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Greece plans to create two large marine parks and end bottom trawling, it announced Tuesday. It also aims to cut the volume of plastic waste flowing into Greek waters in half.

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Nevada is at the frontlines of a national rush to mine lithium. As we work to mitigate climate impacts that play out on a global scale, Indigenous communities in Nevada are raising awareness that we must also address the regional environmental and cultural destruction mining creates.

In March of 2024, Joshua Dini, a Walker River Paiute Tribal member, rode many miles on horseback with a group of other land protectors in prayer. They prayed for health and a clean environment for all people in light of the new mining rush. The ride traversed over 230 miles through Northern Nevada, starting in Dini’s hometown of Shurz and ending at Peehee Mu’huh, also known as Thacker Pass. 

Prayer Horse Riders. Source: Prayer Horse Ride

This was the third year of the Prayer Horse Ride. All along the path the riders stopped to visit Tribes and shared hope, prayer, and education. Through traveling to neighboring communities and educating, Dini is continuing the work of his late brother, indigenous journalist and land protector Myron Dewey, though the tradition of unity, prayer, and moving on the land goes much farther back.

“The government set up these reservations to bring divisions within our people,” Dini said. “The goal for this Prayer Horse Ride is to ride in a vision of our ancestors to bring prayer, healing, and unity. It is reminding the people to look past those boundaries, remembering we didn’t have these boundaries, we welcomed and supported each other’s families.”

The Prayer Horse Ride started in response to the Thacker Pass Mine, a lithium mine being constructed in a sacred landscape known as Peehee Mu’huh. The name translates to rotten moon and references two massacres that took place at the pass. The most recent massacre was an act of the US federal government as efforts were made to open western lands for mining and ranching. 

This prayer ride comes at an important moment to remind people that work to protect Peehee Mu’huh is not  based on the outcome of a federal lawsuit. Last year, the ninth circuit ruled that the BLM violated the law in permitting the Thacker Pass mine, yet broke from judicial precedent in not vacating the permit as a result, allowing the project to move forward. Federal courts also ruled against regional Tribes who sued the BLM for failure to adequately consult with them on the project. 

“We go through a court system that is not made for us,” Dini said. “I am going to continue to go up to those lands and stand with my family that are up there praying to protect this land. There can be a miracle when things turn around. That was part of our prayer this year; for a shift. We look at Thacker Pass, but there is also Jindalee and other mines coming in. If we can shift those, then that is a victory.”

For those like Dini working to protect these lands, it is no longer just about the Thacker Pass Mine; companies have proposed a number of additional mines throughout the McDermitt Caldera, a lithium-rich geological feature in Northern Nevada and Southern Oregon. Peehee Mu’huh is at the southern end of the caldera which extends roughly 28 miles to the north and is 22 miles from east to west. Activists and Tribes in the region are working to prevent the caldera from becoming a sacrifice zone.

Lithium mineralization in McDermitt Caldera. Source: Science Advances

The Jindalee project , at the northern end of the caldera, underwent an environmental assessment for expanded exploratory drilling last year and is moving towards mine permitting.The Aurora project, also on the Oregon side, is also progressing through exploration. The proponents of this mine are planning to produce uranium in addition to lithium. Both of these projects are on public lands and will be subject to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the federal law that requires the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to consider the social and environmental impacts of a proposed project on federal lands.  NEPA will include the opportunity for participation through public comment.

Despite being permitted, there are still impacts from the Thacker Pass Mine that warrant public participation. The mine could significantly harm sensitive species and crucial habitat. Opportunities to better protect species and habitat are ongoing, even with mine construction underway. 

The Kings River pyrg is an endemic spring snail only found at Peehee Mu’huh. There are currently efforts led by Western Watersheds to secure emergency endangered species act listing for the Kings River pyrg. In 2024, the US Fish and Wildlife Service accepted Western Watershed’s petition and determined that the issue warranted a formal 12-month listing status review.

Another sensitive species, the Sage Grouse, also depends on the area in and around Thacker Pass. It is well known that the high desert sagebrush ecosystem found throughout the McDermitt Caldera is crucial to sensitive Sage Grouse populations. The BLM published a Draft Environmental Impact Statement on updating Sage Grouse management for comment in March, 2024.

“We don’t stop because we lose two lawsuits,” Dini said. “We’ve been losing fights for 500 years, but we keep fighting and we keep praying.”

Dini and the other riders are carrying on an old tradition of Indigenous stewardship, though they have also forged relationships with non-native supporters. Not just in Nevada, but across the globe, Indigenous communities are on the frontlines of increased interest in mining to support the energy transition. 

Shruz, NV community gathering to start the prayer ride.

Earthworks attended the start of the ride in Shurz, NV where we were honored to share perspective on a panel discussion focused on the impacts of mining to Indigenous Peoples and the pressing need for mining law reform. 

In the United States, the 1872 General Mining Act, enacted over 150 years ago, still governs hardrock mining. Part of Earthworks’ mission that aligns with the work of the Prayer Horse Riders is to reform the federal mining law to better protect other land uses such as sacred sites from the harmful effects of mining.

On the riders’ first stop in Yerrington, NV, a local mining watchdog non-profit Great Basin Resource Watch provided a mining impact 101 workshop. There is no right to say no to a mine in federal mining law. 

“Working with other organizations is great because they have different knowledge and connections to help us with the legal stuff in addition to the cultural work,” Dini said. “This is not just an Indigenous issue, it is a human issue. It is human survival because now the water is going to be contaminated and there will be bad air that is going to hurt all of our health.”

Dini explained that in light of current tensions between Indigenous land protection and mining for electric vehicle battery minerals, federal reforms and/or new policies are needed.

“We should be able to be at the table to help make policies that will protect us as much as possible,” he said. 

You can support these efforts to protect the Caldera and stay up to date by following People of Red Mountain, Great Basin Resource Watch, and Earthworks. 

The post Third Annual Prayer Horse Ride Travels Northern Nevada to Protect Peehee Mu’huh appeared first on Earthworks.

More than 80 years after the iconic Xerces Blue butterfly vanished from San Francisco, researchers have analyzed century-old specimens to track down its closest living relative, the Silvery Blue. Last week, they released a handful of Silvery Blues on the western edge of the city, where Xerces Blues once thrived.

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Israel’s war on Gaza has sparked discussion within the climate movement. Some activists argue against taking political positions on the conflict, while others believe fighting climate change demands addressing underlying political injustice. 

In recent months, Israel’s assault in Gaza has generated intense debate over the extent to which climate movements, for whom matters of war are typically not a central concern, should become involved in efforts to end it. On one side are the likes of Greta Thunberg. At a protest in Leipzig in Germany, she told a crowd that “To stand with Palestine is to be human”, and that there should be “no silence on genocide in Palestine”, even – or perhaps especially – from the climate movement. On the other side are activists and commentators who feel that speaking out on Gaza is a distraction from the climate movement’s core imperative of stopping global warming. They also fear that addressing this topic creates unnecessary division in the movement and undermines the public support it needs. 

Most recently Andreas Malm, a prominent figure in the climate movement, took a controversial stance on the conflict, writing of “cries of jubilation” in reaction to the 7 October attacks. Such explicit support for Hamas’s actions from within the movement is a clearly distinct radicalisation compared to previous expressions of support for Palestine, and will likely spark further discussion about the position climate activists should take on the issue. 

Science not politics?  

While the tensions surrounding the war in Gaza have been particularly pronounced in Germany – Thunberg’s stance has divided the German branch of Fridays For Future – it isn’t the only place where the question over the climate movement’s public position on the war has surfaced. In November 2023, at another climate rally in Amsterdam where Thunberg was speaking, a man walked onto the stage, seized the microphone, and declared, “I come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view.”  

This rejection of “political views” in the climate movement speaks to a longstanding debate over the extent to which the movement is, or should be, outspokenly “political”. Should it simply demand that those in power “listen to the science”, hoping that in neutralising its message, neither Left nor Right will be offended, and the climate struggle will not be stalled by polarisation? Or should the climate crisis be recognised as inherently political, by underlining the need to address systemic drivers of climate change? And if such a radical political analysis is to be embraced, does that automatically mean the climate movement should address other excesses produced by the system responsible for driving climate change? 

These questions point to several fundamental issues that make the climate movement, like most other movements, a space of internal contention. Understanding those issues clarifies the more general question at stake in the debate over its position on Gaza. Indeed, it reveals that while such tension may be challenging, it does not necessarily undermine the movement, and can even be productive. 

Internal contestation 

Climate activists disagree on why it is important to combat climate change in the first place. For some, like the man who intervened at the Amsterdam rally, addressing climate change is about addressing a major existential threat. It is not (at least explicitly) informed by a broader political agenda. Others, however, perceive climate change as just one driver of broader global injustices, such that isolating climate action from these other issues will leave the struggle for justice incomplete.  

One key implication is that the first position tends to be quite agnostic when it comes to the methods used to address climate change; the second, meanwhile, reflects concerns that many conventional approaches to climate mitigation in fact exacerbate injustices. For instance, carbon offsetting schemes can displace indigenous communities, while low-carbon transitions may create “green sacrifice zones”. In short, whether broader justice issues should be addressed by climate activists depends on what motivates them to tackle climate change in the first place. 

Whether broader justice issues should be addressed by climate activists depends on what motivates them to tackle climate change in the first place.

Climate activists not only differ over why addressing climate change is important, but also what the nature of the problem really is. If climate change is perceived as a standalone issue, addressing it in isolation makes sense. After all, including other issues could harm the fight by diverting attention and challenging movement unity or public support.  

But if climate change is understood as a symptom of underlying systemic problems, then addressing it in isolation becomes ineffective for two reasons. First, it targets the symptoms, not the cause; second, treating only one symptom makes no sense if the disease causes so many other ills. As the likes of Naomi Klein have argued, without a systemic approach, climate change will persist, while related symptoms – other forms of ecological degradation, for instance, or other injustices – will continue to produce unjustifiable human suffering and ecological damage. 

A third point of contention concerns the route to achieving climate goals. Some argue that even if climate change is a systemic issue, there is no time for radical system change. Emissions must be halved by 2030, and it is hard to imagine that the economic systems and culture of consumption that fuel high emissions will be overhauled by then. Advancing reformist change within the current system might therefore be the more realistic path forward. Such reformism is associated with moderate tactics that stick to the playbook of representative democracy, whereby social change results from public pressure on elected politicians. If broad-based support for climate policies is therefore paramount, the exclusion of divisive issues like the war in Palestine might become justifiable.  

