favoritnya. Persaingan akhirnya terjadi pada kualitas pengalaman, bukan hanya jumlah judul.

Rilisan Sedikit Belum Tentu Menjadi Kekurangan

Ukuran katalog kerap digunakan untuk membaca kekuatan sebuah provider. Logikanya sederhana: semakin banyak permainan, semakin banyak pula pilihan. Namun jumlah besar tidak otomatis membuat seluruh judul relevan. Provider Slot Maxwin dengan katalog lebih kecil dapat bersaing melalui fokus. Setiap rilisan bisa membawa tema, fitur, serta target pengguna lebih spesifik. Strategi tersebut memungkinkan studio baru membangun identitas tanpa harus mengejar volume produksi sejak awal. Di sisi pemain, model ini juga mempermudah proses mengenali karakter provider.

Persaingan Fitur Membuat Posisi Provider Cepat Berubah

Fitur permainan menjadi salah satu medan kompetisi paling terlihat. Multiplier, free spin, Wild khusus, pengumpulan simbol, meter progres, sampai mekanisme transformasi karakter terus mendapatkan variasi. Namun fitur lebih banyak belum tentu menghasilkan pengalaman lebih baik. Pengguna tetap membutuhkan aturan mudah dibaca. Jika layar dipenuhi indikator tanpa penjelasan, inovasi justru dapat terasa rumit. Peringkat Slot Maxwin dalam konteks fitur seharusnya mempertimbangkan keseimbangan antara kreativitas dan keterbacaan. Provider dengan mekanisme sederhana tetapi konsisten dapat tetap kompetitif menghadapi studio dengan sistem lebih kompleks.

Performa Mobile Menjadi Arena Kompetisi Baru

Perangkat mobile mengubah standar desain permainan. Tombol harus mudah disentuh, tulisan tetap terbaca, animasi tidak mengganggu navigasi, serta waktu pemuatan perlu dijaga. Provider Baru Muncul memiliki keuntungan karena dapat merancang produk sejak awal untuk kebiasaan tersebut. Mereka tidak selalu membawa struktur lama dari era desktop sehingga desain bisa dibuat lebih fleksibel. Sebaliknya, provider berpengalaman memiliki modal berupa katalog, basis pengguna, serta pemahaman pasar. Pertemuan dua kekuatan tersebut membuat Peringkat provider Slot Maxwin semakin sulit diprediksi hanya berdasarkan usia perusahaan.

Tren Tidak Sama dengan Peluang Menang

Posisi tinggi dalam daftar populer perlu dibedakan dari probabilitas hasil permainan. Provider dengan banyak pengguna atau rilisan viral tidak otomatis menawarkan peluang kemenangan lebih besar. Peringkat lebih tepat digunakan untuk membaca popularitas, variasi produk, atau perkembangan katalog. Untuk memahami mekanisme sebuah game, pemain tetap perlu memeriksa aturan, tabel pembayaran, volatilitas, serta informasi resmi pada permainan terkait.

Provider Slot Maxwin Memasuki Persaingan Berbasis Pengalaman

Munculnya studio baru membuat pasar semakin terfragmentasi. Provider Slot Maxwin lama memiliki reputasi dan katalog luas, sedangkan pendatang membawa kesempatan untuk bereksperimen tanpa terlalu terikat pola sebelumnya. Persaingan tersebut membuat Peringkat Slot Maxwin tidak lagi terlihat seperti daftar permanen. Posisi dapat berubah mengikuti kualitas rilisan, respons pengguna, inovasi mekanisme, serta performa pada perangkat modern. Pada akhirnya, Peringkat provider Slot Maxwin lebih berguna ketika dibaca sebagai gambaran perkembangan pasar, bukan janji hasil permainan. Saat Provider Baru Muncul dengan pendekatan segar, kompetisi justru memberi pemain katalog lebih beragam sekaligus mendorong setiap studio memperjelas identitas produknya.

