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We need a movement for self-rule Channel Comment brendan 14th October 2026 Teaser Media

Sandra Guzmán is director at the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean (GFLAC), and Raju Pandit Chhetri is lead climate finance negotiator for the least-developed countries at the UNFCCC. 

Recent catastrophic floods in Nepal starkly remind us that the climate crisis demands urgent action. The initial estimate that the country will need to spend $5 billion on recovery will likely remain a major concern. However, that is only one part of the story. No financial metric can capture the value of lives lost in crises like this. 

And this is not a standalone event; from the mountains of Nepal to the coastlines of Latin America and the Caribbean, developing countries are increasingly facing severe climate impacts. The average annual loss from climate disasters in the Latin American and Caribbean region is estimated at $58 billion. Human suffering remains immeasurable in all these instances.

Climate finance has been a key demand from our regions and from all developing countries to meet the needs of their citizens. At the recently concluded pre-COP31 in the Pacific, several developing-country governments strongly warned leaders about the dangers of failing to act on both climate and climate finance. 

Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu

Yet, two years after the Baku climate summit, where all governments agreed on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for climate finance – with multilateral development banks (MDBs) playing a key role in delivery – that discussion risks being sidelined at this week’s annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Bangkok, Thailand.

World Bank drops climate finance target

The MDBs have a critical role in mobilising a share of the $300-billion-per-year goal for public climate finance adopted at COP29 and are key to scaling broader financing to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035. They entered the NCQG dialogues promising capacity to mobilise these resources and agreeing to be part of the solution. 

This June, even as the World Bank announced the renewal of its Climate Change Action Plan, it dropped its 45% climate finance target under pressure from the US administration. That commitment was key to ensuring the bank continues to deliver on its promise to mobilise enough climate finance to meet the NCQG target. 

This announcement was a setback at a moment when developing countries are looking to MDBs to step up and fill gaps left by cuts in official development assistance (ODA) by donor governments. 

World Bank’s climate work can endure without finance target, experts say

MDBs have long said they can convert $1 provided by donors into $2-$4 for client countries and have promised to deliver impact. Official data does paint an encouraging picture overall. The MDBs have delivered an increase in climate finance almost every year so far. 

While financing needs far exceed what has been provided, MDBs mobilised an average of around $75bn per year in climate finance for low- and middle-income countries over the last five years, showing they are still on track to deliver the $120 billion per year they committed to. 

Adding to the debt burden

However, climate finance cannot be measured by quantity alone. As MDBs increase their focus on private-sector mobilisation to diversify their funding, tracking the quality of the financing they mobilise becomes even more critical.  Beyond scale, this is where the system currently lags most. 

Between 70-90% of the financing provided by MDBs is in the form of loans, exacerbating the debt burdens that the World Bank and IMF have long warned about. This strains countries’ economies at a time when developing countries face severe climate impacts, inflationary pressures, and global economic uncertainty. Adding further debt that climate-vulnerable countries must repay with interest does not necessarily translate into effective climate finance flows. 

It is also essential to address barriers to accessing finance in low- and middle-income countries, particularly by prioritising transparency around how much climate finance goes to the most climate-vulnerable countries and communities. 

Additionally, there needs to be clarity on how much climate finance is being mobilised to build resilience and address increasingly frequent climate disasters, as well as for renewable energy projects that would help developing countries achieve a just transition. 

A woman looks at an alley filled with debris after the passage of Hurricane Beryl, in St. George’s, Grenada, July 1, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Arthur Daniel) A woman looks at an alley filled with debris after the passage of Hurricane Beryl, in St. George’s, Grenada, July 1, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Arthur Daniel) Climate stresses undermine development 

As climate-induced disasters become more frequent, countries are compelled to shift resources away from vital sectors such as health, education, food security and infrastructure that underpins development. For nations already grappling with limited fiscal budgets and mounting debt, climate change is becoming an even heavier burden, pushing them to borrow more.

These are also development issues at their very core – countering debt challenges, investing in resilient infrastructure, protecting schools and hospitals from climate disasters, and increasing crop yields to reduce the cost of food. So, when the World Bank talks about a smart development framework, it warrants a check on how much climate finance is provided and its quality.

Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap

MDBs must now lead the charge by publishing a clear plan to deliver on the scaled-up climate finance goal as a first step, and make financing accessible and affordable, including grant-based instruments. The plan must also define clear accountability metrics to track delivery, access, affordability and reach and commit to at least triple adaptation finance.

MDB shareholder countries also have a role in backing the institutions to deliver on these promises. When World Bank and IMF management meets with finance ministers this week in a region battered by the worst climate impacts, they must not leave climate finance off the agenda. 

They must give the World Bank and IMF the mandate, the capital and the political backing to make real scale-up possible. The true test of this financial system will not be found in conference rooms in Bangkok, but in the lives saved in Nepal. 

The post World Bank and IMF should lead the financial system in responding to the climate crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

When oil and gas shipments stopped flowing through the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the Iran war, Southeast Asian nations were left reeling as the supply crunch laid bare their acute reliance on fossil fuel imports.

As prices soared, governments in the region scrambled to introduce emergency energy-saving measures – from a four-day work week to curbs on air conditioning. Thailand revived decommissioned coal plants while the Philippines, which imports nearly all of its oil, declared a “national energy emergency”.

But the crisis has also prompted renewed resolve to find a long-term solution to their vulnerability at a time when electricity demand is booming to power the region’s growing industry, cooling needs and the mushrooming of energy-hungry data centres.

At the heart of Southeast Asian nations’ response is a longstanding infrastructure project to connect the region’s power grids by 2045 and enable cross-border trading of clean electricity through a network of underground and subsea interconnectors.

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The plans will allow nations with high renewable energy generation potential to trade surplus power to their neighbours and major demand centres like Singapore, helping to integrate more renewables into the power mix and reduce reliance on fossil fuel imports.

“[It] will give us more energy security,” the Philippines’ energy secretary, Sharon Garin, told a press conference after a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) energy ministers last week, when they discussed accelerating the delivery of the regional grid as part of measures to respond to the energy crisis.

“The Philippines is rich in solar power, Malaysia is rich in hydropower and Indonesia has geothermal: different countries have different resources. [The ASEAN Power Grid] will optimise the utilisation of renewables to the benefits of each member state,” said Garin.

But turning this decade-old political vision into a reality has been slow, held up by painstaking work to harmonise a patchwork of regulatory and legal frameworks and mobilise the private capital needed to build cross-border infrastructure.

More than $300 billion is needed to expand and modernise the region’s fragile grids to support the projected energy demand increase by 2050. This includes $27 billion required to deliver the cross-border interconnections by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Every year of delay could cost the region billions of dollars in additional fuel costs and lock in new gas infrastructure for decades to come, according to analysis by global energy think-tank Ember.

The building block for energy security

With electrification high on the agenda of the COP31 climate talks in Türkiye next month, there is growing attention on the need to modernise and expand grid infrastructure to cope with growing electricity use and more renewables in the power mix.

Clean electrification and energy efficiency could deliver about a third of cumulative carbon emission reductions between 2026 and 2050, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook. But delivering that would require doubling annual global grid investment to $1 trillion between now and 2035.

Last month, the UN launched an initiative to accelerate investment into expanding and modernising grids in Southeast Asia and Africa.

A technician walks next to solar panels that partially provide electrical power to the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan)

First conceptualised in 1997, the ASEAN Power Grid has gained fresh impetus in recent years as countries turn to renewables to cut their emissions and move away from volatile fossil fuel markets.

Energy supply disruption caused by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East has strengthened the case for regional grid connections. Before this year’s conflict began, the Middle East accounted for 60% of Southeast Asia’s crude oil imports. Competition for fewer, more expensive oil and gas shipments has left Southeast Asia facing a $160 billion energy import bill this year. Based on current policies, this could rise to $400 billion by mid-century.

In the Philippines last week, energy ministers agreed on an enhanced planning framework to deliver the ASEAN Power Grid and made progress on regulatory guidelines.

Garin said ministers were considering accelerating the project’s delivery. “The first study was to connect [by] 2045 – that’s too far,” she said.

A strong business case

The economic benefits of the plan have “captured the political imagination” of leaders in the region, Robert Cooke, grids advocacy lead at the Global Renewables Alliance, told Climate Home News. “The business case is stronger than ever,” he said.

“If countries were to go about building their own separate grids, of course that would be an expensive endeavour. But the discussion around the ASEAN Power Grid includes what costs could we share in building out this grid,” added Tiza Mafira, director of the Indonesia office for the Climate Policy Initiative.

Stronger grids would help the region meet collective targets to increase the share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply from 14% to 30% and in installed power capacity from 34% to 45% by 2030.

Connecting and pooling dispersed renewable resources would also help smooth local power shortages caused by daily and seasonal variations, reducing the need for backup gas plants and battery storage.

The IEA found the ASEAN Power Grid could help unlock some of the 20 terawatts of untapped solar and wind potential across Southeast Asia – an amount around 55 times the region’s current total power capacity.

From lines on a map to shovels in the ground

Rather than building a single unified network, the ASEAN Power Grid is developing cross-border links between neighbouring countries and smaller groups of nations.

As of 2025, nine of 18 priority interconnection projects are operational – accounting for around 10 GW of capacity with an additional 13.7 GW planned by 2040.

A power line channelling up to 200 MW of clean electricity generated from hydropower in Laos to Singapore via Thailand and Malaysia has emerged as a key building block for grid-to-grid trading.

Progress on technical discussions will also help provide the clarity the private sector needs to invest in bankable projects, said Cooke.

In 2025, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank announced a dedicated funding initiative to support the project.

“The enabling pieces are emerging,” said Monalisa Dimalanta, former chair of the Philippine Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Renewable Energy Board. “But the timelines remain unclear and a 2045 vision cannot answer today’s emergency,” she said.

“A power grid… that exists only on paper will not keep the lights on.”

Singapore: the delivery test

The implications of failing to deliver the ASEAN Power Grid are most acute in Singapore.

Constrained by space, with few renewable energy resources and dependent on gas for more than 90% of its electricity mix, Singapore has emerged as a leading proponent of a regional power grid as it seeks to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

To meet its power needs, the city-state aims to import 6 GW of low-carbon electricity by 2035, around one-third of its energy demand – a target which it is set to miss, however.

The plans heavily rely on building interconnectors to import solar power from Indonesia across the South China Sea. Around 40% of the ASEAN Power Grid’s planned interconnections are directed towards Singapore.

Skyscrapers in Singapore (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

Ember’s analysis found that delivering the planned interconnectors by 2035 could enable renewables to meet nearly half of Singapore’s electricity demand. Delays could drop this to only a fraction of the country’s needs, and risk locking in new gas capacity until the 2050s. Without the ASEAN Power Grid, Singapore would need to install an additional 300 MW of gas-fired power capacity to bridge the gap by 2035.

Already home to the largest data centre capacity in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s electricity demand keeps rising, driven by the boom in AI infrastructure. “At one point, [it] either has to build a new gas plant, or it has to get the interconnection to supply that demand,” Lam Pham, an Ember energy analyst and the report’s author, told Climate Home News.

