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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.

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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.

As EV sales boom and grids seek more energy storage, researchers are racing to develop batteries that are cheaper, more powerful, and less reliant on hard-to-source materials. Lithium-ion still dominates, but sodium-ion and solid-state technologies are moving from lab to market.

Read more on E360 →

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.

UN asks AI companies to reveal full environmental impacts

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.

The vote that stopped a data center: US communities query resource-hungry AI

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.

Two incidents that generated worldwide headlines in recent months have called attention to the often-overlooked plight of India’s captive elephants.

In the first, an elderly female elephant died three months after she was painted pink by a Russian photographer.

Then, this May, a young tusker attacked an older, tuskless male elephant at a camp run by the forest department, leading to the death of a tourist and the elder elephant.

Although media around the world carried news about these two sad events, they’re not exactly isolated occurrences. Over the past year alone, multiple distressed elephants used in temple festivities have gone on rampages and killed people, or have suffered immensely and died.

The deaths underscore a hidden reality: Despite India’s designation of the elephant as the national heritage animal, the country allows the animals to be privately owned, which has created opportunities for them to be trafficked and exploited.

“India has an ancient cultural relationship with elephants,” says Kartick Satyanarayan, CEO and co-founder of Wildlife SOS, an animal-welfare and conservation organization headquartered in New Delhi. “But in today’s day and age, captive elephants live in a highly compromised situation as their physical, social and psychological needs are not met. Many elephants succumb to serious health and welfare issues over time.”

 

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An estimated 3,000 elephants live in captivity across the country. Of these, about 70% are privately owned – either by individuals or institutions – with a majority spending their lives in horrific conditions. Owners use these elephants for providing rides to tourists, parades at religious festivals, begging, and other exploitative activities, despite the serious concerns raised by animal-welfare activists.

The rest are owned by the various forest departments in the country, where they’re mainly used for anti-poaching patrols or forest-management activities and are better cared for than privately owned elephants.

A subspecies of the Asian elephant, Indian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus) are classified as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). They’re native to 11 countries in south and southeast Asia, and India is home to nearly 75% of the subspecies’ population. The latest census in India (2021-2025) estimated the wild elephant population to be 22,446.

Elephants receive the highest level of protection under Indian law. Yet traffickers take advantage of longstanding legal loopholes and continue to poach calves from the wild, torture them into submission, and exploit them in captivity.

“The law, though strong in intent, has enough structural gaps to render its protections largely ineffective in practice,” says advocate Rishabh Karan Mehta, who practices at India’s Supreme Court.

“Every elephant removed from the wild is a loss to the gene pool and genetic diversity of the wild population,” says Satyanarayan.

According to Mehta, a 2020 response to a Right to Information petition revealed that roughly 1 in 4 privately owned captive elephants lacked proper supporting documentation.

“That’s how widespread the problem is,” he says.

Captive Elephants in Tourism

Elephant riding continues to be touted by some travel agents as a must-do experience in India. Over 100 elephants ferry eager tourists to Amer Fort in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, for example.

“Tourists who ride elephants are often misled,” says Satyanarayan. “Their cultural experience is built entirely on the suffering and abuse of the elephant and causes irreversible damage to its spine and back.”

Several of the elephants at Amer Fort are blind, crippled, and have scores of wounds and abscesses. “These injuries are masterfully concealed beneath colorful decorations, velvet fabrics and paint,” says Satyanarayan.

Snatched from their mothers at an early age, elephant calves undergo a brutal “breaking-of-the-spirit” process involving severe beatings and starvation. Once they’ve submitted to their captors, they spend decades of their lives in chains, abused and neglected until death saves them from their daily suffering.

Two Cases That Ignited Firestorms

In November 2025 a Russian photographer visiting Amer Fort asked for a captive elephant to be painted bright pink for a photoshoot. The owner of an elderly elephant named Chanchal agreed. When the images of the “pink elephant” were shared on social media, a global furor erupted about the ethics of using animals in such projects.

“It’s deeply troubling that people don’t hesitate to use elephants as props and abuse them in the process,” says Satyanarayan. “It shows how little consideration there is for the elephant’s welfare,” he adds.

Three months later, Chanchal — who was in her mid-60s — died. Though the post-mortem said that she died of age-related issues, a lifetime of captivity and neglect would have had an impact on her health and wellbeing, Satyanarayan says.

“Chanchal spent decades without ever knowing a day of true freedom, a victim exploited by people for greed and profit,” he says.

Another gruesome incident in the southern state of Karnataka reignited the conversation around elephant captivity. In May, during an elephant bathing activity in the Cauvery River at the forest department-run Dubare camp, a 26-year-old tusker named Kanjan attacked an older tuskless male, Marthanda.

“These situations can occur when captive bull elephants are in proximity to each other,” says Satyanarayan.

The older elephant lost his footing in the water and fell on a female tourist standing nearby, killing her instantly. Marthanda later succumbed to his injuries as well.

“When camps become tourism attractions, then the welfare and safety of visitors and elephants needs to be the highest priority,” says Satyanarayan. “Placing visitors in close proximity to elephants can create dangerous situations for both.”

Though the camp authorities responded swiftly by stopping all close contact activities, including elephant bathing, feeding, and selfies, the measures came too late for the tourist and the elephant who lost their lives in this entirely preventable tragedy.

Captive Elephants at Religious Festivals

The southern state of Kerala has a tradition of parading richly dressed captive elephants as part of festival processions. Some of these elephants are owned by Hindu temples, but most are leased from private owners for the festivities. While churches and mosques in Kerala are not known to own any elephants, some do rent them for festival parades. The approximately 300 privately owned elephants in the state are transported between thousands of local festivals to meet demand.

Physical trauma and exhaustion, psychological distress from prolonged confinement, combined with the loud noises of festival music and fireworks, have driven several processional elephants to run helter-skelter in distress. Since January there have been multiple such incidents involving human fatalities and injuries, as well as the destruction of property.

