Green News

When Tropical Storm Ana made landfall in Malawi in 2022, it hit the Southeast African country’s electricity system hard, destroying a third of its hydropower capacity and causing nationwide shutdowns.

Even before the storm, Malawi’s power supply – generated mostly from renewables including solar and hydro – had been unreliable for many years, suffering from persistent outages.

The Malawian government is now hoping to improve the stability of its grid power with the construction of a battery energy storage system (BESS) in its capital that will charge up with surplus electricity generated when the sun is shining and hydropower dams are running, and release it when needed.

More than 80% of Malawi’s electricity comes from renewables and the country has been expanding capacity by adding more solar power while decommissioning 78 megawatts (MW) of diesel generation. But climatic impacts such as cyclones disrupt the grid and threaten to reverse energy transition gains.

West Africa’s first lithium mine awaits go-ahead as Ghana seeks better deal 

To ensure a more stable supply, Malawi is building the 20 MW/30 megawatt hour (MWh) battery storage system in Lilongwe with support from the Global Energy Alliance (GEA), under Mission 300 – an initiative led by development banks and their partners to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.

The project in Malawi aims to stabilise the country’s grid, smooth its intermittent power supply, and reduce its reliance on diesel generators, as well as averting about 10,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year.

Battery energy storage systems act like giant power banks, absorbing clean electricity during periods of lower demand and releasing it for use when demand is high or generation drops. A typical BESS includes battery packs, inverters that allow electricity to flow between the batteries and the grid, transformers, and cooling and safety systems.

Damola Omole, director of the ‘Grids of the Future, Africa’ programme at the GEA, a philanthropic organisation, said BESS offers the “flexibility needed to smoothly integrate high levels of variable renewables” into the power grid. In doing so, it can reduce reliance on expensive diesel generation and protect consumers and industries from rising energy costs, he added.

Can BESS drive Africa’s industrialisation?

As calls to develop local green industries grow louder in Africa, Omole said there is a need to prioritise upgrading national grids with BESS so they can “transmit reliable, cost-reflective power directly to commercial clusters”.

While financiers previously doubted that intermittent solar and wind could meet the needs of industrial production, utility-scale BESS has demonstrated that renewables can deliver “predictable, steady output just like traditional fossil-fuel baseload power”, he added.

An electrical power engineer performs preventative maintenance using a digital voltmeter to monitor battery charge efficiency. (Photo: Nitat Termmee/ Getty Images)

In recent years, African leaders, including William Ruto of Kenya, Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe, have called for the continent to use the energy transition to drive green industrialisation and create value from its resources at home.

At a mining investment conference in Nairobi in April, Ruto said Africa had stayed at the bottom of the value chain for too long but would now collaborate to process its minerals within the continent. “We will refine them here and we will manufacture them here,” he told African ministers and business executives.

Kenya seeks regional coordination to build African mineral value chains

However, deploying energy at scale to advance this industrial ambition has long been a problem, while about 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. BESS could therefore become a critical technology in the continent’s development drive, experts say.

Michael Iwu, West Africa business development manager at Empower New Energy, which finances and co-develops renewable energy, said BESS is challenging the narrative that solar and wind power alone cannot provide enough reliable electricity to run factories and other energy-intensive industries. Modern battery systems can now support business operations for several hours, helping maintain production during grid outages, he added.

For GEA’s Omole, the key question has shifted to how quickly countries can build the battery storage, grid infrastructure and market frameworks needed to unlock the potential of renewables.

BESS to help renewables displace fossil fuels

While BESS is still in its initial stages of deployment in Africa, interest is growing as countries look for ways to make renewable energy more reliable.

South Africa is leading with the largest and first of its kind utility-scale BESS on the continent. With the capacity to discharge up to five uninterrupted hours of power, the system is keeping homes and businesses running in Worcester, a southwestern town of more than 100,000 people.

Egypt is also investing heavily in battery storage. In 2025, the country launched its first utility-scale BESS, a 300-MWh facility integrated with a 500 MW solar plant in the southern city of Aswan. It has also committed more than $1 billion to strengthen its electricity grid and update regulation to support battery storage projects.

Africa needs more than export bans to cash in on critical minerals, experts say

Falling battery prices are helping drive the rapid deployment of energy storage. According to BloombergNEF, battery packs for stationary storage (used in BESS) cost an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour in 2025, down 45% from 2024.

Soon the role of BESS in supporting the grid integration of wind and solar could reduce reliance on fossil fuels and help the world meet ambitious climate goals, according to a GEA report released in April.

Stephen Nicholls, director of South-Africa based energy think-tank African Energy Futures, said the rapid pace of technological development and the falling costs of BESS are attracting growing attention.

He said improvements in storage duration could further strengthen the role of renewables in industrial power systems. While most commercial and utility-scale battery systems currently provide around four to eight hours of storage, Nicholls said researchers are developing units capable of storing electricity for extended periods. 

“The cheaper the storage and the longer the storage, the more [BESS] will replace fossil fuels like gas,” he added.

Workers are busy on a product at a Polarium energy-storage facility, where they make energy storage and optimization solutions, built on lithium-ion battery technology for businesses within telecom, commercial and industrial facilities across the world, in Cape Town, South Africa, April 5, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Esa Alexander) Workers are busy on a product at a Polarium energy-storage facility, where they make energy storage and optimization solutions, built on lithium-ion battery technology for businesses within telecom, commercial and industrial facilities across the world, in Cape Town, South Africa, April 5, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Esa Alexander) Limited awareness and data

However, significant obstacles to BESS deployment still stand in the way of its massive potential. Iwu of Empower New Energy said limited awareness of utility-scale BESS, as well as concerns about financing and a lack of long-term performance data continue to slow investment across Africa. 

Governments and developers need to build more pilot projects and demonstration sites to generate evidence of the technology’s value and benefits and boost confidence among investors and policymakers, he added. To scale BESS, we need to “keep amassing this [evidence] data and keep talking about it and exploring it,” Iwu said.

Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals

To help address those barriers, Omole said a BESS Consortium under the Global Energy Alliance is working with governments, development banks and other technical partners to de-risk the sector for private financiers by generating evidence from early projects, mobilising public finance to attract private capital, and introducing policies that make battery storage commercially viable.

“This coordinated action helps African nations bypass legacy infrastructure constraints, integrate massive volumes of clean energy, and secure the reliable power required for large-scale industrialisation,” Omole explained.

The post Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future? appeared first on Climate Home News.

It’s not easy being green — especially when you’re a scientist in an environmental field. Sometimes we’ve been at it for so long we lose sight of the many sympathetic folks and resources that surround us.

But there’s much we can do to find local, national, and international colleagues, and more importantly help the public understand the importance of what we do every day.

 

 

Dear Dr. Green,

I’ve been active in the environmental movement ever since high school. I’m a microbiologist studying the ability of bacteria and fungi to break down pollution. I also partner with organizations like Mossy Earth to restore degraded land. I’m seeing a lot of burnout and pessimism in environmentalist circles, but I’m really optimistic about humanity’s odds to beat climate change, habitat destruction, and our other problems. The scientific discoveries I make show me that nature is resilient. I can’t seem to convince anyone, though. My question is: How do people find hope again? Sometimes it feels like I’m carrying a torch in the dark all by my lonesome.

T.F.

Hello T.F.,

First, thank you for your service and dedication to environmentalism. We need people with the optimistic, whole-hearted commitment to our natural world more than ever. Your  optimism is invigorating and your work sounds fascinating and fulfilling.

Loneliness seems to be part of the package, too, but you don’t have to feel alone. Like the discoveries you’ve made about nature’s resilience, you need to nurture your own resilience and gather other environmentalists around you in a vibrant collective.

Let’s look at how we can get you more grounded with others who share your values and work ethic and how you can inspire hope in the process.

Start with yourself, then friends and colleagues, and expand from there.

Do you like to write about your ecological science work in language accessible to the public? That might be a great way to contribute to local and regional newspapers’ editorial sections; or contact the editors of regional media and suggest an environmental section if there isn’t one already. Such pieces can get people involved in local issues that affect their health and wealth.

Look for local events like farmers’ markets and monthly town celebrations where you might try having an informational table or booth and meet and greet. It may cost you a bit, but you can set out a donation jar to offset costs and get friends involved to help. The World Wildlife Fund has a great guide on how to host an information booth.

Next, reach out to your circle of professional contacts, groups and colleagues — even if you haven’t talked to them in ages. I’m not a fan of Facebook, but it can be a handy place to seek out old comrades and colleagues in your field, as can other social media platforms or LinkedIn. You mentioned your work with Mossy Earth; did you make connections there? Reach out and find where they are gathering with other environmental scientists. What are some other environmental circles you have worked or participated in?

Consider becoming an educator and mentor for younger folks interested in the work you do.

Young people — and really, anyone at any age — love learning about cool stuff like using bacteria and fungi to destroy pollutants. Mentor school kids: They might want to follow in your footsteps. Look for some public presentation opportunities at your local library, community and youth centers, the YMCA/YWCA, Rotary and other clubs (Lions Club, Elks, Veterans), local outdoors clubs — like hiking, gardening, surfing, boating — churches, schools (especially science classes), and community colleges and universities. These places are always looking for guest speakers or experts.

Develop a PowerPoint projected slideshow, handouts, and other educational materials. Again, a little out-of-pocket cost for screens, projectors, and your time is cheaper than feeling lonely or despairing.

In giving these talks, you’ll meet people and have a chance to enlighten them. Remember to speak in layman’s terms: Explain any concept in simple easy-to-understand language and don’t get in the weeds with overly academic or scientific terms. Focus on the enthusiasm you have for what you do, and the audience will be enthusiastic too.

People can rediscover hope when you show them good news about new  developments in environmental science.

Shine a light for everyday people who are not scientists, but who are eco-curious. Communicate to them what you and your colleagues are doing to save the environment, such as with Mossy Earth and other organizations and teams. Your rich experience and optimism will get people engaged.

Scientific achievements mean little to the public unless people in the sciences, like us, get out there and talk about what we’re doing.

Let our readers know how it’s going and ask more questions about the dissemination of scientific work to the public. We want to know how you move forward with this!

See you next time!

Cheers, my friend

Dr. Green

What are you struggling with as a dedicated environmentalist and global citizen? Let us know by sending your questions and success stories in the text box below.

All participants are anonymous. Even Dr. Green has no idea who you are.

Send Dr. Green your questions and stories below:

All questions are considered intended for publication; published questions will be kept anonymous. Individual replies are not possible.

Disclaimer: This column is not a replacement for therapy, and the advice given is educational in nature, not a replacement for professional psychological or psychiatric therapy. This is a peer-driven support effort by The Revelator to inform and build community with environmental and wildlife defenders.

If you are feeling critically depressed and suicidal, it’s time to immediately find professional help. Go to your closest emergency room or call the following numbers to get immediate help in your area:

SUICIDE HOTLINES

Worldwide: http://www.befrienders.org/support/

United Kingdom: http://www.samaritans.org

USA: http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org

1-800-273-TALK

Resources:

“Feeling Hopeless About the Climate? Try Our 30-Day Action Plan” (The Revelator)

“Yes, Your Friends and Neighbors Want to Talk to You About Climate Change” (The Revelator)

WWF: “How to Host a Booth or Table at a Community Event”

The Nature Conservancy: “Ways to Get Involved”

Mossy Earth: A Team Restoring Nature & Fighting Climate Change

American Scientist: “12 Tips for Scientists Writing for the General Public” by Katie L. Burke

Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe

What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

The post Dr. Green: An Environmentalist Scientist Asks About Finding Connections and Inspiring Hope appeared first on The Revelator.

Eric Mackres is senior manager of urban analytics for the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and attended London Climate Action Week during the June 2026 heatwave. Usama Bilal is an associate professor of epidemiology and co-director of the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University.

As thousands gathered in London for one of the year’s largest climate gatherings last week, Western Europe faced its most severe heatwave ever recorded. The irony was not lost.

Across Europe, over a dozen countries issued urgent heat warnings and the World Health Organization recorded over 1,300 excess deaths. In London, where air conditioning is rare in buildings and on trains and buses, temperatures soared past 36 degrees Celsius (97F) and schools closed early. The mayor announced the city’s first heat action plan – an important step.

Extreme heat is now a public health crisis for many of the world’s cities, as the urban heat island effect intensifies dangerous temperatures – and it’s growing worse. Around 500,000 people die from extreme heat every year. As global temperatures rise, and with a severe El Niño getting underway, even more people will die and be hospitalised unless cities act soon.

But most cities are still taking a far too one-sized-fits-all approach to tackling heat, looking only at temperatures and not its local effects on people and their health.

People experience heat differently

How extreme heat affects people’s health can vary widely across a country and city, depending on their environment and demographics. Cities can save far more lives and prevent more hospitalisations by taking a tailored approach, using data to understand who’s most vulnerable and directing solutions toward them.

The good news: better data now exists that enable cities to pinpoint who’s most at risk. And that data can inform customised adaptation strategies to save lives. Indeed, the future of cities will hinge on their ability to deliver solutions to extreme heat tailored to at-risk people and neighborhoods.

Comment: Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions

First, cities should start by measuring heat’s risks to people’s health locally. Our work in Brazil and across Latin America shows big differences in what temperatures are dangerous and how quickly risks escalate at higher temperatures. These variations exist between cities, between demographic groups and between neighbourhoods.