A region at a crossroads

With capital increasingly available, political will is now the biggest risk standing in the way of timely execution, said Pham.

But there are other challenges too, including the lack of frameworks on transmission tariffs and how to share the benefits of clean power trading. “It’s really hard to justify projects without that,” he said.

In addition, climate-fuelled weather events, including extreme heat and tropical storms, pose major threats to the region’s grid infrastructure. Experts say stronger grid interconnection can isolate damage and build the system’s resilience.

Efforts to deliver on the ASEAN Power Grid also come as ministers stressed the “continued importance of oil and gas” for economic development and seek to secure fossil fuel supplies and stockpile oil to prepare for the next crisis.

Despite an acceleration of renewable deployment, particularly solar, coal still generates nearly half the electricity supply in ASEAN member states and dominates the power mix in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, while Singapore and Thailand rely on gas.

While these measures might help the region with the immediate crisis, “the long-term answer is more domestic renewable energy, electrification, storage, efficiency and regional power trade”, Dimalanta said.

Main image: An aerial view of the MTerra solar project in the Philippines, set to become one of the world’s largest solar-and-battery developments (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

The post SE Asia speeds up plan for connected clean power grid after oil shock appeared first on Climate Home News.

This story is part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington, D.C.

Global trade is remarkably efficient at moving things. It carries copper, cars, cameras, and crude oil across oceans and borders with astonishing speed. It takes the product of one country’s labor and ecology and delivers it to warehouses and supermarkets in another with so little friction that consumers barely register the distance.

But some things, intentionally, do not travel down the supply chain. One of them is stench.

Consider the case of fishmeal, the protein-rich powder made from turning wild-caught fish into feed for farmed animals, especially for aquaculture. The foul air produced by fishmeal factories stays in the poorer coastal communities where the fish is unloaded, cooked, pressed, dried, and ground — far from the dinner plates where the seafood gets eaten. Wealthy markets import the benefits of this globally essential commodity, but only after it has been cleaned of certain dirty truths.

In August 2022 at least 50 protesters spilled into the streets of Kayar, a fishing town on Senegal’s Atlantic coast, demanding the closure of a nearby fishmeal plant, Touba Protein Marine. Marching from the fishing wharf to the factory, they carried signs reading “Kayar is sick.” In a video that spread on Facebook, demonstrators chanted, “Time to respect our Kayar.”

The factory, they said, had been built less than a third of a mile from residential neighborhoods, triggering health problems and violating local zoning laws.

Smoke rises from a fishmeal factory in 2025 near a residential community in Callao, Peru. Emissions from fishmeal factories include ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, and methane, impacting more than 9.5 million people who live within a mile of the nearly 1,800 fishmeal plants operating in more than 50 countries. Credit: Ministry of Production of Peru

That same year in Vietnam, hundreds of residents on the country’s northeastern coast surrounded another plant and, for days, blasted loudspeakers at it in protest. In India, in 2024, the odor from fishmeal factories spurred protests that lasted more than 100 days, ending in a boycott of local elections and in villagers convening parallel meetings to pass resolutions against the plants.

These uprisings were not set off by the kind of industrial disaster that usually commands global attention. What brought people onto the streets was fishmeal’s foul smell.

My organization, The Ocean Outlaw Project, recently completed a global investigation of this product’s hidden costs. It reveals that the industry’s rancid odor was among the least tracked, most personally intimate, and widely suffered impacts of this growing market. Half of the seafood eaten globally comes from fish farms, most of them powered by fishmeal and fish oil. More than 9.5 million people worldwide, including nearly 1.7 million under the age of 15, live within a mile of fishmeal plants, according to Bait to Plate, an online tool that tracks the fishing and seafood industries.

This satellite image shows a fishmeal factory under construction near densely populated neighborhoods in Senegal in 2020, with thousands of residents living within a half mile of the plant. The country’s zoning rules forbid fishmeal companies from building plants within 500 meters, or about 550 yards, of a residential area.
The Outlaw Ocean Project/Google Maps

The industry plays a major role in global inequity. Despite claims that fish farming offers an ecological and ethical way to sustain a growing global population, accounting for feed reveals a different dynamic — one that resembles a form of food colonialism. Much of global aquaculture produces high-value seafood for wealthier markets by diverting food-grade fish from poorer regions that depend on those species as affordable sources of protein. Roughly 90% of the catch used to produce fishmeal is edible for humans. Most fishmeal plants rely on whole fish rather than processing waste or inedible byproducts, further intensifying local food insecurity in the communities where these fish are taken.

The industry is also unsustainable. At least half of the species landed by the 2,400 fishmeal ships assessed by the investigation were classified by scientific studies as “overexploited” or worse. Most of the vessels in this fleet are purse seiners or trawlers, which deploy vast nets to capture dense schools of fish. Both gear types are associated with high levels of waste, routinely hauling in large volumes of bycatch and nontarget species. At least 165 of the ships in the global fishmeal fleet were bottom trawlers, a particularly destructive form of fishing that uses weighted nets that scrape the ocean floor, destroying virtually everything in their paths.

The investigation involved more than two dozen journalists in as many countries. In our global discussions, neighbors living near fishmeal plants described to reporters experiencing nausea, headaches, eye irritation, dizziness, coughing fits, and loss of appetite. They recounted laundry brought in early to keep the smell from settling into fabric, doors kept shut in coastal heat, sleep broken at night, and a low-grade sense of agitation that comes from never being able to trust the next gust of wind.

“We don’t invite family or friends here because we are embarrassed that we live in a place that smells like it’s rotting,” a man in Songkla, Thailand explained.

The investigation documented more than 70 cases of neighbors complaining about stench from at least 60 plants in 15 countries. In Mar del Plata, Argentina, the smell from fishmeal plants was so bad that tourists visiting a local hotel sometimes had to step into the courtyard to vomit. In Ecuador the odor emitted by fishmeal plants overwhelmed nearby residents and paralyzed the tourism sector. In the southern town of Huaquillas, which shares a border with Peru, residents told a daily newspaper in 2021 that the smell from fishmeal processing was “unbearable” and “impossible to be around.” In Salango, a rural parish on Ecuador’s coast more than 270 miles north of Huaquillas, researchers who sought to attract beach visitors in 2022 acknowledged that it would be an uphill battle because the smell from an industrial fishmeal factory there “generates unpleasant odors that deter tourists and cause them to choose other destinations.”

The foul smell from these plants was more than just a nuisance. The stink corrodes the local economy by undercutting tourism and scaring away restaurant patrons and beach visitors.

The stench is also an indicator of the release of noxious chemicals like ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, and methane, which have been known to cause serious health problems, including pulmonary edema. The worst part of the odor is from trimethylamine, or TMA, a colorless gas characterized by a “fishy” smell. In 2021 the Society of Chemical Industry identified TMA as “strongly toxic and carcinogenic.”

Humans’ sensitivity to foul odors is a defense mechanism borne of evolution. As part of a basic survival instinct developed over millions of years, people are repulsed by smells like that of feces, rotting food, decaying flesh, or acrid chemicals. This visceral reaction also brings intense feelings of disgust and anxiety that lead to negative health consequences when these exposures last longer than several minutes, according to a 2016 study from the journal Brain Sciences.

In many countries chemical waste is closely regulated, particularly if it makes people sick or harms the environment. But emitting bad smells is typically seen as more of an inconvenience than an actual environmental or health hazard.

Bad smells are also difficult to measure or regulate. “The technology for detecting and characterizing complex odors has not developed to the level of a reliable surveillance method, which has hindered regulatory frameworks,” stated a 2021 piece in a waste-management magazine written by a group of environmental engineers at Florida Atlantic University.

Though there are many studies focused on the health and environmental impact of specific chemicals emitted by sewage plants, livestock operations, composting facilities, landfills, paper mills, or petrochemical industries, little research has concentrated on the “impact of olfactory nuisance,” according to a 2021 study published in the journal Environmental Health.

Stinky industries like chemical refineries, fertilizer factories, incinerators, and landfills are typically limited by zoning laws to prevent them from being too close to residential homes. In the United States, neighbors near businesses that emit foul odors have sometimes successfully filed complaints under federal nuisance laws, which are designed to protect residents from unreasonable interference with the enjoyment of their property. Between 2018 and 2019, juries in five trials awarded 36 plaintiffs a total of $550 million in lawsuits filed against Murphy-Brown/Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producers in the world. The amount was later reduced due to a state cap on punitive damages. For decades neighbors of the farms in North Carolina, the majority of whom were Black, endured “the piercing, acrid odor of hog manure, reminiscent of rotten eggs and ammonia,” according to one report referenced in the lawsuits.

In 2020 the company asked for a retrial, but the 4th District Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s verdict. The conditions at the farms, which included “spraying untreated hog waste high into the air — where it then drifts toward nearby homes,” wrote Justice J. Harvie Wilkinson in a concurring opinion, “violated homeowners’ rights to the healthful enjoyment of their property.”

These types of regulations tend to be applied more in wealthier countries, and the vast majority of fishmeal plants are in poorer nations. In Senegal, where there are at least nine fishmeal plants, the investigation found that zoning rules forbid fishmeal companies from building plants within 500 meters, or about 550 yards, of a residential area. But a review of satellite imagery of the country’s plants vis-a-vis homes indicated that companies routinely violated this rule, the investigation found.

Methods for measuring airborne TMA have been around since at least the 1970s. Over the past few decades, however, the more standard approach has involved collecting air samples with what are known as “solid-phase extraction” tubes and then analyzing those samples at a lab using techniques called “liquid chromatography” and “mass spectrometry.” These techniques are precise but pricey, sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars.

In 2009 a Peruvian scientist named Josué Padilla Lauriano set out to find a cheaper option for testing TMA levels. He focused his research on Chimbote, a city along Peru’s western coast that was not only the world’s largest producer of fishmeal but also ranked as one of the most polluted places on Earth. Using simple air bubblers and a spectrophotometer — standard tools found in nearly every chemistry lab — and adapting a technique originally developed to detect TMA in dead fish, not air, Lauriano and his team spent 20 months collecting samples. Lauriano’s device only cost a few hundred dollars to take measurements. Under local regulations plants were supposed to stay under 12 parts per million (ppm), but Lauriano found nighttime emissions averaging above 17 ppm when the plants cook the most and a maximum reading from a plant that topped 32 ppm.

Even when testing was feasible, many countries did not have emissions standards that included thresholds for foul odors, according to a 2025 paper published in Applied Sciences. “The mechanism of human odor detection is still not fully understood,” which, the paper said, is one reason stench is so difficult to measure and regulate objectively.

The countries that set standards for how much TMA could be released were usually not based on stench or quality-of-life concerns, but instead on the level at which this chemical began to negatively affect human health. In the United States health regulators typically use guidelines between 5-10 ppm as long-term exposure limits. These limits are substantially higher than what a typical person’s nose can detect. TMA can be detected at concentrations as low as 0.0002 ppm, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Fishmeal stench is not an unsolvable problem. When factory owners have tried to reduce it, they have usually succeeded. In 2008 in the United States, in 2021 in South Africa, and in 2022 in Yemen, plant owners installed various types of devices, some of them called scrubbers, that researchers later concluded had drastically reduced the foulest-smelling chemicals. Scrubbers are not more common partly because they can cost upwards of US$1 million.