Then again, pushing a politically “neutral” science-based climate narrative so that neither progressives nor conservatives are offended might backfire. Some contend that a more outspokenly political narrative that integrates climate change and social justice, such as the “just transition” narrative, is more likely to garner broad social support because it speaks to key concerns of workers and provides a guardrail for those whose jobs are threatened by the transition.  

Still another perspective suggests that winning public support isn’t even the most effective path to desired social change. Researchers Kevin A. Young and Laura Thomas-Walters argue that the US civil rights movement derived much of its influence from strategically orchestrated disruptions that put pressure on influential actors to advocate for policy changes. In other words, these actors didn’t meet the movement’s demands because they supported it, but because they wanted the disruptions to end. Notwithstanding major differences between the civil rights movement and the climate movement, the argument suggests that movements shouldn’t necessarily prioritise public support when disruption can be a powerful tool. This insight might not directly inform how the climate movement should respond to issues like the war in Gaza, but it does challenge the prevailing belief that maintaining broad support at all costs is the most effective strategy. 

Strategic considerations aside, ideas around who is an important ally for the climate movement are ultimately informed by ideological considerations. As movements coalesce around collective identities, the question arises: does the movement share more common ground with those advocating for peace and justice, or with anyone dedicated to combating climate change irrespective of social justice? The answer will shape the direction and character of the climate movement as it evolves. It might even challenge the notion that there is such a thing as a singular climate movement.  

Climate and conflict      

Most commonly, activists refer to a capitalist, colonialist, or extractive system as the underlying issue of climate change. When it comes to Gaza, the connections between the war and climate change are, to many, multivarious. Some point to the fact that Israel’s historic treatment of Palestinians exacerbates the climate risks facing the population by, for instance, compromising access to water. Israel is also accused of greenwashing colonialism when it legitimises the dispossession of Palestinians in the name of addressing climate change. The campaigning group 350.org has meanwhile provided a narrative that connects the two without making causal claims, arguing that “there can be no climate justice without peace, and in calling for peace we’re being very clear about peace on both sides.”  

The inclusion of anti-militarism in the climate change struggle, as expressed through its support for Palestine, cannot be dismissed as a distraction from what is “really” at stake in the climate struggle.

The broader debate on the role that climate change plays in intensifying conflicts in the Middle East is longstanding. So too is the depiction of militarism as a critical pillar of extractive systems of oppression. These facilitate climate change while ensuring the system’s continuity in the face of opposition. Since its inception in the 1970s, the modern environmental movement has espoused pacifism as a core tenet, and there are strong historical links between the peace movement and the anti-nuclear wing of the environmental movement. The inclusion of anti-militarism in the climate change struggle, as expressed through its support for Palestine, is historically unsurprising, and cannot be dismissed as a distraction from what is “really” at stake in the climate struggle. In fact, it sits flush with more system-critical climate narratives. 

Dynamic entities 

So how should the climate movement manage internal conflict around the relevance of issues like Gaza? The first thing is to acknowledge that climate action cannot be reduced to simply cutting CO2 emissions; it entails winners and losers, and differing opinions on what constitutes an appropriate response. It is therefore inherently political, as the current farmers’ protests across Europe, and the Yellow Vests movement before them, illustrate. 

Addressing what the movement should do about Palestine or any analogous issue requires asking what the climate movement is. Does it make sense to consider it as a predefined entity seeking to address climate change, and nothing more, nothing less? Those advocating for the exclusion of seemingly unrelated causes seek to police the boundaries of a movement that in their eyes should be concerned with addressing only climate change. But movements are dynamic entities that evolve their ideology as they navigate complex political landscapes. There is no pre-given essence that those joining the movement can be expected to sign up to. Positions are challenged as new constituencies join, issues emerge, and coalitions are built.  

It is therefore crucial to avoid demonising those who raise new concerns or accusing them of undermining the movement’s “actual” cause, for there is no such thing. And while raising new issues may introduce conflict – and while radical political analysis may upset some audiences – activists may rest assured that such conflict can be productive. Indeed, advocating for a singular political message that offends no one is unlikely to be the most convincing path to transformational social change.

Last week Earthworks, along with over sixty organizations from around the world, sent a letter to Guatemalan authorities calling for full respect for the self-determination, customs and traditions of the Xinka and Maya Kaqchikel communities (part of the Peaceful Resistance La Puya) as they participate in the Constitutional Court ordered consultation over the future of a U.S. owned gold mine. In March 2024, La Puya celebrated its twelfth year of defending water, health and the right to live in a healthy environment. 

The letter expresses concern about the various ways that the project owner, Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA) may pressure the Guatemalan government to tip the scales of the consultation process in its favor. The company’s pressure tactics may include using the pending decision in a high-stakes international arbitration process that KCA initiated after Guatemalan courts suspended work on its gold mine in 2016. KCA brought its suit for more than US$400 million against Guatemala in the World Bank arbitration tribunal, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and under the terms of the United States-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). 

The government’s own legal defense in the international arbitration recognizes the legitimacy of La Puya’s struggle against KCA’s Progreso VII Derivado mine and relied on documentation and studies from La Puya to argue that KCA’s mine failed to uphold Guatemalan or international standards and never should have been permitted to operate.

We urge the government to respect the decision of the Constitutional Court, as well as the customs, traditions and self-determination of the Maya Kaqchikel and Xinka communities as they start the design phase of the consultation process. The letter also calls on the government to appropriately limit the role of KCA in the consultation process to one of information-sharing, consistent with the government’s argument to the arbitration panel and the Constitutional Court decision. 

Read the letter in Spanish here.

The post Organizations Urge Guatemalan Authorities to Respect Self-Determination at La Puya appeared first on Earthworks.

Una escasa participación en las elecciones europeas puede socavar la legitimidad democrática del Parlamento Europeo al reflejar la anteposición de la identidad nacional a la europea. ¿Es posible que la europeización progresiva y la reducción de la edad de voto ayuden a la ciudadanía a sentirse más cercana a Europa?

En tema de política europea, se suele escuchar que “las elecciones de la UE tienen una participación escasa”. Y en parte es cierto: en el año 2019 sólo acudieron a las urnas la mitad de los casi 400 millones de personas con derecho a voto. En los comicios del año 2014, la participación fue aún menor, situándose en el 42%.

El comportamiento electoral no es homogéneo en todo el continente. En Bélgica el voto es obligatorio y la participación roza el 100 %. En comparación, Rumanía registró una participación bastante escandalosa en las últimas elecciones europeas: un 51%. Sin embargo, esta cifra parece mucho más alta si se compara con el 32% de participación en las elecciones parlamentarias rumanas del año siguiente. Por otro lado, la participación de la población de Eslovaquia en las últimas elecciones europeas fue inferior al 23%, frente al 65% que sí votó en las parlamentarias nacionales de ese mismo año.

Participación en las elecciones europeas de 2019 y las elecciones nacionales anteriores.

Podemos comprender mejor la democracia europea si analizamos con detenimiento las cifras de participación. En primer lugar, deberíamos desechar el argumento de que la baja participación en las elecciones europeas respecto a las nacionales constituya en sí mismo un problema democrático. La identidad es lo que impulsa la acción política, y la identidad nacional sigue ocupando un lugar prioritario entre la población de la UE: el 91% de la ciudadanía se siente unida a su país, mientras que el 59% se siente unida a la Unión Europea y solo el 72% de quienes integran la UE se identifican con ella.

En cuanto a historia universal, no hay de qué preocuparse. La Unión Europea es una entidad territorial que existe desde hace 66 años y que se asienta sobre unas realidades nacionales previas a su constitución. A título comparativo, los Estados Unidos de América se fundaron en el año 1776 y su identidad nacional no adquirió mayor relevancia que la estatal hasta 1968. Tuvieron que transcurrrir casi 200 años para que la ciudadanía estadounidense se identificara más como “estadounidense” que como californiana, neoyorquina o floridana.

La prevalencia de la identidad nacional también es visible a nivel local, donde las elecciones suelen tener una participación más baja. La distribución del poder también influye en la participación. Tomemos el ejemplo de Francia, donde el presidente es el principal líder político y cuyas elecciones presidenciales de 2022 atrajeron a un 25% más de votantes que las legislativas de ese mismo año.

Participación en las elecciones europeas y las elecciones nacionales en los Estados miembros de la UE durante los años 1979-2024 [Votantes registrados/votantes]

La participación electoral a nivel europeo ha disminuido en gran medida desde el año 1979 hasta la actualidad. Esto se debe en parte a que los países de Europa del Este, que se empezaron a incorporar a la UE a partir del año 2004, suelen tener una participación electoral más baja que sus homólogos occidentales. Sin embargo, algunos países de Europa Occidental también han incidido en esta tendencia. La participación en las elecciones europeas en Francia cayó 10 puntos entre los años 1979 y 2019, mientras que registró un descenso de más de 30 puntos durante el mismo periodo en las elecciones parlamentarias nacionales. Italia derogó el voto obligatorio en la década de 1990 y la participación pasó del 81% en el año 1989 al 54% en 2019. En las elecciones nacionales también se observó una pauta similar.

Ejercer el voto es un elemento esencial de una democracia sana y por ello hemos de velar por que el mayor número posible de personas elija a sus representantes depositando su voto en las urnas

La participación electoral en las elecciones europeas siempre ha sido en torno a un 20% inferior a la de las elecciones parlamentarias nacionales. Esta diferencia se ha reducido desde el año 1999, especialmente en algunos países. En Francia [color rojo], las elecciones europeas de 2019 obtuvieron una participación similar a la de las elecciones nacionales de 2017. En Dinamarca [color verde], la participación nacional se ha mantenido estable en torno al 85%, mientras que en las elecciones europeas registró un aumento del 45% al 66% entre los años 1979 y 2019.

Diferencias entre la participación de las elecciones europeas y nacionales.

Si la participación se ha visto afectada por la ampliación de la UE y las tendencias a largo plazo que también afectan a las elecciones nacionales, ¿qué conclusión podemos sacar entonces sobre la democracia europea?