A fifth of the world’s oil passes through a strait just 55km wide. Right now, that strait is closed, and it’s not the only one. For most of us, the Strait of Hormuz, the Panama Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait are names we half-remembered from a geography lesson. But right now, all three of these critical shipping lanes, plus the Suez Canal and the South China Sea straits, are under simultaneous strain. And the causes aren’t separate stories. War, the climate crisis and a strong El Niño are compounding each other, squeezing the narrow waterways that carry the fuel, food and goods the world runs on.

That’s the warning at the heart of a report from the climate think tank E3G, Beyond Securing Supply. It makes a case that should worry anyone who cares about a just, liveable future: the world’s energy system isn’t just fragile because of any one crisis. It’s fragile because a small number of choke points now have to absorb war, sabotage, congestion and climate breakdown, often at the same time and there’s no cushion left when several hit at once.

Three narrow waterways, one overstretched system

The Strait of Hormuz. Just 55km wide at its narrowest point, this single passage between Iran and Oman normally carries roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its LNG. Since the outbreak of the 2026 war between Iran, the US and Israel, the strait has been effectively shut to commercial shipping. Attacks on tankers pushed war-risk insurance premiums up as much as fourfold, and freight rates on the key Gulf-to-Asia route jumped over 300% almost overnight. Oil and gas prices spiked globally within days, even hitting countries with no direct trade link to the region at all. 

The Gulf of Oman connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz. Photo: picture alliance/dpa/NASA/The Visible Earth

Bab el-Mandeb, at the mouth of the Red Sea, is a vital 18-mile-wide sea lane, a primary global chokepoint where roughly 10% to 12% of international trade and millions of barrels of oil pass dailyOngoing Houthi attacks since late 2023 have made it too dangerous, pushing most Western-linked shipping to go all the way around Africa, via the Cape of Good Hope. That’s not a return to normal , it’s a new, permanently more expensive normal: longer voyages, higher freight and insurance costs, and less spare tanker capacity to absorb the next shock. Egypt runs the  Suez Canal revenues and depends on its tolls, a critical piece of its economy, that have now reportedly fallen by roughly half.

The Bab al-Mandeb Strait from space, between the Horn of Africa (left) and the Arabian Peninsula (right). Photo: by Gallo Images, Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2021/Getty Images

 

The Panama Canal. This is a channel where 5-6% of all global trade goes through, including critical food and gas supplies. Unlike the other two, this chokepoint isn’t shut by conflict , it’s impacted by drought. A strong El Niño, layered on top of long-term climate change, has driven Gatún Lake (the freshwater reservoir the canal’s locks depend on) to record lows for a second time in three years. Daily transits have been cut from the normal ~36–38 ships down toward the low 20s. Ships without a booked slot now face costly reservation auctions , where the average winning bid has reportedly jumped from around $135,000 to as much as $4 million. Scientists studying the 2023 Panama drought concluded it would have been “unlikely” without El Niño, and that climate change is making these swings between El Niño and La Niña more extreme and more frequent.

The Panama Canal is located directly between the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) and the Pacific Ocean Photo: GeogGlobeTales, TikTok

 

Why these aren’t separate problems 

It would be easy to file all this under “geopolitics” and move on but climate change isn’t a bystander here  it’s a structural multiplier of chokepoint risk.

Three things are happening at once:

1. Physical disruption: War, attacks and accidents slow-down or block the routes directly..
2. “Paper chokepoints”: , Insurance companies, sanctions and shipping contracts make it hard to reroute,  even when another path technically exists. 
3. Climate change: drought, heat and extreme weather are steadily eroding the capacity and reliability of the routes that would normally offer a way around a crisis.

Crucially, these layers stack. When Hormuz  closed ships couldn’t simply detour through the Red Sea route as an escape valve from the Hormuz crisis , because that route was already too dangerous.. When shipping gets rerouted around Africa to avoid the Red Sea, that adds pressure on tanker capacity everywhere else. And when the Panama Canal , one of the few large alternative corridors for Asia-bound US cargoes , is running at reduced capacity because of drought, there’s less slack left in the whole system to absorb the next shock, wherever it comes from.