Costs notwithstanding, there are deeper reasons stench stays far away from consumers. In wealthier nations, plant neighbors more often successfully pressure their governments to require odor controls. In poorer nations, people living in the industrial areas where these plants are built usually lack political clout. Their governments are also more desperate for revenue and more reluctant to put up regulatory burdens that may scare away foreign investment. As a result there’s little incentive or pressure for foreign fishmeal producers to fix a problem that does not directly affect their bottom line.

The price being paid by the oceans writ large, and the coastal countries whose resources are being sapped, rarely appear in the balance sheets of the feed and aquaculture companies that profit from this type of extraction. Nor will they appear on the seafood menu. Over a fifth of all marine life pulled from the sea is converted into fishmeal, which is a major factor in why over a third of the world’s stocks are overfished and worsening every year. Despite decades of warnings, this remains a problem that is out of sight and out of mind for the average consumer.

Modern life tends to rank injuries by how neatly they can be photographed, measured, litigated, or charted. Faraway, slow-moving, and intangible harms like stench are the very ones that globalized economies have become especially efficient at disappearing for the customers at the wealthier and tail end of long supply chains.

Or, as the novelist John Berger once asked in another context: “What is the social value of a pain eased?”

(The reporting for this story was part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project.)

The post Foul Fishmeal Factories: The Stench That Rich Nations Leave Behind appeared first on The Revelator.

Indonesia appears to be reversing course on a plan to turn vast swaths of tropical rainforest into rice and sugarcane plantations.

Read more on E360 →

Last week, the Georgia Public Service Commission voted to approve a new deal between Georgia Power and the tech giant Google. Starting in 2028, Google will help pay for upgrades to the state’s nuclear reactors. 

“So, around 100 megawatts of carbon-free energy, paid for by somebody else,” PSC Commissioner Stan Wise said to staffers shortly before the vote. “Why don’t you bring us some more of those deals?”

Georgia Power wants to upgrade four of the state’s older nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle and Plant Hatch so they can produce more energy. State regulators approved the Vogtle upgrades last year, but the specifics of how to pay for the work weren’t hashed out. Now, the commission has voted to move ahead with the updates at Plant Hatch too — and approved a new subscription program so large customers like Google can pay for both.

“We appreciate Google’s continued leadership in this space and partnership in developing this program, which we see as the latest example of how large-load growth can benefit all electric customers,” said Aaron Mitchell, senior vice president of strategic growth for Georgia Power, in a statement. 

Under the program, Google will pay a subscription fee on top of its electricity bill to help cover the cost of the nuclear upgrades. In exchange, Google gets credit toward its goal of using only carbon-free energy by 2030. Since nuclear plants don’t use fossil fuels, the power they generate qualifies; nuclear plants can also generate electricity around the clock, which solar and wind power can’t do. 

Precise details of the agreement between Google and Georgia Power haven’t been made public. It’s expected to add 96 megawatts of nuclear capacity to the grid and provide “approximately $900 million in projected benefits to customers over the life of the units,” according to the utility.

“This collaboration with Georgia Power ensures that digital infrastructure growth goes hand-in-hand with positive local impact, helping to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in direct customer benefits and supporting a more affordable, clean, and reliable energy system for all Georgia residents,” said Lucia Tian, director of advanced energy technologies for Google, in a statement.

Google also announced last week that it will partner with Constellation Energy to fund similar nuclear upgrades at reactors in Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, adding 890 megawatts of energy to the grid for PJM, the largest grid operator in the country. Amazon has announced a deal to add capacity to a Constellation nuclear plant in Maryland.

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Around the country, many utilities are meeting the boom in energy demand from hyperscale data centers by building new natural gas generation and extending the life of coal-fired power plants. Similarly, many data centers are building their own fossil-fuel generation. Deals like this one could present an alternative, according to Priya Barua of the Corporate Energy Buyers Association, which advocates for non-fossil energy solutions for corporate customers.

“A number of large energy customers are looking kind of across the board at what are all of the tools in the toolkit in order to actually support a reliable, affordable grid,” she said. “I do think we’re going to see a lot more of those types of innovations and thinking across the board.”

In addition to nuclear improvements like the ones in Georgia, those tools could include energy efficiency programs, transmission line upgrades, and efforts to reduce energy demand at key times to relieve pressure on the grid — all solutions that can be scaled up relatively quickly with an infusion of cash from a large tech company, Barua said. That speed could prove critical in the coming years because there are significant delays in the supply chain for natural gas turbines and other key components in the gas expansion that Georgia Power and other utilities are planning to meet data center demand. A new nuclear plant can take decades to build, whereas upgrading an existing plant can take around five years.  

“It can mitigate delays in projects coming online,” said Katie Southworth, also of CEBA, of programs like the Google-Georgia Power deal. “You’ve got a relay race, and who is going to get to [commercial operation date] first. In order to have the resources to sort of run a competitive relay race, you have to have a lane for them to go into.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why Google is paying to upgrade nuclear power plants on Oct 13, 2026.

Federal money meant to help restore forests after disasters has stopped flowing because of a lack of funding.

According to the Michigan office of the federal Farm Service Agency, the Emergency Forest Restoration Program, or EFRP, has received more requests for aid around the country than it can pay out. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture — where the farm agency is housed — confirmed the news.

“Currently, requests for financial assistance through the Emergency Forest Restoration Program exceed the funding currently available,” the USDA spokesperson said.

Created by Congress in 2008 as part of the national Farm Bill, EFRP provides disaster relief to landowners restoring nonindustrial forests. Almost two years ago, Congress appropriated $357 million for the program “to remain available until expended.” The USDA earmarked much of that money for landowners dealing with lingering damage from the monster 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. In Michigan, property owners whose forests were compromised by a 2025 ice storm were invited to apply. But the rollout of the federal program in the Mitten State has been mired in delays, confusion about eligibility, and what’s been described by landowners and foresters as little communication from federal officials. 

As climate change threatens to bring more extreme weather that damages forests, some foresters stressed the importance of aid programs like EFRP.

“Our weather conditions are becoming more harsh in many circumstances, so we need to be able to have these pots of funding available,” said Logan Hawley, a landowner and forester in Hubbard Lake, Michigan, who applied for EFRP.

Broken power lines and trees after the 2025 northern Michigan ice storm. Laurent Fady / Getty Images

Administered by the Farm Service Agency, or FSA, the program reimburses private landowners up to 75 percent of the cost of restoring their woods after a disaster. Work can include clearing damaged trees to prevent fire risk, replanting, or managing invasive species.

In Michigan, landowners like Hawley are waiting for federal funds to restore forests that were damaged in a severe ice storm in March 2025. The ice storm damaged approximately 3 million acres of forest in northern Michigan, as the weight of ice downed trees and snapped branches across 12 counties in just two days. To recover just a third of those acres — the 1 million acres managed by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources — the state estimates it needs about $14 million. The EFRP program represents some of the only federal funds available for private landowners after the storm.

Some landowners and foresters said they’re frustrated with the lack of movement on work they say is important for the future of northern Michigan’s forests and the economies that depend on them. The state’s forest industry — from wood products to tourism and recreation — contributes billions to the state’s economy annually. 

“We’ve spent so much time filling out the paperwork, going and doing in-person meetings, having them on site doing visits, for what feels like nothing,” said Neil Haney, executive director at Boyne Falls’ Lake Louise Christian Community, a campground where about 1,700 acres of woods suffered damage from the ice storm.

Michigan’s FSA office and the USDA did not respond to specific questions about how many applications had been approved or where in the country EFRP aid had been provided. Since Congress last funded the EFRP in 2024, the agency has solicited applications from landowners affected by hurricanes in Eastern states, a southern pine beetle infestation in Georgia, flooding in Hawai‘i, and a windstorm in Minnesota. Gary Michael, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources cooperative forest management supervisor, confirmed in an email that EFRP applications in his state are also not being approved. FSA first invited Michigan landowners to apply in May 2025.

In a statement, Michigan’s FSA office said landowners “may begin restoration work at their discretion; however, any work initiated prior to [federal] approval is undertaken at personal expense.”

A southern pine beetle in a pitch tube residue spotted on the bark of a pine tree.
Steve Pfost / Newsday RM via Getty Images

According to Mike Smalligan, forest stewardship coordinator with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, around 600 landowners in the state “are in the application process” for EFRP.

The Michigan DNR doesn’t administer the program, but it helped contract 25 foresters — professionals who help landowners manage and care for their woods — who conducted site visits for applicants on behalf of the FSA. Those foresters drew up restoration plans for federal approval, including recommendations for what work needs to be done, and suggested reimbursement rates.

Tony Fox, a forester in Lake City, worked on more than 10 plans. The program “started off very rough” because the Michigan FSA typically works with farmers and agricultural crops — not hardwood forests. 

“It was a little unfair to the folks at FSA,” Fox said. “You had a lot of folks who had no clue about the forest trying to wedge an agricultural program into the woods, so there was a steep learning curve.”

As of late September, Fox said, some landowners were hoping for reimbursement because “they just couldn’t wait” for official approval before starting work on their woods. Michigan FSA said this work is at personal expense “as financial assistance cannot be guaranteed.” Others were waiting for the federal green light before starting work because efforts like planting trees can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What the delays mean for recovery work will vary from forest to forest, Fox said. 

“As far as waiting, if it’s good or bad, it’s a total case study on the level of damage and the species of tree you had,” he said. 

Red pine and aspen were especially hit hard after the storm, for example. Fox said anyone who hasn’t already salvaged those trees might not be able to sell their timber, and they run the risk of rot and pests, which is where federal aid could help. But damaged hardwoods, like maple or oak, are likely to recover on their own with minimal loss in timber value.

Hawley, the forester in Hubbard Lake, was also contracted by the state to help with more than 30 restoration plans. He said one plus of the program has been working with landowners who otherwise would never have had an expert come look at their property and discuss forest health.

Still, as a landowner whose own EFRP application is up in the air, Hawley said there are no easy answers to questions he gets from applicants about how to start restoration work without leaving them ineligible for future funding, if it becomes available again.

Some landowners don’t have the resources to do the work without federal aid, Hawley said. And “these delays are continually putting us at a place where we have to restart efforts” when the next storm hits. Parts of the region experienced another ice storm in the spring of 2026.

Hawley worries about how delaying restoration work can leave forests more vulnerable to disease, fire, or future storm damage. 

America’s forests store almost 60 billion metric tons of carbon and offset about 13 percent of the country’s overall emissions. Damaged forests can’t store as much carbon as healthy ones.

Congress has acknowledged issues with disaster relief programs like EFRP because the timing of appropriations bills doesn’t coincide with when disaster strikes. This summer, Congress passed a bill to address some of those concerns by allowing advance payments to landowners. It was unclear how the new law would affect aid in Michigan and other states.

Representative Jack Bergman, a Republican who represents all of northern Michigan, said in a statement that landowners “shouldn’t have to fight Washington just to get help recovering.” He called on Congress and his colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee to replenish funding for EFRP. 