No cabe duda de que una participación electoral escasa puede plantear un problema democrático. Cuando solo el 20% o el 30% de la ciudadanía ejerce su derecho al voto (como ocurrió en Eslovenia, Eslovaquia, Portugal, Letonia, Chequia, Croacia y Bulgaria en los comicios de 2019), el resultado representa solamente a una parte minoritaria de la población. Para hacer frente a esta cuestión de legitimidad democrática es necesario que los partidos políticos se tomen en serio las elecciones europeas (empezando por el proceso de los candidatos principales) y que los medios de comunicación hagan lo propio para cultivar la democracia europea. Ahora bien, mientras la UE se prepara para abrirse a los Balcanes Occidentales y a los países más al este, se impone también la necesidad de una reforma institucional que simplifique los procesos y los haga más comprensibles, más políticos y menos burocráticos.

Ejercer el voto es un elemento esencial de una democracia sana y por ello hemos de velar por que el mayor número posible de personas elija a sus representantes depositando su voto en las urnas. Hay que facilitar el proceso de voto, suprimiendo el requerimiento de preinscribirse, por ejemplo, y ofreciendo la posibilidad de votar anticipadamente.

De cualquier modo, considerar la participación como el único indicador de la democracia puede inducir a equívoco. En ocasiones, una alta participación electoral es la consecuencia o el presagio de un retroceso democrático. La gran movilización de jóvenes y mujeres que tuvo lugar el pasado octubre en Polonia fue la reacción a casi una década de gobiernos de extrema derecha que erosionaron el Estado de derecho y los derechos de las mujeres. Y más recientemente, en Portugal, muchas personas con ideas antidemocráticas que acudieron a votar por primera vez lo hicieron a favor de partido de extrema derecha. El aumento de la participación en ambos países (+13% en Polonia, +9 % en Portugal en comparación con las elecciones anteriores) estuvo vinculado a una creciente polarización.

La juventud representa la generación más “europea”, ya que ha nacido y crecido en un mundo interconectado

En otros casos, una menor participación electoral puede corresponderse con una mayor participación democrática. Por ejemplo, en las elecciones europeas de 2024 se permitirá votar a las personas de 16 y 17 años en Alemania, Austria, Bélgica, Malta y Grecia. Aunque el voto a los 16 años pueda dar lugar a una menor participación (la participación suele ser menor entre los votantes más jóvenes), se trata de una mejora democrática que otorga representación política a un grupo que ha de tener ese derecho fundamental. En cierto sentido, la juventud representa la generación más “europea”, ya que ha nacido y crecido en un mundo interconectado. Para la población joven, Europa no es un “proyecto de paz” ni el programa Erasmus, sino la realidad polifacética en la que vivimos.

La última década también ha constatado cómo la población joven puede impulsar el cambio político. Las manifestaciones y movimientos liderados por jóvenes dieron forma a la política de cara a las elecciones europeas celebradas en el año 2019. Por lo tanto, ampliar el derecho al voto a los jóvenes de 16 años es una medida lógica, que puede complementarse con la educación política y cívica desde una edad temprana. De esta forma, es posible que la participación electoral también aumente a largo plazo.

Profiting from poverty Channel News Yasmin 15th April 2024 Teaser Media

This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.

In 2019, Makanalani Gomes stood on the slopes of Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in Hawaiʻi, face-to-face with Honolulu riot police. For decades, Native Hawaiians like Gomes watched — and protested — as their sacred mountain was bulldozed and excavated for the construction of telescopes and other astronomical facilities. After the observatories were built, they abandoned construction equipment and debris, littering Mauna Kea’s summit.

Gomes and other activists spent months sleeping on the mountainside, in the cold, successfully blocking construction crews from heading up the slope to build the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope, and to date, the project remains in limbo.

“We are in the fight of our lives and in the front lines every day,” Gomes said.

This week, Gomes will continue her work fighting for Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty when she speaks at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York — the largest gathering of Indigenous leaders, activists, and policymakers on the planet. Beginning today, the 23rd annual event runs until April 26 and will focus on “emphasizing the voices of Indigenous youth” like Gomes, who is now one of three co-chairs of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus. 

“We are intrinsically of our lands and of our waters, of our mountains and of our oceans, and then laying down our bodies in turn to preserve what we have left,” she said. “So I think that’s what I’m looking forward to, is just being with people who understand the walk that we walk and the honor and privilege that we do it with.”

The forum was established more than two decades ago as a permanent advisory body for Indigenous Peoples at the U.N., and is a uniquely influential venue for attendees to ensure their perspectives are heard. Indigenous Peoples and nations can’t vote at the U.N. like member states, but the forum has the ability to make official recommendations as an adviser to the Economic and Social Council, one of the six main U.N. bodies that helps facilitate multinational agreements on sustainable development. The forum has 16 members that serve three-year terms, with eight nominated by state governments and eight by Indigenous organizations. 

“The importance of the Permanent Forum is that it puts pressure on other parts of the United Nations to take appropriate action regarding Indigenous Peoples,” said Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council. 

The existence of the forum is itself a product of Indigenous advocacy. Mililani Trask, a longtime Native Hawaiian activist and one of the first members of the Permanent Forum, said advocates used to have to sit and listen while U.N. members discussed issues relevant to them. She said that Indigenous advocates wanted a permanent space where they could speak on the floor. 

“Once we were established as a body, it shifted the balance of power,” Trask said. It meant, “we have a basis in working with governments in partnerships instead of going to the gun.”

Trask also said that the forum elevated Indigenous expertise. 

“When the forum came into existence it was the first time that non-white Indigenous international legal experts came to the forefront,” Trask said. Member states “didnʻt think that we had any.”

She said the advisory body had a huge influence on the eventual adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples five years later in 2007. The U.N. document outlines the rights of Indigenous Peoples and has been a key tool for Indigenous advocates who seek to hold states and corporations accountable for human rights violations. It’s not legally binding, but it provides an international standard that Indigenous people can point to when their rights are violated. 

Just two years ago, the venue enabled the Yaqui Nation in Mexico to regain their sacred Maaso Kova from a museum in Stockholm, Sweden. The deer head is used in ceremonial dances and was taken as part of the colonial enslavement and suppression of the Yaqui people. The return of the Maaso Kova in 2022 was what The New York Times reported as the “first successful repatriation of cultural artifacts to an Indigenous group overseen by the United Nations under its Declaration of Indigenous Rights.” 

Andrea Carmen, who is also Yaqui, said it wouldn’t have happened without the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. 

The forum doesn’t accept human rights complaints, or initiate investigations, like the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. But veteran attendees like Carmen say it is an opportunity to meet high-level officials from the U.N. and state governments, bring awareness to important issues, and create community with other Indigenous Peoples from around the world. The latter is what Gomes is most looking forward to as she prepares her remarks to open Tuesday’s discussion on self-determination and Native youth.

“So many of us, although we’re young people, we’ve already experienced being land defenders and water defenders and literally using our physical bodies to defend Earth Mother,” she said. 

This year’s focus will be on how to strengthen those self-determination rights with an eye toward Indigenous youth like Gomes. Gomes is hopeful that the theme will result in more youth attending for the first time. Bryan Bixcul, who is Maya Tz’utujil from Guatemala and works as an advocacy coordinator at the nonprofit Cultural Survival, is one of them. 

“A lot of things are being discussed at the international level, but the implementation happens at the national level,” said Bixcul.

Among other events, he’s looking forward to a conversation on the first day of the forum about ongoing efforts to replace fossil fuel energy production with cleaner alternatives like solar and wind that release fewer carbon emissions. Indigenous Peoples’ territories are critical to the success of the energy transition as land they manage holds an estimated 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, but new mining projects and conservation areas have frequently overlooked their rights. Last year, the Permanent Forum commissioned a group of experts to meet and discuss the green energy transition and its effect on Indigenous Peoples. The resulting report is on the agenda for this year’s forum and spells out a long list of ways that governments and corporations can and should respect Indigenous rights, such as passing laws to require clean energy projects to respect the right for Indigenous people to consent to projects on their land. 

Bixcul is also helping to organize a workshop for youth on April 18 to help build solidarity and learn effective advocacy strategies to bring back home. Side events like this are a critical part of the gathering this week and next because they facilitate discussions and connections between activists who have to abide by official time limits for speeches during the main agenda. 

“We think it’s very important for communities to outline their priorities — their self-determined priorities — so that as they are facing threats, now or in the future, they are prepared to be engaged in these conversations with corporations,” he said. 

One tangible output of the forum will be a report that summarizes recommendations collected during the forum, which advocates can reference as they continue their work in their home countries and in other United Nations bodies. For example, in last year’s report, the Permanent Forum condemned the use of the term “Indigenous Peoples and local communities,” arguing that Indigenous Peoples should be separated from local communities instead of being lumped together, which could diminish the former’s rights. The IPLC acronym continues to be used, but Indigenous advocates have repeatedly pointed to the forum’s statement to bolster their argument for its disuse. They’re concerned that the language could have major implications for who gets access to global funding to mitigate climate change and whether Indigenous people get a say in land decisions, including the expansion of conservation areas.

Last year’s forum also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to conduct a special report led by Indigenous experts to analyze climate change’s effects and opportunities for Indigenous peoples. The recommendation wasn’t immediately taken up by IPCC but Carmen from the International Indigenous Treaty Council said that’s typical.

“These things take some time,” she said. 

Many of the topics at this year’s Permanent Forum arenʻt new: Last year, there was a particular focus on climate, and planned sessions on land defenders and militarization have been discussed before. But one agenda item that wasn’t there last year is a meeting with the president of the General Assembly to discuss the outcome document from the 2014 World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, a report from the General Assembly meeting a decade ago that lists a series of commitments by U.N. member states’ to Indigenous rights, such as implementing policies that promote the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

Carmen said such a high-level meeting hasnʻt happened for a few years and plans to use the opportunity to ask about the creation of a new U.N. body dedicated to the repatriation of Indigenous items. 

The Permanent Forum can be challenging to navigate for Indigenous youth, especially those who are from more rural areas, need visas, or face language barriers. But Gomes said she has been inspired by how many Indigenous people attend despite such hurdles. 

“We find a way to navigate in these systems that weren’t designed by us, or for us,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your guide to the 2024 UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on Apr 15, 2024.

In a South Pacific nation ravaged by logging, several tribes joined together to sell “high integrity” carbon credits on international markets. The project not only preserves their highly biodiverse rainforest, but it funnels life-changing income to Indigenous landowners.

