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Don’t underestimate heat. While less visible than other extreme weather events like hurricanes or floods, heat consistently accounts for more U.S. fatalities than any other type of weather disaster. Around the world, extreme heat now kills one person every minute, according to a recent report, a rate that has risen 23 percent since the 1990s.

Heat deaths are also chronically undercounted, both in the U.S. and around the world. Outdoor workers are among the most vulnerable, along with older people, children, and those with chronic health conditions. But heat can affect anyone, and our own biases about what constitutes good weather (sunny summer days are glorious) often downplay its risks.

Grist has been reporting on the steadily increasing threat of extreme heat for years. So as we contend with continued record-breaking years of temperature highs, we’re rounding up some of that reporting to help you understand why it’s vital to take heat seriously, and how to stay safe. 

The rising threat of heat A sign posted in Phoenix, Arizona during the city’s 2023 heat wave. Mario Tama / Getty Images

To put it simply, hot places are getting hotter, and places that have traditionally not experienced extreme heat and are less prepared to weather it are increasingly subject to dangerous temperatures.

The risk of heat is increasing. Any given heat event can’t be solely attributed to climate change, but there is no doubt that heat waves are happening more often and reaching higher highs as a result of climate change. In fact, scientific consensus is now that climate change has played a role in making almost all heat waves more likely or more severe.

And yes, even in years that experience extreme cold weather, the average overall temperature is rising.

Other factors can amplify the warming effects of climate change, like the naturally occurring El Niño weather pattern. In an El Niño year, global heat is typically exacerbated by high ocean temperatures in the Pacific. The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño.

The term heat wave generally describes any period of unusually hot weather. But some of the most dangerous heat waves are caused by what’s known as a heat dome. In a heat dome, a high-pressure system traps hot air in one region, feeding off itself to increase heat and humidity the longer it stagnates in one place.

Humidity makes heat even more dangerous. Any type of heat can be dangerous when your body can’t pump out sweat fast enough to stay cool. But heat and humidity play together to affect your ability to cool off. Higher humidity makes it harder for sweat to evaporate, reducing your body’s ability to cool itself naturally.

That’s why you may hear not just about temperature, but about something called “wet bulb temperature,” a measure that includes both heat and humidity — essentially the temperature we experience after sweat cools us off.

When the wet bulb temperature crosses 95 degrees Fahrenheit, our bodies lose the ability to cool down entirely — a threshold that has already been breached more than a dozen times, mostly in Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula. But stress on the body can start much lower than that. Even healthy young adults can experience health effects at a wet bulb temperature as low as 86 degrees F.

Heat affects your whole body A poster on a Los Angeles street warns about heat-related illness in 2026. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Exposure to high heat has immediate health effects. Extreme heat forces the heart to pump two to four times as much blood per minute to cool the body. That can lead to dehydration, which makes blood thicker and harder to circulate, and worsen into heat exhaustion or heatstroke, or lead to heart failure. On particularly hot days, burns from scorching hot surfaces, including pavement, are an added risk.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. end up in the emergency department due to heat illness and related cardiovascular, respiratory, and kidney issues. 

What to watch for: The first symptom of severe dehydration is typically cramps, which might feel like normal workout cramps.

Signs of heat exhaustion include muscle aches or cramps; headache; excessive sweating and thirst; feeling lightheaded or dizzy; nausea or vomiting; and pale, cool, clammy skin, especially on the extremities.

To combat heat exhaustion, bring down a person’s body temperature by removing heavy clothes, drinking water, and moving to shade or AC. Laying them down with elevated legs and applying damp cloths or misting with water can also help actively cool the body.

Save this quick tip sheet from Grist’s Instagram. Adapted from Extreme Heat 101.​

Heatstroke occurs when the body loses its ability to cool itself and reaches dangerous internal temperatures. It can result in permanent brain injury or loss of life. Look out for symptoms like confusion, irritability, or unresponsiveness; severe fatigue; a fast pulse; nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea; lack of sweat (though sweating is possible too); and hot and dry skin.

Call 911 if you think someone is experiencing heat stroke, then dunk them in cold or iced water, or apply ice on areas near large blood vessels, like the groin, armpits, neck, and core.

Save this quick tip sheet from Grist’s Instagram. Adapted from Extreme Heat 101.​

Heat’s health effects also reach much deeper. Exposure to extreme heat affects us in all sorts of other ways that doctors and scientists are just beginning to understand. For example, heat has been shown to increase rates of violent crime, and has been linked to worsening mental health including suicide.

Long-term exposure to heat can result in chronic health issues, like cardiovascular disease. Outdoor workers in some of the hottest parts of the world are developing an unusual form of chronic kidney disease linked to extended dehydration and heat stress. 

Heat affects all of your body systems. These are a few key ones. Find even more here: How climate change gets under the skin​

Nighttime heat is a particular driver. Nighttime temperatures are increasing faster than daytime temperatures in much of the world, eliminating a crucial window for cooling down.

We also sleep worse when it’s hot, already losing 45 hours of sleep per year due to the heat.

Ways to prepare Improvised window coverings in a Paris apartment during the June 2026 heat wave. Sophia Berger / Hans Lucas via AFP / Getty Images

Your house makes a big difference. If a heat wave is headed your way, dehumidify your house to get the indoor humidity down. Seal off openings around windows and doors to prevent hot air from entering. Cover windows to prevent the sun from heating up the indoors — blackout shades, blinds, or even DIY solutions work.

In a low humidity environment, you can even DIY your own air conditioning.

Keep water, electrolytes, and ice on hand, at home and at work, and identify cool places to go, like a public library. This isn’t just useful to ease boredom — heat can place additional strain on the electricity grid as everyone runs their air conditioners, sometimes resulting in power outages.

In the long term: Retrofits like reflective roofs, window overhangs to block the sun, and better insulation can provide more relief.

And as you’re preparing, don’t forget to check on vulnerable neighbors and community members. 

Grist has even more advice for safety and preparedness. Go deeper on community readiness and workplace safety here: Extreme heat 101

And more tips on emergency preparedness, including for heat and power outages, can be found here: How to prepare for a disaster

Stay safe out there (or, better yet, inside where it’s cool).

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why heat is so deadly and how to stay safe on Jul 9, 2026.

Wamuyu Manyara is country director for Trócaire Malawi and Tarcizio Kalaundi is its climate resilience officer.

This week, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) faces a significant decision that will determine its ability to address the harms being done by climate change.

Discussions on the Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must get the scale and accessibility of the Fund right. Failure to do so would risk undermining its role to channel finance to countries ex­periencing loss and damage, and undermine obligations to climate justice and human rights.

This discussion could not come at a more pressing time. As loss and damage (L&D) continues to escalate globally, and as the world teeters perilously close to the Paris Agreement’s critical 1.5C warming limit, the FRLD also faces the very real danger of running out of funding in 2027.

As Nigeria rails at loss and damage “mirage”, fund boss assures money is coming

Experts calculate that in 2025, L&D finance needs for climate-vulnerable countries may have reached USD$937 billion. Last year’s major impacts included a series of extremely destructive cyclones that hit the Philippines, estimated to have caused over $5 billion in losses, while in Jamaica, the losses and damage caused by Hurricane Melissa were estimated at $12.2 billion.

The bill for just one of these disasters would exhaust the Fund’s existing resources many times over. While the costs and human rights violations rack up, almost four years after being agreed at COP27, the FRLD remains critically underfunded.

Pledges to the Fund ($822 million) are just a fraction of 1% of annual loss and damage needs, and only around half of those pledges ($448 million) have been paid into the Fund so far.

Meanwhile, those who have done nothing to cause the climate crisis are facing its worst – and intensifying – impacts and are being left to foot the bill for the damages already incurred, not to mention the severe non-economic costs to communities. It is therefore crucial that the FRLD’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy urgently brings in far more L&D finance.

Contributor conundrum

Many developed states will claim that additional countries should provide L&D finance. This, however, is a distraction – particularly considering the deep abyss between the contributions of developed states that are obligated to pay and their fair share as calculated according to their wealth and historical emissions. Furthermore, some states and regions that are currently not obligated to contribute are already doing so. 

Analysis reveals that, even in the highly inequitable scenario where all states including those who have contributed nothing to causing the climate crisis were to pay towards L&D finance, wealthy countries would still be responsible for the vast majority of L&D finance.

New loss and damage fund could run out of money next year

The Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must focus political discussions on the ability of rich and highly polluting states to raise public, grant-based L&D finance that is new and additional to existing climate finance obligations and overseas development assistance.

Developed states have the means to pay and the FRLD should introduce mandatory and progressive mechanisms to make the biggest polluters, including the ultra-rich and fossil fuel corporations, pay for their climate harms. 

African impacts

Increasingly unpredictable seasons and more frequent and extreme events are driving food insecurity, malnutrition, displacement and other human rights risks in climate-vulnerable countries, and communities facing these escalating and compounding impacts must be centred in FRLD policies.

In Ethiopia, 2023 saw 24 million people affected by five back-to-back failed rains leading to severe food and water shortages, including a 90% crop loss in drought-affected areas. Eleven million people required food assistance, and over 500,000 people were displaced. Meanwhile, the 2023–24 floods and the 2024 Gofa landslide disrupted or destroyed health facilities, displaced thousands, and led to outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and measles.

Comment: Let’s tax luxury air travel to fund climate adaptation and loss and damage

Today, Somalia is facing one of its most severe drought emergencies in recent history driven by climate extremes. Malnutrition rates continue to exceed projections and previous devastating records, with 1.9 million children in Somalia acutely malnourished.

In Malawi, child stunting had significantly reduced, but climate impacts are now affecting children’s growth and development. Tropical Cyclone Freddy in 2023 was one of the worst on record, causing over 1,200 deaths, displacing half a million people, and causing damages exceeding $500 million. Recovery needs for four major disasters between 2015 and 2023 are estimated at $1.7 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of Malawi’s 2026-2027 budget. 

Funding for communities

Access to community grants in the southern African country, however, has catalysed local responses to L&D that coordinate around immediate and long-term needs and restoring livelihoods.

Direct access to the FRLD for climate-vulnerable countries and communities, with community-centric planning, is essential to ensure that the Fund can respond to the needs of people experiencing the worst impacts of climate change, through prompt and flexible mechanisms that do not hinder recovery options.

Stepping up to fill the FRLD through an ambitious and needs-based Resource Mobilisation Strategy is the bare minimum that wealthy states can and must do. It is, after all, an obligation that flows from the international duties of cooperation and prevention of harm, and from the obligation to provide reparation when harm occurs. Failure to do so would further erode climate justice and human rights for communities on the frontline of loss and damage.

The post The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice appeared first on Climate Home News.

Between the view, the marshes, and the birds, Liat Meitzenheimer concedes the drive along California State Route 37 is scenic. Still, she avoids it for two reasons: congestion and flooding.