Each festival gives elephant owners “a lot of money,” says Sangita Iyer, founder of the U.S.-registered nonprofit Voice for Asian Elephants Society and a National Geographic explorer, who notes that an elephant can bring in thousands of dollars a day for its owner. “So they don’t care about the welfare of the elephants,” she adds. “That’s the reason these elephants are constantly distressed.”

Iyer, a practicing Hindu herself, has been outspoken about the cruelty these elephants suffer in captivity.

“When elephants are tied in one spot, their wild instincts are cruelly denied,” she says. “In captivity, they are alone and they suffer like human beings suffer in solitary confinement. It impacts their brain and nervous system, and they’re constantly terrified of what’s going to  happen next.”

Iyer’s powerful 2016 film Gods in Shackles sheds light on the dark reality behind the flamboyant elephant parades at Kerala’s festivals.

“They live a life of misery,” Iyer says. “You see the shackles cutting into their flesh, tears oozing down their face,” she adds.

Loopholes in the System

Wildlife traffickers and traders use many different loopholes — both legal and administrative — to circumvent laws and legalize wild-caught elephants.

“When the [Wildlife Protection] Act was enacted [in 1972], ownership certificates were issued to regularize elephants that were already in captivity at the time,” says advocate Mehta. This was intended to be a one-time measure that was never meant to continue. “Over the decades, this mechanism has been repeatedly misused to introduce newly captured wild elephants into the captive pool by issuing fresh ownership certificates.” Mehta explains that these fresh ownership certificates are often fraudulent or issued in a rush without verifying the origin or history of the elephant.

“The absence of a centralized, tamper-proof national elephant registry and the lack of mandatory DNA-based verification means there is no reliable way to distinguish a wild-caught elephant from a captive-born one,” Mehta says.

The Way Forward

Some Asian countries are leading the way on addressing the exploitation of elephants in captivity.

In early 2026 Indonesia became the first country in Asia to introduce a nationwide ban on elephant rides and forced performances and interactions. In May Bangladesh introduced new regulations banning the use of elephants in any exploitative or cruel activities. While India has banned the use of elephants in circuses, their mistreatment in tourism and religious festivities continues.

India launched a DNA profiling program in 2022 to enable the monitoring of the captive elephants in the country and prevent the trafficking of wild elephants into captivity. Genetic material of nearly 2,000 captive elephants has been collected so far. The profiles — including parentage and ownership information — will eventually be uploaded to a centralized database and app that will make it easy to identify wild-caught elephants from captive-born ones, as well as any illegal transfers or fraudulent ownership cases.

Meanwhile animal welfare advocates hope to make elephant riding less attractive by calling attention to the hidden abuses behind tourism activities, such as the Refuse to Ride campaign that Wildlife SOS launched in 2018.

“The only way to stop the demand is by creating awareness,” says Satyanarayan. “When the demand dies, the abuse and cruelty stops,” he adds.

 

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Wildlife SOS also works closely with the Responsible Tourism Society of India, whose members include thousands of local travel agents. “Many of the big operators have assured us and given us written commitments that they will never promote the riding of elephants,” says Satyanarayan.

Wildlife SOS’ latest campaign focuses on the nearly 300 “begging” elephants in the country, who are forced to walk on hot tar roads for hours and beg for alms, despite their many injuries. The nonprofit is working toward the goal of ending this cruel practice by 2030.

The increasing number of incidents involving distressed elephants running amok during festival processions and causing human fatalities is starting to make people rethink their use. As a cruelty-free alternative to the use of captive elephants in festival processions, two nonprofits — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in India and Iyer’s VFAES — have donated life-size robotic elephants to several temples.

“This elephant can be paraded across the village and the public have really taken well to it,” says Iyer. “They get to touch and feel these elephants and feel safe doing it. I’m hoping that in the next five to ten years, we will see a complete abolishment of live elephants being paraded.”

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Study: Commercial Lion Farming in South Africa Could Be Harming, Not Helping, Wild Lions

The post India’s Captive Elephants in the Spotlight After High-Profile Deaths appeared first on The Revelator.

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.

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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.

Read Next Why this NASA climate scientist wants you to stay angry Clayton Aldern

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.

Alors que les fondements de l’alliance transatlantique sont mis à rude épreuve par l’unilatéralisme croissant des États-Unis, l’Europe se voit contrainte d’envisager sa propre défense. Mais à quoi ressemblerait cette défense – et quel en serait le coût, tant sur le plan financier que politique ? Les dirigeants verts Franziska Brantner et Rui Tavares s’entretiennent avec Édouard Gaudot sur la manière dont l’Europe peut se protéger sans perdre de vue les raisons pour lesquelles elle mérite d’être protégée. 

Edouard Gaudot: En quelques mots, comment qualifiez-vous l’état de l’Europe et celui du monde ? 

Rui Tavares: Je dirais une crise généralisée de l’imagination. D’ordinaire, l’imagination vient après la guerre. Là, tout l’enjeu serait d’avoir l’imagination avant le conflit. 

Franziska Brantner: Pour moi, ce serait la confusion et le manque de courage côté européen, et, pour les Américains et le reste du monde, le retour de la puissance et de la folie. 

Rui Tavares: Tout à fait. Il y a une forme de folie qui accompagne cette absence d’imagination, comme si on vivait une réalité parallèle. 

Comment peut-on être un leader écologiste dans un monde plongé dans le chaos et les conflits ? 

Rui Tavares: Il faut être très pédagogique, et très serein à la fois, pour ne pas effrayer les gens, mais les préparer à avoir des débats politiques et à faire des choix qui sont très durs. Mais l’opinion mûrit : il y a 10 ans, il aurait été impossible de parler avec réalisme d’une communauté européenne de défense. Maintenant, tout le monde voit qu’avec Trump, si les Européens ne font pas une communauté européenne de défense, au moment décisif, ils seront démunis. 