But it’s not as simple as finding the hottest places. In temperate Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, a person’s risk of death increases by 25% at temperatures of 27 degrees Celsius (81F). In tropical Teresina, in northern Brazil, which is hot year-round, the same temperature does not elevate the risk of death. At 32 degrees Celsius (90F), a person’s risk of death increases by a milder 10%.

These differences also exist within cities where the climate is the same. Elderly people, the very young, lower-income communities and those without air-conditioning and shaded green spaces are all more likely to get sick, be hospitalised, or die from heat. Areas with more trees and green spaces usually have lower temperatures, and therefore lower impacts of heat.

Targeted heat alerts

Second, cities can use this data to develop early warning systems and outreach campaigns that give people more targeted heat alerts. Research in the UK found that the elderly, despite being among the most at-risk, often were unable to heed warnings during the 2022 heatwave. Well-designed heat warning systems and city responses strengthen people’s trust in health services. They can change people’s behaviours and better prepare municipal services, helping reduce illness, hospital visits and deaths.

Rio de Janeiro adopted a heat alert system in 2024 with five alert levels based on past heatwaves’ impacts on health and forecasts of when temperature and humidity will hit those dangerous levels again. The alert levels activate services like cooling centres, extra public drinking water, and changes to outdoor events. When a heatwave struck during Carnival in 2025, the city was able to deploy resources to protect and warn people while still allowing events to go on.

WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in

Finally, cities should use local heat data to target cooling solutions to where they can help people the most. Solutions like tree cover, shade structures and cool roofs lower temperatures and can provide targeted relief for the most vulnerable people, like outdoor workers and those who travel by foot, bike or public transit.

In Florianópolis, Brazil, we helped the local government use heat impact modeling to design a green corridor and urban forestry project that will reduce pedestrians’ heat stress up to 7 degrees C. In Hermosillo, Mexico, our researchers worked with the city and found that certain neighbourhoods could feel up to 14 degrees C hotter than the shaded city center. A park is now under construction that will bring better shade and heat relief to one of the city’s most at-risk areas.

A modular street shade structure on display during an event at New York Climate Action Week on Governors Island, NYC in September 2025. (Photo: Megan Rowling) A modular street shade structure on display during an event at New York Climate Action Week on Governors Island, NYC in September 2025. (Photo: Megan Rowling) Connecting health and climate planning

Momentum to address extreme heat in cities is growing, from both national and local governments. At last year’s UN climate summit in Brazil, the Belém Health Action Plan saw 30 national health ministries commit to build climate-resilient health systems based on local data and evidence-based policies.

And over 160 local governments joined the Beat the Heat initiative, committing to develop urban heat action plans and deliver passive cooling projects to reduce health risks.

But there’s still a disconnect between health, urban and climate officials. Only 23% of World Meteorological Organization member countries integrate weather information into health surveillance systems. Heat-health impact models, though increasingly easy to scale, are not yet built for every city. Some cities still need to collect local data for specific demographics and neighbourhoods – and many need support.

National and local governments will need to partner on this tailored approach. It will require integrating local heat and health data into public health systems, city planning, infrastructure, and disaster preparedness.

We have the data to know who will be most impacted by extreme heat when – and the solutions to keep people alive and out of the hospital. It’s time for governments to use them.

The post With extreme heat now a public health crisis, local data can save lives appeared first on Climate Home News.

As governments gathered at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa this month, pledging over $6 billion for marine protection, sustainable fisheries and offshore wind, one issue remained largely absent from the main stage: the continued expansion of offshore oil and gas.

From Norway, Brazil and Guyana to South Africa, Angola and Kenya, countries are pushing ahead with offshore oil and gas projects even as they promise to protect marine ecosystems and tackle the climate change that is heating the ocean, raising sea levels and damaging coastal livelihoods. 

Governments argue that offshore oil and gas production is needed for energy security, public revenues and economic growth, but environmental groups say new drilling risks locking countries into decades of fossil fuel production just as they are promising to build a sustainable blue economy. 

Inia Seruiratu, Fijian parliamentarian and the Pacific COP31 Envoy for the Ocean, said the contradiction is becoming harder to ignore. 

“For too long, two conversations – climate mitigation and ocean protection – have run on separate tracks, in separate rooms, with separate experts,” Seruiratu told delegates at a side event during the Mombasa conference held on the shores on the Indian Ocean. 

• Jun 19, 2026 Oceans Mombasa ocean summit drives progress on marine protection, but threats persist At the 11th Our Ocean conference in Kenya, its founder John Kerry says the ocean must become central to climate solutions and needs to be looked after Read more
• Jun 18, 2026 News West African nations target Eastern Atlantic for early high seas protection At the 11th Our Ocean Conference, African governments launched a bid to have the zone classified as one of the first high-seas protected areas Read more
• Jun 5, 2026 Nature Offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report warns Sea life in countries like Kenya is under threat from planned new oil and gas production, analysis by environmental groups has found Read more

“We talk about emissions reductions in one hall, and coral bleaching in the other, as if they were unrelated phenomena rather than cause and effect. As we commit to new marine protected areas, new ocean financing and fisheries action, we cannot continue to treat the symptoms while funding the disease,” he added. 

In Mombasa, only one side event out of the dozens of panels was dedicated to the threats posed by the expansion of offshore oil and gas. That event was organised by civil society rather than governments.

Kenyan officials led by deputy president Kithure Kindiki, alongside John Kerry, founder of the Our Ocean conference. (Photo: Kenya State Department for Blue Economy and Fisheries) Kenyan officials led by deputy president Kithure Kindiki, alongside John Kerry, founder of the Our Ocean conference. (Photo: Kenya State Department for Blue Economy and Fisheries) New wave of offshore projects

One-third of the world’s global production of oil and gas comes from offshore projects. They harm oceans in part through the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the fuels they produce, with climate change already driving record sea temperatures, coral bleaching and sea-level rise. 

Offshore exploration and production also affect marine life through seismic surveys, underwater noise, vessel traffic and the risk of oil spills, threatening sensitive habitats such as coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass meadows that support fisheries, biodiversity and coastal protection. 

Now, as onshore reserves mature, a new wave of offshore oil and gas development is advancing across the world. 

Offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report warns

A May report by Earth Insight found that 85% of all hydrocarbon discoveries made in 2024 were offshore, with new projects advancing from Norway and Brazil to Guyana, Namibia and East Africa. 

In Africa, countries such as Namibia, Tanzania and Kenya say exploiting fossil fuel resources could help finance development, support economic growth and lift millions out of poverty, particularly at a time when many face high debt levels and limited access to climate finance. 

Kenya’s conundrum

The debate was on display at the Mombasa conference, where host Kenya announced it was joining the Global Offshore Wind Alliance (GOWA), while also defending plans to explore for oil and gas in the Lamu Basin, a biodiverse coastal region. 

“The energy transition is a journey. It is not a one-stop shop,” Alex Wachira, principal secretary for Kenya’s Department of Energy, told Climate Home News. “Therefore, we must explore the transition and bring on as many options as possible while exploiting the resources we have. At some point, the entire sector will transition to 100% renewable,” he added. 

Wachira said Kenya’s low contribution to global emissions and its continued development needs justify pursuing offshore oil and gas alongside renewables, adding that the country still has “the industrial revolution” to achieve.

“Kenya needs to have a piece of the pie … our emissions today are the least, but we have suffered the most,” said Wachira. 

How Shell is still benefiting from offloaded Niger Delta oil assets

The East African nation is seen as a world leader in renewable energy, with about 90% of its electricity generated from geothermal, hydropower, wind and solar. 

Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan climate activist and member of the Fossil Free Ocean Initiative, said Kenya should focus on expanding renewable energy, adding that new fossil fuel projects could result in financial losses as countries move to cut planet-heating emissions and shift to cleaner energy. 

“We know we cannot have a future dependent on fossil fuels. The rest of the world is talking about how to move beyond them,” Elmawi told Climate Home News. 

“If we invest heavily in fossil fuels within our oceans, we’ll end up with stranded assets and a huge debt that taxpayers will have to pay,” he added. 

A side event on fossil-fuel-free oceans at the Our Ocean conference in Mombasa. (Photo: Kenya State Department for Blue Economy and Fisheries) A side event on fossil-fuel-free oceans at the Our Ocean conference in Mombasa. (Photo: Kenya State Department for Blue Economy and Fisheries) Offshore wind as a solution

Many environmental groups argue that offshore wind is a promising alternative, as it can deliver similar economic benefits from energy production without worsening climate change. 

A study unveiled at the Mombasa conference by Zero Carbon Analytics, Ocean Conservancy and GOWA found that Africa’s offshore wind potential is vast, yet largely untapped. 

The continent could install around 6,750 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity – roughly 28 times its current power generation capacity. 

Developing just 5% of that potential could create an estimated 5.9 million jobs and generate more than $1 trillion in economic benefits, while producing enough electricity to meet all projected growth in power demand through 2040, the study found. 

Campaigners say this could strengthen energy security, reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels and help build new industries around ports, manufacturing and maritime services. 

According to a 2025 World Bank report, every $1 million invested in offshore wind creates around 25 jobs – five times more than fossil fuels. 

Robust marine protection needed

Bruna Campos, senior campaigner for the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said offshore wind offers a cleaner alternative to offshore oil and gas, but warned that poorly planned projects can also cause harm. 

She called for robust marine spatial planning, environmental assessments and early community involvement to ensure the industry does not repeat mistakes associated with fossil fuel development. 

“You need to understand what are the impacts that offshore wind will have on sensitive ecosystems and communities,” Campos told Climate Home News. 

West African nations target Eastern Atlantic for early high seas protection

A 2024 UN study found that offshore wind farms can disturb whales, seals, porpoises and migratory fish, particularly during construction, when underwater noise and seabed disruption are greatest. At the same time, turbine foundations can act as artificial reefs, creating habitat for some species and boosting local fish populations. 

Pacific COP31 Envoy for the Ocean Seruiratu said that while investing in renewables is crucial, it is also important to keep pushing for fossil fuels to be phased out. 

He said his own country, Fiji, is among a growing block of nations calling for “a binding international mechanism for an orderly and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels”. 

“Every offshore drilling decision, every new exploration site, every delayed phase-out is a decision made against the common good,” he added. 

The post Ocean summit stays silent on new wave of offshore oil and gas expansion appeared first on Climate Home News.

Governments are holding “critical” talks this week on a global treaty to curb plastic pollution, as some countries and activists warn that key issues – including measures to rein in soaring plastic production – are being sidelined.

Diplomats are meeting in person in Nairobi for the first time since negotiations were suspended in chaos nearly a year ago, stymied by a long-running deadlock that pits petrostates against more ambitious nations over the reach of the UN pact.

Because nearly all plastic is made from planet-heating oil, gas and coal, the sector’s trajectory will have a major influence on global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The four-day informal gathering, which begins on Tuesday, has been billed by the chair of the talks, Chilean ambassador Julio Cordano, as a “brainstorming” session in which countries are invited to put forward possible solutions to some of the treaty negotiations’ most divisive elements.

Cordano is expected to distill those views in a new document intended to serve as the basis for a new draft text of the future treaty, which governments would take up at the next official round of negotiations, scheduled for March 13-24, 2027.

Two earlier rounds, each billed as the final one, ended without agreement, derailed largely by a standoff over how the treaty should address plastic production, which the UN says is set to triple by 2060 without intervention.

Production curbs in the spotlight

Large fossil fuel and petrochemical producers, led by Saudi Arabia, the United States, Russia and India, have repeatedly argued that the treaty should focus only on managing plastic waste. A US State Department spokesperson told Climate Home News that Washington supports “practical, cost-effective solutions” to plastic pollution, while opposing “global plastic bans”.

A majority of countries – including most European, Latin American, African and Pacific island nations -want to limit the manufacturing of plastic to “sustainable levels”, but have not pushed for any wide-ranging ban. 

• Jun 22, 2026 Comment China’s coal-chemicals boom risks repeating the mistakes of the past By reviving the problematic industry in the name of energy security, China runs the risk of higher emissions, stranded assets and setting back its ambitions as a clean energy leader Read more
• Mar 18, 2026 News Roadmap launched to restart deadlocked UN plastics treaty talks The chair of the negotiations proposes informal meetings through 2026 to bridge deep divisions among countries, following the collapse of talks in Geneva last year Read more

Ahead of what it described as “critical” talks in Nairobi, the French government said last week it had already shown flexibility and “significantly scaled back” its initial ambitions. But a French official told a meeting of EU environment ministers that without an explicit reference to the “unsustainable nature” of plastic production, the treaty would be “fundamentally unbalanced, ineffective and, worse still, could set us on the wrong path for decades to come”.

In a separate written communication, the French government lamented that informal meetings held in recent months have given “disproportionate visibility to the positions of the least ambitious states”, fuelling a “risk that partial agreements may be reached only on the issues with the broadest consensus”.

Dennis Clare, a negotiator for the Pacific island nation of Micronesia, told Climate Home News that “if we fail to address any key elements”, including overproduction, the impacts of the plastic crisis on the climate, human health and ecosystems will only grow more severe. 

Fears over “political calculations”

Despite such concerns, plastics production is not mentioned in the wide-ranging list of topics Cordano has drafted for the meeting – an omission that has alarmed observers.