In other words: the more the climate crisis narrows our margin for error, the harder every other kind of shock , war, sabotage, an accident, a blockage , hits.

Who pays the price

The costs of this don’t land evenly, and that’s the injustice at the centre of it.

While governments of oil-exporting countries may actually see revenues rise when prices spike; Ordinary households, especially in import-dependent countries, see the opposite: higher fuel and shipping costs pushed straight through to food and energy bills. A 10% rise in fuel prices is estimated to raise food distribution costs by 3–5% in import-dependent economies , a burden that falls hardest on the poorest households, where food can already absorb 50–70% of income.

• South Asian economies like Pakistan and Bangladesh are the most structurally exposed of all major importers, heavily dependent on Gulf LNG routed through Hormuz, with little spare capacity to cushion a shock.
• There’s also a slower-moving hit still coming: the Gulf supplies close to half the world’s sulphur and urea (both critical fertiliser inputs) and roughly 40% of global helium. E3G’s analysis (echoed elsewhere) suggests fertilizer shortages triggered by the Hormuz disruption could take 6–9 months to show up, meaning the full effect on food prices and harvests across South Asia and East Africa may still be ahead of us. 

More fossil fuels won’t fix this

The instinctive response to a supply shock is to look for more fossil fuel supply, from new suppliers, new pipelines, new terminals but more supply does not remove the exposure. Oil is priced on integrated global markets, so a shock anywhere raises prices everywhere, regardless of where your own cargo comes from. Diversifying suppliers can smooth short-term bumps, but it doesn’t touch the structural vulnerability of depending on a small number of narrow physical corridors in the first place.

The one thing that does reduce exposure, durably, is needing less oil and gas to move through these chokepoints at all. Once a wind turbine or solar panel is installed, it generates power locally for 25–30 years, immune to a closed strait or a dried-up lake, in a way that no amount of LNG diversification can match. Electrification, efficiency, grid build-out and clean power aren’t just climate policies anymore , they’re energy security policy, and arguably the only kind that actually holds up under simultaneous shocks.

That’s the throughline connecting Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and Panama: three very different crises, one shared root cause , a global energy system built on continuous shipments through a handful of chokepoints, now colliding with a warming, more volatile world. The war in the Gulf will end at some point. The next El Niño will not be the last, and it won’t be gentler. Building resilience means shrinking our dependence on the fossil fuel system that keeps putting all of us at the mercy of these narrow stretches of water.

Sources:

• E3G, Beyond Securing Supply: Chokepoint Risk for Oil and Gas Importers, March 2026.
• Additional information from World Weather Attribution, Carbon Brief, and reports on the August 2026 Panama Canal restrictions.

The post When war, warming and El Niño collide: the world’s shipping lanes are buckling all at once appeared first on 350.

In response to the havoc caused by industrial aquaculture and its threat to food sovereignty, the Nyéléni Global Forum in 2025 decided to launch a global campaign to resist corporate control, further destruction from this industry and the privatization of ocean and coastal areas.

The post Nyéléni Newsletter: Against the Tide of Industrial Aquaculture appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Headline News:

• “The World Lost A Stealth Eco-Monarch With The Passing Of King Harald V ” • King Harald V of Norway died after a reign of 35 years. Over three decades, a constitutionally silent monarch quietly made green the default without ever legislating a thing. For one example, his country went through the world’s fastest, most complete shift to electric mobility. [CleanTechnica]

Harald V (Sámediggi, CC BY-SA 2.0)