“If Washington calls this emergency relief, it needs to act like it’s an emergency,” Bergman said.

Despite frustrations, Haney said his camp’s woods will ultimately be fine without the funding. “Nature will be nature, and it’ll come back. It’ll just take longer,” he said. 

But Haney hopes this rollout of EFRP in northern Michigan will be a lesson for the federal government. “The federal government knows how to handle hurricanes, tornadoes,” he said. “It felt like they didn’t know what to do with an ice storm.”

Larissa Donovan of KAXE in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A federal program to restore forests after disaster has gotten too many funding requests on Oct 13, 2026.

'Our radical roots' Channel News brendan 13th October 2026 Teaser Media

From California to France to the G20, “tax the billionaires” is shifting from slogan to concrete proposal. Beyond the revenue it would raise, it draws a sharp line between those who profit from crisis and everyone else. As the far right turns economic insecurity into a politics of scarcity and division, the billionaire enemy could become the foundation for a different political “we.” But only targeting a handful of people at the top risks leaving broader inequalities untouched.

This article is an 11-minute read. In the time it takes to finish reading it, the world’s most chronically online billionaire, Elon Musk, could add another 11 million dollars to his wealth – more than most people around the world will earn over their entire working lives – without having to do much of anything at all, other than, perhaps, angrily “tweet”.

And those millions add up fast. When SpaceX went public in June 2026, Musk became the first person Forbes had ever valued at more than one trillion – after his wealth had grown by more than 550 billion dollars over the previous year.

But Musk is not the only one. The US has Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; Europe has its own billionaire class, from Bernard Arnault and his family in France to Amancio Ortega in Spain; China has Zhong Shanshan; and India has Mukesh Ambani. The list goes on, as do the zeros. By 2025, billionaire wealth reached a record 18.3 trillion dollars, increasing by more than 16 per cent in that year alone.

Beyond the numbers, what does any of this mean for our societies? For decades, there has been a rather convenient economic story about what happens when wealth grows at the top: it generates investment, jobs, and growth whose benefits eventually spread to everyone else, or “trickle down”. Yet wealth has become increasingly concentrated: the richest 10 per cent now own around three quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half own just 2 per cent.

The result is not simply inequality. At a certain point, the extraordinary concentration of resources in the hands of a very small number of people also becomes a concentration of power. Billionaires own or control major companies, media, and digital infrastructure; they finance political campaigns; some enter politics themselves. Others do not need to hold office for access. It has become common to see Elon Musk alongside presidents and heads of government, Mark Zuckerberg sitting down with political leaders, and some of the world’s wealthiest people moving through spaces of political power to which very few people have access. Nobody elected them to those rooms. Their invitation is, in large part, their wealth.

That concentration of wealth and power becomes particularly difficult to ignore when set against what everyone else has been asked to absorb. Austerity after the financial crash was followed by a pandemic and then a prolonged cost-of-living crisis. Eurofound’s 2025 survey found that 61 per cent of respondents in low-income EU households were struggling to make ends meet. Yet between 2020 and 2022 alone, billionaire wealth increased more than it had over 23 years between 1987 and 2010.

This divergence between those at the top and everyone else matters politically. When governments talk again about what societies can afford and what must be sacrificed, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what “ordinary people” must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back.

What even is wealth?

Which brings us back to Musk’s 11 million dollars, which is not a salary. Musk does not receive a million-dollar pay cheque every sixty seconds. Much of his wealth comes from his ownership of companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, whose increasing value allows his wealth to grow without anything resembling a conventional income. And that distinction matters enormously when it comes to taxation.

Work remains remarkably easy for states to see and tax. Billionaire wealth is a different creature. It can appreciate without being sold, sit inside companies and be reorganised through legal structures in ways that wages cannot. Someone can therefore become billions richer without reporting anything resembling those billions as taxable personal income.

Tt becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what ‘ordinary people’ must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back

The result is a peculiar political economy. Governments can tell an ordinary worker with extraordinary precision what she owes from her next euro of salary, while struggling to answer a seemingly simpler question about some of the richest people ever to have lived: what constitutes their fair share?

There is also a curious asymmetry in how we think about wealth. We are very accustomed to drawing poverty lines, minimum incomes, measures of deprivation. States have developed remarkably sophisticated ways of calculating exactly how little someone can have before they officially count as having too little. Far less attention has been devoted to drawing a line at the other end: can someone have too much?

That is beginning to change. For instance, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns has made the case for limitarianism – the idea that there should be an upper limit to how much wealth an individual can hold. Others, like University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have focused on designing a wealth tax for the ultra-rich.

The idea has travelled well beyond academia. In 2024, under Brazil’s G20 presidency, Zucman was commissioned to develop a proposal for a coordinated minimum tax on the world’s billionaires, based on the principle that they should contribute at least 2 per cent of their wealth each year. And in California, home to many Silicon Valley billionaires, voters will decide this November on Proposition 40, which would impose a one-off 5 per cent tax on billionaire wealth to help fund healthcare.

These proposals differ substantially in their design, scale, and ambition. But taken together, they point towards a simple idea gathering political momentum: tax the billionaires.

Taxing the untaxable?

How exactly to do that remains contested – and the usual objections are never far behind. Wealth, we are told, can move across borders; billionaires can change their tax residence; some assets are difficult to value; assets tied up in companies are not necessarily available as cash; and sufficiently determined billionaires can employ sufficiently determined accountants to find ways around whatever rules governments create.

These are not imaginary problems. Several European countries have abandoned recurrent net wealth taxes over the past few decades amid concerns over avoidance, valuation, and administrative complexity. IMF economists have also questioned whether annual net wealth taxes are always the most effective instrument, arguing that stronger taxation of capital gains and inheritance may sometimes work better.

But these are, ultimately, problems of design. Tax systems already value assets, trace ownership, and deal with people and companies operating across borders. International information-sharing has made hiding financial wealth offshore more difficult, while international coordination – the entire logic behind Zucman’s G20 proposal – is precisely an attempt to prevent the world’s wealthiest people from playing one tax system against another.

None of this makes taxing billionaire wealth easy. But “difficult to tax” and “should not be taxed” are two quite different arguments.

Zucman estimates that, in proportion to their income, France’s approximately 100 billionaires currently pay half as much tax as the average French person. Correcting that imbalance, which is not unique to France, would improve the fiscal situation of cash-strapped governments. It could mean more resources for healthcare, housing, education, and public transport, or help meet the enormous investment required for the green transition. California’s Proposition 40 makes that connection particularly tangible: take a relatively small (5 per cent) share of excessive private wealth and direct most of it towards healthcare.

There is also the redistributive effect of the tax itself. If wealth at the very top has been accumulating far faster than it has for everyone else, taking some of that wealth back into the public realm can narrow the distance between the top and the rest – particularly when it pays for services on which people with the least depend most. That alone would be a substantial argument for doing it. But it may not be the most politically consequential one.

The perfect enemy

There is one thing billionaire taxation does exceptionally well: everyone knows who it is not about.

That is because, unlike “the rich”, “billionaire” has a very clear boundary. Someone earning 100,000 euros a year, a homeowner sitting on an expensive property, a successful small-business owner or someone who inherited a few millions might all be considered rich – or not – depending on who is drawing the line. And even well-off people have a tendency to draw that line somewhere just above themselves.

There is a distinctly populist logic to that structure. Political scientist Cas Mudde famously defines populism as dividing society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. Few political demands draw that boundary as cleanly as “tax the billionaires”.

The billionaire line sits so far up the wealth distribution that almost nobody risks mistaking themselves for the target. Politically, that distance matters. “Tax the billionaires” singles out an extraordinarily small group while leaving almost everyone else standing on the other side. The “them” is remarkably easy to identify; the potential “us” is enormous.

California’s Proposition 40 makes that political divide unusually concrete: a little over 200 billionaires, according to the campaign, would be subject to the tax, while 90 per cent of the revenue would go towards healthcare. And it is precisely this ability to make distribution so immediately legible that gives the demand its wider political significance.

Across Europe, far-right parties have become adept at connecting experiences of insecurity – unaffordable housing, strained public services, stagnant wages, shrinking welfare provision – to immigration. The details vary between countries, but the underlying story is familiar: resources are scarce, ordinary people are losing out, and somebody else is getting what should have been theirs. Migrants, refugees, and welfare recipients become visible explanations for problems whose causes are considerably more complicated.

Part of the power of that politics is that it gives insecurity a direction. It tells people not only that something has gone wrong, but who is benefiting at their expense and, ultimately, who belongs on either side of “us” and “them”.

Progressive politics has often struggled to offer an equally legible account. For Greens, the problem can be particularly acute. Climate politics is easily caricatured by its opponents as a growing list of things ordinary people will have to surrender or pay more for: your car, your boiler, your flight, perhaps even your steak. However unfair the caricature, it pulls political attention towards what millions of people consume rather than towards who owns, accumulates, and exercises economic power.

“Tax the billionaires” points in a different direction.

Who are “we”?

There is nothing particularly new about politics trying to construct a “we” out of people who do not occupy exactly the same economic position. Political coalitions have repeatedly been built across existing class boundaries, and those boundaries have shifted as societies and economies have changed.

There are particularly striking precedents for organising those coalitions against concentrated economic power. During the New Deal years of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt – himself hailing from an affluent family – railed against what he called the “economic royalists”. Thus, he was placing concentrated private power on one side and a much broader democratic coalition on the other. Decades later, Occupy Wall Street found an even simpler formulation: “We are the 99%.”

Neither required everyone inside the “we” to be economically equal. And “tax the billionaires” doesn’t either. A renter on a relatively high salary, a nurse who owns her home, a factory worker, a precarious university lecturer, a delivery rider and a small-business owner may have very different economic interests and may not understand themselves as belonging to the same class. Yet they all have something rather obvious in common: none is remotely close to being a billionaire.

That makes for an unusually broad political coalition – one capable, at least in principle, of bringing together people who might otherwise have little reason to see their economic interests as shared. But bringing people onto the same side of a political dividing line is one thing; giving them a common politics is another.

Roosevelt’s attack on concentrated wealth was attached to a much broader political project. The New Deal did not simply ask wealthy Americans to contribute more to public coffers. It strengthened collective bargaining, regulated finance, expanded social protection and public investment, and challenged aspects of concentrated corporate power.

Occupy’s “99%”, meanwhile, proved extraordinarily successful at changing the language through which inequality was discussed. The “1%” escaped the occupations themselves and entered mainstream political vocabulary. But turning that enormous “99%” into a durable political organisation or a common programme proved much harder. The billionaire version stretches the boundaries of that “we” even further, placing people with vastly different levels of wealth and economic power on the same side of the line.

But in so doing, it can also obscure the inequalities and conflicts among everyone who is on the same side. What is income to a landlord is rent to a tenant; what increases returns to shareholders may come at the expense of wages; what preserves the value of a large inheritance also preserves inequalities between those who inherit and those who do not.

In other words, the slogan “tax the billionaires” risks serving as a diversion from tackling inequality more broadly.