Christina Dixon, a campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), said there appeared to be an attempt to write off this crucial element of the treaty as “too complicated and politically unviable”.

David Azoulay, environmental health programme director at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said the meeting’s proposed structure was “highly concerning”. He accused the chair of “making political calculations in favour of potential short-term wins” and aiming to deliver a treaty “based on the lowest common denominator”.

UN asks AI companies to reveal full environmental impacts

Speaking to journalists last week, Cordano pushed back, insisting that “no topic is off the table” and inviting countries to bring whatever proposals they judged necessary for a successful outcome.

He added that the treaty could not be allowed to settle for just any level of ambition, and that he would not be happy with an outcome at all costs.

“This is what makes it so difficult and complex,” said Cordano, who was elected in February after his predecessor’s resignation. Countries “are trying to be creative” in finding solutions, he explained, because “the road to the objective of our work might not be so obvious”.

The post UN plastics pact talks restart amid fears production curbs will be left out appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tomás Ayala leaps off the side of a small dinghy and into the dark swell of water. His arms slice through the waves like a cutlass as he dives deep into the bay off the southeastern coast of the Puerto Rican island of Culebra. Armed with a spear gun, Ayala swims even deeper as he scans the perimeter of the reef for his target. It doesn’t take long. Mere seconds later, a cloud of blood darkens the water around a large hogfish — proof enough that he found his mark. He snatches up his catch and makes for the surface. 

Back safely on his boat, Ayala drops the reef fish into a cooler, guns the motor, and heads for shore. It’s late Wednesday afternoon in mid-May. Ayala has been out since before dawn. The 50-year-old hails from a family of fishers — he started free diving for reef fish, laying lobster traps, and catching octopus when he was just eight years old, following in the footsteps of his brother and grandfather. Before long, he arrives at his destination — a concrete dock leading to a villa pesquera, a “fishing village” or “fish landing center,” a site with key infrastructure for Culebra’s community of traditional fisherfolk. Inside are cleaning stations, freezers, a saltwater tank for storing lobsters, a mélange of other equipment, and a bustling market. 

The villa pesquera provides the equipment dozens of local fishers need to sustain their work, and also a space to convene: Every week, the association that co-manages the space comes together for updates and to share their challenges and successes.

Ayala is greeted by Nicolás Gómez Andújar, a marine scientist whose dad is a local fisher, and they prepare the space for their next gathering. The members will discuss the federal permits they’re hoping to get for a native oyster farm, the effort to clear droves of abandoned fishing gear from Culebra’s seabed, and anything else someone may want to bring to the group. While they talk, they’ll eat a seafood mofongo, a popular shrimp-and-plantain dish.

Ayala and Pedro Gómez drive a boat off the coast of the island-municipality of Culebra. Nelson Vega Oliveras / 9 Millones

For decades, Culebra’s villa pesquera lay dormant, an abandoned facility shut down by the Puerto Rican government in 2002 because of political infighting, loss of government funding, and conflict between local fishers. In 2021, when Ayala and Gómez Andújar decided they wanted to resurrect it, dozens of their friends, neighbors, and local businesses donated time and labor to restore the dilapidated structure. It took roughly four years of organizing, fundraising, and securing permits for it all to come together. 

Last October, they formally reopened the fish market to much fanfare. Hundreds of people, on an island home to less than 2,000, showed up to help celebrate. They ate, laughed, and danced together. “We created what we dreamed of,” said Ayala. 

Hidden behind their success, however, lies a story of entrenched government divides and a growing need to rehaul how fishers are represented across the Puerto Rican government. The very survival of small-scale fishing and its unsung role in Puerto Rico’s food system depends on it — especially in the face of climate change, as rising temperatures make it harder and harder to fish for a living.

Ayala fishes for sardines following small-scale and artisanal practices. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

In the early to mid-1960s, amid a push to modernize commercial fishing boats and docking facilities, the Puerto Rican government formally established villas pesqueras, turning informal fishing spots into regulated, communal spaces. In 1979, Corporación para el Desarrollo y Administración de los Recursos Marinos, Lacustres, y Fluviales, or CODREMAR, the centralized agency tasked with handling all research, education, and conservation efforts related to commercial fishing, was born.

By the early ‘80s, the government began promoting the implementation of “fisher associations,” or organized local groups tasked with controlling their own seafood sales — partly to break up emerging seafood monopolies — and co-managing the villas pesqueras alongside municipalities. What happened next is not well documented. Research by University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez social anthropologist Manuel Valdés-Pizzini has found fishers still struggled to keep control of the landing centers because of political infighting and dwindling institutional support — the same dynamics that ultimately led to the closure of Culebra’s fishing village.

“There is a lot of politics in this,” said Valdés-Pizzini. “The landing center is just one piece of infrastructure in the whole fishery, culture, and society.”

In 1990, CODREMAR was dissolved after the Puerto Rican government deemed its oversight of the fishing sector inefficient, leaving its core responsibilities to be divvied up between two agencies — Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture and Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. Nowadays, experts and fishers alike say the governance of the industry in Puerto Rico is little more than a patchwork, piecemeal approach splintered across just about every layer of government. Villas pesqueras are typically co-managed by local fishing associations, independent fishers or businesses, municipalities, and the Department of Agriculture. Some of the equipment inside, such as storage lockers, is overseen by the Department of Agriculture, and fishers’ licenses, boat ramps, and other permitting approvals are largely regulated by the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. 

The list of government stakeholders and regulators also includes the Puerto Rican Department of Economic Development and Commerce, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Caribbean Fishery Management Council, the Puerto Rico State Historic Preservation Office, and the Puerto Rico Planning Board, among others. For the fishers who are trying to adapt to global warming, such as those in Culebra, the red tape just gets in the way.

A forthcoming analysis by The Nature Conservancy Puerto Rico, previewed exclusively by Grist and 9 Millones, found that the burdens of this existing regulatory process as it relates to marine aquaculture “can be disproportionately high for small-scale producers.” Permits and authorizations are not only notoriously unwieldy for small fishers, but can also cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, according to the report. For some, as in the case of traditional shellfish farmers, the upfront and operating costs can be far more than what their peers in other parts of the U.S. pay.

Puerto Rico’s fishing sector also differs from the rest of the U.S. in that it’s primarily made up of small-scale, artisanal fishers rather than industrial-scale operations. Fisheries account for a marginal slice of the archipelago’s economy. Commercial fishing falls within Puerto Rico’s agriculture, forestry, and fishing sector, which accounted for just 0.69 percent of Puerto Rico’s gross domestic product in 2024. Yet in the most vulnerable island communities, where food is almost exclusively imported, poverty rates are more than double the national U.S. average, and resources are scarce, the expansion of local fishing could serve as the cornerstone of long-term food security and sovereignty. 

A recent report found that just 12 villas pesqueras contribute more than $3 million every year to Puerto Rico’s economy. And that contribution is poised to grow, as more fishers advocate for a streamlined permitting system, better industry and cultural valuations for small-scale operators, and a centralized regulatory landscape overseen by one government office. Without those changes, they face an uncertain future. 

“Fishers are embedded in this complex web with the Department of Agriculture and Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. These different governmental institutions, they don’t seem to be talking to each other. There’s a disconnection,” said Luis Alexis Rodríguez Cruz, a food systems researcher and science communicator who works with the Caribbean Agroecology Institute on fisheries. “In Spanish we say, ‘Entre la espada y la pared’ — between the sword and the wall. It’s like, you want to do something, because this agency is requiring you to do [it], often this other agency is not requiring it, or somewhat counters it.”

An aerial view of the fishing village in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, which includes an area for processing the catch of the day and a fish market. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

Even as distrust between fishers and the government deepens, the effects of climate change are pushing fishers toward that very system for relief. 

Rising seas driven by a warming planet have continued to encroach upon shorelines, wetlands, and coastal infrastructure throughout Puerto Rico. Erosion has been identified in more than a third of Puerto Rico’s beaches. The situation is so dire that in 2023, the Puerto Rican government declared a state of emergency over the issue, a move that included earmarking $105 million in federal funds to implement nearly two dozen measures to minimize the effects. Late last month, Puerto Rico’s Governor Jenniffer González-Colón declared yet another state of emergency over coastal erosion. On May 27, days before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, González-Colón signed an executive order that described the “critical condition” of erosion as only having “accelerated” because of rising sea levels, storm surges, atmospheric phenomena, and the landscape vulnerability of several Puerto Rican coastal communities. 

Since 1901, the average ocean temperature around Puerto Rico has increased by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This has scrambled the region’s marine biodiversity — killing off coral reefs and seagrass, shifting which species are more abundant, and affecting the quality of the catch. But the surging frequency of intensified hurricanes hitting the Caribbean remains the biggest climate stressor for Puerto Rico’s fishing sector. 

In 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico as a Category 5 storm, devastating the archipelago and plunging parts of it into close to a year without power. The hurricane was also devastating for small fisheries, which lost an estimated $17.8 million in damaged gear, boats, and shoreside infrastructure, including villas pesqueras. Following the storm, the Puerto Rican government set out to rebuild and reconstruct the fishing hubs with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA, but quickly ran into issues. Aid was repeatedly delayed. Some fisherfolk didn’t receive any federal support for years and were forced to operate in makeshift markets. Others rebuilt, bit by bit, on their own dime. 

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Although no official record of how many structures were lost to the storm currently exists, a 2026 survey by the nonprofit Conservación ConCiencia found that 41 villas pesqueras are actively selling seafood, down from approximately 63 in the ‘80s, and the conditions of those facilities vary widely. The number of total active villages is unknown to the Puerto Rican government. The Department of Natural and Environmental Resources told Grist in an email that the agency currently has 1,646 “bonafide and licensed fishermen on record.” However, there tends to be discrepancies between the number of fishers licensed and those that show up in government data captured by multiple agencies.  

In the small beach town of Ceiba, which hugs the eastern tip of Puerto Rico’s mainland, Beverly Román Figueroa and her partner Ernesto Correa Torres have been fighting battle after battle with local authorities over their villa pesquera — battles that began when Maria hit. 

After the storm severely damaged Ceiba’s fishing hub, Román Figueroa says they were told by the mayor that the municipality had been allocated a little over $124,000 of Federal Emergency Management Agency aid to pay for the repairs. But when she and Correa Torres would visit the site — even as late as 2023, after a lengthy contract dispute over the villa pesquera’s management — they found little evidence that any work had been done. Photos and videos taken in March of 2023 show destroyed pipes and waterlogged floors and walls — a largely unusable space. 

“What they handed me was a neglected property,” said Correa Torres in Spanish. “This isn’t mine; this belongs to the people of Puerto Rico and to the fishermen.”

In Puerto Rico, fishing is a trade passed down through generations. Nelson Vega Oliveras / 9 Millones

For months, their requests for repairs went unanswered by local and federal officials. (The Department of Agriculture sent representatives at one point to conduct an on-site inspection, Román Figueroa says, but the visit resulted in “no real action.”) Tired of waiting and needing to generate income, the duo invested more than $60,000 of their own money into fixing up the villa pesquera. They even collaborated with Conservación ConCiencia and Hispanic Federation to get solar panels installed on the fish market for cleaner, cheaper power. 

Three years later, the structure and its facilities — storage lockers, the boat ramp, and the floating dock — are always accessible to local fishers. Its new restaurant, Pescaderia y Restaurante ANSI, is open four days a week. Román Figueroa whips up piping hot meals like sancocho de tiburón, a traditional stew made from the shark that Correa Torres hauls in from the sea. He is president of ANSI, the company made up of local fishers who manage the villa; she, the secretary and resident cook. Their children also help out — their daughter works in the market, and their son is also a fisher. 

“It was a disaster … but little by little, we got it back up and running,” said Román Figueroa in Spanish. The government, she says, had no part in that. “Despite everything we have done at the villa, we have worked alone.”

A sign reads, “Warning, ramp for exclusive use by commercial fishers” in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

Ariam Torres Cordero, an environmental planner and assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, has visited at least 15 of the archipelago’s villas pesqueras in the last two years to begin mapping the current state of the fishing industry. Together with Valdés-Pizzini, he is setting out to change the fact that the government has no official account of the current conditions of the fishing hubs in Puerto Rico. “You can see, already, the deterioration, even despite the fact that they were reconstructed less than eight years ago. You can already see the impacts of coastal erosion,” said Torres Cordero. 

Puerto Rico’s governance of the sector has made fishers more vulnerable to these threats — not less. This is most apparent in the bungled rebuilding of the dozens of villas pesqueras destroyed by Maria. Fisher communities across the archipelago still report being unable to access federal aid to repair storm-ravaged facilities and equipment. 

An audit published in January 2025 by the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Commerce found that Puerto Rico’s government had distributed only around 7 percent of the $11.4 million in disaster assistance funds earmarked for fisheries since April 2020 and had completed just 4 of 17 designated restoration projects. 

Puerto Rico Secretary of the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources Waldemar Quiles Pérez did not address Grist and 9 Millones’ requests for clarification on the severe delays revealed in the audit or provide updates on the agency’s aid disbursement. “All of the fishing spaces around the Island are either privately owned or are administer[ed] by the Department of Agriculture,” Quiles Pérez said in a written statement. 

Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Not only was the allocation of the aid itself riddled with delays and discrepancies, Torres Cordero pointed out, but what little money the federal government distributed for post-disaster rebuilding of villas pesqueras wasn’t used to rebuild in a way that accounts for the effects of climate change on fishing infrastructure. That much is obvious in how many of the facilities are already falling apart. By building back the structures just as they were designed decades ago, “we’re bound for another situation where we’re going to end up with most of this infrastructure being basically destroyed,” said Torres Cordero. “It’s not sustainable just to keep rebuilding the same.” 

With this in mind, he is trying to figure out how to minimize the risk of future storm and erosion damage while still allowing the fishing facilities to remain near the sea. The answer, he believes, lies in reimagining parts of the villa pesquera design itself to be both more durable and, where it makes the most sense, even mobile. 

Torres Cordero himself is recruiting the help of architecture, landscape, and social work students to come up with a new blueprint for a more “climate-proof” structure. “We need to decide, ‘What things do we need permanently placed in a location? And then what things should be mobile?’ And then design around that,” he said. 

A villa pesquera isn’t a simple building, however. The freezers and areas where fish are cleaned and prepared, for example, often require heavy equipment that would be too complex to move ahead of a storm. On the other hand, a fish market or dock could be designed to be mobile. (The Puerto Rican government, for its part, did try to do some version of this following Hurricane Maria by installing temporary floating docks in a handful of locations, which Torres Cordero says have proven not to be very durable or functional.) 

The pilot project is focused on the island of Vieques, another of Puerto Rico’s smaller island municipalities home to many traditional fishers. The work is in its infancy  — it only started coming together last summer – and Torres Cordero hasn’t yet secured the funding and capacity needed to move it forward. Several outside factors have also contributed to grounding the project before it’s really begun. In September, the fishers they were just beginning to collaborate with in Vieques were suddenly faced with the deployment of U.S. troops to the island, which the military considered a strategic position in its tensions with Venezuela. Vieques still bears the lasting environmental toll of decades of bombing by the U.S. Navy, which used much of the island for military practice. That included the navy’s regular disposal of unknown contaminants in the waters surrounding Vieques, polluting its fishing stock and marine ecosystems. Then, in April, students at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras went on strike, calling for the resignation of the university president, Zayira Jordán Conde, over her controversial decisions having to do with widespread research and staffing cuts.

“All of that fell apart,” said Torres Cordero. “Right now, we are playing the waiting game.” 

As the ocean temperature rises, fishers are forced to go to deeper waters. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

The fishers in Culebra are as ready as they can be for the next calamitous storm. That’s thanks to the more than two dozen solar panels lining the villa pesquera’s roof, the hurricane-proof windows found throughout the blue-and-white building, and a rainwater harvesting system ensuring a backup water supply. These are small but mighty ways fisherfolk there have already sought to better fortify themselves against the many climate-borne stressors assailing their sector. In doing so, they’ve also bolstered their island community’s defenses against food insecurity when the next hurricane or flood tears through Puerto Rico. 

Following Maria, Puerto Rico’s fishers mobilized to feed their neighbors. In Culebra, Ayala remembers how, after the hurricane left the island without electricity for half a year, the local seafood supply chain collapsed entirely. To meet the need, as fishers struggled with damaged gear and lack of power, and the community waited on external food aid that just didn’t come, Ayala organized an informal system. He collected fish from other fishermen, set up a makeshift area to clean the catch, and knocked on doors to sell directly to people. The grassroots effort underscored the need for a more resilient system, catalyzing the formation of the fishing association and restoration of their home base — the villa pesquera. 

Even though fishing only makes up a marginal slice of Puerto Rico’s economy, it’s clear that Culebra is better for the work that Ayala and Gómez Andújar are doing. For a community where about a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, a primary indicator of food insecurity, building a robust local supply chain and bolstering their resilience against environmental degradation isn’t merely an aspiration, but a survival strategy. So in 2020, Gómez Andújar and local environmental scientist Megan Considine set out to create another pillar of that vision — the only permitted oyster farm in Puerto Rico. 

“Climate change is, of course, this unpredictable threat. And it’s chronic, and it’s there,” Gómez Andújar said. “To a certain extent, we need to flow with it. We need to adapt. We need to mitigate.” 

Culebra fishers are prepared for an incoming storm and regular power outages in part by the more than two dozen solar panels installed on the roof of the villa pesquera.
Nelson Vega Oliveras / 9 Millones

Though the oyster farm is currently grant-funded, with only research permits, local fishers like Ayala view farming native shellfish as a way to spark future generations’ interest in careers in fishing and diversify the seafood supply chain operating out of Culebra’s villa pesquera. But in order to keep it running through the next few years, they’ll need to commercialize the farm. Everything was moving in the right direction — until late last month. 

Much of their farm’s federal compliance suddenly hinged on an Army Corps of Engineers permit at risk of expiring. Rather than chance violations, they made the difficult decision to, at least temporarily, shut down roughly half of their operations while awaiting that clearance. “It’s demoralizing,” said Gómez Andújar. “The main message, really, is we’re doing the best we can to do everything right, and it’s still very, very, very hard.” 

After their yearslong effort to restore Culebra’s fishing village, Gómez Andújar and Ayala are buried under layers of bureaucracy, yet again. The road ahead looks much like the road behind. 

“We show people how to live from the ocean, how to grow food from the ocean,” says Ayala. Fishing represents so much more to Ayala than just a job — it’s the foundation of Puerto Rico’s food-sovereign, climate-resilient future. “And the government is the biggest barrier.”

Filmmaker Nelson Vega Oliveras contributed reporting. 9 Millones’ Laura M. Quintero contributed editing.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Puerto Rico’s fishers, climate change isn’t the only challenge — being left to adapt alone is another on Jun 30, 2026.

No city dealing with a lot of lead pipes spends as much as Chicago does to replace them. 

With more than 400,000 lead water service lines, Chicago has the largest known inventory of lead pipes of any city in the country. Officials say replacing each one costs about $31,000 on average — more than six times the Environmental Protection Agency’s national estimate of $4,700 a line.

Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News surveyed other cities with the most lead service lines in the country — including Detroit, Milwaukee, and New York — about the cost of fully replacing a lead service line. The 18 that responded provided averages between $6,000 and $25,000, with most less than half of Chicago’s figure. Engineering firm CDM Smith, which works with cities across the country, pegs the national average at $12,500 per line. 

Now, with a federal mandate to remove every lead pipe within roughly 20 years, Chicago is facing a daunting timeline and an astronomical price tag. Replacing the city’s inventory at the current rate will cost more than $12 billion. 

“It is absurd,” said Cyndi Roper, a senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s safe water initiative. “You can’t play victim to your own policies. … You actually can make changes to bring the cost down.”

A review over seven months of hundreds of pages of program documents and contracts, plus dozens of interviews with city officials, policy experts, contractors, and homeowners, found several key contributors. The most significant include inefficient early contracts, cumbersome permitting requirements, and the city’s reliance on one-off replacements rather than undertaking whole blocks at once.

A glaring lack of clarity from the Department of Water Management, which oversees the city’s replacement program, has also made it difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons for the high cost. Its officials were unable to provide Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News with consistent figures for replacement costs and the number of lines replaced, or make clear whether the water department is tracking these costs systematically.

“It seems like the story here is how hard you have to work to get information that’s needed in order to figure out why the costs are so high,” Roper added.

More in this series

• Chicago residents risk daily lead exposure from toxic pipes. Replacing them will take decades.
• Chicago was supposed to warn residents about toxic lead pipes last year. Most still have no idea.
• Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all.

A spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson said in an emailed statement that he is committed to accelerating replacements and minimizing the burden to residents, but did not respond to specific questions about the city’s unusually high costs. 

“The Johnson administration is working across departments in coordination with local, state, and federal partners to accelerate replacements, streamline processes, and maximize every available dollar so more residents can access safe, reliable drinking water,” said the statement. 

Officials with the water department said they see some room to bring expenses down as work ramps up. But they’ve also disagreed with outside experts who say Chicago’s high costs are unreasonable, and they don’t appear to be treating the drastic cost differential with other cities as a high priority to address.

“There’s a lot of people that claim they know lead service line replacement,” said a senior official with the water department, who spoke with Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News on the condition of not being named. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” 

Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who has been working to secure federal funding for lead service line replacements across the state, said she wasn’t aware of the cost discrepancy but hoped the city would be transparent with the public about why costs are so high. 

“Cities just need to get their act together and get this done, and we’ve been slow to do this in Chicago,” Duckworth said. “Other cities have moved much faster than us.”

Replacing pipes on an entire block

Chicago replaces lead service lines through several programs, including emergency repairs, capital improvement projects, and equity initiatives targeting low-income neighborhoods and daycares.

It also replaces entire blocks of lead pipes at once. But that program accounted for just 3 percent of the approximately 15,000 lines swapped out between 2021 and the end of 2025, according to analysis of city replacement data by Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News. Instead, nearly all of those lines were fixed piecemeal, mostly when crews were sent out to fix leaks and breaks. 

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Both city officials and experts agree that replacing lead pipes a full block at a time is cheaper. In Milwaukee, the per-line cost to replace a full neighborhood is nearly $2,000 less than a one-off replacement. Chicago officials say they want to ramp up blockwide replacements, but there have been legal and logistical barriers to expanding that program. 

In Illinois, property owners control half the service line, and the municipality is responsible for the other. State law forbids partial line replacement because the process can flush more lead into drinking water, and municipalities willing to replace private lines must first get the property owners’ permission. That’s harder and more time-consuming than it may seem, a key reason for the city’s low number of block replacements, according to officials.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers introduced a new bill at the water department’s request to fix that, granting city plumbers access to private lines without the owner’s permission. It passed in May and now awaits Governor JB Pritzker’s signature.

“We need to accelerate, as much as humanly possible, this process,” said state Senator Ram Villivalam of Chicago, a co-sponsor of the bill. 

A Chicago resident holds a lead water test kit from the city. Anthony Vazquez / Chicago Sun-Times

Still, it’s not clear how much block-level replacements will actually decrease Chicago’s costs. Water department officials pegged the average per-line cost for block-level work, which they have said is their cheapest program, at approximately $34,000, and the average for one-off replacements at $39,000. Both figures are well above the $31,000 overall average that department officials have cited.

Asked to explain how that could be, the water department did not respond. In her last email to the news organizations in May, water department spokesperson Megan Vidis said she would not answer any more questions on the topic.

The toll on homeowners

Any lead pipe a property owner replaces on their own is one the city doesn’t have to pay for. But some homeowners are finding that far harder than they imagined — in part because of the city’s prohibitively expensive and complex permitting process. 

Craig Hines and his wife, homeowners in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood, discovered they had a lead service line last summer when they received a letter from the city. They were immediately alarmed. They cook regularly for young nieces and nephews, and Hines knows there’s no safe level of lead exposure.

They called 14 plumbers looking for a quote. Some refused to take them on or seemed to be trying to dissuade them from doing the work altogether, saying the job would be too expensive. One preliminary quote totaled $25,000. They were told permits alone could cost between $5,000 and $7,000.

“These fees seem so exorbitant when it’s like, this was a city screw-up,” Hines said, referring to Chicago’s history of installing lead lines long after the health consequences came to light. “I just cannot believe that the permitting fees are so high to help fix a problem that the city created.”

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Replacing a single line can require permits from the water and transportation departments as well as inspection-related charges, according to the city’s Department of Buildings. The fees vary based on the type of street and size of pipe.

The water department said it waives all its permit fees when the city pays for replacements. But it’s not so simple when property owners want to shoulder the cost. Some qualify for a city program waiving up to $5,000 in fees; others don’t. Water department officials could not provide an average cost for permits, saying it varies by project site. 

After more than six months of research, including contacting their alderman, district commissioner, and multiple city departments to track down answers about costs, Hines and his wife finally settled on a plumber who knew how to navigate the city’s permit waivers. He gave them a quote of $22,000 for the job, which he said will include permits. They hope their replacement will take place in July.

Several miles south, Ryan Wilson and his wife, Alaina Harkness, said they didn’t qualify for the fee waiver. They paid nearly $25,000 to replace the lead line at their Hyde Park home last year, but because they also upsized their service line while replacing it, they weren’t eligible for the waiver.

Ryan Wilson and Alaina Harkness stand next to their new water meter that was placed during the replacement of the lead pipes in their Hyde Park home. Anthony Vazquez / Chicago Sun-Times

Wilson has worked in urban planning for decades, and even so, said he found navigating the city’s permitting requirements extremely confusing. They never were able to figure out how much of their final bill was allotted to permits. If Chicago wants to improve citywide replacement efforts, Wilson said, improving the permitting process should be high on the list.

“There’s not a single person to talk to about this,” he said.

Inefficient contracts and funding woes 

Water department officials pointed to two key reasons for the high costs. First, they said that the city lacked a firm grasp of costs when launching its replacement program in 2021 and that its first round of contracts was inefficient. The early contracts also bundled jobs poorly, tasking contractors with work outside their specialization, like having plumbers work on restoration or outreach.

“Early on, the issue was … a lot of unknowns in our contracts,” the water department’s deputy commissioner, Michael Grillo, said at a webinar last fall. “We are trying to be smarter with our contracts that go out, be more specific, eliminate those unknowns.”