• “How Europe’s scorching summers are reshaping national budgets” • The true price of the European heatwaves, drought, and the wildfires they lead to only surfaces in public accounts months later. The burden of rebuilding roads and rail, propping up health services, and compensating farmers, is outpacing government revenues and reserves. [Euronews]
• “Nepal-Tibet Flood Death Toll Rises To 797, Officials Say, More Than 3,000 Missing” • The death toll from last week’s flash flood disaster in the Nepal-Tibet border region rose to nearly 800 people as of Sunday, according to the latest updates from Nepali and Chinese officials. There are at least 85 Americans still among the missing. [ABC News]
• “How The US-Israeli War On Iran Is Reshaping Global Energy Use” • Six months after US-Israeli strikes disrupted fossil fuel production in the Middle East and turned the Strait of Hormuz into a naval battleground, reports show how the conflict has also been pushing governments, companies and consumers towards renewable energy. [The Japan Times]
• “Maryland Locks In Solar Deal Officials Say Could Save $300 Million” • Governor Wes Moore and the Maryland Department of General Services announced a 20-year agreement to purchase solar energy generated in Western Maryland. State officials say the deal could save Maryland about $300 million and expand the state’s use of renewable energy. [The Cool Down]

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

On August 29, another round of “Fight Ford” protests took place across Ontario. These protests have been taking place monthly since February in response to...

The post Thousands across Ontario protest Doug Ford in support of public education first appeared on Spring.

Data center capacity continues to expand.

Secondary perils, such as severe convective storms, are becoming a primary driver of earnings volatility.

In 2024, an interdisciplinary team of social and marine scientists set out to examine whether the prevalence of marine heat waves — prolonged rises in ocean temperatures that are becoming more frequent and more intense because of climate change — has any impact on child and maternal health outcomes. “I was very ready to find nothing,” said Clark Gray, a human geographer and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who led the research.

The researchers published their report this month, which revealed some distressing results. The team discovered that for every standard deviation increase in the number of marine heat waves in a 24-month period — or roughly three more marine heat waves than normal — child mortality increases by 5.4 percent. Child wasting and child stunting, which can result from malnutrition, also increased — by 6.5 and 8.8 percent respectively. 

The ways in which marine heat waves might influence extreme weather on land are still being studied. This study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not without its limitations. The authors specifically looked at health data from low- and middle-income countries. The data analysis also only demonstrates a correlation between marine heat waves and health; the authors are still not sure why or how child malnutrition and mortality spikes when oceans warm. 

For example, marine heat waves have been shown to disrupt oceanic food chains. It’s possible that these warm-water events are causing vital fish or shellfish populations to die off. However, the authors pointed out that other mechanisms — such as terrestrial heatwaves or the spread of mosquito-borne infectious diseases — cannot be ruled out as other drivers.  

Katy Seto, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, called the research important nevertheless. She noted that high-level findings such as these create an opportunity for refining future research. “It is definitely like a first pass at understanding for whom this could be a big problem and what the solutions might be,” she said. 

Moreover, the report’s findings are consistent with existing research on the relationship between global warming and human health. “I’ve been doing research on the social impact of climate for a while, and I’m continuously surprised by how consistently negative the warming effect on health is,” Gray said. “It really shows up pretty much everywhere on every outcome.”

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One of the ways that Gray and the other study authors attempted to narrow their analysis was to group countries by whether they’re more or less dependent on small-scale fishing. “We do see that the negative effects are concentrated in the countries that depend on small-scale fishing, which is what you would expect,” said Gray. Industrial fishing operations are more likely to have the technology to evade heat waves; their fishing boats, for example, could move further out away from the shore. 

But that distinction still does not illuminate why, exactly, these health declines happen in more vulnerable coastal regions. 

It is not the case, for example, that all countries relying on small-scale fishing necessarily depend on those catches for their own diets, said Seto.  Those harvests could still be traded locally or regionally — meaning that maybe marine heat waves contribute to loss of income, driving malnutrition in a more roundabout way. 

Oceans absorb the majority of the planet’s excess energy, but scientists are still working to understand the full range of impacts on marine systems. Marine heat waves, which are complex, three-dimensional events, have not gotten as much attention as, say, sea-surface temperature rises or ocean acidification, said Seto. Still, this study comes at a time when ocean temperatures are the highest in recorded history, so some conclusions can be drawn. Marine heat waves are “very bad in this current moment,” said Gray, and in the broader context of global warming, they “are going to get worse.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When ocean temperatures increase, so does child malnutrition on land on Aug 31, 2026.