Read more on E360 →

When the sharing economy took off in the 2010s and upended entire industries, the firmest proponents of the model heralded it as an economic revolution that would help slash emissions. Of all the ideas that emerged and dissolved over the years, shareable electric scooters seemed to possess the most promise for climate. Almost anyone with a smartphone and a credit card could grab one and ride it down the block or across town, eschewing automobiles.

Yet, as the industry matures and Lime — which, with operations in 280 cities worldwide, is the biggest player — moves further into its eighth year, researchers have shown that the eco-friendly dreams of shared micromobility have not materialized without problems. The true climate benefits of these fleets depends upon how companies deploy and manage them, and safety remains a concern as injuries climb. But industry leaders appear intent on ensuring their scooters are as sustainable and safe as possible.

“It’s really important as a company that has set a net zero target by 2030,” said Andrew Savage, Lime’s head of sustainability, Andrew Savage, “that we walk the walk, and that we do everything we can to inspire the industries around us to decarbonize as well.”

The sustainability of shared micromobility is an active area of research in a fast-changing industry. Ultimately, researchers see two factors that determine the overall climate impact of e-scooters: how users ride them, and how operators manage them from manufacturing to disposal.

A recent survey of the latest research questioned whether the sharing economy is inherently sustainable, which included a particular look at e-scooters. The survey found many researchers repeatedly concerned with the question, “If riders hadn’t rented a scooter, how would they have gotten to their destination?” If someone would have walked instead of ridden, that person increased the emissions associated with that trip. But several studies, including one by the Portland Bureau of Transportation and another, funded by Lime, by a German research institute, have found that though anywhere from a third to well over half of scooter users would have walked instead, enough other trips that would have been taken by car were not and shared scooters, on the whole, help reduce overall transportation emissions — often preventing 20 grams of CO2 emissions per mile ridden on a scooter.

The picture in urban landscapes, however, can get slightly more complicated when researchers consider how those providing the scooters retrieve them to charge, repair, or redistribute them to where people are likely to use them. Colin Murphy, director of research and consulting at the Shared Use Mobility Center said that when operators use big cargo vans to manage their fleets, they can negate some of the emissions savings from users.

To address this, Savage said the company is improving its fleet logistics to reduce overall emissions. Lime’s scooters and bikes are now equipped with larger, swappable battery packs which means they need to be charged less often and when they do, fleet workers can drive around with a trunk full of battery packs rather than taking the scooter back to a warehouse, effectively cutting logistics emissions in half while ensuring scooters are available more often. Savage said the company has also bought over 140 electric vans to support those operations. Though that’s 10 times the number Lime had a few years ago, it’s still only one van for every two cities it operates in.

Savage said Lime is also working to reduce its impacts in other ways. For instance, in North America, “once vehicles arrive at port,” Savage said “we are now using emissions-free trucking to get those to our distribution centers.” Beyond that, it has designed a modular bike that makes it easier to swap out damaged parts, and parts that are beyond repair are often sent for recycling. And it has worked with one company, Gomi, to salvage cells from partially damaged batteries for use in what it says are zero-waste bluetooth speakers.

But perhaps the most concerning hurdle the industry faces is also the one over which it has, in reality, the least direct control: rider safety. One study, released earlier this year by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles, found that from 2017 to 2020 serious injuries for scooter riders rose threefold, just as revenues for the scooter-sharing industry shot from $10 million to nearly $450 million. This trend only continued into 2021 and 2022, with micromobility injuries increasing an average of 23 percent every year. And these aren’t just scrapes and bruises. The UCLA-led study found that scooter users were, compared to cyclists, more likely to end up with a broken arm or leg, require surgery, or even end up paralyzed. The researchers suspect that may be due, among other things, to riders often lacking safety gear.

Lime insists that it places safety first. But with most American cities designed to promote cars over all other forms of transit, the health of scooter users is, like those of pedestrians and cyclists, at risk once wheels hit pavement. Perhaps it should be no surprise that of the 30 people killed in 2018 while riding an e-scooter, 80 percent were struck by a car. This is why, if society wants to move away from cars as the default, Kailai Wang, who studies urban mobility at the University of Houston, believes urban areas need to invest in upgraded infrastructure like protected bike lanes that can make roads safer for non-automotive transport.

Of course, cars aren’t the only dangers e-scooter users, like cyclists, face. Poor road and sidewalk conditions can lead to serious injuries. And sometimes riders are their own enemy. According to some studies, first-time riders and late-night riders face elevated risks. Murphy, said that these are two areas where scooter-sharing platforms and local policymakers can step in. 

For instance, he said that operators could artificially limit the max speed of a scooter during a user’s first few rides as they grow accustomed to the vehicle. In other cases, many cities prohibit e-scooter rides in the wee hours to prevent misuse. But “to the degree that these vehicles provide a real kind of transportation lifeline for some people,” Murphy said, “that’s almost when they’re at their most important.” For someone who ends a late shift after bus services end, an e-scooter might actually be their best, or only, means of getting home. This reality led the Chicago City Council, for example, to consider revising its own late-night prohibition.

As long as people have access to one of these vehicles when they need one, and a safe lane in which to ride it, shared micromobility can help cities move away from car-dependent transportation, slashing emissions in the process, by shifting transit from something material and energy-intensive to something low-impact and electric.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 8 years into America’s e-scooter experiment, what have we learned? on Apr 15, 2024.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With its expanse of buildings and concrete, Mexico City may not look squishy — but it is. Ever since the Spanish conquistadors drained Lake Texcoco to make way for more urbanization, the land has been gradually compacting under the weight. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and the result is grim: Mexico City is sinking up to 20 inches a year, unleashing havoc on its infrastructure.

That includes the city’s metro system, the second-largest in North America after New York City’s. Now, satellites have allowed scientists to meticulously measure the rate of sinking across Mexico City, mapping where subsidence has the potential to damage railways. “When you’re here in the city, you get used to buildings being tilted a little,” says Darío Solano‐Rojas, a remote-sensing scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “You can feel how the rails are wobbly. Riding the metro in Mexico City feels weird. You don’t know if it’s dangerous or not — you feel like it’s dangerous, but you don’t have that certainty.”

In a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports, Solano‐Rojas went in search of certainty. Using radar satellite data, he and his team measured how the elevation changed across the city between 2011 and 2020. Subsidence isn’t uniform; the rate depends on several factors. The most dramatic instances globally are due to the overextraction of groundwater: Pump enough liquid out and the ground collapses like an empty water bottle. That’s why Jakarta, Indonesia, is sinking up to 10 inches a year. Over in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the land has sunk as much as 28 feet in the past century, due to farmers pumping out too much groundwater.

A similar draining of aquifers is happening in Mexico City, which is gripped by a worsening water crisis. “The subsurface is like a sponge: We get the water out, and then it deforms, because it’s losing volume,” says Solano‐Rojas. How much volume depends on the underlying sediment in a given part of the city — the ancient lake didn’t neatly layer equal proportions of clay and sand in every area. “That produces a lot of different behaviors on the surface,” Solano‐Rojas adds.

Subsidence rates across Mexico City vary substantially, from 20 inches annually to not at all, where the city is built atop solid volcanic rock. This creates “differential subsidence,” where the land sinks differently not just square mile to square mile, or block to block, but square foot to square foot. If a road, railway, or building is sinking differently at one end than the other, it’ll destabilize.

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That’s how you get the tilted road traffic barriers at Acatitla Station, shown above. And below, the deformation of tracks at Oceanía Station. If in either of these places the land was subsiding at a uniform rate, the tracks and road would also sink uniformly, and you might not have a problem. “We found that some of the segments of the metro system are moving faster” than it was designed for, says Solano‐Rojas. The study found that nearly half of elevated segments of the metro are experiencing differential subsidence. This would imply that they would need to be serviced before the system’s typical threshold of 50 years, at which point a segment would need rehabilitation or repair to continue optimal operation.

Sistema de Transporte Colectivo, which operates the Mexico City Metro, did not provide comment for this story after repeated inquiries.

A metro system by its nature is a sprawling web of lines: Mexico City’s includes 140 miles of tracks running underground in subways, aboveground as you can see above, and on elevated platforms. “It goes from areas that are really stable, to areas that are subsiding at 30 centimeters per year, or even almost 40 centimeters every year,” Solano‐Rojas. “So the goal here was to see where the most damage could be.”

That damage comes in a few forms. As the land sinks, it can create divots for rainwater to accumulate, causing flooding along railways. That can mess with the electrical system that powers the trains, Solano‐Rojas says.

And elevation changes can increase the grade of the rails. The metro’s trains are designed to operate on a maximum slope of 3.5 percent, Solano‐Rojas says, but some stretches of track are now double that due to subsidence. “Trains can get derailed very easily if there is a slight change in the leveling of the railways,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech who studies subsidence but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Most of the infrastructure has certain thresholds; it tolerates a certain level of differential land subsidence. But often they don’t account for the rate that we see, for example, in Mexico City.”

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Solano‐Rojas and his colleagues found subsidence in the area of an overpass near the Olivos station, which collapsed in 2021 while a Metro train was traveling over it. “We did part of this analysis before 2021, and we detected that that area was having differential displacements,” says Solano‐Rojas. “We were like, ‘Oh, yeah, it looks like something could be happening here in the future.’ We think that it’s not a coincidence that we found this.” Solano‐Rojas was careful to say that the potential contribution of subsidence to the disaster would require further evaluation, and official investigations have cited construction errors and do not mention subsidence.

For this study, the researchers looked at the metro infrastructure above ground, not the subway segments — basically, the parts of the system they could verify visually. (The photo below shows the differential subsidence of columns supporting an overpass.) But by providing the system’s operators with information on how quickly its infrastructure might be subsiding, their work can hopefully inform interventions. Engineers can add material underneath railways, for instance, to restore lost elevation. Bolstering subways, though, could be much more challenging. “We don’t have a concrete solution for that,” says Shirzaei. “In most cases, when that happens, it just results in shutting down the project and trying to open a new lane.”

This isn’t just Mexico City’s problem. Earlier this year, Shirzaei and his colleagues found that the East Coast’s infrastructure is in serious trouble due to slower — yet steady — subsidence. They calculated that 29,000 square miles of the Atlantic Coast are exposed to sinking of up to 0.08 inches a year, affecting up to 14 million people and 6 million properties. Some 1,400 square miles are sinking up to 0.20 inches a year.