Franziska Brantner: Je suis plutôt fière d’avoir anticipé ce débat dans un pays comme l’Allemagne. À l’époque, tout le monde me disait : « mais tu es anti-transatlantique » ; alors que j’expliquais déjà que tout cela n’a rien à voir avec les États-Unis – il s’agit de notre responsabilité. Maintenant, c’est devenu plus ou moins une évidence que les Américains ne seront pas là pour toujours pour nous. La tâche pour l’Europe est donc d’assumer et d’assurer sa sécurité et sa défense, aussi militaire.  

Ça veut dire quoi « défendre l’Europe » pour les écologistes ? 

Franziska Brantner: C’est défendre la paix et la liberté. Ça signifie que la défense de l’Europe ne peut être qu’européenne. Je remarque qu’une grande partie des adhérents du Parti Vert allemand (ils sont à ce jour plus de 180 000) ont beaucoup moins de doutes que les cadres du parti quant à la nécessité d’une capacité militaire.  

C’est surprenant quand même pour des partis, surtout en Allemagne, qui se sont construits dans les années 70, entre autres, autour du pacifisme et de la non-violence. 

Franziska Brantner: Il y a une profonde différence entre pacifisme et non-violence. Bien sûr qu’il faut promouvoir une éducation non-violente, une société non-violente. Mais ce n’est pas le pacifisme. Chez nous, c’est Joschka Fischer [ministre des Affaires étrangères d’Allemagne entre 1998 et 2005] qui a commencé cette révolution culturelle à l’époque du Kosovo. Mais avec l’Ukraine, ça a complètement basculé. Aujourd’hui, je me retrouve au centre de gravité du parti, parce que certains Verts surenchérissent tellement qu’il faut leur rappeler que les armes ne sont pas nécessairement la seule ni la meilleure réponse. 

C’est défendre la paix et la liberté. Ça signifie que la défense de l’Europe ne peut être qu’européenne.

Rui Tavares: On aurait dû avoir le débat sur l’armée européenne après s’être assurés qu’on aurait bien une démocratie européenne, avec tous les instruments de fiscalisation et un Parlement qui peut contrôler cette armée. Mais le problème, c’est que la guerre en Ukraine a installé l’urgence et renversé les priorités. Je le ressens aussi dans mon électorat – quand je suggère d’y aller prudemment, ils répondent que Poutine est à nos portes et que Trump pourrait menacer d’annexer les Açores, où il y a déjà une base américaine, comme il a menacé le Groenland. Cette question a même été posée au premier ministre, qui a répondu : « Le mieux, c’est qu’on n’en parle pas. » 

Ainsi, face à ceux qui veulent accélérer la militarisation de l’Europe, il faut rappeler que l’Europe n’est pas encore prête, car il lui manque les instruments de contrôle et de financement. 

Franziska Brantner: Parmi les verts allemands, il y a un débat sur ces questions de financement au niveau européen. Il y en a qui insistent sur cette interdiction des dépenses militaires par les traités. Même si les moyens étaient là, ils préfèrent défendre d’abord le cadre institutionnel, plutôt que de trouver des façons de faire avancer à la fois le financement et le contrôle démocratique. C’est un problème, car quand on aura trouvé la voie, il vaudrait mieux que tout cela reste sous le contrôle d’un Parlement. 

Comment doit s’articuler la défense européenne dans les équilibres géopolitiques actuels ? Quid de « l’alliance des puissances moyennes » à la Carney, de l’architecture de sécurité globale, de l’offre de parapluie nucléaire français ? 

Franziska Brantner: Il nous faut un budget européen pour la défense commune, avec des objectifs communs. Je préférerais que cela se fasse au sein des institutions, mais si pour des raisons de légalité ou de majorité c’est impossible, alors imaginons des institutions ad hoc. Quant aux alliances, il me paraît absolument nécessaire d’y intégrer le Royaume-Uni, et peut-être la Norvège. Ensuite, la Turquie ou le Canada ont aussi un rôle à jouer, mais à une échelle plus large. 

Pour le nucléaire, soyons lucides : ni a fortiori les États-Unis d’aujourd’hui, ni la France ni la Grande-Bretagne n’accepteront le partage des responsabilités, au sens de partager le pouvoir du « bouton rouge ». Néanmoins, nous devons parler entre Européens, avec la France et la Grande-Bretagne, au sujet d’une doctrine nucléaire européenne. En contrepartie, nous devrons évidemment financer davantage le conventionnel. 

Et la contrepartie politique ? La garantie nucléaire induit une forme de leadership stratégique que les partenaires de la France ne sont peut-être pas prêts à accepter et que la France n’est peut-être pas prête à assumer ? 

Franziska Brantner: C’est possible, mais on n’a pas le choix. La menace de Poutine est réelle et le recul de Trump aussi. Je souhaiterais tellement que nous vivions dans un monde meilleur, mais ce n’est pas ainsi. Si on n’y arrive pas en Europe, il y a déjà des conservateurs allemands qui proposent une force de frappe allemande – je pense que c’est une très mauvaise idée, même si l’Allemagne en aurait les capacités. D’une part, cela violerait notre constitution, et de l’autre, les traités internationaux. 

Rui Tavares: Sur la garantie nucléaire française, la vitesse du débat est étonnante. Ces choses, normalement, avancent à une lenteur glaciale, mais là on l’envisage concrètement. Selon moi, il faudrait faire quelque chose de très simple, mais très visible : inscrire l’emploi du nucléaire français dans le cadre de l’article 47 du traité, qui parle de venir en aide à l’État membre menacé avec « toutes les ressources » – donc l’arsenal nucléaire aussi. 

Quant à cette alliance des puissances moyennes, ça me chagrine toujours un peu qu’on s’arrête au Canada. Et le Brésil, le Mexique, les autres pays ? Voilà des partenaires stratégiques. 

Franziska Brantner: Je crois qu’on les aborde surtout par les intérêts économiques et politiques. 