The highway, about half of which is two-lane, is often backed up with people commuting between affordable communities in Solano County to the east and jobs in pricier Sonoma and Marin counties to the west. It also is a regional link to Napa Valley and other destinations, much of it built on embankments, bridges, and causeways that span marshes precariously close to San Pablo Bay. That makes it prone to flooding, which has led to occasional closures. 

“I don’t go that route whenever we have the potential of flooding, because I know how crazy it can get,” said Meitzenheimer, a retiree who lives in Vallejo, not far from the highway’s eastern terminus at Interstate 80. 

These problems will worsen as the population grows and climate change brings more frequent and intense storms. Without adaptation measures, portions of the road are at risk of permanent inundation by 2050.

The state Department of Transportation and the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission are pursuing a $500 million project that would, over five years, remake portions of the 21-mile highway. It would replace one of five bridges with one 5 feet taller, raise two one-mile sections by up to 8 inches, add a carpool and bus lane in each direction, and restore a tidal marsh and other ecosystems. 

Not everyone thinks that goes far enough. Some want the highway moved several miles inland. Others favor a far more ambitious $10 billion project that would take at least 20 years. It would raise almost the entire roadway, add a lane for cyclists and pedestrians, and perhaps include railway tracks. To do anything less, advocates of this approach say, overlooks two pressing issues.

“Highway expansion does not solve congestion and will worsen climate change,” said Zack Deutsch-Gross, who leads TransForm CA, a sustainable transportation advocacy organization. “This project is pretty egregious,” because the highway, if left where it is, “in the long term will be underwater.”

The challenges facing SR-37 are not unique. California’s iconic Highway 1, has been repeatedly closed due to floods, fires, and rockslides. Coastal cities like Miami Beach and Atlantic City are scrambling to harden infrastructure against rising seas and frequent inundation. Hurricanes routinely leave island and low-lying communities isolated by deluged causeways. Addressing these problems requires tremendous investment — bolstering bridges alone could cost $170 billion by 2050. Failing to do so could bring grave consequences. Without further adaptation, annual damage from coastal flooding worldwide could account for 2.9 percent of global gross domestic product by 2100. That’s up from 0.3 percent just 11 years ago.

California is among the states most aggressively planning for a warmer world. How it proceeds with SR-37 will show just how serious it is about adapting roadways to climate change.

California Highway 37 regularly floods during severe rain, as it did during an atmospheric river that dumped enough rain in January 2023 to require closing the two westbound lanes. Alan Dep / Marin Independent Journal via Getty Images

Highway 37 began as Sears Point Tollway, which opened in 1928 to connect Marin and Solano counties north of San Francisco. California bought it 10 years later, and in the decades since has widened it as the road became an increasingly important commuter and freight route. The road is essentially a causeway and crosses an intricate system of wetlands, sloughs, rivers, and creeks at the northern end of San Pablo Bay. It also traverses a federally protected wildlife refuge, a state managed wildlife area, and an immense tidal marsh.

Transportation planners have considered widening, raising, or relocating portions of the road since the 1950s, but rarely proceeded due to the cost and environmental impact. That’s become less of a concern as repeated flooding and sea level rise — California could see an average increase of 10 inches by 2050 and 1.6 to 3.1 feet by 2100 — become more urgent problems.

Fraser Shilling, who leads the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis, started researching SR-37 in 2010, which is about when Caltrans started considering sea level rise. His work presented a variety of ways to bolster it against that inevitability. “The least resilient was what they’re currently building, which is the highway on a berm,” he said. “The most resilient was to move the highway inland.”

A raised highway would still rest precariously on mud, Shilling said. He favors the strategic retreat of moving it as much as 5 miles inland. “There’s always been a problem that it goes through the marshes,” Shilling said. “You would never ever get permission to build that today.”

Barring that, he said, the state and region face irreconcilable choices. Without sufficient hardening, the highway could wash away. But too much could make the shoreline erode more quickly. 

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission considered relocating the highway, but chose to focus on more feasible projects given the cost and time constraints, said agency spokesperson John Goodwin. “We would love to see the long-term projects completed sooner rather than later, but recognizing that [it] would take many billions of dollars, and probably 20 years, we’ve got needs that need to be satisfied,” he said.

The agency has secured $270 million to replace the Novato Creek Bridge in what Goodwin called the first part of the long-term project –– that would accommodate sea-level rise and storm surges on SR-37 until 2130. He said starting with quicker, relatively cheaper projects will also give the agency enough time to find the $10 billion needed for the long-term project.

The Sanibel Causeway is the only road connecting Sanibel Island with mainland Florida. The state reopened it in 15 days. Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images

In 2022, Hurricane Ian flooded the 3-mile Sanibel Causeway, which connects that Florida island to the mainland. While the state managed to reopen it in 15 days, the experience has become a cautionary tale for other islands. 

Jill Gambill, a researcher at Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology, began developing an adaptation plan for Tybee Island in 2012 –– the first of its kind by a local government in the state. An 11-mile causeway connects it to the mainland near Savannah. Flooding closed it four times in 2024, leaving residents stranded for as long as five hours.

A hurricane has not made landfall in Georgia since 1979, but hurricanes Irma and Matthew brought the highest water levels since measurement began in 1935. “If we were to get hit by, even a category two or a category three storm here, where it’s a direct hit, that would be catastrophic,” Gambill said. 

The state, which maintains Highway 80, repaved and raised it 8 inches in 2019. Elevating it more substantially could help reduce flooding but require widening the base, threatening important marsh habitat. It would also be expensive, and the state Department of Transportation, which did not respond to a request for comment, has yet to commit the funding. 

Jo E. Sias, a civil engineer and professor who studies pavement design at the University of New Hampshire, said rising seas also bring hidden problems. As groundwater tables rise, they intersect with pavement below the surface, weakening the road and leading to faster deterioration, she said. The increased moisture in the soil caused by precipitation and sea level can weaken the road and potentially halve its lifetime.

There is growing interest in nature-based solutions. When the Sanibel Island Causeway disappeared, for example, segments near small, self-contained “pocket beaches” remained largely intact when others washed away. “Pocket beaches, beach nourishment projects, dune systems,” Sias said, listing possible solutions. “Anything that you can do to minimize the energy of the water as it’s coming across the roads is going to reduce the propensity for washout.”

Tybee Island recently added three rain gardens to bolster roads around Highway 80 through funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the city. A future phase of the project would build living shorelines, which use bags of oyster shells, smooth cordgrass, and other vegetation to absorb energy from waves.

Jason Evans, the executive director at Stetson University’s Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience, sees an opportunity to strengthen both habitats and highways. Oyster reefs, for instance, benefit the ecosystem and grow vertically as seas rise, unlike seawalls. 

Evans said flooding in low-lying southeastern communities is increasing as seas rise. That makes it essential to consider where roads lead and how they are used when developing mitigation plans. It makes little sense to raise a road by six feet if what’s at the other end hasn’t been prepared as well. “You might have an elevated road going out to a flooded island,” he said. 

There are also questions of equity. Residents of coastal communities tend to be wealthier than those living inland. Using tax revenue to elevate a causeway or bridge “so the millionaires and billionaires can get to their beach house” denies funding to projects that could serve a wider swath of the community, Evans said.

Ethan Elkind, who leads the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said the Golden State’s approach to transportation conflicts with its climate goals, though he concedes fixing SR-37 is complicated. Many of those who use it commute to rural jobs in wine country or in low-density suburbs. Greater job density would allow public transit to drop workers at fewer, more central locations, “as opposed to needing small-scale transit to help workers reach dispersed locations,” Elkind said. 

Dense, affordable housing in Marin and Sonoma counties would help too by reducing the number of commuters. “Instead, those communities, for decades now, have really put up the gates to any new development,” Elkind said. He added that there’s still time to greenlight more housing development, shore up the roadway, and build a high-capacity bus lane.

As for plans to expand the highway, Hana Cregar, associate director of climate equity at the Greenlining Institute, said people are starting to see the downsides of adding lanes. A Transportation for America survey found that only 10 percent of respondents consider that the best solution to reducing traffic. It may help explain how the project is being pitched.

“The way that this highway expansion project is aiming to rebrand under a climate resilience lens is unique,” Cregar said, “because I think it’s aiming to hide the flaws in this project by painting it as solving a very real issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to build a highway in the age of climate change on Jul 9, 2026.

For decades, Jon Zehr was haunted by an organism he knew was there — but couldn’t see.

It all started in the ‘90s on a research boat in the middle of the ocean. Zehr was an oceanographer studying nitrogen-fixing bacteria — simple, microbial life forms that could pull the element straight from the air, making it bioavailable to plants and animals. Scientists at the time had only seriously studied one species of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the entire ocean, but Zehr wanted to change that. His plan was to gather and test samples of seawater with the hope that he might find something that other scientists had missed.

Left: Jon Zehr (bottom center) sits aboard a research vessel. Right: Zehr studies nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the lab. Courtesy of Jon Zehr.

Zehr’s plans involved something pretty cutting-edge for the time: DNA. He gathered seawater samples and ran tests for the presence of the gene for nitrogenase, the enzyme that gives bacteria the ability to pull nitrogen out of the air. If he got a hit, it would hopefully mean the seawater contained some new kind of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

And it worked. Almost immediately, he found traces of a species of nitrogen-fixing bacteria previously unknown to science. Looking at the genes themselves, he could get a pretty good idea of what this new bacteria should look like. It was likely a unicellular cyanobacteria, around 3 micrometers in size, that should fluoresce orange under the microscope. Full of anticipation, he popped the seawater samples under the microscope, expecting to see that bacteria everywhere.

Instead, he found nothing. There weren’t any organisms in the sample that matched the right description.

Surprised, Zehr repeated the process over and over. He tested samples of seawater from the tropical waters of Hawaii and the southern Caribbean, all the way to the cold waters in the Arctic. Again and again, the genetic signature surfaced but not the visible bacteria. It was as if he had discovered a footprint without an animal.

But he didn’t want to stop looking. He knew that any new discovery could represent a vital link in the Earth’s fragile nitrogen cycle. “This one I kept chasing, because it’s globally important,” Zehr said. 

To understand Jon’s obsession, it helps to start with a peculiar biological constraint — a cruel joke, as one scientist put it — at the heart of all life on Earth. It goes like this: All living organisms need the element nitrogen to survive. It’s a key part of proteins, DNA, and RNA. But while our atmosphere is absolutely packed with nitrogen, the one enzyme that can pull nitrogen from the air so that living organisms can actually use it basically falls apart in the presence of oxygen. So even though plants, animals, and fungi are constantly surrounded by nitrogen in the air, they can’t get a hold of it on their own. 

The only organisms that can actually pull this off are ones that can survive without oxygen: super simple bacteria and archaea. That means the entire natural world relies on a relatively small number of microscopic species to make nitrogen usable by more complex forms of life.