Differential subsidence is not only threatening railways, the researchers found, but all kinds of other critical infrastructure, like levees and airports. A metropolis like New York City has the added problem of sheer weight pushing down on the ground, which alone leads to subsidence. The Bay Area, too, is sinking. On either coast, subsidence is greatly exacerbating the problem of sea level rise: The land is going down just as the water is coming up.

Wherever in the world it’s happening, people have to stop overextracting groundwater to slow subsidence. Newfangled systems are already relieving pressure on aquifers. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to recycle toilet water into drinking water, for instance. And more cities are deploying “sponge” infrastructure — lots of green spaces that allow rainwater to soak into the underlying aquifer, essentially reinflating the land to fend off subsidence. Such efforts are increasingly urgent as climate change exacerbates droughts in many parts of the world, including Mexico City, putting ever more pressure on groundwater supplies.

With increasing satellite data, cities can get a better handle on the subsidence they can’t immediately avoid. “I really feel like governments have a chance to use these kinds of studies to have a more structured plan of action,” says Solano‐Rojas.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mexico City’s metro system is sinking fast. Yours could be next. on Apr 14, 2024.

This story was originally published by Capital & Main.

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and watershed protection, several downballot elections this year in a handful of states could have a major effect in the transition away from fossil fuel. 

The media tend to ignore such contests, which attract far fewer voters than big federal and state elections. But board members of public utilities in Arizona and Nebraska are up for election in coming months, and the results of those contests could potentially transform energy policy for millions of Americans. 

The elections come amid growing concern about the role of money in such races and in the wake of headline-grabbing corruption scandals at utilities across the country. Utility fraud and corruption — in Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio, and South Carolina — has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion, according to an analysis by news nonprofit Floodlight, which noted that “some power companies embrace — or seek to block — the transition away from fossil fuels toward wind, solar, hydrogen, and nuclear, which produce fewer greenhouse gasses.”

On April 2, six clean-energy candidates won seats on two boards of the Salt River Project, a not-for-profit utility that provides water and power to more than 2 million people living in central Arizona. It’s one of the largest public power companies in the country. Critics say that it’s also one of the biggest contributors in the Western U.S. to greenhouse gas emissions since it relies on coal, oil, and natural gas to generate more than two-thirds of its energy. Arizona is the sunniest state in the country, yet the Salt River Project gets only 3.4 percent of its energy from solar, lagging behind the state overall, which gets 10 percent from solar.

Though they didn’t win a majority of the board, the new clean energy members could have a greater role shaping the energy future of Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the U.S. with a population of more than 1.6 million. The election attracted controversy due to rules limiting voter eligibility to property owners and not all rate payers in the district — it also got the attention of famed environmental activists like Bill McKibben, leader of the climate campaign group 350.org.

Some of the incumbent board members have served for decades because of an election system set up in the early 1900s — when the Valley of the Sun was settled by farmers and ranchers — that allows only property owners to vote and apportions votes by acreage. The more land you own, the more votes you get. 

As a result, most of the utility’s customers don’t have a say in choosing the leadership of a body that sets their energy rates and decides what energy sources they use to generate electricity.

The clean energy advocates promise to accelerate solar deployments, adjust rates to incentivize the use of rooftop solar, and strengthen watershed protection in a region that is increasingly suffering from drought and extreme heat. In 2023, Phoenix saw a record 54 days when the temperature hit 110 degrees.

“We call ourselves the Valley of the Sun for a reason,” said Randy Miller, a winning Salt River Project board member who supports the slate of clean energy candidates and was motivated to run several years ago when he was told that his energy rates would nearly triple since he installed rooftop solar on his home. “I couldn’t believe it, the nearby ASP [Arizona Public Service] district has more than triple the amount of rooftop solar. Higher rates are a complete disincentive to getting solar power. We need new leadership on the board.”

The candidates were especially motivated in light of a state commission’s recent decision to scrap its renewable energy standard, the only state to take such action, according to solar industry advocates. That body, the Arizona Corporation Commission, also has an election coming up in August.

Longtime board member Stephen H. Williams, who defeated one of the clean-energy candidates, did not return calls from Capital & Main for comment.

The current board members running for reelection had pushed back against the new candidates, sending out flyers touting “40 combined years of providing affordable and reliable power and water” and citing sustainability as one of their concerns. They criticized what they called an attempted “takeover” by “ideological extremists,” claiming that Salt River Project “has managed to reduce carbon intensity by 35 percent since 2005, despite the dramatic growth happening in our service area.”

The insurgents in the Salt River Project race had hoped to emulate Nebraska, where clean-energy advocates won three seats in 2016 on the heavily rural Nebraska Public Power District. That helped tip the balance of power and led the board to vote 9-2 in 2021 to aim for net-zero emissions in the utility’s generation by 2050. As a result, with the state’s other two major power utilities already making similar pledges in recent years, Nebraska became the first GOP-dominated state to commit to net-zero electricity emissions.

The end result was a long-sought goal of climate activists and environmental groups, such as the Nebraska Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, which poured money into the 2018 and 2020 races. Before that, such races were sleepy affairs with incumbents running unopposed. The unprecedented level of campaign contributions sparked debate in this year’s election cycle, with some state lawmakers recently pushing to make the elections partisan so that voters have a better idea of each candidate’s agenda.

“Nebraskans support clean energy” but the utilities didn’t reflect those values — and so it became a matter of organizing and educating voters, said Chelsea Johnson, deputy director of Nebraska Conservation Voters, describing recent election results. “You can have a really big impact running for these local offices.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The downballot races that could transform energy policy in Arizona and Nebraska on Apr 13, 2024.

The Department of Energy, or DOE, announced Friday that it’s strengthening energy efficiency requirements for light bulbs in U.S. markets, in a move anticipated to save Americans $27 billion on their utility bills over 30 years. The DOE estimates that the new standards will prevent 70 million metric tons of carbon from being emitted over 30 years — equivalent to the annual emissions of 9 million homes.

According to the new rule, light bulbs sold or imported after 2028 must have an efficiency level of at least 120 lumens per watt, almost triple the current minimum standard. Under the new standard, a light bulb as bright as an old-school 60-watt incandescent bulb would require no more than 6.5 watts of electricity.

The federal government has already once strengthened its efficiency standards under the Biden administration. Last year, the classic Edison-style incandescent bulb was almost entirely phased out. (That rule, which set the current efficiency standard of 45 lumens per watt, actually predates Biden’s presidency and was initially scheduled by Congress to go into effect in 2020, but it was delayed by the Trump administration.)

By 2028, when the new standards kick in, the DOE predicts that some 98 percent of new bulbs sold in the U.S. will be LEDs.

The federal standards do not prescribe a particular kind of bulb for common household usage, but merely mandate minimum efficiency levels. And they only apply to new sales and imports; no one is required to replace the bulbs already in their homes.

Exemptions are carved out for certain types of bulbs, like oven lights, where LEDs are unsuitable because they don’t perform well under high heat.

Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of energy efficiency proponents, said the trend toward greater efficiency has made a difference in the battle against global warming — especially since the widespread adoption of LEDs.

“What was a 60 watt light bulb now uses, say, 9 or 10 watts,” deLaski said. “That’s a big reduction in energy use, which means less fossil fuels being burned in power plants which leads to climate change. But even an efficient technology can get better.”

Those improvements are already on their way, as lighting manufacturers have been steadily increasing efficiency in light bulbs for years, driven by economic incentives as well as federal regulation. Lighting manufacturers weighed in on the new standard during the federal rulemaking process.

“The modern LED light bulb is a much better light bulb than the one you bought five years ago, way way better than the one you bought ten years ago, and in another universe than the CFL [ compact fluorescent lamp] that you can’t even buy anymore,” said deLaski.

The new federal standards effectively guarantee that these innovations are shared across the market, ensuring “that all the choices available in stores and from internet sellers are going to be LEDs that incorporate the latest efficiency technologies,” deLaski said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The lowly light bulb is the Biden administration’s latest climate-fighting tool on Apr 12, 2024.

The world’s most prominent verification program for corporate climate pledges is reportedly in turmoil following its board of trustees’ unilateral decision this week to allow carbon offsets to count toward companies’ supply chain emissions reduction targets.

In a letter to the board seen by Grist, dozens of staffers and program managers at the Science-Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, said the decision had caused “grave reputational damage” and implied that it risked turning their organization into a “greenwashing platform.”

The letter called for the resignation of SBTi CEO Luiz Amaral and board members who supported the change, as well as the withdrawal of the new policy.

“The actions of the CEO and the board have resulted in significant harm to our organization’s reputation and viability,” the letter said.

The SBTi is a nonprofit that sets standards for corporate emissions reduction targets. It evaluates hundreds of companies’ targets each year and certifies those it deems legitimate. Companies, in turn, advertise the SBTi’s certification as evidence that their pledges are meaningful.

Among the staffers’ main concerns is that access to carbon credits will incentivize companies to offset, rather than reduce, greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and production of materials they buy and products they sell to consumers. Scientists say companies should do everything they can to limit these emissions, known as “scope 3” emissions, before trying to cancel them out with credits. 

Carbon credits are supposed to represent some amount of carbon emissions that are avoided or removed from the atmosphere — through projects like planting trees or installing wind turbines — but experts say it’s questionable whether they actually work. More than 90 percent of the rainforest-based credits offered by one popular organization were shown last year to be “worthless,” largely because they promised to protect forests that were never under threat. (The issuer of those credits disputed the findings.)

The SBTi staffers also said the board moved “prematurely,” without notifying or adequately consulting with its technical advisers.

“The Technical Council was neither informed, consulted, nor given approval for such a significant decision,” they wrote, calling this a “clear and apparent breach” of the SBTi’s governance structures. At least one of the SBTi’s technical advisory group members — Stephan Singer, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Climate Action Network — said he resigned from the SBTi over the issue. In his resignation letter, obtained by the Financial Times, he called carbon credits “scientifically, socially, and from a climate perspective a hoax.”

Doreen Stabinsky, another SBTi adviser and a professor of global environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, told Grist the move was a “corporate takeover of SBTi that will undermine any ‘science-based’ credibility they had.”

More than 90 percent of the rainforest-based credits offered by one popular organization were shown last year to be “worthless,” largely because they promised to protect forests that were never under threat. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images

The trustees’ abrupt decision may have been influenced by external pressure to boost business prospects for the voluntary carbon market. Over the past few years, investigations and public scrutiny of “fraudulent” offsets have made prospective buyers wary of carbon credits; perhaps fearing backlash, companies bought 17 percent fewer carbon credits in 2022 than they did the previous year.