Rui Tavares: C’est vrai, mais c’est aussi que les Européens négligent ce que ces pays-là disent sur l’état du monde, sur le développement, sur les réformes de l’ONU. Ils ne veulent pas écouter ce que le Brésil aurait à dire aussi sur les questions de la mémoire de l’esclavage, par exemple. Ces pays veulent parler de ça aussi. Si l’Europe veut contrer les puissances autoritaires en ralliant ces puissances moyennes peu attachées au système international fondé sur l’ONU et les règles partagées, nous devons nous mettre à leur écoute – car ces partenaires potentiels en ont marre de l’arrogance européenne. C’est pour ça que nous avons échoué à les engager pleinement dans le soutien à l’Ukraine. L’Europe doit sortir de ses évidences et de sa zone de confort. 

Franziska Brantner: Je crois qu’il y a quand même une différence à faire entre les liens économiques, voire politiques et stratégiques, et les liens de défense. Je suis tout à fait d’accord avec toi sur les premiers, mais pour la défense européenne, je suis moins convaincue. 

Rui Tavares: Pourtant, si tu prends l’exemple de la sécurité contre les narcotrafics dans l’Atlantique du Sud, il faudra parler avec les Sud-Américains. 

Outre les alliances, la « défense de l’Europe en Européens » passe par les questions industrielles. Un budget militaire, soit, mais pour quoi faire ? 

Rui Tavares: Quand les Américains ont construit leur puissance militaire au lendemain de la guerre, ils ont fait des investissements publics colossaux dans la recherche, à travers le MIT et des programmes spécifiques. On sait tous que l’Internet est directement issu de ce genre de recherche. Je trouve inquiétant que la révolution de l’intelligence artificielle, fondamentale dans le domaine de la défense, soit complètement dominée, commandée et organisée par le privé – sans aucune participation publique. Là, l’Europe aurait une énorme opportunité historique de faire des investissements publics massifs, surtout dans la recherche, la science et la technologie, avec des objectifs ambitieux. 

Si on montre que la recherche militaire produit des avancées civiles, on peut sortir de ce piège très efficace qui force les électorats à choisir entre avoir les moyens d’un modèle social et avoir les moyens de le défendre.

Franziska Brantner: En Europe, c’est l’Ukraine qui fait ça. Ce sont les plus créatifs et innovants. Plus encore que les États-Unis. 

À ce propos, comment répondre à la question piège qui dénonce le sacrifice des dépenses sociales sur l’autel des dépenses militaires ? 

Franziska Brantner:  D’abord, il nous faut un marché de la défense unique et intégré, avec des économies d’échelle à la clé et une capacité de créer ainsi notre souveraineté technologique, par exemple l’IA. Ceci doit être fait d’une manière à générer des gains technologiques et économiques, des « dividendes de la défense » pour la productivité et la souveraineté industrielles européennes.  

Mais il est évident qu’on ne peut financer longtemps la défense qu’à travers la dette. Dans le budget allemand, il y a déjà aujourd’hui 80 milliards d’euros annuels de services de la dette. On s’attend à 40 milliards de dettes supplémentaires rien que pour la défense. Pour les plus jeunes générations, c’est intenable. Et il y a aussi le risque d’une dette non soutenable qui peut nous coûter très cher, au sens économique et ensuite social. Donc à un moment, soit on augmente les ressources, soit il faut couper quelque part.  

Il faut aussi devenir plus efficace économiquement. Si la productivité ne progresse plus, ça va nécessairement peser sur le reste du budget. On a eu de la chance, pendant 80 ans, mais les « dividendes de la paix » sont finis. 

En revanche, il y aura des dividendes des dépenses publiques pour la défense, dont il faut s’assurer qu’ils ne soient pas accaparés par les plus riches. Voilà une autre façon de reposer la question de la répartition public-privé. Et soyons lucides : Nous avons besoin d’une industrie de la défense européenne pour protéger notre paix et notre modèle de vie – ce qui à terme produira de nouveaux dividendes, d’une paix nouvelle et souveraine.  

Rui Tavares: Je suis en désaccord sur ça. Je ne voudrais pas revivre les débats de la crise de la zone euro, qui ont été vraiment très douloureux. Il y a une différence, peut-être culturelle, entre Nord et Sud, sur cette question de la dette. Quand on me dit qu’il faut investir dans les dépenses militaires pour répondre aux défis internationaux et qu’il n’est pas sérieux de ne pas prendre sur les dépenses sociales, je réponds que l’investissement sur la défense sans dette, c’est cela qui n’est pas sérieux. L’effort militaire a toujours coûté cher. Si on prend au sérieux une menace existentielle, on ne se tracasse pas à cause de la dette. D’autant que dans le passé, les investissements militaires ont tous été accompagnés ou suivis de près par de nouveaux investissements dans le social. 

Imaginons : il y a une crise du logement en Europe, une question très concrète pour beaucoup de gens. Si on développait de nouvelles technologies de construction, avec de nouveaux matériaux issus de la recherche, si on avait une agence européenne du logement, on pourrait encourager ces progrès. Et puisque les armées ont toujours été pleines d’ingénieurs, il peut y avoir là un bénéfice de l’investissement militaire – un dividende de guerre. 

Si on montre que la recherche militaire produit des avancées civiles, on peut sortir de ce piège très efficace qui force les électorats à choisir entre avoir les moyens d’un modèle social et avoir les moyens de le défendre. En ce sens, l’Allemagne a un rôle clé : il faut que les Allemands comprennent que l’Europe est prête à investir dans une dette sûre. Maintenant que la dette américaine n’est plus sûre, si les Européens font enfin le choix des fameux Eurobonds, il y aura des milliards d’euros prêts à être investis. 

Franziska Brantner: À condition que ce soient vraiment des investissements. Sinon ces ressources sont gaspillées, et ce sont les générations suivantes qui doivent financer. On a engagé près de 100 milliards de dettes pour la défense et 99% de cet argent est allé dans des trucs du passé. 

Il faut donc développer un complexe militaro-industriel européen, qui produise du futur, pas qui comble le passé ? 