Beyond the billionaires

And there is plenty beneath the billionaire line to look at. A billion euros of private wealth does not appear from nowhere. It grows within an economy in which companies and land have owners, profits are divided between workers and shareholders, wages reflect very different levels of bargaining power, housing can function as both a home and a financial asset, and wealth can be passed from one generation to the next. Long before the tax authorities arrive, decisions have already been made about who owns what, who receives what, and who has power over whom.

This is where a distinction emerges between redistributing wealth and changing how it is distributed in the first place. A billionaire tax largely does the former. Once enormous wealth has accumulated, the state takes a share of it and redirects those resources towards society. That can make the final distribution less unequal – particularly when the money funds public services and social protection on which people with lower incomes depend.

Changing how wealth is distributed in the first place means intervening earlier. It means looking at workers’ bargaining power and how profits are shared; at who owns companies, housing and land; at what is publicly or collectively owned and what remains privately controlled; and at how large amounts of wealth are inherited across generations.

None of this is an argument against billionaire taxation; after all, it can raise substantial revenue, redistribute resources, and slow accumulation at the very top. Nor do redistribution and changing the underlying distribution need to be mutually exclusive. But if the politics ends at the billionaire line, much of what created the inequality on either side of it remains beyond reach.

Perhaps this is where the real political potential of “tax the billionaires” lies. The billionaire may be the most visible expression of a much broader distribution of wealth and power.

And this matters at a moment when the far right has become remarkably successful at explaining insecurity through competition between locals and immigrants over scarce resources. Billionaire politics offers a very different account: away from who might be receiving too much, and towards who has accumulated so much, how they did so, and what that accumulation allows them to do.

For Greens and the wider left, that offers something more than a new source of tax revenue. It offers the possibility of contesting the politics of scarcity itself. And in doing so, it unsettles the premise on which so much of that politics rests: that there is simply not enough to go around, and that politics is therefore a matter of deciding who among the rest of us must make do with less. Before accepting that ordinary people must compete over what is available – who gets the house, the hospital bed, the welfare payment or the secure job – it asks us to look at where resources and power have actually gone, who owns them, who controls them, and how they became so concentrated in the first place. And why, in societies capable of producing such extraordinary private wealth, does the political conversation so often begin with what everyone else must learn to live without?

That does not make scarcity imaginary. Housing can genuinely be in short supply, public services can simply lack capacity, and governments face real choices about resources. But those shortages do not tell us, by themselves, how the resources a society does have should be distributed, who should contribute more, or whose claims should be placed in competition with who else’s. Those are political choices too.

But constructing a convincing “them” is still easier than building a meaningful “we”. If that “we” is to mean more than simply everyone who doesn’t own a billion euros, it eventually has to acquire political content: what should be more equally shared, what forms of power should be challenged, and what people should be able to expect from the society they belong to.

That is why “tax the billionaires” is perhaps most powerful as the point of departure. It can raise revenue and redistribute wealth at the very top. But it can also serve to open a much broader argument about who owns companies, housing, and land; how economic power is distributed between workers and owners; and how much of the wealth societies produce should remain privately controlled in the first place.

The risk is that the politics stops at the slogan. The opportunity is that it does not.

Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.

The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.

These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.

They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).

Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”. 

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Exemption push rejected

More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.

Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.

They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.

But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.

A spokesperson for the Project Developer Forum, an umbrella group for carbon credit developers, said it was “disappointed” with the Supervisory Body’s decision. “The new requirements are expected to weigh heavily on a sector where major integrity improvements are already underway,” he added.

‘New paradigm’

The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing. 

For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists. 

Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added. 

Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.

Pre-COP draws attention to Pacific’s climate plight and 1.5C goal

Pushback over science

As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.

The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves. 

While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.

A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.

A drone view of the Turmalina Farm in Mae do Rio, Para, Brazil, September 29, 2025. REUTERS/Wagner Santana Policy discounts questioned

To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting. 

That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme. 

Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced. 

“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.

Moving target

A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes. 

These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”. 

Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.

Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.

“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.

The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.

The ocean surrounding California’s Channel Islands can feel like another world. Beneath the surface sway towering kelp forests that are patrolled by huge sheephead fish, striking in pink and black with protruding teeth, along with refrigerator-sized giant sea bass. Seals and sea lions swim among colorful sponges and sea stars. “We sometimes think of the Channel Islands as our Galapagos in California,” said Doug McCauley, a professor of marine science at UC Santa Barbara. 

The cornucopia of marine wildlife here wasn’t always this vibrant. Violet Sage Walker, the chair of California’s Northern Chumash Tribal Council, recalled documentary footage showing the Channel Islands before marine protections were enacted, in an era when intensive commercial fishing had damaged kelp forests and key species. “It looked like Mars, like a dead planet,” she said.

But beginning in 2003, areas around the Channel Islands were designated as California Marine Protected Areas, or MPAs — a conservation strategy akin to creating underwater state parks. With roughly 150 square miles of protected waters, the islands now function as a safe haven for marine flora and fauna, essentially acting as nurseries for baby fish and protecting dozens of iconic species like kelp bass, rockfish, leopard sharks, and more.  

Now, for the first time in 15 years, California officials are considering proposals to create new areas and expand existing ones, as part of the state’s first-ever review of its MPA network. “This is a historic opportunity that we don’t want to miss,” said McCauley.

Building California’s marine protections

MPAs are designated ocean zones where restrictions on activities such as fishing, oil and gas drilling, and other seafloor disturbances can help preserve marine ecosystems and give damaged habitats room to recover. Protections vary by site, but in areas where these kinds of disturbances are removed, “you have larger fish, more abundant wildlife, and a healthier habitat,” said Sandy Aylesworth, director of the Pacific Initiative, Nature, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC.

Among the 2026 potential additions are two new proposals for protected areas on the state’s Central Coast: the Point Sal and Mishopshno State Marine Conservation Area proposals. Each of these sites is co-sponsored by a California Tribe in collaboration with NRDC, and in the case of Mishopshno, also by the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit. These Tribally sponsored proposals represent a first for California’s MPA network, and offer the state an opportunity to formally recognize the longstanding role of California Tribes as ocean stewards and make good on its commitment to Tribal marine stewardship. 

A rare convergence of habitats

The proposed Point Sal State Marine Conservation Area would include roughly nine square miles off the Santa Barbara County coast. Here, a headland shelters the waters on its southern side from the wind, creating calmer conditions where fish larvae can linger and mature safely. Nearby Lion Rock is a gathering place for seals and sea lions and a roosting area for seabirds, while kelp forests and rocky reefs provide habitat for fish, sharks, sea otters, and other wildlife. Over 880 sea lions have been documented there by scientists in a single day. “It’s a little tiny paradise,” Walker said.

For the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, which co-sponsored the proposal, Point Sal is also a place of deep cultural significance. Chairwoman Walker described ancient village sites up and down the coast and a relationship to the area woven through Chumash history. “Our people lived and thrived there for thousands of years,” she said. 

Preserving marine ecosystems and cultural connections

That history is central to another feature of the current MPA review: Tribal stewardship. California’s current MPAs don’t have formal Tribal co-management systems, though the Tribes  have stewarded the lands and waters of the Central Coast for over 10,000 years. The Point Sal and Mishopshno proposals are among the first potential additions to the MPA network led by California Tribes.

Walker said she wants California to create a clearer pathway for coastal Tribes to continue to participate in ocean stewardship, including access for cultural practices and a role in management. “Being able to reconnect and offer our vision and our help with dealing with climate resiliency and coastal stewardship is critical,” she said.

The proposed Mishopshno State Marine Conservation Area offers another example of what that kind of Tribal stewardship could look like. Farther down the coast, near Carpinteria, is another unusual convergence of habitats. Just offshore sits a 1.6-mile rocky reef supporting one of the Central Coast’s most enduring kelp forests. 

Nearby sandy-bottom habitat, beach, and a protected salt marsh create connected nursery and feeding areas for marine life, supporting hundreds of bat rays, large fish species, and juvenile white sharks. The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, NRDC and the Environmental Defense Center have sponsored a proposal to protect the area, which is named for a historic Chumash village in the region.

A refuge for marine wildlife

Shark filmmaker, documentarian, and researcher Carlos Gauna has spent thousands of hours filming the marine environment that would be protected by the Mishopshno MPA. “I live and breathe sharks daily, and this is one of the most amazing spots in the world to see a great white shark. There is literally nothing like it anywhere else on the California coast,” he said. 

In his years of filming there, Gauna said, he’s documented illegal fishing, jet skiers purposely ramming into wildlife, and other harms to the local marine population. “I’ve seen sharks get hit and injured by boats, or even deliberately killed,” he says, noting that the proposed MPA might help guard against such damaging actions because its status as an MPA would signal to visitors that it’s a safe haven for marine wildlife. 

He also points to successful protected areas as a model for what the new Mishopshno MPA might achieve. At Cabo Pulmo in Baja California, Gauna said, the contrast across the protected-area boundary is night and day. Inside is a thriving, abundant ecosystem. “It’s one of the most stable and beautiful areas in the world for marine wildlife,” he said. Outside, where there is intensive  fishing activity, “it’s an underwater desert.”

An urgent moment

The state’s voters treasure California’s iconic coastal waters and advocate for keeping them healthy: Roughly 70% of California voters support expanding MPA protections at both Point Sal and Mishopshno. And while a small group of fishing interests opposes the new MPA proposals, there is no scientific evidence that California’s MPAs cause financial harm to fisheries. In certain circumstances, the opposite is true: a 2021 study of two Southern California MPAs established in 2012 found that fishing boats in the surrounding areas had increased lobster catch by about 225% over six years.

The California Fish and Game Commission final votes on the proposed changes to the California MPA network are scheduled for October 14th-16th. “We have an opportunity now to protect the areas where California has jurisdiction, at a time when the Federal government is undoing protections more broadly,” McCauley said. Given that the periodic reviews of California’s MPA network only happen once every ten years, the Fish and Game Commission is unlikely to consider these two proposals again for many years. 

The outcome of the October 2026 process could help define the next chapter of California’s marine protection network. For Walker, the stakes extend beyond this unique moment. “The ocean, given the opportunity, will thrive,” she said. “But we have to give it the space and the time to heal itself.”

California’s Fish and Game Commission are deciding whether to expand MPAs this month. Now is our chance to protect these precious areas and the marine life that call them home. Join NRDC in calling on the California Fish and Game Commission to conserve these special areas of our Coast.

LEARN MORE

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A once-in-a-generation opportunity for California’s ocean on Oct 12, 2026.

The Congo Basin is one of the few places on Earth where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has failed to track the long-term shift in extreme heat and rainfall. The reason is a lack of readily available data. To fill this gap, scientists have digitized thousands of handwritten weather records, which reveal the impact of warming in the region. 

Read more on E360 →

Piers Forster is Professor of Physical Climate Change and Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. He has previously served as a lead author on several IPCC assessment reports.

Evidence of a rapidly changing climate and our improved scientific understanding is compelling nations to act, but not always in a good way. The science itself is facing well-organised obstruction.

The consequences of politicising the evidence are now more apparent than ever, especially in the run-up to a crucial intergovernmental climate meeting taking place in Addis Ababa this week.