If the SBTi softened its position on these credits, it could drive up demand for them. Carbon credit programs would benefit from a bigger pool of interested buyers, and companies would be able to meet their emissions reduction targets more easily. Indeed, dozens of companies told the SBTi in a survey published last month that meeting their scope 3 targets is “too much of a challenge,” and the overwhelming majority of positive reactions to the board’s about-face on carbon credits have come from carbon market funders and participants like the American Forest Foundation, Climate Impact Partners, and Indigo Ag.

María Mendiluce, CEO of the We Mean Business Coalition — which advocates for corporate climate action and is one of the SBTi’s five partner organizations — said in a statement that the move would allow companies to “bring more innovation and investment into cutting emissions from their value chains, while also bringing in much needed funding for climate projects in the Global South.” 

Organizations that set standards for the voluntary carbon market in order to help it grow, including the International Emissions Trading Association, the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets, and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, also supported the new policy. The last of these recently adopted a similar position on carbon credits used to offset supply chain emissions that raised similar concerns among experts.

“The faulty business model of offset credits is in danger, and this wild move is an attempt to keep the business model alive,” Sybrig Smit, a policy analyst for the nonprofit NewClimate Institute, told Grist. “It’s not an attempt to save the climate.”

Some carbon credit proponents may have lobbied the SBTi board directly for a change in policy. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion philanthropic organization created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a “core funder” of the SBTi, arranged a two-day meeting in March with SBTi board members, at which representatives of the fund urged the SBTi to allow companies to use offsets.

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The Bezos Earth Fund is a founding sponsor, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. State Department, of a large-scale carbon credit system that was first unveiled at the U.N.’s annual climate summit in 2022. At the time, an independent analysis suggested that the system would need to attract significant business participation in order to have more than marginal impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate finance. 

The initiative “basically aims to develop a system that will look to sell a lot of credits, and they need to find buyers,” said Gilles Dufrasne, lead on global carbon markets for the European nonprofit Carbon Market Watch.

The Bezos fund and its partners relaunched their carbon credit system at last year’s U.N. summit and said they would finalize a framework for the system by Earth Day 2024, less than two weeks after the SBTi board’s announcement. Dufrasne called the timing “curious.”

The Bezos Earth Fund did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, but the philanthropy told the Financial Times it was uninvolved in the SBTi’s new policy on offsets. A spokesperson said the fund is committed to “ensuring that any use of high integrity market mechanisms is subject to stringent guardrails, limits, and rules so that any use of high integrity carbon credits enhances rather than undermines the integrity of corporate climate targets.”

Neither the U.S. Department of State nor the SBTi board of trustees responded to Grist’s requests for comment. Amaral, the SBTi’s CEO, didn’t respond to a message on LinkedIn.

Across academia and the advocacy world, critics have not held back in repudiating the SBTi board’s decision. Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for the nonprofit ActionAid International, said on X that the move “renders the standard for climate action meaningless.” Alison Taylor, a clinical professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, posted that the move was “good news for voluntary carbon markets, bad news for the overwhelming prevalence of BS in this area.”

Other organizations, including Carbon Market Watch, run their own efforts to evaluate private sector decarbonization plans, but none of them do it at the same scale as the SBTi. In 2022, the organization approved more than 1,000 companies’ climate pledges. It removed hundreds of them from a validation process last month over their failure to submit sufficiently ambitious emissions reduction targets.

“It’s just sad,” said Peter Riggs, director of the environmental nonprofit Pivot Point, describing the niche position the SBTi has held as a widely respected arbiter of corporate climate plans, trusted by both business leaders and climate advocacy groups. “We were hoping SBTi was going to be the exemplar of integrity at a time when other initiatives were still messing around with offsets. And now they’re indistinguishable.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips2','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A climate pledge verifier said it would allow more carbon offsets. Its staff revolted. on Apr 12, 2024.

Editor’s note:  This story  originally appeared on Ensia. It’s part of a collaboration between Ensia and Egab exploring environmental efforts by communities facing potentially more urgent concerns such as war and poverty. 

On a recent trek through Yemen’s Socotra island, local resident Issa al-Rumaili stops to point out a spot in the distance: “In front of us are the ruins of a vast forest of dragon blood trees,” he says.

To see it requires some imagination. On an otherwise deserted hill stood three lonely trees, with their distinct umbrella-like canopies.

Dragon’s blood, or Dam al-Akhawain (two brothers’ blood), as it’s locally known, is endemic to Socotra, a mostly desert archipelago south of the Arabian Peninsula, whose isolation from Yemen’s mainland has largely spared it the destruction of the country’s nine-year civil war and preserved its distinctive nature.

But international and government funding for Socotra’s environmental protection authority has dried up, and financial support previously offered to native efforts to save the tree has dwindled, says the authority’s director Salem Hawash.

This funding reduction isn’t completely due to the ongoing conflict, according to a 2021 report from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a charity based in the UK. “The problems pre-date the current conflict,” the report reads. “By 2012, the IUCN reported that the Socotra EPA’s annual budget was just US$5,000.”

That said, the report goes on: “It appears inevitable that the intensifying pressures that the islands are facing as they are dragged into the conflict will continue to place their unique natural and social heritage at risk.” Meanwhile, the authority’s building was converted by Saudi military forces into a temporary headquarters, according to Socotra residents — a reflection of the war’s impact on the island, and the further sidelining of its biodiversity.

These hurdles, along with those brought about by a changing climate, contribute to the uncertain future for the dragon’s blood tree. “I’m afraid this may be the last generation of this amazing tree,” says Hawash. In the face of this uncertainty, many of the island’s residents are working to protect the tree and make sure it does indeed have a future on the island.

A Priceless Lifeline

The Socotra archipelago, one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth, was classified a UNESCO Natural World Heritage site in 2008, but is now facing ecological devastation as a result of climate change and human activity. Populations of the dragon’s blood tree — which is at the heart of the island’s unique flora and fauna and part of Socotra’s identity that sets its people apart from the rest of Yemen and the region — are in frightening decline.

The effects of climate change, including increasing frequency, duration, and intensity of cyclonic storms, and overgrazing and harvesting of the tree’s deep-red resin, which is popular for medicinal purposes, cut the tree’s density by 44% in the 20th century. And while it is estimated that the tree only covers 5% of its potential habitat, scientists expect drier conditions to slash it by another 45% by 2080.

Dragon’s blood trees on Socotra Island, Yemen. Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)

“The loss of one dragon blood tree means the loss of tourists, of water, of medication, and — what is worse — the loss of the Soqotri identity,” says Kay Van Damme, a conservation biologist who has been involved in Socotra conservation since 1999.

In response to these challenges, a local community on secluded Socotra Island at the periphery of a country that was the poorest nation in the Middle East and North Africa long before it became “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” is trying to keep the coveted tree from going extinct. Currently it is listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List.

While a power struggle continues in Yemen between parties involved in the ongoing conflict, flights linking Abu Dhabi and Socotra still bring in adventurous visitors keen to enjoy the island’s magical landscape and its unique tree.

In an archipelago where most of the people live below the poverty line and job opportunities are rare, ecotourism is a priceless lifeline. Tourists visiting the archipelago increased from less than 200 in 2001 to more than 3,700 in 2010. While the island did see a decline in visitors after 2010 due to political unrest and security concerns, last year, roughly 5,000 tourists visited Socotra, tourism ministry officials say.

“Tourists from all around the world come to our remote villages to spend days among these trees,” says al-Rumaili. “If we lose this, what will become of us?”

Biodiversity Linchpin

Efforts to save the dragon’s blood tree began 27 years ago when Adeeb Abdullah, who is now in his 80s, started a plant nursery in the backyard of his home near Hadibu, a small coastal town on Socotra. Serving as a haven for seedlings to grow without being grazed or harvested, the nursery was the first community initiative to preserve endemic and endangered plants on the archipelago.

Since then, a handful of other initiatives have sprung up to protect the dragon’s blood tree. One has managed to grow as many as 600 saplings over the past 20 years.

Van Damme says there are currently more than 80,000 dragon’s blood trees, which can live for hundreds of years. But they’re mostly very old, while younger ones rarely survive.

According to researchers, the dragon blood tree’s canopy shades and provides water to other rare plants that grow around it, capturing moisture equivalent to more than 40% of the island’s annual precipitation. The tree is therefore pivotal to the biodiversity of Socotra, where 37% of the plants and 90% of the reptiles are endemic.

Where the Trees Belong

Abdullah’s nursery now attracts visitors from all over the world. “They come to the nursery for these rare plants, especially dragon blood seedlings, taking pictures for research or memories,” Abdullah says. “This way, the tour guide, the car driver, the hotel owner and I benefit. The unique biodiversity and amazing scenery attract tourists. But if this disappears, no one will come to us.”

Returns from tourism help Socotra’s inhabitants afford essential services often unavailable on the island. While regional players involved in the war construct schools and medical units and provide electricity as part of development plans in which they compete for control over the strategic island, utilities on Socotra remain scarce. For instance, Abdullah’s wife and children still need to make daily trips to distant wells to fetch drinking water, as well as gather firewood to be able to cook.

Ahmed Fathi, a local photographer, says Socotra’s inhabitants still need to travel outside the island for medical treatment, employment and studying. “This is two or three days at sea, or a weekly flight that is too pricey for most.” The island is still “marginalized and isolated,” he says.

The dragon’s blood tree and the biodiversity it fosters are widely seen by many in Socotra as their link to the world beyond through tourism and general international interest.

The decline in government funding makes local initiatives like Abdullah’s even more critical.

Despite his efforts to save the dragon blood trees, Abdullah remains anxious about the future. He worries his children won’t be able to move the trees to the mountainous habitat outside the nursery’s confines.

“We are waiting for support to help us move the seedlings to the mountains,” says Abdullah, a step that necessitates transportation and equipment he says they don’t have. But that’s where they belong, he says. Previously in The Revelator:

Blood Is Life — The Amazing Dragon’s Blood Tree

 

The post The Race to Save the Dragon’s Blood Tree appeared first on The Revelator.

La coalición de partidos que derrocó a la extrema derecha en Polonia está cumpliendo sus promesas de reforma, pero el hecho de dejar de lado a un presidente intransigente deja al nuevo Gobierno expuesto a acusaciones de actuación antidemocrática.