Franziska Brantner: Voilà. Il faut rompre avec les inerties du passé. C’est le cas aussi dans notre modèle social en Allemagne : il y a des réformes qui améliorent la qualité des services et permettent en même temps des économies, et il faut les faire. On ne peut pas juste refuser l’économie, c’est impossible. Surtout avec une société qui vieillit. On ne peut pas se cacher derrière les faux-semblants. Je pense qu’il faut investir dans la défense, réformer le secteur économique et social.  

Comment est-ce qu’on prépare les populations aux réalités de la menace et aux réponses ? 

Rui Tavares: J’ai beaucoup aimé le rapport Niinistö, parce qu’il transmet aux Européens le savoir-faire des Nordiques sur ces questions de défense, qui reposent sur la société, les familles, les liens. On peut reproduire certaines choses comme les livrets sur la sécurité chez soi, la défense de proximité, qu’on peut imprimer et donner à tous les foyers européens. Ensuite, il faut tenir compte des réalités culturelles et sociales : s’il faut avoir deux semaines de vivres à la maison pour être préparé, au Portugal, le 10 du mois, quand le salaire est déjà dépensé, je suis sûr que le kit de sécurité ne tient pas. 

Il faut donc peut-être penser aussi à des réseaux de distribution. Mobiliser les mairies d’arrondissement. Inclure les pompiers. Ce sont autant d’opportunités de faire une Europe tangible. Quand on a des inondations, des incendies catastrophiques, les gens s’attendent à une réponse européenne. Avec ce type de kit européen de réponse aux guerres et aux catastrophes, qui pourrait être distribué, ce serait plus clair. 

Franziska Brantner: Je crains que ça ne marche pas, que sans l’urgence, les gens ne soient pas prêts. 

Au-delà de la base industrielle et technologique de défense européenne, quelle politique industrielle faut-il mettre en œuvre à l’échelle de l’UE ? 

Franziska Brantner: Je pense que la compétitivité européenne repose sur trois piliers. D’abord la résilience, avec la réduction de nos dépendances, surtout de la Chine et des États-Unis. Ensuite, l’innovation. Pas seulement dans la défense, mais aussi dans le numérique, la bioéconomie, la médecine. Et enfin, le troisième, c’est la question de la durabilité, pour répondre au changement climatique et aussi aux inégalités. Je veux qu’à la sortie des écoles, il y ait à nouveau une majorité de parents qui pensent que leurs enfants iront mieux qu’eux. Pour ça, il nous faut une éducation qui développe les compétences et les capacités d’innovation de nos jeunes. C’est une compétitivité au service du bien-être social, de la qualité de vie.  

Quelles priorités voyez-vous pour le futur de l’Europe? Selon vous, qu’est-ce qui fait aujourd’hui la cohésion européenne et l’actualité du projet européen ? 

Franziska Brantner: Je pense que la question à se poser est d’abord : « Pourquoi on veut la paix, la liberté et la démocratie ? » Pour nous, Européens, l’enjeu est de donner un sens à la liberté qui ne soit pas celui de JD Vance et un contenu à la paix qui ne soit pas celui de Poutine. C’est à nous de le faire, parce que c’est l’Europe qui porte ces valeurs-là. Et sans elles, le projet européen est vide. 

Rui Tavares: Je suis tout à fait d’accord, et je voudrais ajouter une notion : la qualité de vie. Quand on regarde l’Europe depuis l’extérieur, ce qui la caractérise, c’est une façon de vivre et des standards de qualité de vie. Notre idée de liberté se construit dans le droit universel à cette qualité de vie. Ça ne veut pas dire que tout le monde est riche, mais ça veut sûrement dire que personne n’est pauvre. En mettant cette notion au centre des politiques européennes, on voit rapidement que ça englobe tout : l’économique, le social, l’environnement, la culture, la sécurité, la défense. 

Ce qui m’inquiète, c’est que j’ai l’impression que la qualité de vie a cessé d’être un objectif de la politique. On entend des discours qui proposent de sacrifier tel ou tel service pour faire des économies. Mais je pense qu’épargner pour épargner, ça ne dit rien aux Européens. Personne ne veut être compétitif pour gagner une guerre économique dont on ne voit pas les bénéfices. En revanche, les Européens sont fiers et attachés à leur qualité de vie et pour de bonnes raisons. Si on réussit à les convaincre que les politiques proposées prennent cette qualité de vie au sérieux, je pense que les gens accepteront plus facilement les sacrifices.

Heatwave insomnia Channel News brendan 7th July 2026 Teaser Media

As the foundations of the transatlantic alliance strain under the weight of the US’s growing unilateralism, Europe is being forced to imagine a defence of its own. But what would that defence look like – and what would it cost, financially and politically? Green leaders Franziska Brantner and Rui Tavares talk to Edouard Gaudot about how Europe can protect itself without losing sight of why it’s worth protecting.

Edouard Gaudot: Amid heightened geopolitical tension and the growing prevalence of military conflict, can you briefly describe the state of Europe and the world today? 

Rui Tavares: I’d say there’s a general crisis of imagination. Usually, imagination comes after war. But today, the challenge is finding imagination before conflict. 

Franziska Brantner: For me, it’s confusion and a lack of courage from Europeans, and from the Americans and the rest of the world, it’s the return of madness and “might makes right.” 

Rui Tavares: Exactly. There’s a form of madness that comes with this absence of imagination, as if we’re living in a parallel reality. 

What does green leadership look like in a world plunged into chaos and conflict? 

Rui Tavares: We need to educate people but stay calm at the same time. We must avoid scaring them and instead prepare them for political debates and tough choices. Public opinion matures: 10 years ago, it would have been impossible to talk realistically about a European defence community. Now, with Trump, everyone can see that if the Europeans don’t create one, they’ll be defenceless at the decisive moment. 

Franziska Brantner: I’m rather proud to have seen this debate taking shape in a country like Germany. Previously, everyone would say to me, “You’re just an anti-Atlanticist,” even as I explained that my emphasis on defence autonomy had nothing to do with the United States but was about our responsibility. Now, it’s become very clear that the Americans won’t always be there for us. The task for Europe, then, is to step up and take responsibility for its own defence and security.  