On the agenda is a proposal that would prevent all governments from being able to use the most up-to-date analysis of options for combatting climate change at a critical stage in UN negotiations.  

The meeting is the 65th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body charged with providing gold-standard scientific and economic evidence on climate change to the world.

• Oct 8, 2026 News Pre-COP draws attention to Pacific’s climate plight and 1.5C goal After visiting Tuvalu’s shrinking land, COP31 President Murat Kurum said that the global 1.5C warming limit is “a matter of survival” for the Pacific Read more
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Often characterised as a scientific organisation, the IPCC is actually a forum of governments that commissions assessments from scientists from across the globe. This unique effort is doubly important as it represents the world’s only climate science reports that are approved by consensus among the 195 countries that make up its membership.

But this consensus also means that governments can regulate the IPCC’s reports and timescales. Countries can make it difficult for their scientists to participate or even withhold the organisation’s budget.

By doing so, they can place a straitjacket on the production of analysis that these self-same governments are obliged to consider when they assemble under a different umbrella – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which relies on the findings from the IPCC to guide negotiations.

When it works well, this intergovernmental approach means that countries agree on, and have a firm, authoritative scientific basis for acting on the evidence in a cooperative way. 

Until now, the system has largely functioned as it should, despite a certain amount of posturing and politicking. This month, however, could be the time when that delicately balanced state of affairs comes to an end.

Enemies of science?

The vast majority of governments – in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and most importantly the small island developing states which sit on the frontlines of climate impacts – want the three main parts of the IPCC’s current assessment report (AR7) finished by the end of 2028. That would mean its conclusions can inform the next Global Stocktake – the five-yearly process set up under the Paris Agreement where governments review progress on climate action and ideally commit to stronger efforts.

Against this view stands a handful of major emitters who are determined that the IPCC’s upcoming report on mitigation – reducing climate-heating emissions – will not emerge until after that crucial political decision-making point.

The figureheads for this group are Saudi Arabia and India, with a few others such as Russia lurking in the background. Finding the Saudis here is absolutely expected, but India’s presence is more surprising given President Narendra Modi’s commendable commitment to building a clean energy economy, most notably his leadership of the International Solar Initiative.

As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond

Underneath pretexts of giving the authors more time, or making it fairer in terms of who can contribute, they have a hidden motive: if the report on mitigation is delayed beyond the second Global Stocktake, the same governments that delayed it will then argue that the stocktake cannot meaningfully discuss vital mitigation action without the latest report, effectively delaying more ambitious agreements on cutting emissions by another five years.

It is the duty of every government that professes to care about climate change to oppose such a retrograde step. There are worrying signs, however, that some governments which are highly influential within the IPCC system may be about to cave.

No time to appease

What seems to be happening is that in the face of signals that the Saudis, for example, are prepared to block the IPCC’s budget if they don’t get their way, some governments are leaning towards appeasement, i.e. publishing the mitigation report only after the Stocktake been has completed, just to keep the whole process moving – better a bad agreement than no agreement.

This would be a major error of judgement, for two reasons.

One is that appeasement will not stop the naysayers’ moves to derail climate action – quite the opposite. Giving ground on this will only embolden them to propose other roadblocks, such as further delays and arguments over report content, or further minimising and excluding UN and non-UN science in other fora, such as the UNFCCC science negotiation tracks.

The second is that giving way would be a betrayal of communities in countries impacted by climate change around the world. In India itself, 90% of the workforce toils outdoors in informal settings and temperatures are rising well above 40C – so constraining global warming as soon as possible is clearly desirable for both human health and economic productivity.

Funding gap threatens next round of IPCC climate science reports, chair warns

For the UK, this is a time to remain rock-solid in support of an outcome that so manifestly serves the interests of people at home and around the world. Britain has a distinguished record in international climate science, being the only country to have supplied two chairs to the IPCC, including the incumbent, Jim Skea.

The climate impacts seen around the world this year – from lethal heatwaves in Europe to Nepal’s devastating flood – prove there is no time to wait. Climate action needs to be accelerated. Getting the right decision this week, so that the latest evidence can be acted on at the right time, is essential.

The world will be watching and counting on governments to stand strong and defend the need to deliver relevant and timely climate science for us all.

The post Governments that support climate science must stand firm against naysayers appeared first on Climate Home News.

Trees, borders and environmentalist coalitions Channel News brendan 12th October 2026 Teaser Media

It’s an early May afternoon, and Charlie Barrett has parked his pickup in a pullout along a county road a few hundred feet from the Black River in southern New Mexico, just a mile from where it empties into the Pecos River. 

He has stopped to set up a video camera that detects heat and gasses invisible to the eye to check for emissions at a nearby oil and gas operation. 

Stepping out of the truck, Barrett finds the pullout muddy and dotted with puddles — an anomaly during an ongoing drought. A gray chunk of salt the size of a medicine ball sits near a mud puddle flecked with shimmering, white crystals.

“Unfortunately this is pretty common,” he said. “It’s also quite dangerous.” It appeared that someone had dumped oilfield wastewater — also known as produced water — at the pullout. The extremely saline and toxic byproduct of oil and gas production carries a mix of petroleum compounds and oilfield chemicals. Produced water can be radioactive, too. Barrett said he worries that people would unwittingly drive through the muck or pull off the road and walk through it. 

All day, every day, hundreds of semi trucks haul the toxic produced water from well sites to disposal stations along the highways and backroads of this far corner of New Mexico. That water is an unwanted byproduct of oil and gas development. More than three barrels of wastewater come out of the ground for every barrel of extracted oil, on average in New Mexico. As fossil fuel production has skyrocketed in the Permian Basin, the amount of produced water has followed. In addition, the water-to-oil ratio increases as wells and oilfields age — a process known as “watering out.” 

Charlie Barrett, a thermographer with Oilfield Witness, points out a chunk of salt that likely fell off of a truck carrying oilfield wastewater near Malaga, New Mexico. Jerry Redfern / Capital & Main

New Mexico state rules ban produced water use for anything outside the oilfield. This has led to a parallel industry devoted to gathering, transporting and reinjecting produced water deep underground. That, in turn, has led to a rise in seismic activity in the region, as well as dramatic blowouts that spew toxic water when injection wells fail.

Barrett works for industry watchdog Oilfield Witness as a thermographer, using a thermal camera to measure gaseous emissions from oilfield equipment. As he set up to record, produced water trucks rumbled by under a cloudless sky. 

Barrett began filming. “Oh, man, that’s fucking terrible,” he said. On its small screen, in wavy, candy-colored hues, the camera revealed the heat signatures of three active flares near a house. “Got a person’s home here and then this mess … all producing CO2 and methane and other volatile organic compounds, blowing right into their home,” he said, looking through the viewfinder. “Jesus, man. It’s ridiculous.”

When he looked at the footage later on a bigger screen, he found another lit flare in the video, in addition to the first three. One shot — four flares. This despite the fact that New Mexico has banned nearly all flaring since 2022. 

Companies burn off — or “flare” — natural gas for a few reasons, including: it doesn’t meet specifications; it is over pressurized in a pipeline; or it’s required for equipment maintenance. Though better for the climate than venting unburned gas into the atmosphere, flaring still produces carbon dioxide and other toxic pollutants. 

Barrett documents emissions coming from nearby oil and wastewater storage tanks on an oil well site near Loving. Jerry Redfern / Capital & Main

Later, Barrett sat on a small boulder along a quiet bend in the Pecos River, talking about his work. The river gurgled; dragonflies hovered, and the grasses rustled as more oilfield trucks rumbled over a nearby bridge, a reminder that Barrett was sitting in one of the most prolific fossil fuel basins on the planet. 

“It sucks,” he said. “It’s a beautiful river in the middle of a hellscape.” 

Several months earlier, the last time Barrett visited this spot, he found salt deposits covering the ground between the bridge and the riverbank. “I mean, the whole road was flooded over,” he said. “We couldn’t confirm one way or another if that was an actual produced water spill,” he added, but there are few other possibilities. 

Such a spill would represent another environmental shock for this troubled river. The irony: The river needs more water. U.S. Geological Survey data going back nearly 40 years shows the annual snowpack slowly but steadily declining in the mountains around the Pecos River’s headwaters. River flow measurements in the upriver town of Pecos show the same. 

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As climate change heats and dries New Mexico, and the Pecos River runs ever lower, one of the biggest drivers of that change sits atop the river’s banks, just feet from where Barrett sits — 75,000 square miles of oil and gas wells across 55 counties in New Mexico and Texas: the vast Permian Basin. 

Water and geology

The Pecos River, favorite of Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam and the historic demarcation line of the Wild West, starts among some of New Mexico’s highest mountains east of Santa Fe and runs south for more than 500 miles before entering Texas at New Mexico’s lowest point. 

Its headwaters rush untamed through miles of steep canyons and pine-covered slopes, garnering it a National Wild and Scenic River designation. Its waters nourish farms and ranches across the center of New Mexico. But where it exits the state, the Pecos looks more like a tightly managed creek — a conveyance delivering carefully tallied water through the middle of the Permian Basin, the country’s most productive oil and gas region. 

The environmental group American Rivers has twice named the Pecos one of the country’s most endangered rivers: once in 2024, along with New Mexico’s other waterways, and in 2021 all on its own.

Both the river and the Permian Basin are natural features of a landscape transmogrified by the human desire for energy from fossil fuels. 

Over the last century, people have drilled tens of thousands of wells, stitched the basin with pipes and released carbon trapped tens of millions of years ago, all to power cars and jets and buildings. That released carbon changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, trapping heat that warms the planet and dries New Mexico. 

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Meanwhile, on the Pecos, as on other rivers across the state, there is a greater demand for less and less water year after year. Last winter’s snow bust only added to the pressure.  

“It is totally terrifying in a lot of ways,” said Hannah Riseley-White, the director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission. Her job is to make sure that the state meets its obligations to all of the groups that have a stake in river water.

“Everyone this spring got tired of me at the beginning of every meeting screen-sharing the snowpack figures for all of the basins that we manage,” she said. “It fell off the cliff. It wasn’t just record breaking. It was beyond anything that we could have imagined in terms of snowpack.”

The previous winter wasn’t much better. Neither are the long-term forecasts. Riseley-White said she expects a 25% to 30% decrease in river water by 2070.

“So the biggest challenge that the Pecos faces is just aridification due to climate change,” she said.

The percentages come from New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s 50-Year Water Action Plan, which lays out how global warming will shrink New Mexico’s water supplies in coming decades. It also proposes how to conserve existing supplies and create new water sources in a very dry state. That includes treating oilfield wastewater — the stuff Barrett believes he found on the roadside — to make it clean enough that the state will allow it to be used outside the oilfield for industrial and other, broader uses. 

A string of oil wells lines the Pecos River south of Loving. There are 380 oil and gas wells within a half-mile of the river in New Mexico. Aerial photography made possible by LightHawk. Jerry Redfern / Capital & Main

“The industry’s actually advocating for repurposing produced water and pumping it into this river,” Barrett said, while sitting beside the Pecos. 