En octubre de 2023, los ciudadanos polacos echaron del poder al partido nacional conservador Ley y Justicia, abriendo el camino a un cambio político. El nuevo Gobierno presidido por Donald Tusk —una coalición de varios partidos que van del centro-derecha al centro-izquierda— tomó posesión en diciembre. La Comisión Europea no tardó en desbloquear el dinero para Polonia que había sido retenido debido al mecanismo del Estado de Derecho. Esto ocurrió incluso antes de que el nuevo Gobierno pudiera dar pasos sustanciales para cumplir realmente las condiciones. Como explicó en la televisión Leszek Miller, ex primer ministro y actual eurodiputado, “yo mismo lo he oído en los pasillos [de Bruselas]: señores, el hito más importante para nosotros ha sido el cambio de gobierno”. Más allá de la euroburbuja, en muchos países se oyen voces que afirman que Polonia es la prueba de que se puede derrotar a los populistas y evitar una deriva aparentemente inevitable hacia la extrema derecha en todo el continente. Grandes esperanzas suscita este nuevo Gobierno no sólo a nivel nacional, sino también en el seno de la Unión Europea.

En términos de políticas, el nuevo Ejecutivo presenta una mezcla de ruptura y continuación. El acuerdo de coalición es breve y vago, rico en promesas generales, pero cauteloso con los detalles. Hay buenas razones para ello. La actual coalición pudo imponerse en las elecciones precisamente porque no era una coalición electoral bajo un liderazgo único. Los futuros socios de gobierno se habían presentado en tres papeletas distintas: la Coalición Cívica (centro-derecha), la Tercera Vía (centrista-agraria) y Nueva Izquierda. Aunque todos coinciden en la necesidad de restaurar el Estado de Derecho, en otros ámbitos políticos suelen tener programas diferentes, cuando no contradictorios.

¿Se puede ignorar la Constitución “sólo esta vez” y esperar construir un marco sostenible que posteriormente sea respetado por todas las partes?

La dinámica de la lucha política viene dictada por el calendario electoral. Las elecciones parlamentarias de octubre de 2023 constituyeron, por así decirlo, el partido inaugural, al que seguirían las elecciones locales de abril, las europeas de junio y —el gran partido final— las presidenciales del primer semestre de 2025. Con el presidente Andrzej Duda, asociado a Ley y Justicia, todavía en el cargo y ejerciendo el poder de veto sobre la nueva legislación, el margen de maniobra del Gobierno es limitado, y todo el tiempo entre el otoño de 2023 y la primavera de 2025 se percibe como un tiempo de transición entre el periodo antiliberal y una democracia plenamente restaurada. Mientras que la nueva coalición espera obtener pleno poder ejecutivo y poder pasar la página del periodo iliberal, el partido Ley y Justicia también puede esperar contraatacar y hacer girar la ola a su favor.

Primeras batallas

La política del Estado de derecho sirve así a un doble propósito: restaurar un orden democrático y preparar el escenario para las elecciones venideras. Algunos pasos son obvios y fáciles. Sustituir a los consejeros delegados de las empresas públicas y a los directores de las instituciones culturales es algo obvio, como lo es la creación de algunas comisiones parlamentarias de investigación encargadas de esclarecer, y ajustar cuentas, con algunos de los escándalos más controvertidos en los que se vieron implicados funcionarios del gobierno anterior. Entre ellas, probablemente la más importante sea la comisión encargada de investigar los abusos de la vigilancia estatal con Pegasus, el programa espía israelí utilizado por el anterior gobierno contra muchos políticos de la oposición (y también contra algunos de sus propias filas). Pero otras tareas, como el restablecimiento de la confianza en los medios de comunicación públicos o los esfuerzos por volver a reformar el poder judicial, plantean un auténtico enigma. El presidente y la sombra de su veto no son el único obstáculo en los esfuerzos por salir del antiliberalismo.

Muchos de los riesgos y dilemas asociados a la restauración se han puesto de manifiesto durante la batalla por “recuperar los medios de comunicación públicos”. En diciembre, el ministro de Cultura cambió los consejos de administración de la televisión estatal, la radio y la Agencia Polaca de Prensa. Con la ayuda de la policía, que impidió que altos funcionarios despedidos ingresaran a las instalaciones, la nueva junta tomó el relevo y, tras una brevísima pausa, procedió a emitir. Para conseguirlo, el ministro hizo caso omiso tanto de una orden de protección dictada días antes por el Tribunal Constitucional, como de la ley vigente sobre medios de comunicación públicos. La decisión se basó en una resolución del Parlamento (no legislativa y, por tanto, no sujeta a veto presidencial) y en una pretensión de vacío legislativo en la materia. La oposición denunció el acto como “un golpe contra la democracia”, mientras muchos partidarios del Gobierno disfrutaban de su momento de dulce venganza. Una de las reacciones más notables fue la de la Fundación de Derechos Humanos de Helsinki, ONG comprometida con los derechos humanos y el Estado de Derecho, y una de las más feroces opositoras al anterior Gobierno iliberal. La Fundación criticó enérgicamente la actuación del ministro y preguntó si se basaba en algún asesoramiento jurídico previo, presentando una solicitud de información pública. A pesar de que el Ministerio ha asegurado que existe tal documento, hasta la fecha el Gobierno no lo ha presentado.

El nuevo Gobierno parece incapaz y poco dispuesto a convencer a los líderes de la oposición y a sus votantes de que un orden constitucional liberal es mejor para ellos

Si todo esto podría haberse hecho de otra manera, de forma más lenta, pero con plena legalidad procesal, es ahora una cuestión académica. Los medios de comunicación públicos fueron una de las áreas en las que los abusos del Gobierno anterior fueron más tangibles y las expectativas de un arreglo rápido fueron elevadas. Lo interesante es que empieza a ser un patrón. Un método similar —crear un simulacro de vacío legislativo para saltarse las prerrogativas del presidente— fue el elegido por el ministro de Justicia para sanear la fiscalía. Queda por ver si esto se aplicará también al poder judicial. Va a ser aún más difícil debido al desacuerdo entre las filas de los propios abogados liberales. La Fundación de Derechos Humanos de Helsinki y la Asociación de Jueces Polacos Iustitia propusieron dos visiones muy diferentes sobre cómo restaurar la independencia del poder judicial. Sea cual sea la versión que elija el Gobierno, una parte de la sociedad civil liberal se llevará una decepción.

La apuesta de Münchhausen

En todos estos esfuerzos hay una paradoja: para restaurar un orden liberal, el Gobierno necesita pasar por alto las prerrogativas constitucionales del presidente e ignorar un creciente número de sentencias del Tribunal Constitucional. Esto se presenta como justificado, porque el Gobierno considera que el Tribunal Constitucional existente es inconstitucional, por lo que no puede emitir ninguna sentencia vinculante. Y hay buenas razones para ello: en primer lugar, algunos miembros del tribunal no deberían formar parte de él, y la presidenta del tribunal se aferra a su cargo a pesar de que su mandato legal ha expirado hace tiempo. Pero esto tiene un coste. Para restablecer el Estado de Derecho, el Gobierno tiene que declarar un vacío constitucional e introducir de hecho un estado de excepción legal limitado. Todo esto se parece cada vez más al aprieto del famoso barón Münchhausen, que afirmó haber salido de un pantano tirándose de los pelos.

No es malo salir de un pantano, a menos que lo que se haga sea justo lo contrario. Hay que ignorar la Constitución, porque había sido ignorada, así que hay que ignorarla una vez más, sólo esta vez, para volver al buen camino. Pero, ¿se puede ignorar la Constitución “sólo esta vez” y esperar construir un marco sostenible que posteriormente sea respetado por todas las partes? El supuesto necesario es que la oposición acabe aceptando las reglas del juego o que se le impida para siempre volver al poder. De lo contrario, la actual apariencia de vacío constitucional podría, en lugar de una excepción, convertirse en un punto de referencia.

La Tercera Vía bloquea los avances en los derechos de las mujeres. Quiere volver al statu quo anterior

Circulan muchos argumentos para explicar por qué la Ley y la Justicia no volverán jamás. Teniendo en cuenta las tendencias políticas y los movimientos tectónicos en Europa y fuera de ella, la mayoría de estos argumentos son claramente delirantes. En particular, el modelo de la transición poscomunista de los años noventa es engañoso. Dos aspectos de la situación eran diferentes: la democracia era la tendencia global, por lo que el contexto internacional estabilizó la transición y, lo que es más importante, la propia transición se negoció entre los líderes de ambos lados de la división, que posteriormente aceptaron las nuevas reglas. Hoy, la tendencia mundial es hacia el iliberalismo, no alejarse de él. Y el nuevo Gobierno parece incapaz y poco dispuesto a convencer a los líderes de la oposición y a sus votantes de que un orden constitucional liberal es mejor para ellos.

Para ello, el Gobierno tendría que ofrecer una dirección para el país y contrarrestar la visión de comunidad construida por la Ley y la Justicia con otra más atractiva. Y esto va a ser una lucha cuesta arriba.

Una coalición de minorías de bloqueo

El Gobierno ganó las elecciones gracias a una división bien diseñada de los mensajes dirigidos a diferentes partes del electorado. Pero precisamente lo que hizo posible ganar hace también más difícil gobernar. La agenda del Ejecutivo puede entenderse como una reacción al legado del Gobierno anterior: ya sea una inversión o una continuación del mismo. Y, aparte de la corta lista de temas en los que existe consenso dentro de la actual coalición, el curso de acción depende de quién pueda bloquear a quién.

La continuidad es más visible en las áreas de política exterior asociadas a cuestiones de seguridad. Apoyo militar y diplomático a Ucrania, conflicto persistente con Ucrania en relación con las exportaciones agrícolas, contratos de defensa con Corea del Sur… en estos ámbitos existe un amplio consenso entre las partes. También continúan las políticas represivas contra los refugiados en la frontera con Bielorrusia, y el viceministro responsable de migración afirma que ahora son “empujones éticos”, mientras que las ONG humanitarias con conocimiento de primera mano de la situación discrepan.

Otra área de continuación es el gasto social. El Gobierno está dispuesto a continuar los programas sociales generales de sus predecesores, e incluso a subir la apuesta, con aumentos salariales a profesores y policías y exenciones fiscales prometidas (aunque aún no aplicadas) a especialistas en informática, al sector de la belleza y a empresarios. Aunque algunos de los socios de la coalición no estén contentos con ello, en general se entiende que el gasto social es una buena inversión para que la Ley y la Justicia no vuelvan al poder.