Plumbing companies overbid to cover worst-case scenarios in those early contracts, he said. The water department’s Vidis confirmed via email that the city has implemented four new contracts this year, focused on improving equitable access for small businesses to replace lead service lines, but said the goal of those contracts was not to reduce per-line prices. 

Grillo also blamed labor costs for part of the city’s high price tag. But that explanation doesn’t appear to pan out. 

The base prevailing wage for a union plumber in the Chicago area is $99.52 per hour. By contrast, it’s about $97 in Minneapolis and roughly $121 in New York City, both of which replace their lead pipes for less than half of Chicago’s costs.  

“I have a hard time believing that the prevailing wage would be the cost factor,” said Betony Jones, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and former director of energy jobs under the Biden administration.

The city says a lack of robust, flexible funding is compounding the problem. Chicago has to cobble together funding from a patchwork of local and federal sources in the form of grants and low-interest loans, which bring red tape and restrictions.

The Biden-era Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act delivered a historic $15 billion for lead pipe removal, with Illinois getting about $1.2 billion, according to Duckworth’s office. This month, Duckworth’s office announced a separate $22 million federal grant earmarked for Chicago’s majority-Black Austin neighborhood — where 92 percent of service lines require replacement, according to last year’s lead service line inventory. At Chicago’s price point, the state estimates that $22 million will only replace about 650 lines out of the nearly 17,000 reported in city data for Austin last year. 

“Chicago needs to explain where the money is going and justify the cost,” wrote Elin Betanzo, a national drinking water expert who helped uncover the Flint water crisis, in an email.

Read Next He’s the only comprehensive lead tester in this contaminated neighborhood. He graduates next month. Anna Mattson

Betanzo, who has done extensive research on cost-saving tactics, said she has not seen a realistic cost breakdown that demonstrates why Chicago is paying as much as it is.

“They need to figure out how to complete the most cost-efficient lead service line replacements in the country, not the most expensive,” she added.

With funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act set to run out this year, public health experts have been calling for more local, federal, and state dollars to fund replacements, especially in overburdened cities like Chicago.

“It’s a critical part of the infrastructure,” Betanzo said. “It’s that final piece of public health protection.”

Amy Qin and Cam Rodriguez contributed data analysis to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why is it so unusually expensive to replace lead pipes in Chicago? on Jun 30, 2026.

For almost century, Europe’s agriculture has been structurally reliant on chemical fertilisers. The risks of this dependence have been made amply clear by successive conflicts that have disrupted supply chains, while decades of intensive application have led to pollution and soil imbalances. Changing this trajectory will be a tough challenge.

In France, the baguette has recently become a matter of public concern. According to the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES), staples of the French diet like bread, cereals, and even potatoes are among the main pathways of exposure to cadmium, a carcinogenic heavy metal that accumulates in agricultural soils. While cadmium is naturally present in the environment, its levels in France have become increasingly concerning over the past two decades, prompting ANSES to issue warnings that a significant share of the population is estimated to exceed health-based reference exposure values, with higher levels observed among children and adolescents. At the core of this looming public health crisis lies the intensive use of phosphate-based fertilisers. 

As the French Parliament moved to tighten cadmium limits in agricultural soils this spring – finally aligning national standards with existing European rules – the European Commission adopted a Fertiliser Action Plan designed to facilitate farmers’ access to key agricultural inputs. Like previous geopolitical shocks, the war in Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a major artery for global trade, have revealed Europe’s dependence on imported fertilisers.  

These local, national, European, and global developments point to a structural vulnerability at the heart of Europe’s food system, with fertilisers lying at the intersection of ecological constraints, public health, market volatility, and external dependence.  

Vulnerable supply chains 

On 19 May, more than 200 farmers protested in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, carrying a large red banner declaring a “fertiliser crisis”. Just a few weeks earlier, in April, the prices of many raw materials and fertilisers had surged. Urea, the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertiliser, had climbed above 850 dollars per tonne, the highest level since 2022.  An estimated 30 per cent of globally traded volumes of urea passed through Hormuz before the war.  

Since the 1950s, synthetic nutrients have dramatically increased agricultural productivity while reshaping Europe’s food system.

The effect of the blockade was compounded by the growing importance of Gulf states in the global fertiliser market. The world’s largest urea production complex, for instance, is located south of Doha, in Qatar. In the last 10 years, Saudi Arabia has also rapidly climbed the ranks among leading producers of phosphate-based fertilisers. The broader Gulf energy industrial complex, which underpins global fertiliser production, was put under pressure following Iran’s strikes on key energy infrastructure in the region. Qatar, for instance, suspended production of urea, ammonia, and sulfur after key facilities were damaged. 

Ammonia and sulphur, two key feedstocks used in fertiliser production, are intertwined with the fossil fuels extracted in the region. Ammonia, the key feedstock for the production of urea and all other nitrogen-based fertilisers, is obtained by combining nitrogen with hydrogen, the latter typically extracted from natural gas. Although efforts are underway to produce ammonia using “green hydrogen” produced from renewables, these technologies remain marginal.  

Similarly, sulphur is largely recovered as a by-product of oil and natural gas processing. Most of it is converted into sulfuric acid, essential for producing phosphate fertilisers, whose supply chains have also been disrupted by the war: Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates are major sulphur exporters. Iran, which exported sulphur to China, Latin America, Pakistan, India, and other Asian and African countries, halted production of both sulphur and ammonia during the conflict. In light of the crisis, countries such as China – the world’s largest producer of sulfuric acid – Turkey, and India considered export restrictions. 

An old dependency 

Europe’s dependence on imported fertilisers and their feedstocks has deep historical roots. Fertiliser use began as an innovative solution to increase agricultural productivity in the early 20th century, gradually reshaping the continent’s food system, and tying farming to industrial production and global supply chains. At the heart of this shift lies the industrial processing of three essential nutrients found naturally in the environment: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. “It’s like a big kitchen,” a laboratory operator at Norwegian fertiliser giant Yara International, told me. “These elements are mixed together according to farmers’ needs, increasingly in tailor-made combinations.” 

One of the earliest artificial fertilisers, superphosphate (SSP), was first produced commercially in the mid-19th century by treating phosphate rock, rich in phosphorus, with sulphuric acid. With SSP, fertiliser manufacturing gradually moved from farms – where the natural manure cycle was rooted in the recycling of organic waste back into agricultural soils – into the hands of the agrochemical industry, accompanying the industrialisation of agriculture in the early 20th century.  

The expansion of phosphate use further tied agrochemistry to mining: phosphate rock is only found in a handful of countries, particularly in North Africa. Morocco alone holds more than 70 per cent of global phosphate reserves; it is the world’s largest producer and the second-largest exporter after China. With some reserves facing depletion in the coming decades, Beijing has implemented export controls on phosphate fertilisers since 2021. In 2017, the European Commission added phosphate to its list of critical raw materials, acknowledging its strategic importance and Europe’s exposure to supply risk.  

Since the 1950s, synthetic nutrients have dramatically increased agricultural productivity while reshaping Europe’s food system. Globally, fertiliser use rose from roughly 30 million tonnes in 1960 to more than 190 million tonnes today – a more than sixfold increase. According to estimates by Fertilizers Europe, the industry’s main trade association in the EU, of the roughly 180 million hectares of agricultural land in the European Union, nearly 124 million are now fertilised. The remaining areas consist mainly of permanent grasslands, fallow land, or land left temporarily out of production. 

Arable land dedicated to annual crops accounts for 57 per cent of fertilised land. Yet this broad picture masks significant regional differences. In Western Europe, a substantial share of agricultural land is devoted to permanent crops (such as vineyards, orchards, and forestry plantations) as well as fertilised grasslands. In Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, agriculture is more heavily concentrated on large-scale annual cropping systems, particularly cereals, oilseeds such as rapeseed and sunflower, and fodder crops used for animal feed. As a result, Fertilizers Europe expects most Central and Eastern European EU member states to record higher fertiliser consumption in the coming years. 

The EU as a whole remains a key player in the global fertiliser market, with France, Poland, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Romania accounting for the bulk of phosphate fertiliser consumption. France is also the continent’s largest consumer of nitrogen fertilisers.  

However, overall consumption is contracting. In 2023, European agriculture applied 9.3 million tonnes of mineral fertilisers, marking a 3.7 per cent decrease compared to 2022 and a decline of more than 20 per cent from the 2017 peak. While producer associations point to signs of stabilisation and hope for a return to pre-2022 levels, the market still appears not to have fully recovered from the disruptions triggered by the war in Ukraine.  

But amid recurring geopolitical shocks and ecosystems reaching critical conditions, to what extent is a return to business as usual in fertiliser use necessary or desirable? 

Nutrition and pollution 

Intensive fertilisation has enabled Europe to expand agricultural production and secure millions of tonnes of food, but it has also created a dependence that goes beyond the actual agronomic needs of soils.  

Decades of continuous application have, in some cases, led to nutrient accumulation or imbalances. Numerous studies, some of them published by fertiliser producer associations themselves, suggest that fertiliser needs in many European and American production systems are increasingly oriented toward maintenance applications (keeping existing soil nutrient levels stable) rather than corrective inputs (raising deficient nutrient levels to a healthy target). Meanwhile, regions facing nutrient deficiencies, such as many African countries, still struggle to access fertilisers. 

Intensive nutrient use in the Global North has intensified concerns over soil health, water quality, and the accumulation of contaminants in agricultural land, all of which have entered public and policy debates. In recent years, discussions on fertiliser use in the EU have increasingly centred on pollution linked to eutrophication, a process in which excess nutrients in water bodies trigger algal blooms that deplete oxygen and disrupt aquatic ecosystems. The problem remains unresolved and continues to affect lakes and river deltas across Europe, despite the EU Nitrates Directive, which aims to reduce agricultural nitrate pollution. 

In Italy’s Po Delta, pollutants accumulated along the river system cause algal blooms, particularly in the summer. In Spain, civil society organisations have taken agro-industrial actors to court for eutrophication in the Mar Menor, accusing them of illegal discharges that contribute to the lagoon’s degradation. France’s recent cadmium controversy has expanded the debate on fertiliser sustainability beyond production sites to food safety and public health concerns.  

EU contradictions 

Despite the reassuring slogans of fertiliser producers, often framed in humanitarian terms – “saving lives” and “feeding the planet,” – the environmental costs of the agrochemical industry have long fuelled public debate and grassroots mobilisation. In autumn 2025, for instance, Tunisia saw large demonstrations against the Groupe Chimique Tunisien along the coastline of Gabès, following the hospitalisation of more than 200 people, mostly children, for respiratory distress and gas poisoning. 

In Europe, this tension between productivity and environmental limits gradually entered policy frameworks. In the early 2000s, the European agricultural policy framework finally acknowledged the urgency of limiting fertiliser dispersion by introducing environmental measures and, more recently, eco-schemes under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). These measures encourage farmers to return to more traditional agroecological practices, such as crop rotation with legumes and other plants capable of naturally enriching the soil. Agroecology Europe, a Brussels-based organisation, also recommends a partial return to non-chemical soil fertilisation methods.  

Geopolitical instability has added another layer of urgency to Europe’s need to reduce its dependency on mineral fertilisers. The President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, stressed in May that the EU’s Fertiliser Action Plan isn’t just about supporting farmers in the short term but also aimed at “accelerating innovation in sustainable, home-grown solutions”. She also acknowledged that “climate leadership and economic resilience are interlinked”. 

However, the EU is rolling back climate and environmental measures to placate farmers and pursue economic competitiveness. In early 2026, under pressure from the agrochemical sector, the European Commission proposed an amendment to its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), allowing for the temporary exclusion of certain products – particularly fertilisers – in the event of “serious harm to the EU internal market.” Meanwhile, the signing of the EU-Mercosur trade agreement with South American countries in January 2026 angered the agricultural sector, particularly in France, with farmers fearing unfair competition from imported products.  

These conflicting interests show that reversing a century-long trajectory of agricultural intensification and supply fragmentation won’t be easy, particularly in the current political climate. In this context, the EU appears to be advancing the liberalisation of agricultural policy under the banner of “sovereignty”. However, the declining productivity of soils and mounting ecological pressures both point to the need to transform this trajectory. 

The renewables tricks Channel Comment brendan 30th June 2026 Teaser Media

Originally published by Mongabay. 

VJOSA-NARTA, Albania — In late April, heavy machinery began moving into the Pishë Poro-Narta protected landscape on Albania’s Adriatic coast without permits or public notice. Bulldozers and excavators felled coastal pine trees, flattened sand dunes, and cut new roads through previously untouched habitat. Then, barbed wire fences went up along the shoreline.

The incursion was the realization of a luxury resort development backed by Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. The development plans of Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity fund, stretch from the uninhabited Sazan Island into the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape, the delta region of Albania’s Vjosa River that includes Pishë Poro-Narta.

Roughly twice the size of Paris, the Vjosa-Narta area shelters flamingos, Dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus), loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and more than 70 endangered species, among them the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus).

Neither Affinity Partners nor the office of the prime minister of Albania responded to Mongabay’s requests for comment.

Aerial drone video of demonstrators gathering at Dalan Beach on June 6 for a rally near the site of the original resort-construction site. Footage by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

When protesters arrived at the site, security guards confronted them. Video of a demonstrator being dragged across the dunes on May 30 near the village of Zvërnec went viral. Soon demonstrations erupted in Tirana, the Albanian capital, in what has since been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. The protests have grown larger every day, with tens of thousands demanding accountability for corruption, an end to environmental abuses, and the resignation of Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister.