Animals, plants, and fungi rely on simple microbes like bacteria and archaea for nitrogen. Jesse Nichols / Grist

This biological bottleneck has had major impacts on human civilization. Nitrogen is a major component of fertilizer, since plants need it to grow. Enriching soil with nitrogen drastically increases crop yields — important for feeding a growing population. Centuries ago, fertilizer was in such short supply that countries fought wars over islands covered in nitrogen-rich bird guano. In the early 20th century, German scientists created an industrial method to create synthetic, or lab-made, fertilizer. While this invention saved billions of lives from starvation, it also wreaked havoc on the environment. Producing synthetic fertilizer uses a massive amount of energy, and the overuse of fertilizer has polluted the water enough to lead to massive “dead zones” in the ocean. 

These dueling problems — the consequences of too much and too little nitrogen — have led scientists to muse about innovations like self-fertilizing plants. But despite these dreams, researchers hadn’t been able to develop a form of complex life capable of fixing its own nitrogen. It seemed to be an ironclad rule of biology that no organism from the complex side of the tree of life could pull nitrogen out of the air.

Which made it all the more puzzling that Jon Zehr’s particular type of nitrogen-fixing bacteria didn’t seem to be playing by the usual rules. His research team had plenty of the organism’s DNA, but no actual organism. Not only that, but the more they studied it, the less the bacteria’s DNA seemed to make sense. They could tell from its genetic markers that it was photosynthetic bacteria, but it didn’t actually seem to have the genes to photosynthesize. In fact, it seemed to have lost about 80 percent of its entire genome, including several genes it should technically need to survive. The organism seemed less like a complete bacterium than a collection of absences. How was it even alive?

After years of studying this puzzle, Zehr started to notice a pattern: Every sample of seawater that contained the mystery bacteria DNA also contained DNA for one specific type of algae. What if the reason that he had never seen the bacteria under the microscope was because it was hiding in plain sight, inside another organism? That might also explain how the bacteria could survive, even with all those missing genes. 

Zehr began to suspect the algae was the missing piece he had been chasing for decades. What he didn’t know was that someone else had spent years trying to solve the other half of the same puzzle from the other side of the world.

Despite being told her research would be of no use to others, Japanese scientist Kyoko Hagino spent decades of her career studying a type of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii.
Naotomo Umewaka / Grist

Kyoko Hagino is an algae scientist from Kochi, Japan. Just like Jon Zehr, her story also started in the late ‘90s, with a microorganism that changed the course of her career. She was part of a paleontology research team, studying tiny algae fossils on the ocean floor, to piece together information about Earth’s past climate.

Among the countless microscopic fossils she examined, there was one that absolutely captivated her. It was a type of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii. Hagino fondly just calls it Bigelowii.

At certain points in Bigelowii’s life, it surrounds itself with this beautiful geometric shell, and Hagino would find these pentagonal skeletons throughout her samples. “When I first spotted Bigelowii, I thought it was in such a beautiful shape,” she said. “It has a very beautiful shape like a jewel.”

But no one really knew anything about the algae living inside. This was what Hagino wanted to study. But no one else seemed to share her fascination.

Braarudosphaera bigelowii in its jewel-like calcified (left) and non-calcified (right) forms.
Courtesy of Kyoko Hagino

“When I first started the research, my boss at the time objected to it,” she said. “[I was told] even if you do such research that nobody reads, it won’t land you a job.”

At the time, Hagino was having trouble finding a position at a university. At the same time, she was taking care of her young kids. And she was moving to a new city where her husband had found work. Everything in her life seemed to be sending the clear message that she should just drop it and find something else to study. But Hagino just couldn’t do that. For whatever reason, there was something about this algae that just absolutely fascinated her, and she wanted to learn everything about it. Even if that meant studying it on her own.

So Hagino and her daughter started taking trips to the beach, collecting samples of seawater in the hopes of finding this elusive algae. Over the years, they ended up taking hundreds of these trips. They did this so often that her daughter genuinely didn’t know that people went to the beach for other reasons, like to go swimming.

“‘The ocean — isn’t that the place to collect seawater?’” Hagino recounted her daughter saying.
  

Kyoko Hagino and her daughter collect samples of seawater. Courtesy of Kyoko Hagino

Hagino would then spend hours at home with the microscope, searching for Bigelowii cells and individually picking them out when she’d find them. This was incredibly time-consuming, but it was kind of the only way to study them. No matter what she did, the cells didn’t seem to want to grow in a test tube. 

For years, Hagino worked on growing a culture without any kind of university salary. To make ends meet, she ended up picking up a part-time job washing test tubes in a lab. One day, she was talking to one of the scientists there, and he suggested adding an unusual ingredient to her culture. It wasn’t a chemical or anything else you’d normally find in the lab. It was tokoroten, a type of traditional Japanese jelly noodle made from seaweed.

To Hagino’s amazement, the noodles were just what Bigelowii needed.

“I saw Bigelowii swimming and increasing in number,” she said. “I was extremely happy.”

Left: Kyoko Hagino holds a bowl of tokoroten, the secret ingredient she used in her Bigelowii culture. Naotomo Umewaka / Grist. Right: A microscope image of Hagino’s culture. Courtesy of Zehr Lab.

Now that she had a culture, she could finally grow enough cells to answer some of the big questions about this organism. And there was one big question at the top of Hagino’s mind. Over the course of her many years studying Bigelowii, she noticed something odd. It had all the normal components of an algae cell. But then it also had something she couldn’t explain — something she had never seen in any textbook. It was a black dot in the center of the algae.

A transmission electron microscope image of a Bigelowii revealed a strange object. Courtesy of Kyoko Hagino

Hagino was preparing to publish a paper on this mysterious dot, when she stumbled upon an article that had just come out in the American journal Science. It described the search for a seemingly invisible nitrogen-fixing bacteria that the author theorized was likely living inside a species of algae. The author of the article was Jon Zehr, and he was talking about Braarudosphaera bigelowii.

Hagino thought about the strange object she had discovered inside Bigelowii. The pieces fit. She ran a genetic test on Bigelowii, and it came out positive: She had found the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that Zehr had spent so many years searching for. 

“I never imagined that someone was doing research on Bigelowii,” she said. “I was shocked to think that I had been surpassed.”

Zehr was also surprised when Hagino reached out to share her discovery with him — the same puzzle, worked on from an ocean away. “Neither one of us knew that the two things went together!” he said.

Hagino and Zehr had both spent their careers trying to solve a scientific puzzle, with no idea that they each held the other’s missing piece. Now that they had a culture, they had the chance to unravel a mystery that would end up going deeper than they’d ever imagined.

Together, they would reveal a level of cooperation that would rewrite a fundamental rule of biology.

Zehr and Hagino look out at the Pacific Ocean. Left: Naotomo Umewaka​ / Grist Right: Jesse Nichols / Grist

Nature is full of symbiotic relationships: two organisms, each helping the other out. The clownfish from Finding Nemo is a good example of this — it looks after its sea anemone partner, in exchange for a safe place to live. But these helpful relationships can get closer and closer. There are organisms that live inside other organisms, like corals, which get food from zooxanthellae algae living in them. And you even have cells that live inside other cells. At a certain point, the relationship becomes so close that we’re not sure where one organism starts and the other begins. 
  
Now, two organisms converging — going from being considered separate entities to part of the same being — is pretty mind-bending, and it’s a line that’s only been crossed a few times in the history of life on Earth. The two famous examples of this are mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell found in every complex life form on Earth, and chloroplasts, the parts of plant cells that use photosynthesis to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into food. Both of these examples started as independent cells that over time got so close to their partners that they became organelles: little organs inside other cells.
  
But what about Bigelowii and its internal bacteria? There was no doubt the relationship between the two was close. Zehr and Hagino were eager to find out just how the two worked together. So they teamed up. She sent a culture to John’s lab with hopes to visit California as the experiment went on.
  
When the culture arrived at Zehr’s office, he was so excited he took a photo to capture the moment. His team debated over which experiments they were going to run first.  

Jon Zehr smiles as he receives the first Bigelowii culture shipment from Hagino in 2020. Courtesy of Zehr Lab

“We sat around as a lab, and we decided the ten things we were going to do first, because we didn’t know how long the culture would stay alive,” he said.  “And within three days, Covid lockdown started.”

The pandemic threw a wrench in all of their plans. Japan put up very strict travel restrictions that ended up staying in place for years. After all her hard work, Hagino couldn’t join Zehr in person. But the two were still hungry for answers, and they decided that Zehr’s lab should proceed with the tests. Hagino, who had funding from a grant she shared with Zehr, would help as much as she could from afar.
  
And pretty quickly, they started to find clues that the algae and the bacteria’s relationship was not a standard case of symbiosis. Bigelowii and the bacteria always divided at the same time. They also grew at the same rate, and in ways that looked really similar to mitochondria or chloroplasts. 

But the most compelling piece of evidence came from Tyler Coale, a postdoc in Zehr’s lab. He was studying the proteins inside of the two organisms, when he noticed something strange: the bacteria were full of proteins that they didn’t have the genes to make. Instead, these proteins were being produced from extra genes found in Bigelowii. And on the very ends of each of these extra genes, there was the same short DNA sequence that kept showing up over and over.

Tyler Coale looks at Braarudosphaera bigelowii cells under a microscope at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Jesse Nichols / Grist

This pattern reminded Coale of an earlier mystery: The nitrogen-fixing bacteria that had somehow lost many of the genes for proteins it needed to survive. Could Bigelowii be supplying them instead? To find out, he ran an experiment, lining up the missing genes from one organism with the extra genes from the other. The match was striking. For nearly every gene that the bacteria had lost, Bigelowii had evolved an extra copy. And each of those extra genes were tagged with that same sequence of DNA on the end — molecular delivery instructions to send the protein over to the bacteria.

This discovery was huge because this kind of system had only been seen a small handful of times in mitochondria and in chloroplasts and now, in the tiny dot Zehr and Hagino had found inside of Bigelowii. The nitrogen-fixing bacteria were no longer bacteria anymore. It had become a part of Bigelowii, an independent microorganism-turned-organelle.

Zehr and his team decided to call it the Nitroplast.

And that also meant Bigelowii had broken the fundamental rule that only simple organisms like bacteria could pull nitrogen out of the air. The algae are the first known organisms on the complex side of the tree of life that can pull nitrogen out of the air. 

While it’s early days, Coale says the discovery could have big implications for industries like agriculture. “This organism has done what decades of biotech couldn’t do, right? It has engineered this capability into this cell. It’s natural to think that there might be lessons here that we could learn.” he said. 

Zehr, while cautiously optimistic, thinks that self-fertilizing plants are still a long way from becoming a reality. “The downer is it’s really difficult to go from what we know about the nitroplast to engineering a plant,” he said. “But if you don’t take one step, you’re not going to make 100 steps.”