For the Greens, defending Europe means safeguarding peace and freedom. Therefore, Europe’s defence can only be European. I note that many German Green party members (of whom there are over 180,000 today) have far fewer reservations than the party’s leaders do about the need for a stronger military capability.  

That’s surprising for a party that was founded in the 1970s on, among other things, pacifism and non-violence. 

Franziska Brantner: There’s a profound difference between pacifism and non-violence. Of course, we must promote non-violent education and a non-violent society, but that isn’t pacifism. In our party, it was Joschka Fischer [German foreign minister from 1998 to 2005] who started this cultural shift at the time of the Kosovo conflict. But with Ukraine, everything changed. Today I find myself in the party’s centre, because some Greens have gone so far that they need reminding that weapons are not necessarily the only answer, nor the best. 

For the Greens, defending Europe means safeguarding peace and freedom. Therefore, Europe’s defence can only be European.

Rui Tavares: Ideally, we would be having this debate on a European army after making sure that we really have a European democracy, with full tax-raising powers and a parliament that could oversee this army. But the war in Ukraine has brought urgency and upended priorities. I sense it in my voters [in Portugal], too: when I suggest moving cautiously, they reply that Putin is at the gates and that Trump could threaten to annex the Azores – where there is already an American base – just as he threatened Greenland. This question was even put to the prime minister, whose answer was: “It’s best we don’t talk about it.” 

So, to those who want to accelerate Europe’s militarisation, we must point out that Europe is not yet ready because it lacks the mechanisms for oversight and funding. 

Franziska Brantner: Among German Greens, there’s a debate about funding at the European level. Some insist that European treaties prohibit military spending. And even if the resources were there, they would rather defend the institutional framework than find ways to move ahead on funding and democratic oversight. This is a problem, because once we find the path forward, it would be better if all this remained under parliamentary oversight. 

What about the “alliance of middle powers” proposed by Mark Carney, the global security architecture, and the French nuclear umbrella? How should European defence fit into the current geopolitical landscape?  

Franziska Brantner: We need a European budget for common defence, with common goals. I’d rather this were created within the institutions, but if it’s impossible for reasons of legality or majority, let’s devise ad hoc institutions. As for alliances, it’s absolutely essential to include the United Kingdom, and maybe Norway. Turkey and Canada also have roles to play, but on a broader level. 

When it comes to nuclear weapons, let’s be clear-eyed: neither the United States – especially today – nor France nor the United Kingdom will agree to sharing responsibility, in the sense of sharing the power to press the “red button”. That said, Europeans must talk to each other, to France and the United Kingdom, about a European nuclear doctrine. In return, we will obviously have to increase funding for conventional weapons. 

A nuclear guarantee would entail a sort of strategic leadership from France that its partners may not be willing to allow, and that Paris may not be willing to accept.  

Franziska Brantner: That’s possible, but we don’t have a choice. Putin’s threat is real, and so is Trump’s retreat. I really wish we lived in a better world, but we don’t. If Europe can’t do it, there are already German conservatives proposing a German nuclear deterrent. I think this is a very bad idea, even if Germany has the capability. It would violate both our constitution and international treaties. 

Rui Tavares: On the French nuclear guarantee, the speed of the debate is astonishing. These things usually move forward at a glacial pace, but this is now actually being considered. I think we need to do something very simple, but very visible: expand French nuclear doctrine to include Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union. It talks about coming to the aid of threatened member states with all available resources. That would mean nuclear weapons, too. 

As for this alliance of middle powers, it always bothers me a bit that we stop at Canada. What about Brazil, Mexico, and other countries? There’s some strategic partners for you. 

Franziska Brantner: I think that our approach to them is primarily driven by economic and political interests. 

Rui Tavares: True, but Europeans also ignore what these countries say about the state of the world, about development and UN reforms. They don’t want to listen to what Brazil might also have to say about the remembrance of slavery, for example. If Europe wants to counter authoritarian powers by courting middle powers that are not particularly invested in the UN-led rules-based international order, we need to listen to them. These potential partners are fed up with European arrogance, and that’s why we failed to secure their full backing for Ukraine. Europe must challenge its assumptions and get out of its comfort zone. 

Franziska Brantner: I still think there’s a distinction to be made between economic ties – political and strategic ties even – and defence ties. I completely agree with you on the first three, but when it comes to European defence, I’m less convinced. 

Rui Tavares: But to fight drug trafficking in the South Atlantic, for example, you’ll have to speak to the South Americans. 

Alliances aside, a European defence of Europe means grappling with questions of industrial policy. A military budget is all well and good, but what for? 

Rui Tavares: When the Americans built up their military power after the [Second World] War, they made colossal public investments in research through the likes of MIT and special programmes. As we all know, the Internet was a direct result of this type of research. So I find it worrying that the revolution in artificial intelligence, fundamental in the realm of defence, is completely driven, shaped, and dominated by the private sector, with no public involvement. Here, Europe has an enormous historic opportunity to make massive public investments – especially in research, science, and technology – with ambitious goals. 

If we show that military research produces civilian advances, we can escape this pernicious trap that forces voters to choose between funding a welfare state and funding its defence.

Franziska Brantner: In Europe, it’s the Ukrainians who are doing this. They are the most creative and innovative. Even more so than the Americans. 

And how should we respond to those who claim social spending is being sacrificed on the altar of military expenditure? 

Franziska Brantner:  First of all, we need a single, integrated defence market with economies of scale and the capacity to develop our own technological sovereignty, in AI for example. This must be done in a way that delivers technological and economic benefits – “defence dividends” for European industrial productivity and sovereignty.  

But it’s obvious that in the long run we can’t fund defence through borrowing. Germany already spends 80 billion euros a year on servicing debt. An extra 40 billion euros of debt is expected to be added just for defence. For younger generations, it’s unsustainable. And there’s also the risk that unsustainable borrowing could cost us dearly, both economically and socially. So at some point, we must either increase resources or make cuts somewhere.  