On June 6, hundreds of demonstrators made their way to Dalan Beach for a symbolic rally near the site of the original incursion. The barbed wire fences had been taken down a few days earlier and the machinery was gone. But no one there believed the battle was done.

Protesters spell out “Save Narta” in the sand at Dalan Beach during a symbolic rally June 6 near the original resort-construction site, as the Adriatic Sea and surrounding hills frame what demonstrators are fighting to protect. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

Vjosa-Narta is one of the last intact delta wildernesses in the Mediterranean. Only 4% of the region’s deltas remain in a relatively undisturbed state, and this is the largest and most biodiverse. More than 2,300 species have been documented across a mosaic of lagoons, reed beds, salt flats and coastal dunes that formed over millennia.

“I call it the place where I go to meet the gods,” Hanais Mhilli, a 36-year-old baker and part-time hiking guide living in Vlorë, a city south of the delta, told Mongabay as he joined other protesters there who were boarding a bus to the beach.

At the heart of the delta lies the Narta Lagoon, a vast, shallow body of brackish water stretching more than 40 square kilometers (15.4 square miles) where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea. It hosts more than 20,000 wintering waterbirds and ranks among the most important wetlands on the Adriatic Flyway, the migration corridor along which millions of birds travel each year between Africa and Europe.

 

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“Here we are not just fighting for Albania’s natural heritage, we are fighting for the natural heritage” everywhere, Aleksandër Trajçe, executive director of the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, told Mongabay. “Italy and Spain have destroyed miles and miles of coastline and now they’re trying to restore what they lost. Albania doesn’t have to make the same mistakes.”

Protesters carry an Albanian flag along the beach in the Vjosa-Narta delta after a rally on June 6. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay. A Biosphere Reserve

For more than a decade, the Vjosa River — flowing from the Pindus Mountains in Greece through southern Albania to the Adriatic Sea — was at the center of one of Europe’s fiercest conservation battles. Though dammed near its headwaters in Greece, it runs entirely free through Albania, its channels shifting and braiding across gravel beds in patterns that once characterized rivers throughout Europe.

When the river faced a cascade of proposed hydropower projects, campaigners organized and won a landmark victory in 2023 as the Vjosa became Europe’s first Wild River National Park, pioneering a conservation model in which the river itself, not just the surrounding land, is protected from development.

The Vjosa River braids freely across a wide gravel floodplain in southern Albania. The Vjosa is one of the last major rivers in Europe to flow largely unimpeded by dams. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

But the delta was left out. Campaigners feared that pushing to include it would jeopardize the entire agreement, and it remained under a weaker designation, the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape. Where the national park carries the strictest level of protection under international conservation standards, the protected landscape category permits limited development and human use.

Warning signs quickly stacked up. Maps had already been redrawn to accommodate a new international airport near the lagoon. Then, in early 2024, the Rama government amended the law on protected areas to allow construction of what it vaguely describes as high-end tourism projects, even inside protected zones. Three weeks later, Kushner’s Affinity Partners announced its plans.

“The delta was intentionally left out of the national park,” Trajçe said. “It was part of a political agenda.”

Albania hopes to join the European Union by 2030, a goal that requires closing the environment chapter of accession negotiations. This in turn requires repealing the very amendment that created the high-end tourism exception.

What Trajçe and other conservationists see unfolding now is a race against that deadline. “It’s a rush for development before they change the law,” he said. “It defies the whole purpose of a protected area.”

A cut-out flamingo rises above the crowd at a protest June 9 in Tirana, where the bird has become the unlikely symbol of a movement that Albanians have dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. The ongoing protests were sparked by a planned luxury resort development in the country’s Vjosa-Narta delta region. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

In September 2025, the delta received an additional layer of protection when it was included in the newly designated Vjosa Valley UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a status the EU had supported as part of Albania’s accession process. But in January, Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, visited Albania with architects and met with Rama, a trip widely interpreted as a signal that the Kushner project was moving toward construction.

Rama has made his position clear. Speaking on the sidelines of the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Montenegro on June 5, he dismissed the international attention the project has drawn. “If it wasn’t Jared, they wouldn’t give a shit,” he told Politico.

From Source to Sea

Conservationists say the Albanian government has also failed to honor its legal obligations under the management plan for the wild river national park. While the park has delivered important results — most of all, stopping the dam projects — violations have mounted.

Large quantities of water have been diverted from the Shushicë River, a major tributary within the national park, for irrigation, in direct violation of the plan, with further plans to pipe its water to the coast for tourism development. Crude oil has spilled into the Vjosa near the town of Poçem, where 150 active oil wells line the river’s middle stretch.

Excavators work in September 2025 to divert water from the Shushicë River, a protected tributary of the Vjosa River within the Vjosa Wild River National Park, seemingly in violation of the park’s legally binding management plan. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

Ulrich Eichelmann, a German conservationist who heads the Vienna-based NGO RiverWatch and was a key driver behind the park’s establishment, said the government has treated the designation primarily as a marketing tool. Almost none of the activities required under the management plan have been implemented, he told Mongabay. “All they focus on is getting more tourists into the area,” Eichelmann said. “Three years after the national park was created, the river system is in a worse state than before.”

The threat to the delta is part of a broader global crisis. Deltas are among the most biologically productive ecosystems on earth, the place where freshwater and saltwater mix to create conditions of great fertility. But many deltas have been relentlessly exploited, drained for agriculture and built over for ports and other infrastructure. A 2024 assessment of all 258 river deltas discharging into the Mediterranean found that no large delta — except those in Albania — still qualifies as relatively intact.

“The delta is an integral part of the wild river,” Besjana Guri, founder of LUMI and winner of a 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work to protect the Vjosa River, told Mongabay. “Ecologically, you cannot divide them.”

A sea of protesters fills one of Tirana’s main boulevards on June 9, with crowds calling for the resignation of Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama. The ongoing protests were sparked by a planned luxury resort development in the country’s Vjosa-Narta delta region. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay. Euro Leverage

The Flamingo Revolution shows no sign of losing momentum. The demonstrations have remained largely peaceful, drawing people of all ages — young couples, parents with children, elderly Albanians who lived through decades of communist rule — united by something that has rarely mobilized this society before.

The movement has also attracted the attention of Albania’s anti-corruption authority. SPAK, the independent prosecutorial body that has pursued high-profile corruption cases since its establishment in 2019, has opened a formal investigation into the project, examining not only environmental violations but reportedly extending into questions of land ownership changes and government decisions made in 2024 that cleared the way for development in the protected area.

The EU’s position has sharpened significantly, too. The European Commission has publicly and repeatedly warned Albania that it must terminate the strategic investments law that gives favored projects fast-track treatment, bypassing environmental safeguards. Failure to do so, the commission made clear, could put Albania’s path to EU membership at risk.

“Can the EU really allow Albania to destroy this unique ecosystem on the last stretch before it becomes a member state?” asked Eichelmann before heading out to join other demonstrators on the ninth day of protests in Tirana. “I don’t think so.”

 

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Citations

Miho, A., Bego, F., & Beqiraj, S. (2023). Overview of the Vjosa Delta (Pishe Poro – Narta Landscape Protected Area) – Natural Values and Threats. Albanian Journal of Natural and Technical Sciences, 59(XXVIII), 43–68.

Schwarz, U. (2024). Mediterranean Deltas: Assessment of General Intactness Based on Hydromorphological Criteria and Land Use Obstruction. EuroNatur & Riverwatch, Radolfzell/Vienna.

Schwarz, U. (2025). The State of Balkan Rivers 2025: Hydromorphological Assessment and 13-Year Trends. EuroNatur & Riverwatch, Radolfzell/Vienna.

The post Albanian ‘Flamingo Revolution’ Aims to Stop Kushner-Backed Resort on Protected Delta appeared first on The Revelator.

How Indigenous Land and Water Defenders Strategized to Defend the Guatemalan People

This is part two of a two-part series on the Peaceful Resistance La Puya and Kappes v. Guatemala by Jennifer Moore at The Institute for Policy Studies and Ellen Moore at Earthworks. Read the first part here.

Nevada-based Kappes, Cassiday & Associates lost their international arbitration suit against Guatemala in December, 2025. The company was seeking damages because Guatemala’s courts had halted extraction at their gold mine there.

The Guatemalan government built its legal strategy in the case based on the legitimacy of the struggle of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, a social movement of Indigenous land and water defenders. Peaceful Resistance La Puya has maintained a 24-hour camp by the side of a road at the entrance to the mine for fourteen years. 

The government’s case also relied on the wealth of information La Puya had gathered. La Puya provided information on the company’s failures to uphold Guatemalan environmental regulations, its shoddy environmental studies, incomplete permits, and the overwhelming social opposition to the project from the start. 

Don Alvaro Sandoval on the road to the mine Fourteen Years of Resistance and Repression

Since the resistance began in March 2012, La Puya has stood up to many challenges, including violent police repression by the Guatemalan government. La Puya has faced disinformation campaigns, divide and conquer tactics, intimidation and threats from a private security outfit staffed with ex-military personnel, as well as the trauma of legal persecution and intense police repression in order to facilitate the mine’s operation from 2014-2016. 

Documenting Impact and Struggle

Like many frontline struggles opposing mining projects, the resistance built allies to document the human rights violations and to demonstrate the illegalities of the gold mine, including the fact that the project never had a valid municipal construction permit. 

As well, La Puya worked with independent experts to evaluate the mining company’s environmental impact assessment and found serious deficiencies and gaps, although authorities granted KCA a license to operate anyway.

A History of State and Company Repression

In KCA’s arbitration suit, the company argued that it had faced discrimination as a result of the mine suspension and that the government failed to provide it with adequate protection and security from the peaceful resistance to continue expanding the project.

For people from La Puya, KCA’s claim was surreal and infuriating. 

Alvaro Sandoval, from the nearby village of La Choleña, was indignant. He remembers that there were two permanent police check points while the mine was operating. One was on the road in front of the resistance camp and the other at the entrance to the mine.

It made me angry because it isn’t true that the state didn’t provide security to the company so that it could mine. Our bodies bore witness to the sacrifices, fears, anguish. And after all that the state did to us, in collusion with the company… It made me really mad and really upset.
Candelaria Carrera from the community of Carrizal in San Pedro Ayampuc

Weighing In on KCA’s Arbitration Case

Presenting an amicus curiae submission to the arbitration panel is the only formal channel of participation for third parties in ISDS cases. Amicus curiae (friend of the court) submissions are legal arguments presented by third parties who can share relevant information on cases.

However, the arbitration panel has no obligation to consider these requests. La Puya tried to make a submission and was refused. 

Looking back, La Puya member Ana Sandoval thinks this was fortuitous: “In the end, we came out ahead… The amicus brief would have been just a single document presenting our arguments and that would have been it. But the relationship that developed with the government instead is important.”

The Very Difficult Decision to Collaborate with Their Oppressor 

Around the time that La Puya was presenting its request to submit an amicus, the state’s lawyers approached the resistance to ask that they provide information and witnesses to support the state’s defense. The arrogance of the initial approach and the state’s role in repressing La Puya in order to open KCA’s mine provoked hard feelings and challenging discussions within the resistance. 

“It is really difficult,” Candelaria recalls, “because after someone has been messing with your life for so long, and we’ve been here resisting and defending life, defending water, and then they finally notice that we’ve been fighting and then they come and ask that of us, after they’ve knocked us around, criminalized so many of us, beat us… It made us angry.” 

But despite the conflicting feelings that the discussion provoked, La Puya decided to participate, contributing documentation and three witnesses who would testify to the arbitration panel. 

Given the high stakes of the multi-million dollar arbitration, for Alvaro Sandoval, the decision went beyond the local interests of La Puya.

“We’re doing this to defend the people of Guatemala, and if we have to do our part, we have to do whatever we can.”
Alvaro Sandoval, Peaceful Resistance La Puya

The Decision Pays Off

While ISDS proceedings tend to be plagued with misinformation and omissions, the reliance on La Puya´s records helped keep the facts straight. At the same time, La Puya and their national and international allies also brought public attention to the injustice of KCA’s arbitration and its gold mine that should never have been approved. 

Finally, after seven years of proceedings, the three-person arbitration panel ruled against KCA on almost all grounds in December 2025. It ordered the company to pay a portion of the government’s arbitration costs. However, the government would still have to pay over $4 million dollars in legal and arbitral costs. 

KCA’s Loss: A Relief for La Puya and a Wake Up Call for Guatemala  

The ruling was received by the Peaceful Resistance La Puya as an early Christmas gift. The outcome of this specific ISDS claim means the Guatemalan government will pay out less in public funds for a private mining project. But it also offers an important opportunity to reflect critically on how the investor protection system poses a wider threat to the defense of water, territory and Indigenous rights in Guatemala. 

Candelaria Carrera said it was hard to contain her emotion when they heard the decision “in the interest of the Guatemalan people; to ensure that public services, which are already inadequate, are not even less capable of reaching the population.”

They also felt joy at the role La Puya had played, “by providing information and agreeing to give interviews… La Puya contributed to this arbitration ruling in favor of Guatemala.” 

The post “We Have to Do Whatever We Can” appeared first on Earthworks.