Zehr and Hagino are excited to see where the research takes them next. But for them, it’s never really been about changing the world. They spent their careers studying their tiny pieces of the puzzle, not knowing what they’d find, but with the hope that whatever they discovered could teach them a little more about how the natural world works.

And on that front, there’s so much more to learn.

“This experience has shown that we don’t know which research will be useful and when,” Hagino said.

“Some of the biggest, biggest advances might come from things that you didn’t expect,” Zehr said. “And this might be a case like that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The tiny cell that broke a big rule of biology on Jul 9, 2026.

All you need is love Channel Comment brendan 9th July 2026 Teaser Media

Tucked among forested slopes and pristine valleys in a corner of northeastern India, young villagers have been busy knocking on doors – hoping to convince sceptical elders that graphite mining would bring much-needed jobs to their distant region.

“The youth in our village migrate to cities for work. What’s better than to have jobs near home?” Gollo Doni, a farmer and secretary of the local youth association, told Climate Home News as he and other members in their 20s discussed the latest meetings between locals and representatives of Oil India Limited (OIL), a state company exploring graphite and vanadium reserves in Arunachal Pradesh.

The mining plans in the state, which is home to more than one-third of India’s graphite reserves and the subject of a sovereignty dispute with China, reflect a push by the Indian government to position itself as a leading producer of battery-grade graphite as the mass rollout of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and power storage drives demand for the mineral.

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An average electric car contains about 60 kg of graphite anode materials, according to the International Energy Agency, and the graphite supply chain is heavily dominated by China, which produces about 80% of the world’s natural graphite and controls more than 90% of global refining.

As Western countries seek to reduce their dependency on China, India’s reserves of graphite and other minerals vital for the switch to clean energy have caught governments’ attention, with Germany signing a critical minerals partnership agreement in January.

Ambitious plans

But hurdles remain to India’s ambitious plans to ramp up critical minerals output, both to position itself as an alternative to China and to meet its own fast-growing needs.

India has a target for 30% of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, and demand for EV lithium batteries looks set to surge close to 35-fold between 2023 and 2035, according to S&P Global Mobility, driven by growth in two- and three-wheelers in the country of 1.4 billion people.

Although domestic manufacturing of EV batteries is expanding, the sector remains at an early stage and India depends heavily on imports from China, South Korea and Japan.

Gollo Doni (left) and other members of the All Pith-Seer Youth Welfare Association meet to discuss graphite exploration around Phop village in Arunachal Pradesh, India (Photo: Cheena Kapoor)

At the same time, it wants to get graphite processing off the ground, aiming to turn its reserves of the mineral – which rank among the world’s 10 biggest – into higher value battery-grade supplies.

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With exploration already underway, the next step should be starting discussions about developing processing facilities – including support from foreign partners, said Kaira Rakheja, South Asia energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

“These exploration and extraction projects have a long gestation period. So even if discussions on processing start now, it will still take a while,” she said, noting India’s simultaneous push to create “rare earth corridors” encompassing every step of production.

Hurdles ahead

India’s graphite reserves are mainly of a lower grade, however, making processing for use in battery anodes more complex, while the country is a late entrant.

“We are not a big player in the market and have missed the bus,” said Aditya Ramji, director of the Global South Clean Transportation Centre at the University of California, Davis.

While exploration work is already underway at several sites in Arunachal Pradesh, and at some places in eastern and southern India, production will take at least two years to start, said Tana Tage, director at the Centre for the Earth Sciences and Himalayan Studies, OIL’s local partner and holder of a 10% stake in the Phop project. 

Graphite powder, used for battery paste, is pictured in a Volkswagen pilot line for battery cell production in Salzgitter, Germany, May 18, 2022. German carmaker will launch its so called “Mission SalzGiga”, a plant for battery cell production, including battery recycling, on July 7, 2022. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer Graphite powder, used for battery paste, is pictured in a Volkswagen pilot line for battery cell production in Salzgitter, Germany, May 18, 2022. German carmaker will launch its so called “Mission SalzGiga”, a plant for battery cell production, including battery recycling, on July 7, 2022. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer

A mine would create about 300 jobs and the project’s partners are discussing options for processing the site’s medium- to high-grade graphite locally, Tage added, despite voicing concern about a lack of technological know-how. 

“India does not have the large-scale, advanced processing capabilities to achieve the ultra-high purity levels required for EV batteries and clean technologies,” he told Climate Home News.

Diversification drive

Despite such challenges, industry experts say India could benefit from the push to find sources of battery graphite other than China.

“We can’t beat China in this space, but we can still create a space for ourselves in buying and selling, as everyone is looking for a space to diversify,” said Rishabh Jain, fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment  and Water, a New Delhi-based think-tank.

India’s government hopes the bilateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with Germany could help.

A graphite deposits visible on a hillside near the village of Phop, Arunachal Pradesh, India (Photo: Cheena Kapoor)

As well as pledging cooperation on critical minerals exploration, the declaration envisions the exchange of know-how to add value through processing and recycling, facilitating investment and building the supply chain resilience of both countries. That could include identifying joint research projects and facilitating cooperation between industry players.

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“India and Germany will work together to mutually strengthen supply chains in the field of critical minerals,” a spokesperson for the German government’s energy strategy said. “We will encourage companies to build strong ties in terms of knowledge sharing, offtake agreements and investments.”

Germany is already supporting several domestic projects focused on converting graphite into battery anode material – valuable experience that could potentially be shared with India, said Rakheja. In return for shared technical expertise, India offers a strong pool of workforce talent and a big market.

“This way, both partners can look beyond China,” she said.

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The MoU, which is non-binding, is “a good start”, said Svenja Schöneich, a senior advisor at the NGO Germanwatch, adding that it was thin on details, including on how to add value to India’s critical mineral resources.

“The partnership document should figure out the problem of local value creation. It should also consider that it can’t really skip processing through China,” Schöneich said.

An official at India’s Mining Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Trade deals and tax breaks

Beyond the five-year German accord, India has implemented numerous policy measures aimed at securing its own supplies of critical minerals and adding value to its mineral exports, for example by signing favourable trade deals. Last year, India’s graphite was granted zero-duty access to the US, just as the tariffs on Chinese graphite imports climbed to a high 160%. 

When the government announced the national budget in February, it included a raft of financial measures aimed at kickstarting a plan to process minerals domestically – the details of which are expected to be announced in the coming months.

They included zero customs duty on critical mineral inputs and enhanced tax deductions for exploration, while the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme allocated the equivalent of $1.87 billion to build domestic battery cell manufacturing.

Before that can happen, progress on new mining – such as the Arunachal Pradesh graphite projects – is vital, Jain said.

“We are in 2026, and looking to move towards a cleaner world. This is the future,” he said.

The state government in Arunachal Pradesh agrees. It called last year for fast-tracked environmental permitting for graphite projects, new infrastructure around mine sites and reforms to avoid legal disputes that could hold the sector back. 

Gollo Kami, 60, a cardamom farmer and a traditional hunter has lived all his life in Phop village. He worries about the impact of mining on the local environment (Photo: Cheena Kapoor)

Back in the village of Phop, youth association secretary Doni said that while reluctant residents did not raise an objection to OIL’s preliminary exploration licence, he fears a bigger fight ahead.

Tage said up to 3,000 people could ultimately be displaced if the project proceeds, raising questions about whether economic benefits would outweigh the social and environmental costs.

“It has been difficult to make the elders agree to actual mining,” Doni said, as he and other young villagers sipped on sweet tea in a thatched mountain house. “We are trying to convince our elders that mining will not only bring resources for the nation, but bring us jobs here.”

This article was produced as part of the India-Germany Climate and Energy Journalism Programme organised by Clean Energy Wire, supported by Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

The post India looks to untapped graphite riches for slice of critical minerals boom appeared first on Climate Home News.

Europe has spent several weeks enduring blistering heat. The heatwave the continent experienced last month closed schools, disrupted power supplies, and has been linked to thousands of deaths. France, Germany, and Denmark all saw their highest temperature ever, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Now, new data shows that western Europe set another record: its hottest June ever. 

The readings, from the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program, showed that western Europe averaged 20.74 degrees Celsius, or a little over 69 degrees Fahrenheit, across the entire month — night and day. That squeaks past the previous mark set during June of 2025, and is more than 3 degrees Celsius above the average for the month. Ocean temperatures were also the hottest ever recorded. Globally, June was only .01 degrees Celsius off the all-time high.

“These records reflect a climate system continuing to accumulate heat,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. “The result is increasingly intense heatwaves, a persistently warm ocean, and growing risks for people, ecosystems, and infrastructure across Europe and beyond.”

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The late-June heatwave followed a similar spike in May, and preceded still more high temperatures in July. These extreme conditions would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago, the World Weather Attribution initiative noted last month. Climate change, it said, is driving a new, dangerous norm that’s wreaking havoc on European systems that weren’t built for these risks. 

“Many people still live, work, and study in places that are not designed for the temperatures we are now experiencing,” Carolina Pereira Marghidan, with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said in a statement. “We need greater investment in heat-resilient homes, cities, and infrastructure to keep people safe.” 

Recent extremes are reminiscent of Europe’s sweltering summer of 2003. Since then, World Weather Attribution scientists say climate change has made daytime heat of the kind Europe is experiencing 10 times more likely and overnight extremes 100 times more likely. Going into the morning of June 28, a weather station in East Saxony, Germany, recorded a minimum temperature of 29.4 degrees Celsius, or nearly 85 Fahrenheit. The country’s meteorological agency, Deutscher Wetterdienst, called the reading historic.

Experts say elevated overnight minimums are especially concerning for human health. “When we have these high nighttime temperatures, the body isn’t able to recover sufficiently,” said Kurt Shickman, who works on heat issues at the World Resources Institute. “They’re going into the next hot day with a couple strikes against you from a health perspective.” 

The heat is also further fueling wildfire risks in parts of Europe that are already dry. Fires in Spain and southern France have caused thousands to flee, thwarted Tour de France spectators, and killed at least one firefighter. Such conditions are expected to continue, as is the general trend toward a warmer planet. 

Extreme weather can sometimes prompt policymakers to take action. After the 2003 heatwaves, European governments developed early warning systems and other adaptation measures that research shows would have reduced deaths by as much as 75 percent. Shickman also points to apps like Extrema, which help people map the thermally safest route when they’re traveling. But he says there’s a lot more that could still be done — from increasing access to affordable air conditioning to installing more resilient infrastructure, such as reflective roofs and cooler walls — in the face of a warming future. 

Extreme heat is “something that we’re seeing more and more of,” said Shickman. But he’s also optimistic that events like this can also be a catalyst for change. “These types of iconic moments can be galvanizing for years and years to come.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Western Europe just set the record for its hottest June ever on Jul 8, 2026.

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As governments and institutions pledged billions for offshore wind, cleaner shipping and marine protection at last month’s Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, countries are increasingly turning to the ocean as a source of jobs and climate action.