To date, the legal maneuvering to make that happen has been unsuccessful. A recent push to change state rules and allow the broad use of treated wastewater ended when Lujan Grisham appeared to have influenced a rulemaking body’s deliberations. Another push to change state rules is underway, but no deadlines have been set. State environmental groups strongly oppose the idea, arguing that it’s not possible to be 100% sure that all toxic chemicals are removed from the water.

Meanwhile, over the border, the Texas branch of the Sierra Club has tallied five proposals to discharge treated produced water into the Texas portion of the Pecos River watershed, though none have yet been approved. 

“Do I think [treated] produced water will solve all of our problems in the Pecos? No,” Riseley-White said. “But thinking about it as one of the many sort of tools in the toolbox I think makes sense.”

She added: “Part of coming up with creative solutions is going to necessarily require looking at all of the options, and that’s certainly one of them. And I think technology is there to clean water to various standards. It’s just a question of whether financially the incentives are there.”

Other dangers

Endangered animals live along the Pecos River, including the dunes sagebrush lizard and the Texas hornshell mussel. The lesser prairie chicken was part of that group until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally removed its protections under the Endangered Species Act in early 2026, despite its declining population.

“There’s going to be just increasing challenges in ensuring that there’s sufficient water for those species, just like for the other users that depend on it,” Riseley-White said. One successful example: While working with the hornshell on a tributary of the Pecos, “landowners recognized that if there was water in the Black [River] for the hornshell, that meant that there was water there for them, too,” she said.

The latest challenges to endangered animals’ survival comes from Washington. In early July, the Department of the Interior rolled back the definition of “harm” to mean only directly injuring or killing endangered species. Noise and habitat destruction would no longer be considered threats to an endangered species’ well-being. 

Read Next A New Mexico town is running dry. An immigration detention center is its biggest water customer. Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News

In late July, the department rescinded the so-called “blanket rule” that covered threatened species with many of the same protections afforded endangered species. It also imposed consideration of the economic cost of protecting plants and animals — i.e. the additional costs to oil and gas production.

Taken together, the two changes undo historic protections for plants and animals across the country, including those that call the Pecos River watershed home. Of the thousands of oil and gas wells that pierce the ground in New Mexico’s share of the Permian Basin, 380 are within a half mile of the river. Another 11 injection wells — used to dispose of produced water — lie within that same stretch. 

“The sound pollution and light pollution also affect this river ecosystem,” Barrett said. He studied ecology and wildlife management and previously worked for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Texas A&M Forest Service as a staff ecologist. He said the oilfield disturbance “drives a lot of species away from this ecosystem, which can lead to extirpation, which is regional extinction.”

Despite the enormous challenges, Riseley-White said she remains optimistic.

“My hope in the Pecos is that as we face these challenges, we can get all of the different interests at the table and find solutions that make sense to everybody,” she said.

“I think it’s challenging, but I think it’s definitely possible,” she said.

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main

toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In New Mexico, a river runs through ‘the middle of a hellscape’ on Oct 11, 2026.

Niku Argane’s farm sits on a steep hillside in central Ethiopia’s semi-mountainous Gurage Zone, where years of flooding have carved deep gullies through the land. Soil that once produced enough barley and potatoes to feed his wife and four children — and left a surplus to sell in the market — has eroded, while drought has made what land remains harder to cultivate.

“We have never stopped farming, but our production declined because of land degradation,” the 32-year-old said from his farm in Ambele Kebele.

Over the last century, Ethiopia nearly eradicated its forests as trees were cleared for farming, grazing, and fuel. The loss of tree cover and tree roots allowed wind and rain to wash away fertile topsoil and contributed to declining crop yields. That vulnerability is now being compounded by climate change. Ethiopia is among the countries most vulnerable to its effects: Heavier downpours are sluicing away depleted soils and triggering landslides, while more intense droughts, combined with the loss of shade that trees once provided, rapidly dry out the land.

Land degradation costs the country an estimated $4.3 billion a year through smaller harvests and lost income to farmers, which also means there is less food to eat. With more than 100 million Ethiopians dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, the consequences reach far beyond the environment. Climate shocks and crop losses are among the biggest drivers of acute hunger; in 2024, 15.8 million Ethiopians were estimated to need food assistance, roughly 12 percent of the population.

Volunteers plant seedlings on the outskirts of Addis Ababa as part of a nationwide tree-planting drive in early August. Freddie Clayton

Now the country is trying to reverse this trajectory. Argane planted 80 tree seedlings on his farmland and another 50 in a communal area — a small contribution to a vastly larger effort. In just the last seven years, tens of millions of Ethiopians have planted more than 47 billion seedlings across the country in one of the world’s largest environmental restoration campaigns. Volunteers for the program, which aims to plant 50 billion seedlings by 2030, are planting trees to rebuild native forests and integrating them into farmland. In the process, they are sequestering carbon to help protect future generations from ever more extreme weather.

Such programs often fall short, but Ethiopians are finding hope in the scale of their ambitions. “Reforestation is one of the most difficult things you can imagine,” said Aad Kessler, a researcher at the Netherlands’ Wageningen University. “It almost always fails, but this is so big that even if 30 percent of the trees survive, it’s still huge.”

In the early 20th century, forests covered an estimated 35 to 40 percent of Ethiopia. Its highlands were greener, with forests spanning much of the country’s cool, fertile uplands. But as populations grew and settlements spread, trees were cleared for agriculture, pasture, fuel, and construction. As soils lost their fertility, cultivation moved onto increasingly marginal land, including steep slopes, where tillage and the loss of protective vegetation led to the erosion of fertile topsoil, which washed into rivers and reservoirs. By 1989, forest cover was estimated at less than 3 percent, while Ethiopia’s highlands were losing around 1 billion metric tons of topsoil every year. 

After the devastating droughts and famines of the 1970s and 1980s, Ethiopia’s government and international donor organizations began investing heavily in soil and water conservation, excluding livestock from worn-out land, planting trees across the country, and building terraces and check dams — small, low barriers of rocks and logs placed across gullies — to slow the flow of rainwater. By the 2000s, restoration programs were being implemented at increasing scale.

Local women load seedlings from the Mekalu nursery in Adua, Ethiopia. Brent Stirton/Getty Images

The government supercharged that effort in 2019 by turning tree-planting into a nationwide campaign with a scheme known as the Green Legacy Initiative, which mobilized millions of individuals and groups, including farmers, public servants, schools, and religious organizations, and distributed free seedlings across the country. In 2024, the government established the Green Legacy and Landscape Restoration Special Fund, committing 0.5 percent to 1 percent of the annual federal budget — roughly $73 million to $145 million — to restoring landscapes. It was an unusually large commitment for a low-income country, and the program’s success and ambition, according to development experts, contributed to the selection of Ethiopia as the host of next year’s U.N. climate conference — a prestigious honor that will help the nation showcase its greening efforts.

In August, 26.6 million Ethiopians planted 800 million tree seedlings in a single day, according to government figures, beating the previous year’s tally of 714.7 million. One of the volunteers, Yeshihareg Teferi, traveled at sunrise from her home in Addis Ababa to Tulu Dimtu so she could hunch in the rain to dig holes in the mud. It was Teferi’s fifth year participating in the annual event. Previously she’d planted indigenous species, including African wild olive and African fern pine. This time, she chose juniper. “We have a responsibility to ensure future generations inherit a green and fertile environment, rather than barren land,” she said.

There are already signs the work is having an impact.

The government reports that national forest cover rose from 17.2 percent in 2019 to 23.6 percent in 2023, while studies of restored areas have found substantial reductions in soil erosion. Between 2013 and 2023, the annual deforestation rate fell from more than 350 square miles to around 100 square miles. 

Such efforts can also benefit wildlife. In Abijata-Shalla National Park, in the Ethiopian highlands, workers replanted degraded areas and built terraces and contour bunds (small earthen ridges that run across hillsides to slow runoff and allow water to soak into the soil). As trees and native grasses returned, more water infiltrated into the ground, and water levels on lakes in the park began to rise, said Kumera Wakjira, director-general of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority. More water spurred the return of fish and fish-eating birds like cormorants and African darters. Grant’s gazelles and wild dogs are also expanding into areas where they were previously scarce, Wakjira said.

Read Next The Great Plains face a surprising threat: Too many trees Bekah Stolhandske McNeel

But planted trees are not guaranteed to survive. A 2022 study of 176 reforestation projects in Asia found that around half of planted trees did not live five years. And trees alone do not make a forest, said Endalkachew Wolde-Meskel, a soil scientist and senior researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research: That process usually requires the regeneration of grasses and other vegetation, in addition to soil- and water-conservation measures and management by local communities. “The objective is not really ‘plant trees,’” he said. “It is to restore the functioning of the entire landscape.” 

Emiru Birhane Hizikias, an Ethiopian restoration ecologist at Norway’s Nord University, said it was a “blessing, politically speaking,” to have the prime minister lead on tree planting but that the scale of the Green Legacy Initiative had outpaced the systems needed to make it work effectively on the ground. Too often, he said, the focus is on getting huge numbers of seedlings into the earth rather than ensuring their survival. You can’t expect a baby to grow if you don’t care for it, he said, but “that’s how plantation in Ethiopia is being done.” 

Abreham Berta Aneseyee, an environmental scientist at Ethiopia’s Wolkite University and an adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture, disputes that characterization, saying the planting campaign is accompanied by practical advice from government experts in forestry and farming. The experts go from farm to farm, advising smallholders on how to plant and care for different types of seedlings, he said, including how deeply to place them in soil and how to conserve soil with structures like bunds. They also advise farmers on managing forests and protecting trees rather than cutting them down. 

A 2026 study of more than 44,500 seedlings planted in southern Ethiopia under the Green Legacy Initiative in 2023 found that about 80 percent had survived, with rates significantly higher among older seedlings, wet-season plantings, and seedlings whose planters had received training in best “plantation practices.” In Humbo and Boloso Sore districts in Ethiopia’s southwestern Wolaita Zone, the Green Legacy Initiative has been layered onto longer-running efforts to sustainably manage land, with communities building check dams to stabilize gullies, digging half-moon ditches to trap water and let it soak into the soil, and planting trees alongside grasses and other vegetation.

Ethiopia’s approach has few direct parallels in Africa for its combination of political leadership, funding, public mobilization, and scale, said Kessler of Wageningen University. He compared the effort with China’s restoration of the Loess Plateau, one of the world’s most highly eroded regions. In the 1990s, China launched major restoration efforts on the plateau, including a World Bank-backed watershed rehabilitation project and, starting in 1999, the Grain for Green program, which paid farmers to restrict cultivation and plant trees, shrubs, and grasses. By 2016, more than 11,500 square miles of rain-fed cropland had been converted to more dense forest or grassland, contributing to a 25 percent increase in vegetative cover in a decade.

Read Next The deadly experiment that could save the American elm Tik Root

The comparison has limits, though. China paid farmers to take degraded slopes out of cultivation, while millions of Ethiopian smallholders still depend on the land for food and livelihoods. But Kessler said the two efforts shared a fundamental approach: “Do it massively, and then see where you end up.”

Kessler’s work, which includes a government-backed field project in Ethiopia, takes a more participatory approach, involving farmers and communities in decisions about what to restore and how. “Of course it is better [than top-down action],” he said, “but it takes more time.”