Indigenous Land and Water Defenders Celebrate Arbitration Result

This is part one of a two-part series on the Peaceful Resistance La Puya and Kappes v. Guatemala. Read the second part here.

For fourteen years, the social movement Peaceful Resistance La Puya has maintained a 24-hour camp on the side of a dusty road just north of Guatemala City. The camp sits at the entrance to an open pit gold mine owned by Nevada-based Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA). 

A lot can happen in that time. Kids who grew up at the encampment left home and went to college. Elders who spent their days supporting La Puya passed away, their commitment memorialized in photos displayed on a banner. 

This winter, what started as a handful of brave women risking their lives to physically block the entrance to the project in March 2012 contributed to a critical step in defense of land and water. 

Peaceful Resistance La Puya celebrated the 14th anniversary of its resistance camp in 2026. A Victory over Corporate Power

In 2016, KCA brought an international arbitration case against Guatemala for the Guatemalan courts’ decision to suspend operations at its mine. The case relied on privileges for transnational investors in the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement. 

KCA sued Guatemala for nearly half a billion-dollars after La Puya’s legal actions achieved the suspension of the mine. A permanent decision from the government about the future of the mine depends on results of an as of yet ongoing court-ordered consultation with affected Maya Kaqchikel and Xinka peoples. 

In December 2025, an arbitration panel at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes concluded that the country did not have to pay damages to KCA for the decision to close its mine. It will still need to cover over $4 million in legal and arbitration costs.

Peaceful Resistance La Puya contributed significantly to Guatemala’s defense during the case. Leaders pointed out that countries often face unfavorable odds in an arbitration system skewed in investors’ favor.

We feel satisfied and vindicated in our peaceful struggle. KCA lost its wager to make millions of dollars through this international arbitration process, which it initiated knowing that it would never win the consent of the communities that have always said no to its unviable project. This project is so bad that the company couldn’t even defend it in an arbitration system designed to protect the investments of transnational companies. 

—Statement by Peaceful Resistance La Puya

An Unjust System

Investor State Dispute Settlement is a system envisioned by and for extractive corporations seeking to maintain control over the natural commons, especially in the Global South. As a one-way system in which only investors can sue governments through private arbitration, it only values corporate rights and deepens the already huge power imbalance between mining-affected communities and project-backers. 

Investors can leap-frog over local and national-level decision-making to bring their cases to arbitration tribunals presided over by corporate lawyers. They can do this without having to exhaust every legal avenue in national courts. This system frequently excludes affected people from participation and has no obligation to consider their rights or perspectives at all. 

Oil, gas, and mining companies are the most litigious in the ISDS system. Issues of Indigenous rights, community opposition and environmental protection often underlie their claims. These cases are used to coerce countries into ignoring these important priorities or to otherwise compensate firms for millions or even billions of dollars.

KCA’s suit was the first that Guatemala has faced from a mining company. 

International Arbitration Cases Undermine Self-Determination

Over 2,500 free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties include provisions that allow transnational investors to unilaterally sue governments before a private arbitration panel when decisions are made that they believe affect the value of their investment. 

As a new report outlines, Guatemala exposed itself to ISDS claims when it began signing bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements following the peace accords in 1996. Since then, it has faced 13 arbitration claims, over half of which stem from the energy sector and several of which — like KCA v. Guatemala —relate to underlying community struggles for water, collective well-being, and self-determination.

Another of these, also decided in 2025, did not go well for Guatemalans. Energía y Renovación Holding, a company owned by Guatemalan partners but registered in Panama, was awarded $64.5 million plus interest and costs. This company attempted to develop a hydroelectric project on Indigenous lands in the Yichk’isis (Ixquisis) Microregion of Huehuetenango despite the communities’ opposition expressed in a community-led “good faith” consultation and repression of the movement. Guatemala is attempting to annul this decision.  

Overall, arbitration tribunals have ordered the government to pay more than $160 million to investors, an amount equivalent to more than three times the budget of Guatemala’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources in 2025.

While La Puya values the lessons they gained from an effective inside-outside strategy during the course of KCA’s ISDS suit against Guatemala, they recognize that the threat is ongoing. They are calling on Guatemalan authorities to review the commitments that expose the country to further suits. 

The post A Mining Company Loses Its Bet appeared first on Earthworks.

Activists upstage climate institute launch Channel News brendan 29th June 2026 Teaser Media

Perrine Fournier is a trade, mining, and forest campaigner at Fern. 

The threat that mining critical raw materials poses to some of the planet’s most important ecosystems is beyond dispute. To prevent it, some places on Earth must be declared off-limits for mining under any circumstances. Work has already began to identify them.

A global power struggle to secure strategic resources powering the energy transition, AI and weapons systems is driving growing demand for minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese, which are used to make electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies needed to transition away from fossil fuels.

This mining boom is compounding the threats that extraction poses to precious ecosystems – including tropical forests which are vital to address climate change – and the communities who depend on them.

Preventing this environmental destruction and ensuring that mining is carried out within planetary boundaries is urgent. One solution that is gaining traction has long been advocated by Indigenous groups: creating mining no-go zones.

Fern and a group of NGOs in consultations with Indigenous Peoples’ organisations have began to sketch out a methodology to map out where mining poses unacceptable social, environmental and human rights-related risks and should be prohibited.

Off-limits: Fragile ecosystems that store carbon

The methodology is based on six criteria to determine where mining should be off-limits.

This includes areas protected under international conventions; areas with high conservation value from intact forests to key biodiversity hotspots; forests, peatlands and wetlands that are critical for carbon storage; significant ecosystems such as small islands, mangroves and grasslands; critical water bodies and Indigenous Peoples’ territories.

Around half of the of the metals and minerals needed for the energy transition are located on or near Indigenous Peoples’ territories.

A case in point is Brazil, one of the most mineral-rich countries on earth. Recent research shows that the expansion of mining threatens the conservation of about 363,000 km2 of protected land in the Brazilian Amazon, which consist mainly of forests, and is home to 195,000 traditional and Indigenous people.

Deforestation is a major driver of climate change as it releases carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere, weakening the forests’ role as a carbon sink. Most of the Brazilian Amazon should therefore be off-limits to mining, both to protect Indigenous Peoples’ rights and because of its crucial role for the climate and biodiversity.  

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, mining has had a devastating impact on the precious Miombo forest, one of the world’s largest dry forest ecosystems, and local peoples’ food security. This too is an area where mining should not be allowed to take place.

Protected areas must be default no-go zones

In Europe, efforts to secure access to minerals is also threatening fragile ecosystems. Recent reporting revealed that the European Commission disregarded expert advice when selecting “strategic” mining sites eligible for streamlined permitting procedures, with several environmentally and socially controversial projects added to the list after they initially failed to meet expert assessments. 

One project which met the expert assessment but is nevertheless attracting controversy is the Sakatti nickel mining project in Finnish Lapland. 

• Jun 10, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Brazil jostles for rare earths share as US-China rivalry heats up With the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earths after China, Brazil is catching the eye of US and Chinese companies – spurring the government’s critical minerals policy push Read more
• May 27, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Recycling could meet half of Europe’s critical mineral needs by 2050 A new report by an EU-funded research project says the bloc could harness its “urban mines” to reduce its dependence on China for energy transition minerals Read more
• Jun 5, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier The scramble to stockpile critical minerals could drive up energy transition costs Researchers warn that uncoordinated stockpiling could push up prices of minerals needed for clean energy technologies and delay their roll out Read more

Part of its nickel deposit lies under a rich peat bog ecosystem, a major carbon store which developed when glacial rivers and a lake melted at the end of the late Ice Age. The site is protected under Finnish law and is as part of the Natura 2000 network intended to protect Europe’s most valuable species and habitats. These legal safeguards are on the verge of being overridden. Such protected areas should always remain off-limits to mining.

Kicking starting a discussion

To prevent mining from undermining human rights and global climate and biodiversity goals, we urgently need to adopt a global and precautionary approach. This should start with a shared definition of which areas on land and sea should be considered off-limits for extraction.

The methodology we propose is intended to kick-start a broader and transparent discussion, based on scientific, legal and social criteria, in which rights-holders and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations have a seat at the table. No mining should go ahead if it doesn’t have the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples’ or local communities.

Many of the restricted areas are bound to lie in forested tropical countries in the Global South, which understandably want to capitalise on their resources to spur industrial development and create jobs. But history has taught us that relying on a single resource for development runs the risk of being trapped in a resource curse. The more diversified an economy is, the more secure it is. 

Reducing mineral demand

Our modelling shows that for minerals such as nickel, cobalt, lithium, there are sufficient resources that could be mined outside of these restrictive areas to wean the global economy away from climate-wrecking fossil fuels and shift to clean energy systems.

However, that requires hard policy choices, such as reducing mineral demand by promoting more efficient vehicles and alternative battery technologies that are less reliant on critical minerals, as well as better public transport, active travel and car sharing opportunities.

In addition, recycling has a major role to play. A major study recently showed that Europe could meet half of its critical mineral needs through recycling by 2050.

Some mining to access the materials the world needs to address climate change is both inevitable and necessary. But agreeing on a framework to restrict mining in the world’s most sensitive areas will protect them from its ravages, and break the destructive patterns of the past.

The post We need no-go mining zones for the energy transition to be just: Here’s how it could work appeared first on Climate Home News.

As extreme heat worsens pollution, a network of 277 monitors will identify pollution hot spots.

Read more on E360 →

Amid the many political casualties of 2025 — mass federal layoffs, shuttered agencies, and clean energy spending cuts — the passing of one of the last decade’s defining political projects went almost entirely unnoticed. On December 31, 2025, the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of climate, labor, and social justice organizations, officially died. 

The coalition wasn’t intended to last forever, but its demise was sped up by the political mood that got President Donald Trump reelected in 2024, when the momentum that the movement had enjoyed under Joe Biden’s administration seemingly evaporated overnight. As Trump launched an all-out assault on environmental regulations and climate policies, the climate movement was left at a loss, unsure how to push for change with the public increasingly focused on other issues, like the cost of living, and a federal government hostile to its cause.

“The conditions under which the Green New Deal Network was founded have fundamentally changed,” the coalition’s site said, explaining its decision to fold. “The mission of climate, jobs, and justice is far from over — but the structure built to win a specific moment is no longer the right vehicle for what comes next.”

Saul Levin, who was the network’s director of campaigns and politics, knew what was next for him personally: fighting AI data centers. The artificial intelligence boom has created a surge in construction of giant facilities that process digital information, and communities across the country are working to stop them from being built, concerned about water usage, soaring energy bills, and Big Tech taking over. Over a year ago, Levin had started a Signal chat to help people opposing data centers get organized. Now his chat has about 350 members across 40 states, and he’s busy with his new podcast, “The Hum,” capturing their stories and highlighting successes.

Many climate activists are following a similar path. Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, and social justice fit organically into the growing anti-data center movement, which has attracted a much broader, bipartisan coalition than the Green New Deal ever did. “The climate movement is increasingly realizing that this is a fight that’s both an important fight and a strategic fight,” said Evan Sutton, an anti-AI advocate who’s helping connect people who oppose data centers. 

Read Next America’s data center backlash is bipartisan — can it stay that way? Zoya Teirstein & Kate Yoder

Take the Sunrise Movement, whose members stormed Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018 to demand a Green New Deal, catapulting the idea into the national conversation. “We’ve definitely seen a surge of interest in data center fights around the country,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director. Local Sunrise hubs have been mobilizing to stop data centers in Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Lansing, Michigan, Shiney-Ajay said. 

There’s a logical reason for the climate movement to get involved: These hyperscale data centers are poised to cause carbon emissions to spike. A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers could account for about one-third of the growth in U.S. electricity demand between 2024 and 2030. This thirst for energy is driving the expansion of infrastructure for natural gas, a fossil fuel. A typical AI data center demands as much electricity as 100,000 households, but some of the largest ones being built may use up to 20 times that, according to the International Energy Agency. The rapid expansion of data centers threatens to “undo a huge amount of the progress that we made in terms of moving toward clean energy,” Shiney-Ajay said. “If we don’t really seriously start to pass policy that mitigates that, then they could be a disaster for our climate.”

Sunrise Movement protesters call for a Green New Deal at Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington, D.C., in 2018. Michael Brochstein / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Some established environmental organizations have gotten on board with suspending hyperscale data center construction. A letter sent to Congress this month calling for a nationwide moratorium was signed by more than 500 groups, most of them related to the environment, climate change, or environmental justice — such as Greenpeace USA, Third Act, GreenLatinos, and Food and Water Watch. But some of the biggest names of the U.S. environmental movement were absent from the list, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy.

That’s not to say they’re pro-data center, though. “The speculative rush to build data centers is harming ratepayers, our climate, and community health, which is why we urgently need protections from states and the federal government,” Jeremy Fisher, the Sierra Club’s principal advisor, said in an emailed statement. The organization advocates for holding Big Tech to a higher standard in terms of environmental and health impacts and argues that companies should invest in clean energy to run their facilities instead of fossil fuels. “Data centers can and should be powered with renewable energy that does not threaten our environment and our health, our wallets, or our environment,” Fisher said.