En otros ámbitos políticos, el curso de acción viene determinado por el bloqueo de las minorías internas. La izquierda está bloqueando el retroceso de algunos derechos laborales. En 2018, Ley y Justicia hizo realidad una vieja reivindicación de algunos sindicatos e introdujo una reforma que limitaba seriamente el comercio los domingos. La reforma fue recibida con entusiasmo por los empleados del sector y la población en general se ha habituado a ella, con la pluralidad de ciudadanos apoyando ahora el statu quo. Aunque tanto la Plataforma Cívica como la Tercera Vía prometieron volver a permitir que los centros comerciales abrieran los domingos, esto no podrá hacerse sin el apoyo de la izquierda y del actual ministro de Familia, Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales, que parece conformarse con las restricciones actuales.

Es probable que la Plataforma Cívica bloquee algunos de los megaproyectos iniciados por el Gobierno anterior. Ley y Justicia inició el proceso de construcción de una central nuclear y de un Polo Central de Comunicaciones que constaría de un enorme aeropuerto y de varias líneas ferroviarias de alta velocidad que lo conectarían con el resto del país. Ahora, lo más probable es que se abandone el aeropuerto, aunque la izquierda intente defender el proyecto como símbolo de modernización e inversión pública.

La Tercera Vía bloquea los avances en los derechos de las mujeres. Quiere volver al statu quo anterior, es decir, deshacer los cambios introducidos con la prohibición del aborto por malformación del feto por parte del Tribunal Constitucional, quedando pendiente de referéndum cualquier cambio más profundo. Tanto la Plataforma Cívica como la Izquierda se muestran escépticas a la hora de someter a referéndum los derechos de las mujeres y ambas prometieron el acceso al aborto legal a petición de la mujer dentro de las 12 primeras semanas de embarazo. Sin embargo, sin los diputados de la Tercera Vía no habrá mayoría para aprobar una ley.

En octubre, los ciudadanos polacos echaron del poder al partido nacional conservador Ley y Justicia, abriendo el camino a un cambio político. El factor más importante fue la movilización sin precedentes de los votantes jóvenes y las mujeres. Fue la primera vez en la historia reciente en que la participación femenina fue superior a la masculina. ¿Les merecerá la pena votar la próxima vez? El mayor reto para el Gobierno es no dejarse defraudar. Para ello, tendrá que ganar no sólo la batalla con los populistas, sino, lo que es más importante, la batalla consigo mismo.

Last year’s United Nations climate conference in the United Arab Emirates ended on a surprising high note as the world’s countries endorsed a landmark agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. After weeks of tense negotiation, the conference produced a slew of unprecedented commitments to ramp up the deployment of renewables, adapt to climate disasters, and move away from the use of coal, oil, and gas.

The question at this year’s COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, is just how much that massive effort will cost. After years of global debate over the scale of funding that developed countries owe less fortunate nations for decarbonization and disaster aid, negotiators have until the end of the conference in December to agree on a hard-fought financial target for climate assistance over the next few decades. This new target, referred to as the New Collective Quantified Goal by climate negotiators, is critical to upholding the 2015 Paris Agreement and addressing the harm of fossil fuel emissions from industrialized countries like the United States. Without funding, some of the poorest nations in Asia and Africa, which have contributed negligibly to the climate crisis, stand little chance of transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels and adapting to a warmer world. 

The last time the world set such a goal, it didn’t work out well. Back in 2009, wealthy countries agreed to send poorer countries $100 billion in climate finance every year by 2020. Though the figure was less than half of the annual global need, according to World Bank estimates, rich countries didn’t even come close to meeting their target until last year. Even then, some aid organizations like Oxfam contend that these countries have overstated or double-counted their aid by tens of billions of dollars. In the meantime, international estimates of total aid needs have ballooned into the trillions. As a result, the talks around climate finance are still marked by frustration and mistrust, and diplomats debating the goal over the past two years have made little progress toward consensus.

As dozens of negotiators head to Colombia later this month for the first in a series of pre-conference talks that will lay the groundwork for the new goal, developing countries are trying to use the failures of the $100 billion promise as leverage for a much bigger commitment. After years of advocacy from climate-vulnerable nations, the economic heavyweights of India and Saudi Arabia are making a formal demand for climate aid to reach $1 trillion per year, broaching a number that will send negotiations into uncharted territory. 

Increasing climate aid by more than tenfold could alter the life prospects of millions of people staring down imminent climate impacts in poor countries in Africa and Asia, but experts say the astronomical number will be a hard sell for many wealthy nations dealing with inflation and domestic turmoil. Plus, the commitment itself won’t mean much without strong safeguards to ensure the money reaches the vulnerable communities that most need it.

“It’s good that countries are using the t-word because that’s grappling with the scale of ambition that we need,” said Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “But the key question is the political one of how you break that up.”

The world has known for years that the $100 billion goal was fundamentally flawed: The target number was far too low to match the mounting toll of climate change in the developing world, which one recent estimate pegged at around $2.4 trillion per year. And more than two-thirds of the aid from wealthy countries has been through loans rather than grants, forcing poor states to take on higher debt loads to respond to climate disasters. Some countries also tried to count aid to seaside hotels and gelato stores as climate assistance, exaggerating their contributions.

The slow pace of United Nations diplomacy has forced developing countries to wait more than a decade for the opportunity to hash out a new number with their counterparts in the United States and the European Union. Now that that chance has arrived, many of these countries are seeking to raise the floor for climate finance by scaling up their demands to a level that once would have sounded ludicrous. 

In a letter to fellow negotiators in February, India argued that “developed countries need to provide at least USD 1 trillion per year, composed primarily of grants and concessional finance,” or very low-interest loans. Saudi Arabia, writing on behalf of a group of countries in the Middle East, said just a few days later that “we set a [target] of USD 1.1 trillion from developed to developing countries,” plus arrears for the failure of the last goal. There are just 19 countries in the world whose economies are larger than $1 trillion, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.

The fact that India and Saudi Arabia have endorsed this number is significant. India is the world’s most populous country and one of its largest emitters, and it has significant political clout in climate talks as the largest country that still needs aid to finance its energy transition. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and it has faced immense pressure to join the United States and the European Union in sending aid to poorer countries. They are the only two countries to name a number so far.

Setting such an ambitious goal comes with pros and cons, experts say. On the one hand, shooting for the moon with a very high target provides poor countries with some cushion against the possibility that rich countries may fail to meet their promises. On the other hand, if voters and political leaders in wealthy countries don’t back the goal, the strategy might backfire and poor countries may end up receiving very little aid. 

The United States Congress, for instance, has fought for months over whether to send around $60 billion in new aid to Ukraine, and it’s a safe bet that many lawmakers would balk at helping with a trillion-dollar global commitment. Mobilizing climate aid in a divided Congress has proven to be a challenging endeavor in previous years. Endorsing a new goal could even become a liability for President Biden and other climate-forward leaders as they stare down an election year. 

Developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and those within the European Union haven’t proposed a numerical target for the goal in their missives to fellow negotiators. Instead, they’ve urged a broader conversation about how to mobilize private money and how to ensure aid contributions are reaching the right communities, with Canada for instance advocating a “pragmatic approach to establishing a quantum [goal size].” The U.S. has shied away from discussion of the size, focusing in its letters on questions about which nations should contribute aid money and which nations should receive it.

“Although this [trillion] number better reflects the needs of developing countries, it will be a difficult outcome to achieve given the current constraints of developed countries — shifting geopolitics, energy security concerns, stagflation, and internal politics,” said Aman Srivatstava, a climate finance expert at the Centre for Policy Research, an India-based think tank.

But negotiators and climate advocates told Grist that the structure of the new goal matters just as much as the eventual size. The $100 billion goal was too low, but it was also too vague about what counts as “climate finance,” and many wealthy countries focused on doling out loans and private investment rather than no-strings-attached grants. These countries also tended to provide much more assistance for renewables and energy projects rather than the flood and drought aid that many countries have demanded. 

“We don’t need to talk only about the quantum in terms of the money, but also about the quality of the money,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, the founder of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, which helps developing countries in the region track and access climate aid money. 

Herd boys pull out an ox stuck in the muddy waters of a drying reservoir in southern Zimbabwe. The county has declared a national emergency due to a drought caused by climate change and El Niño. Zinyange Auntony / AFP via Getty Images

The most likely outcome is a structure that some negotiators liken to an onion with multiple concentric layers. The United States, the European Union, and other wealthy countries would contribute a chunk of public funding in the form of grants for unprofitable projects like sea walls and drinking water systems. The other layers could include additional grants from new contributors like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have ample wealth but have never donated much climate aid, or private loans from investors and banks. This approach would mimic the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a 2022 agreement to protect nature and endangered species that also featured a “layered” set of commitments.

But creating such a complex structure for climate aid ahead of COP29 will be a Herculean task. Despite new endorsements for a $1 trillion goal, rich and poor countries still have huge disagreements about who should contribute to the goal, how much money should come from grants and loans, and how rich countries should be held accountable for their share. Rich countries are advocating a broader group of contributors that would include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as more flexibility to include private money in their aid contributions. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia, which have huge economies but account for a low share of carbon emissions historically, are pushing for the U.S. and the E.U. to bear the greatest burden.

With COP29 just seven months away, negotiators still haven’t even put their ideas to paper, and drafts of the potential text likely won’t appear until the summer. From there the world’s climate leaders will sprint to settle as many details as possible before the conference clock in Baku runs out. Thwaites likened the process to the puzzle game Rush Hour, where a player has to move several cars around on a grid in order to clear space for one car to escape.

“Even when you think that it’s a done deal, things can fall apart, so it’s hard to make predictions,” said Eleonora Cogo, a climate finance expert at ECCO, an Italian think tank. (Cogo has negotiated on behalf of the European Union in previous climate finance talks.) 

Given how far apart the sides are right now, Cogo says that she doubts countries will be able to work out all the details by the end of COP29. The most likely outcome is a basic agreement on “some core elements” like an approximate size and a promise to work the rest out later. This could produce any number of commitments — a strong promise from rich countries to scale up their grants, a weakened framework like the $100 billion goal, or something in between.

“The asks on the table are so different, and the points of departure are so far away,” said Cogo. “It’s all open.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much do rich countries owe in climate aid? That’s the trillion-dollar question. on Apr 12, 2024.

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