Even as Ethiopia invests in rebuilding forests and soils, climate change is altering the conditions landscapes must withstand. In the arid pastoral regions of Afar and Somali, the Green Legacy Initiative focuses on drought-tolerant species, but it is unclear whether the trees planted today will be able to withstand the conditions they face decades from now.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects more frequent and intense rainfall in East Africa as global temperatures rise. In July 2024, exceptionally heavy rainfall in Ethiopia’s Geze Gofa district, in the southern highlands, triggered two landslides that killed at least 257 people. Recent studies also suggest that climate change is making El Niños more frequent and severe, with consequences for East Africa. This summer, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network linked El Niño to “historically poor” summer rains in parts of Ethiopia, leaving some areas with their driest June and July on record. 

For some farmers, the changing climate has already complicated the most basic requirement of restoration: getting seedlings to survive their first season. Belayneh Mamo, 65, a farmer from Ethiopia’s northern and drought-prone Amhara region, relies on July rainfall for his teff, sorghum, maize, and wheat for bulgur. He also receives government-provided coffee, neem, and gesho seeds, but was unable to plant any crop until August, when the season’s first rains arrived. 

“In previous years, September was a period when crops were already developing and food such as bulgur and maize were becoming available for consumption,” he said. “The delays affected the seedlings we plant, our crops, and the availability of animal feed.”

On Argane’s hillside in the Gurage Zone, however, signs of restoration are already visible. Since 2019, he has planted grass, fodder, fenugreek, and fruit trees along the edges of his fields, helping to hold soil in place while providing feed for the four cows, six goats, and three sheep that he keeps for milk and meat. His barley harvest has risen from about 1,800 pounds per acre to roughly 3,200, while the trees and grasses have reduced erosion and slowed the flow of water across his land during heavy rains.

“Restoring degraded land isn’t just about protecting the environment,” Argane said. “It’s also about making life better for my family and community.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Fifty billion seedlings: Can Ethiopia replant its ravaged forests? on Oct 10, 2026.

Researchers have recorded a new species of giant waterlily after first spotting the plant in an Instagram photo. 

Read more on E360 →

Andy 'must cap oil' Channel News brendan 9th October 2026 Teaser Media

Louisiana’s offshore wind industry has a date circled on the calendar: January 21, 2029 — the first day after President Donald Trump is scheduled to leave office.

Trump’s policies have brought offshore wind development to a near standstill around the country, with his administration paying developers roughly $4 billion to walk away from projects. But in Louisiana, leaders in the industry say they are trying to preserve their expertise and supply chain in hopes of reviving offshore wind projects under the next administration. 

“Come January 21st, 2029, we all get to wave goodbye,” said state Representative Joe Orgeron, a Republican from southeastern Louisiana who worked in the offshore wind industry. “The current administration has been a one-man stopping show. I’m pretty confident, and I’m hopeful that it’ll change.”

Orgeron later put the industry’s near-term strategy more succinctly: “Just wait for the clock to run out.”

His views were echoed by the other wind energy experts on a panel at Tulane University’s Future of Energy Forum. “The Trump administration has been pretty openly hostile to seeing the advancement of the offshore wind industry,” said Madelyn Smith, a program manager with the Southeastern Wind Coalition, a nonprofit that supports the development of wind power across 11 states. 

Trump’s second-term efforts to halt the industry’s growth in the United States started on his first day in office last January with executive orders withdrawing federal waters from new offshore wind leases and halting permitting for any additional projects. The Trump administration also issued a series of stop-work orders for all of the projects under construction. When that sparked a legal fight, the administration shifted tactics, offering federal money for offshore wind developers to simply walk away from their projects. 

“For many reasons, it’s very compelling,” Smith said of the payout offers. “And there’s no real pathway for progress in the next two to three years, and some of these leases are quite expensive.” 

Smith said developers have relinquished 12 offshore wind leases in exchange for federal payouts, including plans for a 2-gigawatt wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico south of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

“About $4 billion of taxpayer money has been spent to remove those from the pool,” Smith said. “And those projects also represented about 21 gigawatts of potential capacity.” That’s enough energy to electricity to power more than 5 million homes. 

Several Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry had shifted to helping plan and build offshore wind farms on the East Coast. Orgeron’s family-owned supply boat business, along with several Louisiana engineers and metal fabricators, helped build the United States’ first offshore wind farm near Block Island, Rhode Island, in 2016.  

For Louisiana companies, the work kept coming. By 2024, nearly a quarter of all offshore wind work contracts in the U.S. had gone to Gulf-based firms, with about $1 billion in investments flowing to the region’s ship and fabrication yards, according to the Oceantic Network, an industry trade group.

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Louisiana colleges shifted their curricula to meet the growing demand for workers. Nunez Community College in Chalmette launched a two-year turbine technician program, while the University of New Orleans started the Wind Energy Hub, offering engineering scholarships and internships with offshore wind companies. 

RWE, the German company behind that 2-gigawatt project, had planned to tap into this workforce to build its wind farm about 44 miles south of Lake Charles by 2035. It also had a customer for its power, securing a deal with Entergy to deliver electricity to an estimated 350,000 homes in Louisiana and Texas. 

But as the offshore wind industry expanded under the Biden administration, Trump became an increasingly vocal opponent, eventually pledging to halt new projects. His opposition to wind energy dates to at least 2006, when he began a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over an offshore wind farm he said would spoil views from a golf course he planned to develop. Since then, he has frequently derided wind energy, portraying turbines as threats to property values and wildlife while also claiming that the technology spikes food prices, causes cancer, and can somehow drive people insane. 

Trump has managed to stall and at times derail Louisiana businesses that had steered investment toward supporting the industry, said James Martin, CEO of Gulf Wind Technology, an Avondale-based company that builds and tests wind blades. “It is a shame,” he said at the Tulane forum. “It’s been a big pause button on what was a sleeping giant of an industry.”

Martin’s company has tried to adapt by seeking work in the aerospace and defense sectors. Other companies have trimmed budgets and laid off workers. 

“There’s huge layoffs in the wind space, and some of the best engineers on the planet — they’re giving up,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Louisiana wind industry’s plan for survival: Outlast Trump on Oct 9, 2026.

Last week, this magazine published a review of Digger, the new climate change allegory from Mexican provocateur Alejandro Iñárritu. In it, my colleague Jake Bittle explains in detail why he “hated it.” 

I was skeptical of the bad reviews that Digger has been getting; after all, I like more of the Iñárritu films I’ve seen than not. I would even call one of them (his 2001 debut, Amores Perros) a cinematic masterpiece. (Birdman was fine.) In any case, most of the time a Mexican person is in the news, I am invested in their success, so I decided to see the movie for myself. 

Even then — two hours, nine minutes, and a small popcorn later — I was surprised by my reaction: I simply loved the movie. Despite the negative reviews and poor box-office numbers, Digger is a film well-worth seeing — and talking about. To do that fully, this review contains spoilers. 

Digger is Iñárritu’s most ambitious, visually maximalist, thematically convoluted, and sonically grating movie yet. Or as Jake puts it, yes, it is “ugly, loud, and unpleasant,” but I didn’t mind the sensory overload. In fact, it’s part of why I liked it. There are plenty of movies that try to capture the non-stop roar of the so-called unprecedented times we live in: Sorry to Bother You, Uncut Gems, and Eddington come to mind. These movies offer up cacophony as a form of contemporary social commentary. They’re grating on purpose, because that’s often how waking up, checking your phone, and heading to work feels. 

Digger joins the ranks of these unsubtle, borderline noxious films; it features fiery accidents, signs of planetary collapse, bumbling bureaucrats, casual sexism, decaying pet animals, and bouts of senseless violence. But it also stars Tom Cruise in one of his weirdest roles ever, which is truly a delight to watch. 

Digger revolves around a morally unsound man named Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon (played by Cruise) who ignores warnings from climate scientists that he should stop drilling in the Arctic. A crack has formed in the ice sheet and is leaking methane into the atmosphere — and it’s only likely to get bigger, they say, posing a massive threat to life and property. When their warnings come to pass and an explosion at Rockwell’s oil operation in Greenland triggers a monstrous ice shelf to break off and drift toward Europe, Rockwell and the president of the United States (played by a ghoulish John Goodman), who helped facilitate the drilling, start to panic. These cartoonish men are, clearly, avatars for the real-life architects of the climate crisis: the companies that knew what they were doing, and the powerful governments that delayed meaningful action to correct such oversights. 

Iñárritu takes pleasure in portraying them as howling windbags, targets of both ire from Ganesh, the film’s noble climate scientist played by Riz Ahmed, and of laughter from the audience. The way Rockwell and President Compson stumble through their hubris is often funny, but the laughs are closely followed by discomfort. Uncanny shots of trees falling in the background (only to be propped back up again?) begin to disorient the viewer. You think you’re watching a satire about the bad guys who started this mess, and then a crack in the movie’s narrative world appears. 

At its heart, Digger presents the problem we have with climate change as one of narrative: What is the story about how things went wrong, and who gets to tell it? Its answers might get Iñárritu called a doomer, but I found the way he intellectualizes our current predicament too compelling to look away from. (Spoilers start here!) 

Iñárritu pulls back a curtain, and reveals that Cruise is not actually Digger Rockwell; he’s an actor named Curtis Markson, and he’s playing Rockwell in a stage play. More specifically, Markson is an actor struggling to understand his character’s internal motivations. Here is where Cruise really shines: not as a laughable villain, but as a tortured artist trying to tell the story of the greatest crisis of our time. Goodman and Ahmed are, likewise, actors in supporting roles in this play-within-a-movie. 

As the movie goes on and more details of the theatric production are slowly revealed, this structure offers up more complicating questions for the viewer. Why stage a play about climate change in the first place? Isn’t it bad enough to have to live through global warming without figuring out what to say about it? These questions are aimed at Iñárritu as much as they are at Hannah, the “hip” theatre director (played by the wonderful Sophie Wilde) tussling with a pedantic Markson. These two cannot agree on the nature of what they’re doing onstage. Is the story of climate change a farcical comedy or a devastating tragedy? What would be the point of telling it either way?

The answers offered by Digger will certainly alienate some audiences. During tech rehearsal, Hannah explodes at Markson, saying the purpose of art is to comfort the dispossessed, especially those whose families were lost or displaced by climate change. The point, she argues, is to laugh at Markson as Rockwell, and the sooner he gets onboard, the better. At this point, the viewer learns that an iceberg really did take untold lives throughout Europe, and the play is a cult classic detailing how the Rockwell family attempted to profit off of disaster. 

Exactly why and how the play is being staged 25 years after these horrific events is a juicy twist I won’t share here. Suffice to say, Digger is concerned with legacy, and Iñárritu, the first and only Mexican filmmaker to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture twice, clearly is too. “The movie is not perfect,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview. He did it anyway because, as he put it, “I like taking risks.” Digger feels like the director’s latest bid to cement himself as an auteur, and it also feels like a vehicle for a potentially unpopular idea. Maybe art can’t change the world and maybe we shouldn’t expect it to — at least not when a tsunami is approaching. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong. on Oct 9, 2026.