New York City has more than 500 miles of coastline. The city’s coastal zone is home to around 1 million people as well as billions of dollars of residential and commercial property, and no two miles of the waterfront are quite the same. The marshy areas of southern Queens, the housing projects in waterfront Brooklyn, and the towers of Manhattan’s Financial District are all vulnerable during high tides and major storm events, and each of these areas is vulnerable in a different way.

The city learned these lessons the hard way in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy sent almost 14 feet of storm surge up New York Harbor and flooded thousands of structures across the five boroughs. In the aftermath of the disaster, the city embarked on one of the most ambitious climate adaptation efforts in U.S. history. Leaders spent billions of dollars to elevate and armor the lower reaches of Manhattan with flood gates and berms, rebuild the destroyed beaches in Queens, and buy out homes in the low-lying neighborhoods of Staten Island. 

Each stage of this effort faced delay and controversy, but the post-Sandy effort is now almost complete. The elevated East River Park in Manhattan is now partly open to sunbathers and tennis players. Farther down the island, construction crews are installing rolling-track flood walls that will be deployed during major storm surge events. These flood defenses will be operational by the 2027 hurricane season, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already laying the groundwork for what comes next. 

Last month, the mayor announced a major expansion of the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, promising to add almost 70 new staff members to a unit that had been on a shoestring budget under prior mayor Eric Adams. The first members of this new team will deploy the flood gates and clear the coastal zone in the run-up to big storm events.

“There was this huge investment of over a billion dollars to build these gates, and once you build it, you have to maintain it,” said Lisa Garcia, the new commissioner for the Department of Environmental Protection, which will oversee the flood system. (Garcia was the director of Grist’s climate solutions lab from 2019 to 2021 and later worked as a regional administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency.)

The new bulkhead at the rebuilt East River Park in Manhattan, with the Williamsburg Bridge in the background. New York City has been working to elevate the waterfront park since Superstorm Sandy flooded thousands of homes on the Lower East Side in 2012. Jake Bittle / Grist

But managing the gates is the easy part. The harder task for Mamdani will be to decide what the city’s next big flood protection effort should be. The stakes of this decision are higher than almost anywhere else in the United States, or for any other climate adaptation in New York. While heat waves, smoke, and flash floods all pose big risks to the city, sea level rise and storm surge have the potential to wipe out huge sections of the city’s most populous areas and cripple its economy. 

“I don’t think that there’s anyone who is saying we can protect all 520 miles of coastline,” said Garcia. “So part of it is this… What lessons can we take to other boroughs or to other communities?” 

Mamdani will have to make some big decisions about where and how to spend the city’s limited capital budget. Is it better to fund marsh restoration in outer Queens, or a coastal park in Harlem, or a bulkhead in the waterfront of Brooklyn? If you want to do all of those things, which of them do you do first?

These decisions are fraught with political and economic risks. When Norfolk, Virginia, another coastal city, created its master resilience plan, city officials made the controversial decision not to build flood protections for areas that were at high risk of flooding but didn’t have the high-value property that would justify the enormous expense. Under its plan, Norfolk would instead help those residents of the “yellow zones” live with rising waters or relocate elsewhere. In other coastal areas like California and North Carolina, efforts to promote “managed retreat” from vulnerable areas have met forceful blowback from residents who want structural protections. 

For its part, New York City says it’s still in the early phases of planning for future protections. Mamdani won the mayoral election last year by assembling a coalition that spanned the lower-income neighborhoods of the outer boroughs, and he took office promising to make life more affordable for the city’s lower and middle classes. The Department of Environmental Protection said it plans to start its master plan (which Garcia wants to analyze both stormwater flooding and coastal risk) next year, with a goal of finishing by 2031. It’s too early, then, to say how Mamdani’s governing philosophy will affect the city’s approach to the risks of climate change. 

New flood walls under construction beneath an elevated highway in downtown Manhattan. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani announced last month that he plans to hire dozens more city staffers to manage this new flood wall system and others under construction around the city. Jake Bittle / Grist

There is no shortage of underserved areas that need flood protection. Perhaps the most glaring example is the western edge of Coney Island, which faces routine “backdoor” flooding during heavy rain as the ocean rushes up through creeks and out of the drainage system. This flooding often makes it impossible for children to walk to school. Even though Coney Island was one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by Sandy in 2012, the city still hasn’t built new flood defenses there.