We also have to become more economically efficient. If productivity stops growing, it will put more pressure on the budget. We got lucky for 80 years, but the peace dividend is gone. 

That said, there will be dividends from public spending on defence, though we’ll have to make sure that they’re not pocketed by the richest. That’s another way of asking how we draw the line between public and private.  

Let’s be clear about this: we need a European defence industry to protect our peace and our way of life – and in the long run, this will pay fresh dividends from a new and sovereign peace.  

Rui Tavares: This is where I disagree with you. I don’t want to reopen arguments from the Eurozone crisis, which was extremely painful. But there’s a difference, perhaps cultural, between north and south on the question of debt. When I’m told that we must invest in defence spending to meet global challenges and that doing so without cutting social spending is unrealistic, my response is that investing in defence without borrowing is what’s unrealistic. Military investment has always been expensive. If we take an existential threat seriously, we don’t fret about debt. Especially given that, in the past, military investment has always been accompanied or followed by new social investment. 

Just take into account the fact that there’s a housing crisis in Europe, an issue that’s very real for many people. If we developed construction technologies, with new materials invented through research and development, and if we had a European housing agency, we could build on this progress. And since armies have always been full of engineers, this might be another benefit of military spending – a war dividend. 

If we show that military research produces civilian advances, we can escape this pernicious trap that forces voters to choose between funding a welfare state and funding its defence. This is where Germany has a key role to play: Germans must understand that Europe is willing to invest in safe debt. Now that American debt is no longer safe, if Europeans were to finally opt for the famous Eurobonds, there would be billions of euros ready to invest. 

Franziska Brantner: So long as these are really investments. Otherwise, they’re a waste of resources, and future generations will have to pay for them. We’ve taken on almost 100 billion euros in defence debt, and 99 per cent of this money has gone into stuff that’s obsolete. 

So, we need to develop a European military-industrial complex, one that builds for the future, not the past. 

Franziska Brantner: Exactly. We must break free from past inertias. It’s also the case for our welfare state in Germany: there are reforms that will improve the quality of services while also making savings, and they have to be implemented. We can’t just refuse to make savings. It’s impossible, especially with an ageing society. We can’t hide behind false pretexts. I think we have to invest in defence while also reforming the economy and public services.  

How do we prepare people for the reality of the security threats facing Europe and the responses they require? 

Rui Tavares: I loved the Niinistö report [drawn up by Sauli Niinistö, former president of Finland and special adviser to the president of the European Commission] because it shares with the rest of Europe Nordic know-how on defence, which is based around society, families, and bonds. Some materials – like booklets on preparedness and local defence – can be reproduced, printed, and distributed to all European households. But it’s important to take into account cultural and social realities: you’re supposed to have two weeks’ supplies in the house to be prepared, but in Portugal, where wages are often spent by the 10th of the month, I’m sure the survival kit won’t last. 

So, we should perhaps think about distribution networks, mobilise local councils, and even involve the fire service. These are also opportunities to make Europe tangible. When devastating fires or floods break out, people expect a European response. With a European war and disaster survival kit that could be distributed to citizens, Europe’s role in helping people would be clearer to see. 

Franziska Brantner: I fear that it won’t work – that without a sense of urgency, people won’t be ready. 

Besides the European defence technological and industrial base, what industrial policy should be implemented at the EU level? 

Franziska Brantner: I believe European competitiveness rests on three pillars. First, resilience, which requires a reduction in our dependencies, especially on China and the United States. Next, innovation. Not just in defence, but in tech, medicine, the bioeconomy. And the third is sustainability, which is a necessary response to climate change and inequality.  

To succeed, we need education that develops our young people’s skills and capacity for innovation. It’s competitiveness in the service of social wellbeing and a better quality of life.  

Going forward, what objectives do you think Europe should prioritise? How can the European project gain more relevance and foster cohesion?  

Franziska Brantner: I think the question we must ask ourselves first is: “Why do we want peace, freedom, and democracy?” For us Europeans, the challenge is to give a meaning to freedom that isn’t JD Vance’s, and a substance to peace that isn’t Putin’s. It’s up to us to do this, because it’s Europe that upholds these values. And without them, the European project is hollow. 

Rui Tavares: I couldn’t agree more, and I’d like to add another idea: quality of life. Seen from the outside, Europe is defined by a way of life and a standard of living. Our notion of freedom is built on a universal right to this quality of life. It doesn’t mean that everybody is rich, but it does mean that nobody is poor. When we put this idea at the core of European policies, we soon see that it touches on everything: the economy, social policy, the environment, culture, security, and defence. 

What worries me is a sense that the quality of life has stopped being a goal of politics. We keep hearing calls to sacrifice this or that service to save money. But I think that saving for saving’s sake doesn’t appeal to Europeans. Nobody wants to stay competitive just to win an economic war they don’t see any benefits in. Europeans are proud of their quality of life and are deeply attached to it – and for good reason. If we manage to convince them that the policies that affect them take this quality of life seriously, I think people will be more willing to make sacrifices. 

The dive started like any other: hauling tanks out of the truck, helping guests into their gear, and overseeing safety checks. It was a particularly hot day on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, and divemaster Kaitlyn was eager to get into the water to cool off.

The dive would be easy. Salt Pier is one of the most popular dive sites on Bonaire for a reason. Its giant, looming pillars made navigation easy and created an exciting landscape for guests, and the sandbar on the south side is known for spotted eagle rays and green sea turtles. One more easy dive, and then she could take lunch.

But shortly after the dive began, she noticed something in the distance, something lying on the reef. It couldn’t be trash; she was pretty sure she’d just seen bubbles. Could it be a diver who needed help?

She signaled to her group to follow and quickly swam over. There on the reef was a woman. She was lying across the coral, arm outstretched, reaching for an octopus.

“Not again,” Kaitlyn thought, springing into action.

She swam right up to the diver, banging on her tank to draw her attention. But the diver didn’t look up, seemingly intent on getting this octopus into her hand.

Kaitlyn grabbed the diver’s shoulder, signaling that they needed to get off the reef. Adamant to have their “octopus moment,” the diver persisted.