Read Next A solution to data center backlash? Put them in oil fields. Jake Bittle

Thomas Meyer, the organizing projects director at Food and Water Watch, which led the letter to Congress, said that powering data centers with clean energy doesn’t solve the problem. In Washington state, for instance, Amazon outbid the utility Puget Sound Energy in an auction for an enormous Oregon solar farm, leaving the utility concerned about competition for renewable resources as Amazon races to build energy-hungry data centers. “What about the things that that solar power would have gone to power instead?” Meyer said. “You haven’t grown the pie. You’ve just shifted it from one place to another.”

Big green groups may also be taking cues from Democratic politicians, many of whom, like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, have been friendly to data center development. “The unfortunate reality is that some organizations tend to follow rather than lead, especially when it comes to mainstream positions of Democratic Party leaders or elected officials,” Meyer said.

Meyer witnessed a similar dynamic a decade ago when working as a field organizer on campaigns to ban fracking: a disconnect between grassroots energy and mainstream institutions. Established environmental groups tend to move more slowly than bottom-up movements, said Valerie Costa, co-executive director of the Oil and Gas Action Network, a nonprofit that supports grassroots groups working to move the U.S. beyond fossil fuels. “One of the things that grassroots movements do really well is shifting when there are more immediate threats, and being able to respond quickly,” Costa said.

That was recently in play in Seattle, where the climate activist group 350 Seattle joined the push to pass a moratorium on new large data centers after the news broke this spring that five major facilities could be coming to town. If all the projects were actually built, they would require about one-third the amount of power that Seattle uses on a typical day. The Seattle City Council passed the moratorium unanimously earlier this month, making it the largest city in the U.S. so far to suspend approvals. For local activists working on an issue as amorphous and overwhelming as climate change, it was invigorating to get involved in a mission with a concrete, local outcome. 

Audrey Wang Gosselin, a member of the Soapbox Project and a board member of 350 Seattle, speaks in favor of a data center moratorium at a Seattle City Council meeting. Courtesy of Renaissance

“For us, it was a very good on-ramp for people who just want to do something and want to turn that powerlessness into something meaningful,” said Nivi Achanta, the founder and CEO of Soapbox Project, a local climate action group that advocated for the moratorium. The group’s Signal chat buzzed as the city council weighed the policy: “People were, like, pulling out drinks and grabbing their popcorn and actually watching these city council politics unfold in a way that’s so much more fun than anything I’ve experienced outside of this, in the general climate movement,” Achanta said. 

In Washington state, known for its progressive climate policies, new natural gas infrastructure driven by power-hungry AI data centers threatens to produce an additional 13.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, about 14 percent of the state’s current annual emissions. That could derail its attempt to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, as required by the state’s Climate Commitment Act. Even in a blue state, there’s an understanding that opposition to data centers has to be bipartisan if it’s going to be successful, especially since most data centers are being proposed in rural areas. “We can’t just rely on the West Coast, or on the blue corridor from Bellingham down to Vancouver, Washington, to get something done,” said Lauren Redfield, a voluntary organizer with the Washington AI Resistance.

As climate activists join local fights, they may find themselves teaming up with people they don’t agree with on everything, or on much at all. Data centers are a rare issue that unites Americans across the political spectrum, with 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans opposed to building data centers in their area, according to polling from Gallup. All kinds of people — punk musicians in Utah, farmers in Oregon, beauty salon workers in Maryland — are coming out for all kinds of reasons, according to Levin, the host of “The Hum.” But their differences aren’t stopping them from working together. 

“Again and again, we hear from organizers who are like, ‘I don’t care if you’re here for climate change, and I’m here because I think it’s going to be ugly, and that person’s here because they hate AI’ — all of us think this is a bad project,” Levin said.

In the first three months of this year, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 facilities worth nearly $130 billion. One reason this resistance has been effective is because of its people power — the hundreds of thousands of people who are turning out to town halls, meeting up on porches, and otherwise showing up to fight. In an age of loneliness and political disillusionment, it’s a sign that something is changing. 

“I’m really hopeful that this is the thing that gets communities re-engaged in local politics,” Redfield said. “We’ve seen a lot of apathy over the last several years, and I’m really hoping that this civic engagement can help us build that community that can help us stitch our society back together.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate activists take on a new foe: Data centers on Jun 29, 2026.

A legal catastrophe Channel News brendan 29th June 2026 Teaser Media

At first glance, Lent Hill Dairy Farm in Steuben County, New York, looks like most other industrial dairies. There are red buildings that house some 4,000 cows, a staggering manure pit, and two gigantic dome-like structures that serve as anaerobic co-digesters.

These giant machines break down manure and local food waste to produce biogas. This renewable natural gas, or RNG, is then typically transported for use as electricity, heating, and fuel. But at Lent Hill, the gas produced isn’t just heating homes or running tractors. It’s also powering an on-site cryptomine.

The operation, run by Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy, is the first of its kind in the country. The company claims the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste could be a game-changer, not only in powering crypto, but data centers, which currently use 4.9 percent of the country’s electricity, a figure that could double by 2030.

“At the end of the day, our model is providing value to the rural area that we are in,” Rashi Akki, the founder and CEO of Ag-Grid Energy, told Sentient.

The project claims to recycle more than 45,000 gallons of food waste per day and the manure of 4,000 cows. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” Akki said.

While Ag-Grid Energy wants to work with midsize dairies to create on-site power generation for small-scale data centers, the world’s largest technology players have bigger visions. Tech giants are increasingly searching for fossil fuel alternative fuel sources to power hyperscale data centers that won’t put a strain on the grid.

Read Next America’s data center backlash is bipartisan — can it stay that way? Zoya Teirstein & Kate Yoder

Biogas proponents — a broad coalition of industries, including agriculture, fossil fuels, utilities, and waste management — are pushing renewable natural gas, sourced in part by manure digesters, as a sustainable way forward.

In California, Microsoft has partnered with Enchanted Rock to use RNG for backup data center power. Vanguard Renewables, a waste management company and portfolio company of Black Rock, has touted RNG as “the fuel of the AI age.” Critics, however, fear the digester-to-data-center connection will give digesters an economic lifeline at a time when they’re struggling to stay online.

Renewable natural gas from digesters are touted as a drop-in energy solution, Sarah D’Onofrio, a scholar and advocate who works with digester-impacted communities across the country, told Sentient. This means the RNG can be used without changing existing fossil fuel based infrastructure, and can be added to other fuel sources like natural gas so companies could claim they are fueling data centers sustainably, according to D’Onofrio.

But researchers like D’Onofrio argue that to truly reduce emissions, we need to transition to clean energy fuels rather than rely on renewable substitutes for fossil fuels.

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“Why would you want to incorporate that [RNG] into our fuel system during the period of climate change?” she said.

D’Onofrio has helped communities in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina defeat proposals for large-scale co-digesters. She fears data centers are creating a new, massive market for the manure-to-energy industry, which could in turn incentivize the further proliferation of factory farms.

“It attaches these industrial food operations into our energy system and makes us really dependent on them over time, because the more it becomes intermingled with agriculture, the more it’s going to concentrate agriculture,” said D’Onofrio.

Animals raised on factory farms in the U.S. produce an estimated 941 billion pounds of manure each year, which pollutes air and water in communities all over the United States. In addition to problems with leakage, digesters do not make the manure disappear. The digested waste, or digestate, is meant to be recycled, potentially into a range of products, such as fertilizer and animal bedding. But there are a number of challenges with these downstream products, from economic to environmental. Digested manure can be more polluting than manure that hasn’t been digested, according to USDA research.

In 2023, Victoria Gehrke, a community organizer who owns recreational property in Lind, Wisconsin, learned that a leader in the waste-to-energy field had proposed a co-digester in the town, touting it as a way to manage manure and reduce waste.

Gehrke and her fellow organizer Laurie Knutzen quickly discovered the impacts a co-digester would have on the community: hazardous air emissions, trucks going in and out delivering industrial food waste — and few restrictions about where that waste would come from — and water pollution. The project intended to send about 41,000 gallons of waste per day into a tributary of Walla Walla Creek, which empties into Lake Michigan.

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“These are manure and industrial food-waste processing and biogas-producing facilities, they are not ag accessories,” Gehrke said of co-digesters. “They don’t belong on ag land,” she explained, “and what they’re really doing is having our small rural communities — because we’re so vulnerable — we become sacrificial dumping grounds for the industrial waste that other big places don’t want to put in their communities.”

After more than a year of relentless community opposition, the town of Lind denied Vanguard’s application in the spring of 2024. The organizers celebrated the decision as a win for Lind, but Vanguard is still “developing and operating” more than 50 co-digesters across the country. It aims to have more than 100 completed projects by the end of 2028.

Patrick Serfass, the executive director of the American Biogas Council, told Sentient that biogas is an “excellent fit” for data centers in search of a reliable and high-capacity fuel source.

“We’re really excited about the prospect of biogas systems being able to provide power to data centers, because they can provide that reliability,” Serfass says.

Data center demand could lead to the expansion of co-digester buildouts across the country, he said. Serfass estimates that the U.S. has only built about 10 percent to 15 percent of the biogas market’s capacity.

“The data centers are going to be so hungry for power that they could eat up pretty much all of the supply that the biogas industry could create,” Serfass says.

Read Next This simple farming technique can capture carbon for thousands of years Matt Simon

Vanguard Renewables makes a similar pitch. “As energy demand from data centers continues to grow, there is increasing interest in solutions that are both reliable and lower carbon,” Vanguard Renewables told Sentient in an email statement.

The company is yet to partner with any data centers directly, but they have partnered with energy delivery companies like TotalEnergies and Enbridge, and both of these companies have relationships with hyperscalers and data center operators. In November 2025, TotalEnergies signed a 15-year deal with Google to provide solar energy to support the company’s data center operations in Ohio.

Anaerobic digesters are not new. They have long been hailed as a way to reduce emissions, capture methane and manage waste — a solution to agriculture’s methane problem with few tradeoffs.

The technology has received billions in subsidies at both the federal and state level. The California Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, a climate program implemented to incentivize the production of alternative fuels, funds nearly 200 digesters across 16 states; in 2023, Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act provided over $150 million in funding to biogas projects across the country; and the Michigan Strategic Fund has approved more than $100 million in private bonds for digesters.

Akki said tax credits are incredibly important in making Ag-Grid Energy’s projects a reality. While most of the subsidies given to digester projects have been to support electricity and fuel for transportation, she wants to see fiscal support specifically for co-digesters that power AI.

Read Next A solution to data center backlash? Put them in oil fields. Jake Bittle

“Tax credits — just like what we had with the Inflation Reduction Act — for electricity production for AI would really support our projects,” Akki says.

But using tax-payer dollars to support digesters has lost favor with the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture. In May, the USDA extended a 90-day moratorium on loans for anaerobic digesters through the end of the year amid environmental concerns and delinquent loans. According to a review of USDA lender data by Inside Climate News, 11 percent of the 746 project lenders across the country were considered over 90 days delinquent.

On top of this, a growing body of research raises questions about whether digesters make economic or environmental sense.

Government subsidies for digesters create a “perverse incentive where the value of manure or animal waste starts to compete with the value of the milk,” Brent Kim, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Liveable Future, told Sentient. In other words, farmers are incentivized to produce waste for profit, not to produce milk for human consumption.

Kim and his colleagues published a scientific review of the touted benefits and downsides to the controversial technology. “The reality is nuanced,” he said of digesters. While they can reduce methane emissions in the short term, they may also lead to an increase in ammonia emissions, toxic byproducts, and other pollutants released into the environment, a phenomena Kim calls “pollution swapping.”

“So sure, all else being equal, you do have a reduction in methane, but if they’re incentivizing growth in the industry, the larger herd size is going to release more methane,” Kim said.

Some research suggests digesters aren’t always effective at reducing methane either. As Sentient has previously reported, research from the World Resources Institute found that digesters offer limited climate benefit given their cost. Digesters reduce methane from manure storage by only about 25 percent, the WRI research finds.

A report from Friends of the Earth found that dairies with digesters increased herd sizes by 3.7 percent annually, or 24 times the growth rate of dairies without digesters. In Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, herd sizes grew by about 58 percent since they were installed.

The trend comes as no surprise to Lynn Henning, a soybean farmer in Michigan who lives near a Chevron-owned co-digester. When manure becomes “more valuable than the milk,” it creates incentive for growth, and changes what farming is all about, she told Sentient.

“The system is changing farming. They’re shifting from producing food for people instead to producing manure so they can be paid more by the government,” Henning said.

Kathy Morrison, a farmer in Fremont, Michigan, has similar concerns. She lived next to a co-digester for years, and it significantly impacted her quality of life. The smell was unbearable, sometimes so bad it woke her up in the middle of the night. She described it as being at a giant music festival and all the Porta Potties are overflowing. That smell was digestate, the liquid solid waste that’s left over and spread on fields after the digestion process.

Morrison is not against the technology of digesters themselves, particularly at the local level, but with so many private companies looking to make a profit, equitable implementation and scale is hard to control. Data centers (which come with their own environmental impacts) would likely expand those opportunities for profit.

“I would be all in favor of small, very controlled, community-size digesters, but when they’re large scale like this, and they’re operating for profit, corners get cut,” she said. But this is something else, she said. “All the different industries that have come together to turn this into something insanely profitable. …There’s just so many industries behind this. It’s wild.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cow manure could be the next data center fuel on Jun 28, 2026.