But civil society groups warn that the push to expand the “blue economy” may reproduce familiar inequalities unless coastal communities have a greater say in how projects are designed, financed and governed. 

Neville van Rooy from The Green Connection in South Africa, which works with coastal communities who rely directly on the ocean for their livelihoods, said local people were frequently unaware of proposed developments until civil society groups alerted them. 

“Communities need to be taken seriously,” van Rooy told delegates at the Mombasa conference held on the shores of the Indian Ocean. 

“Just because they are often struggling does not mean they do not have a vision of development. Inclusivity needs to be at the centre and development pathways must build on communities’ own experience, including indigenous knowledge systems rooted in harmony with nature.” 

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Ocean investment flowing in

The value of the blue economy—the sustainable use and protection of marine resources—doubled from $1.3 trillion in 1995 to $2.6 trillion in 2020 and is projected to quadruple by 2050, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The scale of ambition in Mombasa was clear, with governments, institutions, companies and civil society groups announcing 320 commitments worth $6.4 billion.

The largest share went to sustainable blue economy projects, with 86 commitments worth $2.86 billion, followed by sustainable fisheries with $1.75 billion and ocean-climate action with $1.18 billion.  

The pledges included support for ocean startups in Africa, coastal ecosystem restoration across the Indian Ocean, marine research and policy, recycling discarded fishing nets, sustainable livelihoods in Timor-Leste and planning tools for offshore wind.  

Cynthia Barzuna, global deputy director of the Ocean Program at the World Resources Institute, said there are signs that blue finance and ocean planning are moving closer to coastal communities, particularly through the development of sustainable ocean plans.  

In 2020, a group of 14 countries – co-led by Australia and Chile – pledged to manage their oceans sustainably, by jointly drawing up plans with coastal communities to shape how marine resources are managed and where investments should go.

“Once communities are involved in the planning, bring in their knowledge, and participate in designing, developing and implementing a sustainable ocean plan, it puts us on the right path,” Barzuna told Climate Home News on the sidelines of the conference. 

Yet some of those countries – including Kenya, Australia and Mexico – have embarked on a new wave of offshore oil and gas projects, threatening key biodiversity hotspots, according to a recent report by a group of environmental NGOs.

When projects go wrong

Civil society groups say lessons need to be learnt from failed blue economy projects too. 

In Kenya, a proposed coal-fired power plant at Lamu Port – a fragile coastal ecosystem and a UNESCO World Heritage site – was challenged by residents and campaigners who cited little consultation and threats to fishing, tourism, culture and public health. 

In 2019, Kenya’s National Environment Tribunal revoked its environmental licence, citing inadequate public participation and flaws in the environmental assessment – a decision later upheld by the courts.  

“It is not enough to say that whatever you are doing is in the name of the communities, their livelihoods and whatever else you want to improve”, but that they should be directly involved in projects from the start, said Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan climate activist and Convenor of the Africa Movement of Movements. 

He said another lesson learnt was that environmental impact assessments must not only be completed, but “must be done rigorously” and that the process has to be transparent so that people feel involved and that their views are being counted. 

Blue transition

Blue carbon schemes can also attract finance, but campaigners said communities that have long protected mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes must be treated as rights-holders, not just beneficiaries. In some past projects, they said, communities were asked to provide labour, attend consultations or receive small payments, while outside developers retained control over carbon revenues and decisions over how ecosystems were managed.

Similarly, offshore wind and marine protected areas can bring climate and conservation gains, but if poorly planned, they can disrupt fishing grounds, marine species and small-scale fishers’ access to the sea, added campaigners. 

Farida Aliwa, executive director of Natural Justice, said the answer was not to halt ocean-based development, but to put in place stronger safeguards before projects are approved, financed and expanded. 

Aliwa said legal frameworks across Africa were evolving, with strategic litigation increasingly being used to hold governments accountable for environmental, climate and human rights impacts related to new projects.  

But she warned that communities and coastal defenders still face shrinking civic space, and said any shift to renewable energy must be designed responsibly. 

“As we work on alternatives, we need to ensure that renewable projects benefit communities,” she said. 

The post As blue economy gathers pace, communities must benefit from ocean boom, activists say appeared first on Climate Home News.

As countries gathered in Geneva this week for the first UN dialogue on the governance of artificial intelligence, campaigners said the debate around the fast-evolving technology has overlooked the potential harm it could cause to nature and biodiversity.

Not only has nature been absent from discussions on the environmental impacts of AI data centres, which focus mainly on carbon emissions and water use, there has also been no consideration of how AI deployment by industry could gobble up more natural resources, activists warned.

Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said that while AI can help protect wildlife and forests, the broader boost it will give to economic growth poses a far bigger threat than expected benefits.

“We’ve seen over $250 billion of private capital go into AI in 2024 alone – and almost all of that is seeking an economic return, and the money follows commercial value,” he told journalists. “Extraction, industrial farming, resource logistics, and the engines that drive ever more consumption are all activities that contribute to biodiversity loss.”

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The leading conservationist added that the policy documents produced by leading AI companies do not address the downstream effects of their technology for nature and biodiversity, focusing more on employment and other social issues.

Some have firms have put small sums towards projects that support conservation, he noted, but none are addressing the issue in a serious way or have included nature in the safety rules for their models.

“The living world that all of this rests upon – nature being the foundation of our economies, our societies, all life on earth – is not a primary concern in the governance of AI, as proposed by the corporates of AI,” O’Donnell said.

Positive uses steal the show

Last month, UN chief António Guterres launched an initiative to hold major AI firms accountable for their exploding environmental impacts, including carbon emissions, the amount of water and land used for data centres, and the energy they consume.

The UN boss also wants big players to commit to power all data centres with renewable energy by 2030. On Monday in Geneva, in a wide-ranging speech, he again raised his proposed “AI Environmental Transparency Initiative”. But nature has not featured in his comments on the issue.

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In addition, the preliminary report of the newly formed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI – which assesses the opportunities, risks and impacts of AI – mentions environmental concerns only briefly.

The report, which examines available scientific evidence and was presented to governments at the Geneva dialogue, does not highlight any threats to nature and biodiversity but cites a study showing how AI has been used to track and reduce conflict between humans and wildlife.

O’Donnell pointed to “some really important technological uses of AI for biodiversity” such as monitoring species, forest damage and tree cover and using camera traps to see what kind of wildlife migrates in a particular area. But, he added, these get a disproportionate amount of attention compared with the threat from more rapacious resource extraction which he perceives as far greater.

By making commercial operations cheaper, quicker and more efficient, and opening access to untapped areas of land and sea, AI could drive biodiversity loss through increased over-exploitation of fish, wildlife and timber, worsening pollution and spreading invasive species on faster trade networks, he added.

Indigenous concerns

Indigenous peoples are also worried that their lands, critical mineral reserves and knowledge will be appropriated by AI and the accelerated economic development it fuels, said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a leading global environmental activist and Indigenous leader from Chad.

Ibrahim, who produced a report on Indigenous peoples and AI for the UN in April, told journalists that before Indigenous peoples share their know-how on managing forests and stewarding nature, companies and governments must put in place principles to ensure this can happen in a fair way that prevents it being abused by bad actors.

Warning against ‘consumer club’ as G7 forms critical minerals alliance

Her report also points to positive ways that AI can support Indigenous culture and rights, such as tackling their lack of access to digital tools, preserving their languages and knowledge and mapping their territories to detect threats and better protect biodiversity.

Efforts such as those by the UN to shape the future of AI governance should look not only at what AI can do, but also ask who benefits and how it safeguards the planet, Ibrahim said.

“If we answer those questions together with Indigenous peoples as equal partners, we can build AI that serves humanity, protects biodiversity and help restore the balance between peoples and planet in an equitable and just way,” she added.

Policy processes lag AI development

Both O’Donnell and Ibrahim said they would lobby countries, the UN and AI firms themselves to put nature and biodiversity on the political agenda, including at the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia in October.

O’Donnell told Climate Home News that when the Global Biodiversity Framework, the world’s main treaty to protect nature, was agreed in 2022, AI was still nascent but has since exploded in terms of investment and its influence on economies.

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He pointed to the mismatch between the timeline of the UN’s efforts to develop governance guidelines and the speed with which AI is being developed in the real world.

“Nature can’t be sidelined in these discussions,” he said, calling for a faster and more comprehensive response from policymakers, business and the environmental community.

“We have a very short window to embed nature both into the governance constitutions of the companies themselves and into the formal regulatory [system] going forward,” he added.

The post AI governance debate silent on risks to nature, campaigners warn appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pervasive plastic contamination and unreliable methods have clouded the science on microplastics in the human body. In an interview, Australian scientist Cassandra Rauert, who built a plastics-free lab to study human exposure, explores the challenges for researchers.

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We’re not even one month into “super” El Niño, the natural Pacific weather pattern characterized by warmer than average sea surface temperatures, and fisheries around the world are already getting scrambled.

In Peru, government officials have effectively canceled the fishing season for anchovies, one of the country’s most important exports and a leading source of fish oil and animal feed globally. The Indian government is preparing for a season of smaller, less plentiful Indian mackerel. Meanwhile, in Southern California, recreational and commercial fishers have reported some of the most successful months of tuna fishing they’ve ever seen. 

The divergent situations show how El Niño can create winners and losers across the fishing industry, decimating some species while making others easier to catch. For fishers, the result is instability, with many forced to consider seasonal diversification. And consumers can expect fluctuations in the price of key fish products.

“People are worried,” said Juan Carlos Sueiro, an economist and fisheries director for the nonprofit Oceana Peru. As climate change is expected to drive more frequent, stronger El Niños, “our vulnerability is increasing.” 

El Niño is a weather phenomenon that happens every two to seven years in the tropical Pacific Ocean. It was named by Peruvian fishers who, hundreds of years ago, noticed periodic fluctuations in their catches, with huge declines occurring every few years around Christmas. They called it El Niño, after the baby Jesus.

The reason it has such disparate impacts on different fisheries has to do with the way it moves around ocean water. 

Under normal conditions, trade winds blowing west along the equator move warm water from South America toward Asia. This causes cold, nutrient-dense water to rise up from the depths, a process known as “upwelling” that encourages the growth of tiny algae near the ocean’s surface. During an El Niño, however, weakening trade winds slow or even stop this upwelling. Less algae at the surface means species that depend on it, like anchovies, are forced to search for grub in deeper waters. Not only does this make the fish harder to catch, it can also stress and shrink their populations.

At the same time, those ocean dynamics can boost other fisheries. El Niño often sees warm-water species like the skipjack tuna straying toward coastal waters of the Americas, where temperatures would normally be too frigid for them. Nearer to the shore, these species become easier to catch.