“After Sandy, neighborhoods in Manhattan had millions and millions of dollars invested,” said Pamela Pettyjohn, the founder of the Coney Island Beautification Project, a neighborhood group that advocates for flood protection and quality-of-life improvements. “There hasn’t been any investment at all in Coney Island other than development — a lot of new development, new buildings, but nothing for the infrastructure.” The city government is now holding meetings with Coney Island residents to decide how to reduce flood risk along local creeks.

In other areas, architects and planners have sketched out possible defenses for which there is no available money. In East Harlem, for instance, the city worked with architecture firm One Architecture to design a plan that would drain stormwater that pools in low-lying streets and elevate the esplanades along the river. The plan has been around for almost a decade, but the city has not been able to raise the money to build it.

In other cases, flood defense efforts have fallen through due to budget constraints. The city pivoted its proposed flood adaptation project in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx to a cheaper project that will provide off-grid backup power to the area’s critical food depot, said Amy Chester, the director of Rebuild by Design, the organization that led the post-Sandy adaptation effort.

“We can plan for it, but it’s all about priorities,” said Chester.

The other problem is that people often disagree about how a given area should defend against flooding, and about what counts as sufficient investment. Garcia has said that in some cases a flood gate or bulwark may be the best scenario, while in other cases home buyouts or nature-based living shorelines may work better. 

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City officials have already encountered pushback over at least one project. The city broke ground late last year on a project in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, which was also hit hard by Sandy. The effort will elevate streets and install new bulkheads along the water, but residents and activists say it’s inadequate: it is only designed to protect against “10-year storms” that have a 1-in-10 chance of happening in a given year, not the much larger “100-year storms” that the Lower Manhattan projects will protect against. The city has said that local topography and privately owned waterfront land make a Manhattan-esque barrier impossible.

The issue of flood risk has also come up farther north in the gentrified neighborhood of Greenpoint. In that area, a real estate developer is proposing to build a large new apartment complex that will contain more than 1,300 homes. The new towers will have steel bulkheads that the developer says will protect them from flooding, but some activists have protested that the bulkheads will push water onto nearby areas. 

These two controversies highlight the extent to which the city’s current flood defenses are a patchwork of individual neighborhood projects. That approach will lead to conflict over each investment and over where the city chooses to invest, says Matthijs Bouw, an architect with the firm One Architecture who helped conceive the flood barrier project that now surrounds lower Manhattan and who has also envisioned flood protections in East Harlem and other areas.

“You can’t build this stuff in isolation; you need to find a way to make sure that you align whatever you design with the way the city changes over time,” he said.

In theory, planners could come up with a comprehensive process for deciding where and how to spend its money, but there are tough choices involved in such a process. Lower Manhattan was an easy place to start after Sandy, since it was home to both the all-important cluster of downtown skyscrapers and a dense neighborhood of vulnerable public housing. Figuring out where to go next is harder.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Manhattan’s flood walls are almost done. What will Mamdani do next? on Aug 31, 2026.

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Anuradha Barua, Aakriti Wanchoo and Swapan Mehra are from Iora Ecological Solutions, a New Delhi-based company focused on nature-based solutions, climate action, conservation and environmental policy.

When Rojo Neog’s village in northeast India was hit by a power cut in July, he headed out to buy candles. Three days later, his body was recovered – swept away by surging floodwaters. His niece said the water had risen from knee- to neck-level in about half an hour.

The devastating floods highlight how climate risk across India is becoming harder to confine to a season or a disaster bulletin. Just weeks before the disaster in Assam, authorities in Mumbai rationed water as reservoir storage fell to just over 10%.

India does not lack warnings about climate risk. The more difficult task is making sure money, institutions and communities are ready to act before those warnings become disasters. Adaptation should not be just an obligation once a crisis has arrived, but an investment made while there is still something to protect.