As she told me the story, my friend’s face was flushed with anger. It took several more minutes of persistent interference on Kaitlyn’s behalf before the diver decided to leave the octopus alone. Kaitlyn was furious; not only had the diver invaded this octopus’s space but now the reef beneath her body was left broken beyond repair.

The most frustrating part of all is that we, and other divemasters on the island, were dealing with situations like that every day.

As Kaitlyn told me this story, under a palapa during lunch at the dive shop where we worked, I came to a conclusion: I wish “My Octopus Teacher” had never been filmed.

I recognize that this is a strange thing for a professional SCUBA diver and conservation biologist to say. But ever since the documentary won its Oscar, people across the planet have flocked to the ocean, hoping to form an intimate friendship with an octopus.

Instead of forming that friendship, people end up having unethical wildlife encounters. Sensitive species are disturbed, surrounding habitat is destroyed, and precariously balanced ecosystems are disrupted for the sake of an Instagram post.

A study conducted in the Philippines and Indonesia found that damaging contact with a reef by divers more than doubled when a wildlife encounter occurred during a dive. Whether the contact was intentional or not, these encounters reveal a deeper issue: Even the most well-meaning tourists can be detrimental to the places they visit.

Right now coral tourism is estimated to be worth over U.S. $36 billion annually, despite coral reefs being among the most threatened ecosystems on our planet. Scientists have determined that our oceans have passed a tipping point, meaning they’re quickly becoming unsuitable for sustaining coral life. Warming ocean temperatures, pollution, and ocean acidification are all contributing to the loss of coral reefs, but an overlooked threat is also at play. Increasing research shows that coral-related tourism reduces reef resilience and adds stress to these already vulnerable ecosystems.

A coral reef can take 100,000 years to form, but it only takes a moment for a person to cause irreparable damage to a colony. This is because the coral you see when snorkeling is actually a group of tiny animals called polyps that build their exoskeleton bit by bit using calcium carbonate in the ocean.

Physical contact with the reef is all too common. I’ve witnessed hundreds of instances where divers lost control of their buoyancy or became unaware of their fins snapping chunks of coral. Research has shown that the number of times a diver makes direct contact with a reef is directly correlated with the diver’s SCUBA certification level. The less experienced a diver is, the more likely they are to make physical contact with a reef. Beginner SCUBA divers lack the technical skills needed for precise buoyancy control.

I remember feeling completely out of control underwater when I first started diving. On one of my first dives, I began to float toward the surface, completely unable to figure out how to stop my ascent. When I later began assisting with Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) classes, I had to literally hold down numerous beginner divers struggling with the exact same thing. Good buoyancy is something a diver only acquires through practice. The more you dive, the less likely you are to drag along a reef.

There are, however, instances like the one my coworker experienced with the octopus seeker where contact with the reef is entirely optional. I’ve seen people collect shells and chunks of living coral as souvenirs — all too often, during my time in Bonaire.

In addition to the physical harm, there’s growing scientific evidence that human activity on reefs correlates with the presence of coral diseases. For example, coral disease prevalence on the Great Barrier Reef increased with the presence of an offshore tourist platform that brings hundreds of visitors to the reefs each day. In the Red Sea, physical damage to brain corals by divers increased a coral colony’s susceptibility to predation and disease. Coral growth was found to be five times slower on unprotected reefs with high tourist activity than on protected reefs.

Coral reefs across the Caribbean are currently battling a particularly nasty coral ailment called Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which targets hard corals such as brain and maze and causes irreparable damage to the skeletal tissue of a colony, spreading over an area the size of a sticky note each day. Total mortality of a colony can occur within days or weeks. The disease is highly contagious, and the exact mechanism of transmission is still unknown.

Some evidence  supports the claim that humans can spread SCTLD. Research suggests that contaminated gear can bring the disease to other dive sites and even to different countries or regions if it’s not properly disinfected. Dive shops on Bonaire keep clean rinse tanks available and require anyone diving to rinse their gear before and after each dive. When dealing with such a lethal disease, every small act of prevention can make a difference.

Even the most well-intentioned ocean enthusiast can cause harm to these delicate ecosystems. But what can we do about this problem?

Surely stopping all reef tourism is not the answer. As an ocean enthusiast myself, I wouldn’t recommend removing that snorkel tour from your vacation itinerary. Alienating ourselves from the natural world will never bring us closer to saving it.

Change can start with you on your next vacation. There are simple actions each of us can take to help improve the coral tourism industry.

• • Be picky about your guides. Guides often feel pressured to give their guests exciting, memorable experiences. Look for a local expert who can offer an authentic and respectful experience. Be wary of tour companies that promise close, personal experiences with wildlife. Do not be afraid to tell your guide “no” if they begin doing something you feel is harmful to the environment.
  • Build your water skills. Whether it’s a SCUBA course, swim lessons, or just spending time in a local pool, get yourself and fellow travelers in the water before visiting a coral reef. Not only will you have a more enjoyable experience if you feel more comfortable in the water, but you’re also less likely to cause damage to the reef you are visiting.
  • Rinse your gear. This is one of the simplest ways you can help protect the coral reefs you visit. If you own SCUBA gear, masks, snorkels, and floaties, be sure to thoroughly clean them before entering the water, especially if they’ve been used elsewhere.
  • Hold your travel buddies responsible. Talk to your friends and family (or even your whole tour group, if you’re feeling brave) about the shared responsibility of keeping coral reefs healthy. Encourage those around you to be considerate of all living creatures, including coral reefs.
  • Do your research. Get online and explore what regulations your destination may have for coral reef experiences. Most countries have a government agency, such as a national park service, that provides information on best practices and laws. By better understanding expectations, you can make better decisions in the water.
  • Most important of all, be respectful. Each time you enter the water, frame yourself not only as a visitor but as a steward. Each small action can have a larger impact. You’d be amazed at just how far that positivity can reach.

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The post I Will Love You to Death: A Divemaster’s View on Coral Tourism appeared first on The Revelator.

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.