Both of these dynamics affect Peru, where El Niños of the past have both wiped out the country’s anchoveta fishery — the largest single-species fishery in the world — and increased the availability of shrimp, scallops, dolphinfish, and tuna. This spring and summer, coastal El Niño conditions have already strained the country’s anchovies, prompting the government to issue an indefinite ban on fishing for them during the April to July season so their populations don’t fall even further. Humberto Speziani, a Peruvian industrial fishing adviser and former director of the International Marine Ingredients Organization, said vessels equipped with sonar technology have been locating anchovies more than 100 meters below the sea surface. Even if commercial fishers were trying to catch those anchovies, they likely couldn’t — that’s twice the depth that’s reachable using normal purse seine fishing nets.

A fisherman carries a box of fish at Chorrillos beach in Lima, Peru, in April. Luis Robayo / Getty Images

Seafood prices are liable to change, too, due to El Niño’s milder impacts outside the Pacific Ocean. Wild salmon, for example, can get so skinny from a lack of food during El Niño that they’re dubbed “snakes”; their decline in North American coastal waters can lead to higher ex-vessel prices — what fishers receive at the dock — that are then passed down to retail and restaurant customers. And in local Peruvian markets, prices for jack mackerel and corvina have already reportedly doubled, prompting families to buy more chicken instead. Sueiro said the opposite may happen with species like shrimp, whose populations have boomed during past El Niños.

One demographic that is likely to benefit from El Niño is Southern California fishers, who call the weather phenomenon a “special treat” due to higher-than-normal catches of bluefin tuna, swordfish, blue marlin, and other species that usually stay closer to the equator. Even before El Niño was officially declared in June, SoCal’s recreational anglers and commercial fishers were celebrating “unprecedented” bluefin tuna yields; one fishing tracker suggests that nearly 300,000 more of the fish were caught off the California coast during the first half of the year, compared to the same period last year.

“We’ve got yellowfin, we’ve got bluefin, yellowtail, and dorado. What else can you ask for?” the manager of one San Diego-based sportsfishing company said on YouTube at the end of April. “It’s not even May, and fishing’s been red-hot.”

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Although artisanal fishers in South America often catch more of these species, too, they’re unlikely to fully offset economic losses wrought by El Niño. For one, high winds associated with the weather phenomenon can frustrate shipping vessels, making it harder to reel in additional species. And heavy rainfall can damage onshore infrastructure needed to process marine animals and take them to market.

El Niño-related shifts in fish migration can impact more than fishing economies. High ocean temperatures associated with the weather phenomenon can decimate coral reefs and the species that call them home. They can also cause kelp to deteriorate faster, reducing the amount of underwater oxygen available to maintain healthy ecosystems. And there’s been some research to suggest that shifting fish populations can escalate geopolitical conflict, as vessels stray into other countries’ economic zones.

Arnaud Bertrand, a senior scientist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, also worries about the Humboldt squid. These animals are an important income source for Peru’s artisanal fishers — they yield half a million tons of catch per year — and they tend to fare poorly during El Niños due to changes in prey availability. “If the Humboldt squid collapses, then you’ll have 10,000 boats that will try to find another resource,” Bertrand said. And because these artisanal fishers are less strictly regulated than commercial enterprises, all those boats looking for alternative species could have “huge, huge consequences for the ecosystem.”

Ultimately, the exact impacts will depend on how this El Niño forms and when its peak arrives. Exceptionally high temperatures in September could signal a more damaging El Niño, on par or similar to the disastrous one that struck in 1982. But even then, it’s hard to say exactly what will happen.

“Each El Niño is different,” Bertrand said, though climate change doesn’t make him optimistic. “With global warming, the worst is the most probable.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline El Niño is here, and it’s already scrambling fisheries throughout the Pacific on Jul 8, 2026.

When a 150-mph cyclone hit the Mariana Islands in mid-April, federal officials handed out more than 1,400 tents and 1,100 temporary roofs to help families with damaged or destroyed homes. Last week, local officials urged residents to take the tents down and find safer shelter as another super typhoon approached.

“Those tents are not rated to withstand anything stronger than a weak tropical storm,” Miguel Dandan, a public information officer for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, told NMI News Service. Days later, Super Typhoon Bavi hit the island of Rota with 180 mph winds; the neighboring islands of Guam and Saipan saw winds over 100 mph. “Our washer flew, our dryer, even our freezers flew. Everything, even the trees in the back broke down and fell on our cars,” Rota resident Peter James Meskin told the Marianas Press.

It’s the second massive typhoon to pummel the Marianas in less than three months, and the archipelago is only a week into its typical typhoon season. The islands are home to Indigenous Chamorro and Carolinian peoples who are accustomed to frequent storms, but scientists say climate change is making them more intense. It’s part of a broader pattern of Indigenous Pacific peoples bearing the brunt of climate impacts while contributing relatively little to the burning of fossil fuels that cause the atmosphere to warm. 

Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist who leads the science division at the nonprofit Climate Central, said abnormally hot ocean waters due to that warming atmosphere intensified both Bavi and Sinlaku, another super typhoon that struck Chuuk with 185 mph winds then weakened to 150 before hitting the Marianas on April 14. “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths,” she said. 

Federal emergency officials were still processing disaster aid applications for Sinlaku when Bavi hit on Monday, and many families were still without power. A June 26 update from the commonwealth government estimated 29 percent of utility customers — more than 4,000 — lacked electricity more than two months after the April storm. Zeno Camacho Deleon Guerrero Jr., an Indigenous Chamorro resident of northern Saipan, considered himself lucky that his outage lasted only a little over a month after Sinlaku. But now his family is out of water and power again. Deleon Guerrero had been in Japan on a work trip when Sinlaku hit and was shocked to see the islandwide destruction on Saipan when he returned. “We were all just jaw-dropped flying in from Guam, being able to just see the whole south to north landscape, and it was just brown, dry and toasted bare,” he said. “We got the house cleaned up to a standard where it was livable but to where things were actually clean it was impossible because there was just a lack of running water.” He saw his neighbors lining up as early as 3 a.m. to buy water. 

Bavi didn’t hit his village as hard as Sinlaku did, but he still spent the storm mopping up water coming in through the windows. “It was honestly really chilling and terrifying to hear the rattling of the windows and just wondering, is it going to cave in or burst in at any moment?” 

The island of Rota, also known as Luta, had a direct hit from the 180-mph storm. Courtesy of Marianas Press

Deleon Guerrero’s experience might be repeated yet again before the year ends. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated last month that U.S.-affiliated Pacific island nations and territories would experience more frequent tropical cyclones due to El Niño, a weather pattern that shifts warm waters in the Pacific Ocean east toward South America. Chuuk is expected to see four to six cyclones this year, with Saipan and Guam potentially experiencing as many as seven tropical storms and typhoons.

Dahl noted that while El Niño may be fostering the formation of those storms, climate change is making them more intense. “Our data shows that the temperatures that (Bavi) is encountering along its path are 10 to 40 times more likely to be as hot as they are because of climate change,” she said. 

The fact that storms are growing more intense has major implications for Pacific peoples’ homes, health, economies, and lives. There are no confirmed deaths from Bavi so far, but Sinlaku was the deadliest storm to strike the Micronesian region in more than two decades, with the death toll reaching 17 across the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Deleon Guerrero, who works as solidarity director at the nonprofit Right to Democracy that advocates on behalf of U.S. territories, said the commonwealth’s inability to meaningfully participate in the federal government — including its lack of a vote in Congress or for president — makes it hard for the community to have any say in critical moments like this, when the commonwealth relies so heavily on federal disaster response. 

The day after Bavi swept through the Marianas, Deleon Guerrero woke up to another landscape of destruction, with his neighbors’ temporary roofing installed post-Sinlaku now part of typhoon debris. 

“We understand that it was meant to be temporary but it just goes to show that in this region, especially with the climate changing the way that it is, these temporary fixes aren’t cutting it,” he said. “A lot of people are just back to square one when some people thought we were making some meaningful progress.”

Grist reporter Joseph Lee contributed to this story. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Another super typhoon just pummeled the Pacific on Jul 8, 2026.

Time to act for nature Channel Comment brendan 8th July 2026 Teaser Media

On a 200-acre farm and cattle ranch in Bandera, Texas, Mollie Engelhart grows organic produce, sells raw milk, and writes a daily column about the power of regenerative agriculture. She’s a farmer and a Make America Healthy Again mom who doesn’t like being called a MAHA mom. She prefers to think of herself as “MAHA-aligned.”  

In May, Engelhart opened her ranch to a couple hundred pro-MAHA politicians, activists, and leaders for a two-day MAHA farming retreat. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was there. Engelhart’s brother, Ryland, is one of the more well-known figureheads of the movement. 

Her biggest issue with the MAHA label is what she considers the “blue team or red team” politicization of it. Like many MAHA-aligned supporters, she voted for President Donald Trump in the last election largely because of RFK Jr.’s endorsement and their joint promise to clean up America’s chemical-laden food system. Back then, she had faith Trump would make good on that promise. But in the last year and half, that faith has frayed. 

“I think that one hundred percent the MAHA movement is very disappointed and disenchanted, and I am not the only one,” said Engelhart. “MAHA voters are homeless.” 

MAHA’s disenchantment with the Trump administration has much to do with its open support of Bayer, the manufacturer of the popular pesticide Roundup, which just won a Supreme Court case over the claim that the company failed to adequately warn users about the cancer risk of its weedkiller. First, the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up the case. Then, in February, the president signed an executive order that classified glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup key to national security and called for increased domestic production of the chemical. In March, it was reported that top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency met with Bayer’s CEO to discuss “litigation” issues. The following month, the administration sent a lawyer to argue on behalf of the chemical company in a Supreme Court hearing. 

Tens of thousands of plaintiffs had sued Bayer, alleging that the active ingredient in Roundup has caused cancer and other health issues and that the company failed to follow state laws when it did not include a warning about cancer risk on its label. But now, the court’s ruling means that states cannot mandate more information on the product’s label than required by federal law, and any such claims against Bayer will have limited pathways of legal recourse. 

Just hours after the decision was released, Trump signed an executive order framed as boosting regenerative agriculture and American farm resilience. (Broadly speaking, the term “regenerative agriculture” refers to farming methodologies that boost soil health and its potential for carbon capture, though there is no federal standard or definition like there is for “organic,” leaving it open to interpretation — and, in some cases, greenwashing.) The contradictions between the two actions have sparked a new barrage of criticisms from MAHA voters. “It does seem a little schizophrenic,” said Engelhart. “None of us can be a one-issue voter anymore…I don’t think that anybody is just going to blindly go and vote for one party or another,” she added. 

That sentiment is already showing up in the data, though the picture is far from clear-cut. Polling results from last October found that roughly 74 percent of MAHA-supporters identified as Republicans, with 59 percent also identifying as Make America Great Again supporters — the president’s most loyal base. Meanwhile, a POLITICO poll conducted this spring revealed that 47 percent of self-identified MAHA respondents who voted for Trump believe the administration has not done enough to “Make America Healthy Again.” And a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 28 percent of MAHA voters somewhat or strongly disapprove of the way the administration is handling food and vaccine policy, which may affect turnout in the midterm elections that could decide control of Congress. Limiting pesticide use, however, remains one of the movement’s defining causes, with 94 percent of MAHA adherents in favor of reducing exposure to harmful chemicals. 