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As governments head towards COP31 in Antalya this November, India should push not only for more adaptation finance, but for finance that arrives earlier and can be traced to outcomes on the ground.

That is the gap India needs to close if we wish to become truly resilient in the face of the changing climate. Money must move with risk, institutions must know what to do before an emergency is declared, and long-term spending must reduce vulnerability before it becomes loss.

India’s adaptation disconnect

This year the disconnect has become painfully clear in Assam, where more than 100 people have died due to the flooding, with nearly 140,000 people across seven districts affected. More than 450 villages remain inundated, while some 49,000 people are taking shelter in relief camps after losing everything.

No financing mechanism can stop a river from rising. But timely measures can change what happens before it does. If forecasts and river levels triggered financing before the water arrived, authorities could position boats and stock shelters, and evacuate people where needed, while families could move cattle, seed, medicines and documents before roads disappeared.

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India already has much of the information needed to address climate change. High-risk states and districts should agree in advance which local thresholds trigger action, who is responsible and how funds will be released, so officials do not have to negotiate responsibility and budgets from scratch once risk becomes an emergency.

Linking community know-how to financing

Our work in Majuli, a river island district in Assam, shows why this matters.

Across 64 villages, communities helped identify flood and erosion risks, assess their capacity to respond, and to develop resilience measures with indicative budgets and possible funding sources.

Communities often know what would help; the harder task is connecting that knowledge to institutions and finance that can act on it.

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Public health offers an example of how systems can adapt as risks change. In New Delhi, vector-control workers who once prepared for a defined “dengue season” now remain on alert throughout the year, using surveillance and hotspot mapping to identify risks earlier.

The next step is to make these systems more predictive by integrating climate forecasts into public health planning.

India needs sustained investment in drainage, health systems, wetlands, water security and climate-resilient agriculture. Some will remain public responsibilities; others, including water reuse, efficient irrigation, resilient cold chains and risk-proofed infrastructure, can generate savings or revenue and attract private capital if projects are prepared well.

The economic case for adaptation is not always about generating new revenue. Often, it is about avoiding future costs. Flood shelters, public-health preparedness, early-warning systems and support for the poorest households will still need public or grant finance. The point is to match the finance to the risk rather than treat adaptation as a single financing problem.

A sugarcane farmer removes weeds which have grown in floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India. Credit: Meenal Upreti A sugarcane farmer removes weeds which have grown in floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India. Credit: Meenal Upreti Rising disaster bill shows cost of inaction

India is already spending heavily on adaptation, with related expenditure reaching 5.6% of GDP in 2021-22. Yet tracked adaptation finance was only about $15 billion annually, almost entirely from domestic public sources, against estimated needs of about $100 billion a year through 2030.

Internationally, the shortfall is wider: developing countries may need $310 billion-$365 billion annually by 2035, compared with just $26 billion in international public adaptation finance in 2023.

For governments repeatedly paying for flood, droughts and heat relief, the cost of inaction can quickly exceed the cost of building resilience, though not all the costs of inaction appear neatly on a balance sheet.

In floodplain landscapes such as Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, animals move towards higher ground every monsoon as the floodplain fills, crossing roads and leaving the park in search of safety. During the 2024 floods, 215 animals died, including 13 one-horned rhinos.

Development plans in such sensitive landscapes must leave room for water, wildlife and communities to move safely. A wetland may not generate monetary revenue, but the floodwater it stores has real value. The cost of losing that capacity may only become visible when the next flood arrives.

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Success should not be measured only by how quickly relief follows a disaster. It should also be measured by what never had to be replaced: people and animals moved before the water rose, seeds kept dry, medicines waiting at the shelter, a wetland that still had room to hold water, and a family that could leave while the road was still open.

Adaptation becomes an investment when it preserves those choices before they disappear.

The post India needs climate adaptation cash to be an investment, not a quick fix appeared first on Climate Home News.

We support the introduction of Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing in Ontario. C-PACE is a proven tool to drive commercial building retrofit activity while supporting local jobs and communities. By connecting private capital...