“The People vs the Poison” protesters gather at the U.S. Supreme Court in April. Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

South Dakota farmer Jonathan Lundgren was at the White House on the day that the Supreme Court ruling was announced. Days earlier, he’d been invited to the Rose Garden for a dinner recognizing farmers and was asked to join Trump in the Oval Office for the signing of the regenerative agriculture executive order. Lundgren raises bees, sheep, and poultry, and grows flowers and apples on a 50-acre regenerative farm in Estelline, South Dakota. Like Engelhart, he shirks the political implication of identifying as MAHA, but considers himself aligned with the pro-regenerative agriculture and anti-pesticide faction of the movement.

“They needed some farmer faces to kind of give the whole thing a spin,” he said. Lundgren called the executive order “meaningful,” though it’s not lost on him that it doesn’t introduce new funding or regulations. 

Experts say it doesn’t do much at all. “It may sound great, but fundamentally, there’s nothing really new or substantive or meaningful in the EO that I can see that actually changes the equation for how the administration treats regenerative agriculture,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. 

Inside the Oval Office meeting, Lundgren watched on as Kennedy’s team swiftly mobilized to try to soften the MAHA backlash to the Supreme Court ruling with the president’s executive order, which culminated in an explosive argument between a Department of Health and Human Services official and a top farming lobbyist who was concerned that the order would imply that there are safety issues in the U.S. food supply. Lundgren himself stopped using Roundup about eight years ago when he noticed that agrochemicals were “causing more problems than they were solving” on his farm. But he can’t escape the downwind effects of nearby farms that spray it. Right now, he’s watching scores of bees slow down before outright dying, and his orchard’s leaves cup from herbicide drift. Then there’s the human toll. 

“We’re sick this time of year, and it’s a direct result of all of these pesticides being applied. My family is sick. That ain’t right,” Lundgren told Grist. His daughter is grappling with asthma and allergy flare-ups while his farm staff battles recurring headaches and fatigue. “It’s so intense that we call it in my community ‘The Spray Flu.’”

He says these dual actions by the administration, as well as the EPA’s recent approval of yet another batch of pesticides that contain PFAS, often called “forever chemicals,” have changed how he plans to vote in the midterms. 

“We’re in a weird state right now that has never really happened before, where food safety and the health of our children is weighing very heavily on American politics,” said Lundgren. “This is far broader than the farming community. I think that this is consumers; I think this is parents; I think this is society at-large.” 

Others argue that, despite the administration’s recent pro-regenerative ag messaging, Trump’s track record of anti-climate and pro-chemical policies has not helped the movement to clean up the food system, but hindered it. 

Kelly Ryerson, a leading MAHA mom and co-founder of the farming organization American Regeneration, agrees that, when taken together, the ruling and the order reveal a disconnect. “It’s inconsistent, to say the least,” said Ryerson. “If Trump is going to be doing things like the Supreme Court situation, it’s certainly not what anyone voted for…it’ll be really hard to come back from this now.”

For Ryerson, a registered independent who voted for Trump, the two actions have shifted how she plans to approach the midterms. “I don’t care if they’re a Republican or Democrat, I’m going to support the candidate that wants to decrease toxic exposures,” she said. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump tried to appease MAHA’s fury over Roundup. It backfired. on Jul 7, 2026.

Four Ugandan farmers filed a case with London’s High Court on Tuesday, aiming to stop the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from starting to operate by asking the court to apply Uganda’s laws against the project’s UK-registered company.

The controversial 1,443-kilometre (897-mile) pipeline, majority-owned by French energy company ​TotalEnergies, aims to carry crude from Ugandan fields for export through neighbouring Tanzania. About 80% has been built so far, according to its developers.

The pipeline’s first oil exports are expected as soon as October, according to its developers, and the campaign group Avaaz, which is backing the farmers’ crowdfunded lawsuit, called it “one final chance to stop one of the worst oil pipelines on the planet”.

The claim, filed by London law firm Leigh Day, argues that EACOP Ltd’s role in developing and operating the pipeline breaches Ugandan laws that protect citizens’ right to a clean and healthy environment.

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One of the claimants, Racheal Tugume, told a press conference she had been displaced from her land due to the pipeline’s construction, which she said had damaged local rivers, wildlife and ecosystems that communities depend on for their livelihoods just as erratic weather linked to climate change takes an increasing toll. 

“I am very happy that there are people in countries like the UK who are listening to us, who are behind us and who have come to support us,” Tugume said, adding that she hoped the case would bring justice to communities affected by the pipeline.

Ugandan law in UK court

While the pipeline is a joint venture led by TotalEnergies, with smaller stakes owned by Ugandan, Tanzanian and Chinese national oil firms, it is operated by EACOP Ltd, a company registered to an office in London’s Canary Wharf financial district.  

EACOP Ltd did not respond to a request for comment. 

The claim appears to be the first attempt to have Uganda’s climate and environmental protections enforced in a foreign court, partly reflecting concerns over whether cases challenging the multibillion-dollar pipeline would get a fair trial in Uganda.

Ugandans living near new oil pipeline let down by compensation programmes

Concerns about access to a fair hearing are among the issues the court will consider when deciding if it should take on the case, said Matthew Renshaw, partner at Leigh Day.

Renshaw said that precedents including the Nigerian oil pollution case against Shell have shown that claims against British-registered companies for harms overseas can be successfully fought in UK courts. 

“We are proud to represent the four brave principled individuals,” Renshaw said.

Constitutional protections

The pipeline project has already been subject to repeated lawsuits in several countries, none of which have succeeded. A climate lawsuit filed in Uganda more than a decade ago by a group of young people has yet to conclude. Another at the East African Court of Justice, brought by campaign groups against Uganda and Tanzania, was rejected on procedural grounds last November. 

A separate ongoing lawsuit in TotalEnergies’ home country of France – a refiled version of an earlier failed claim – cannot stop EACOP going ahead, but it does seek damages from TotalEnergies for affected communities.

With the newly launched case, Leigh Day’s legal adviser Marc Willers said the claim draws on specific Ugandan laws in a bid to stop EACOP’s operations. 

Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls

These include the Ugandan constitution, a 2019 environmental law and the National Climate Change Act 2021, which gives Ugandans the right to bring a case before a court in circumstances where anyone or any entity threatens the country’s ability to mitigate climate change.  

In response to the legal case in Britain, the African Energy Chamber – which represents and promotes the continent’s oil and gas industry – said Ugandans should decide the energy future of their country rather than the UK courts.

“This is colonialism 2.0,” said the chamber’s executive chairman NJ Ayuk. “For generations, Africa was told what resources it could exploit and how it should develop. Today, some of those same pressures are being repackaged through foreign-funded litigation and ideological campaigns that seek to dictate Africa’s energy choices from thousands of kilometres away.”

Stopping a “carbon bomb”

The pipeline, which will link Uganda’s Lake Albert oil fields to Africa’s east coast in Tanzania, has already displaced thousands of people and cuts through the Lake Victoria basin, one of East Africa’s major freshwater systems and a critical water source for around 40 million people. 

According to the BankTrack non-profit, when the pipeline is at peak production, it will carry 216,000 barrels of crude oil per day and release over 33 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year. Over its full lifetime of 25 years, it is estimated to release about 379 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain including construction, refining and product use.

A May 2026 report from Earth Insight also warns that the pipeline and related infrastructure could affect 158 wetlands in Uganda, 11 rivers, 44 protected areas and seven key biodiversity areas while disrupting about 2,000 square km of protected wildlife habitats. 

This is why the primary focus of the UK court case is to stop the operation of the pipeline in its tracks, Leigh Day’s Willers said, calling it a “carbon bomb” that would worsen the world’s climate crisis.

Long wait for first hearing 

While the purpose of the case is to stop the pipeline from launching operations, Renshaw said it could take about 12 months before the case gets a first hearing and about 18 months before it goes to trial. 

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The farmers are, however, seeking an injunction to stop EACOP Ltd from proceeding with operations. In the event that shipments begin, the lawsuit will still seek to stop the pipeline from then on, Renshaw said.

“We will be doing what we can to expedite matters but it is possible that EACOP will have started operating the pipeline before the claim is heard. If that is the case, the claim would intend to halt operations from that point. For example, the pipeline may operate for just one year rather than 30-plus, resulting in far less harm,” he said.

This story was updated after publication to include comment from the African Energy Chamber, an oil and gas lobby group.

The post Ugandan farmers launch UK court case against East African oil pipeline appeared first on Climate Home News.

A vast system of Atlantic currents that delivers warmth to northern Europe is at risk of collapse, according to a growing body of research. The latest study to warn of its demise finds there is at least a 10 percent chance that a collapse may already be “locked in.”

Read more on E360 →

When Rebecca Lindsey was fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last February, the first thing she did was stew. Then she worried about what was going to happen to the website she and her team had built over the last decade and a half. Lindsey had long been the lead writer and editor, and more recently the program manager, of Climate.gov, a site that distilled the agency’s research on climate change into easy-to-understand, free resources for the public. 

She was right to be concerned: Within a matter of months, the Trump administration had eliminated the rest of the staff supporting Climate.gov and shut down the website — ironically, to comply with an executive order calling for “restoring gold standard science.”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of it all being thrown away,” Lindsey said of the website, which had been used by teachers, community leaders, and policymakers. It had also given researchers in the government important insight into what everyday Americans needed to know about climate science and how to answer their questions effectively. Members of the former Climate.gov team met periodically to discuss what could be done to preserve the work. By the end of last summer, they’d decided to create an independent version of the site. It launched late last month with a new nongovernmental domain: Climate.us. 

The intent behind Climate.us isn’t just to save what was on the Climate.gov website when it died, but to continue to update it with new visuals, explainers, features, and Q&As, making climate science relevant to people with resources that are vetted by scientists. “We just try to constantly take the pulse of what scientists say is valuable and important and needs to be talked about and explained,” Lindsey said.

Since its launch two weeks ago, the new site has gotten about 800,000 page views — an impressive number, considering that the old NOAA site had been getting about a million views a month, according to Lindsey.

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After President Donald Trump took office a second time, some of the most easy-to-understand resources to help people understand the warming planet disappeared. The National Climate Assessments, congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into warnings for policymakers and the public, vanished last summer. In December, the Environmental Protection Agency removed at least 80 webpages about the causes, indicators, and effects of climate change. The EPA webpage explaining the causes of climate change no longer lists human activity as a direct driver of global warming. It now emphasizes — misleadingly — natural processes. 

Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, called it “an all-out assault on climate information.”

Thousands gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to defend science as a public good and central pillar of social progress in March 2025. Astrid Riecken / The Washington Post via Getty Images Beyond the federal government

As organizations race to fill the gap left by the United States’ attack on its own scientific knowledge, many experts see an opportunity to shield research and data from the shifting winds of politics. The world’s science has relied on massive support from the U.S. government, but experts see a future that disperses some of its responsibilities, including how data is collected, handled, preserved, and used.

“It can’t just be the federal government anymore,” said Janice Lachance, executive director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union, the largest Earth and space organization in the world. “That’s proven to us that that’s unreliable, that there’s too much control in very few hands. And so how do we distribute this to like-minded organizations, civil society, and [nongovernmental organizations] who care about it?

The American Geophysical Union is trying to fill the void where it can. It has launched a global initiative to ensure that environmental datasets are more resilient against threats such as political interference, pulling together a group of about 100 experts around the world. It’s also working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science, hosting an academic network that allows U.S. scientists to participate in key international reports even after the Trump administration withdrew from the group. Along with the American Meteorological Society, it has also released an invitation for climate manuscripts to maintain the research momentum of what would have been the sixth National Climate Assessment, with plans to eventually publish a special climate collection across different peer-reviewed journals.

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For many former federal researchers like Lindsey, trying to carry on their previous work at nonprofits and through independent initiatives has been challenging. 

Adam Smith, who led a project tracking billion-dollar weather and climate disasters at NOAA before the agency ended the program last year, has taken the work over to the nonprofit Climate Central. The project is now up and running with all the same data and methods, but it took almost a year to get it fully where it was back at NOAA. The research is important, Smith said, because it quantifies the economic effects of extreme weather, helping to communicate the real-world consequences of climate change to businesses, policymakers, and the public. He is working to develop the project further, documenting disasters that cost $100 million or more back to 1980. 

Creating an independent copy of the Climate.gov site wasn’t easy, either. Researchers who had no experience fundraising had to crowdsource money and court philanthropists to back their work, Lindsey said. Web developers had to update all the old links that directed people to the defunct original site. The Climate.us team wanted independent scientific review for their materials, as they had done at NOAA, but some scientists declined to put their names on a defunded federal project because of unwanted publicity or fear of retaliation. 

Lindsey managed to revive the site as one of just three full-time staff, compared to roughly eight people who were running the operation under NOAA full-time. 

“In a lot of ways, I feel I’m back in 2010 when we first started building Climate.gov,” she said. “There are days when I think, ‘What am I doing? Do I have it in me to start this all over again?’”

These efforts to save climate information are crucial, experts said, but it’s tough for a patchwork of nonprofits, universities, and independent initiatives to fill the vacuum left by the federal government removing the most accessible resources about climate change. “No nonprofit is going to have the reach of the federal government, and so I think that there’s a massive gap in terms of people learning about where they can find these resources,” said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental and public information researcher who co-founded the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Philanthropic funders can be fickle, too, raising questions about financial sustainability. “Truly, all of us are scrambling for funding and underfunded,” she said.

Nonprofits also don’t have the instant recognition that the government does, which can make it harder to earn public trust. When Smith started running the billion-dollar disaster project at Climate Central, for example, he found that some people didn’t know that anyone from NOAA was still involved. Now, the top of the website makes it clear that Climate Central is continuing NOAA’s dataset, with the same methods and the same lead scientist. 

A sign that reads “NOAA Saves Lives” is seen in a corridor of the University of Colorado at Boulder in May. Ulysse Bellier / AFP via Getty Images From rescue to reform

For information and data advocates, the current crisis is a wake-up call. “Guess what? We have really terrible and really insufficient data policies,” Gehrke said. As the Trump administration tests those vulnerabilities, it gives these stakeholders insight into what needs to change to protect government information from the political whims of future administrations. That could include writing specific requirements for agencies into law and building up Congress’ oversight capacity and enforcement mechanisms. 

When public-facing platforms like Climate.gov disappear, people tend to wonder, How can we bring this product back? without examining the structural failures that led it to be vulnerable in the first place. Sonia Wang, senior director at the Data Foundation’s Center for Climate and Environmental Data, uses the metaphor that people usually focus on the fountain — the shiny map or platform — rather than the plumbing behind it. This invisible infrastructure is much more fragile than people realize, Wang said, sometimes relying on one person who’s been maintaining a dataset for decades, or relationships the federal government has built over time. 

“This was always a problem, regardless of administration,” Wang said. “I think we’re just seeing more of the cracks be exposed now with the rapid decline in some of our federal partners being able to actually carry on their work without the staff.” 

As organizations work to shore up the plumbing of the data that helps us understand the world, there’s increasingly a sense that they can’t count on government support like they did in the past. “It happened in the United States last year, and it continues this year, but it could happen anywhere,” Lachance said. “And we just don’t think that critical scientific data should be vulnerable to the political winds of the day.” 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The plan to make climate science harder to erase on Jul 7, 2026.

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For decades, toxic lead cables lay like giant sea monsters snaking across the bottom of Lake Tahoe. Installed as early telecommunications lines and owned by AT&T, the abandoned cables contained over 100,000 pounds of lead and were slowly deteriorating, leaching contaminants into one of the most iconic lakes in the country.

In 2021, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, or CSPA, filed a lawsuit to force AT&T to remove the abandoned lead cables. The multimillion-dollar litigation dragged on for over two years. Without sampling and scientific testing, it was difficult to make the case in court. Then Roland Peralta, the founder of a new non-profit called WHEN Justice, offered to provide $100,000 for the science needed to support the litigation. The case quickly changed course. 

With the new funding, scuba divers went down to the lake floor to collect samples that helped show that the lead in the cables was leaching into the surrounding waters. The crucial piece of missing evidence was found with lead isotopic testing, providing “fingerprints” that showed the lead in the cables was the same as the surrounding contamination in the lake.

Once the lead contamination was linked to the cables, AT&T settled the case in nine weeks and removed the cables within months. “That was the ‘aha’ moment, where we realized we could scale this model,” said Peralta.

An innovative pay-it-forward model

WHEN Justice is built around a simple but deeply powerful idea: Strategic funding at the right moment in litigation can help public-interest cases win. The non-profit raises funds to help pay for the costly pieces of litigation at the intersection of environmental and human health — like scientific testing, expert analysis, and sampling — that smaller entities taking on massive corporations in court frequently cannot afford. Because environmental lawsuits often include cost recovery, WHEN’s donations can sometimes be used repeatedly, helping fund multiple cases from the same original donation. 

Building off the AT&T case success, WHEN was officially launched on Earth Day in April of 2026. “WHEN made a huge difference in the Lake Tahoe case,” said Erica Maharg, the environmental attorney who represented the sportfishing group against AT&T. “Those funds provided us with the evidence we needed at a critical time in the litigation.”

Colin West, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake, sees that role as especially important for groups without deep legal budgets. “Being a smaller organization that is trying to step up and take on big litigation against larger entities is challenging,” he said. “A group like WHEN Justice that has closing that funding gap as their core focus fills a need, and a role that others can’t.”

The litigation bottleneck

Adequate funding is critical in today’s environmental justice landscape. Currently, much of the environmental law enforcement that forces powerful entities to clean up pollution is being done by individuals and nonprofit organizations. “We think of government and regulators as being the primary enforcement mechanisms. But in reality, many environmental cleanups happen because of the efforts of small organizations,” said Maharg.

For those groups, the main obstacle is usually not the legal standard, but the cost of assembling the scientific evidence needed to support the case. “If you’re going up against big companies, litigation is so expensive,” said WHEN’s chief executive and legal officer, Jacqueline Biner. “The way the legal system is set up right now, it sadly is not always about the merits of the case. It’s often just about who has more money.”

WHEN’s model is designed to help remove that barrier. In another current campaign, the organization is fundraising to support scientific analysis and sampling in a lawsuit involving a long-closed hazardous waste disposal site located on the edge of the San Pablo Bay in California. The lawsuit alleges that toxic substances are now leaching from the landfill into the bay. Together, WHEN and the public are funding experts to conduct sampling and analyze the results, showing how the pollution is moving from the landfill toward the bay, grounding the case in science and data.

“There are so many cases out there, like landfills that are leaching contaminants, or factory farms leaking manure and nitrates into water bodies,” said Biner. She sees strategic, targeted litigation funding as a tool that could help fuel a sea change, showing large corporations that it’s more cost-efficient to clean up their own messes and address sources of harm, rather than fighting in court to try to evade responsibility.

A new way to demand accountability

A serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of wellness company Nutrafol, WHEN’s founder Roland Peralta initially envisioned giving back through traditional philanthropy. But he soon began to see an additional, larger opportunity: By directing strategic funding to organizations fighting expensive David-and-Goliath battles against large corporations, he could help create a healthier planet for future generations. “I kept asking myself, what kind of world will I leave for my son?” he said.

By helping cover litigation costs, WHEN can help smaller organizations pursue cases against much larger and better-resourced opponents. “The ability to access funding for litigation is really exciting, because it means that we can take on bigger cases,” said Maharg. “Having a partner like WHEN that can help with fundraising key costs in the litigation makes all the difference in our ability to take on these well-funded polluters.”

Over the next several years, WHEN Justice aims to build an infrastructure for a new kind of corporate accountability — helping identify harmful corporate conduct before it becomes irreversible. They plan to give people a direct way to participate in the fight for transparency and justice through crowd-funding. Peralta and Biner envision an interactive platform, where donors can direct their dollars toward the fights that matter most to them. These funds would support both large, precedent-setting cases, and smaller, community-driven campaigns that help local residents confront injustices in their own backyards. 

Winning is not the only goal, said Biner. “We also believe it is ok to pursue a case that may lose if it will create momentum and pressure. If we educate the courts, place new accountability on corporations, and educate consumers, that moves the needle in a different way.”

WHEN’s goal is also to get the public involved. “We think there is so much more power in a million people giving a dollar than in a single person giving a million dollars,” Biner noted. “We want people to become invested in these cases, to follow them, and to become more informed about the legal process.”

A call to action

That sense of agency is central to WHEN’s purpose. At its core, the model is designed to give people a concrete, accessible way to respond to injustices that might otherwise feel too large or too entrenched to take on.

For Peralta, that means creating a clear path that allows ordinary people to turn outrage into action. “Everybody’s angry and appalled about these massive environmental issues, but as an individual, it’s hard to know how to help,” he said. “WHEN Justice is designed to be the call to action button that everyone has been longing for, to help individuals play a role in shutting this madness down by voting with their dollar.”

WHEN Justice is a charitable crowdfunding platform for legal and regulatory action at the intersection of environmental and human health. From pollution and toxic exposure to climate-related harms, we select and fund high-impact efforts that seek accountability from powerful actors whose actions put people, communities, and ecosystems at risk. Every campaign is open to the public, creating a direct way for concerned citizens to participate in outcomes that affect their families, communities, and future.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Funding the fight against corporate polluters on Jul 6, 2026.