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Chemicals play a critical, though often overlooked, role in modern society. They provide many of the key building blocks for the construction industry, support agriculture by increasing crop yields, and offer novel materials for a range of products from automobiles to new energy technologies. In fact, chemicals are everywhere, present in 96% of manufactured goods, including 75% of the energy technologies that will be needed to navigate the energy transition.

While chemicals are deeply embedded in modern society, it is equally important to acknowledge the challenges they pose. Among these are the need to reduce reliance on fossil inputs, develop better end-of-life management for chemical products, and lower emissions even as production is projected to grow up to 43% by 2050. More effort is needed across all these fronts, but addressing the 2 billion metric tons — or roughly 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions — from chemical production annually requires particularly urgent action given the long timelines to commercialize new production methods.

Despite these challenges, technologies are emerging to enable low-emissions chemicals production. While many of these technologies show technical promise, few have moved beyond the pilot or early demonstration phase. Scale-up of these technologies is often not held back by technical feasibility so much as by commercial barriers, including uncertainty about demand for low-emissions products and risk-aversion among participants spread across long and complex chemicals value chains.

Clear demand signals from companies that use chemicals in their products and novel mechanisms to bridge chemicals value chains are critical to overcoming these roadblocks and unlocking investment. The Center for Green Market Activation (GMA) and RMI are actively working to establish demand signals by aggregating buyers of low-emissions chemicals and by developing a book and claim system to enable chemical producers to transact directly with downstream companies that have committed to lowering supply chain emissions and are willing to pay a premium to do so.

The Challenge of Decarbonizing Chemicals Production

Scaling low-emission technologies in the chemicals sector is uniquely challenging. Chemical production assets are highly capital-intensive, with investment horizons that span decades. Existing plants, many of which are fully depreciated and can produce at a low marginal cost, leverage processes that have been optimized over many years and produce at enormous scale. The result is constant cost pressure that reinforces the competitiveness of conventional production methods. As a result, even when low-emission alternatives exist, buyers and suppliers alike often default to the legacy status quo.

The diversity of chemical products — and the resulting complexity of value chains required to produce them — results in an additional challenge. Unlike other industries with relatively standardized products, the chemical sector encompasses thousands of molecules, intermediates, and derivatives. This often results in long value chains with multiple layers of intermediaries separating a primary chemicals producer, generally responsible for the majority of emissions, from the better-known companies at the end of the value chain that have made net-zero commitments and are closer to consumer demand. In the middle are specialized producers of intermediate chemicals or products that often operate with thin margins and limited visibility.

In this environment, intermediate producers operating with thin margins have few incentives to source lower-emissions, higher-cost inputs unless they have certainty that their customers are willing to pay an equivalent price premium. The result is an enormous coordination challenge. Multiple parties within a value chain must simultaneously close both procurement and offtake contracts at a material premium to market prices. And all of this needs to occur at a volume that gives the primary chemical producers certainty that customers will pay a premium for most of their output over an extended time horizon. While this may be possible in rare cases where large buyers directly purchase from primary chemical producers, it will be all but impossible in most chemical value chains.

Leveraging Novel Mechanisms to Catalyze Investment

Breaking the deadlock requires both credible demand for low-emissions chemical products and mechanisms to bridge companies across long, complex value chains. GMA and RMI believe that two critical interventions, pursued in tandem, have the potential to address these challenges and unlock investment in low-emissions chemical production: demand aggregation and book and claim.

Demand aggregation is the first necessary intervention. As in many industrial sectors, low-emissions production will come at a price premium, particularly given that novel technologies often operate at small scale and with less historical process optimization than their fossil-intensive counterparts. While new technologies have the potential to decrease costs as they scale, the ability to achieve initial traction in highly price-sensitive markets is often a challenge for these production methods. The presence of buyers willing to purchase at a premium is a critical proof point for projects seeking capital to invest in low-emissions production.

But why is it necessary for multiple buyers to act together in order to provide this proof point? Because chemical assets operate at such a significant scale and because their lifetimes are so long, the purchasing volume required to unlock investment in a new facility can be enormous. By pooling demand, multiple buyers can provide the necessary volume to support an investment decision, thereby decreasing the cost and risk that any individual company would otherwise have to take on.

In cases where physical offtake of low-emission chemicals is constrained, Book and claim systems provide a mechanism to aggregate larger demand volumes through the use of Environmental Attribute Certificates (EACs). Under this chain of custody approach, chemical producers generate an EAC for each unit of low-emission product, such as a ton of ethylene, that reflects the reduced emissions intensity associated with production. This certificate is then sold separately from the physical product, which continues through the value chain as a traditional commodity with a baseline emissions intensity. This separation enables chemical producers to receive revenue from EAC sales to cover the premium associated with low-emission production, providing the financial certainty needed to finance capital-intensive projects. At the same time, buyers gain verifiable, traceable progress toward climate commitments through certificates that are independently verified and tracked through a registry system.

The result is three benefits that can dramatically alter the viability of low-emissions production:

1. Value Chain Bridging: Perhaps the most significant impact of book and claim systems is the ability for interested parties to transact efficiently. By enabling standardized transactions between downstream brands willing to pay for value chain decarbonization and upstream producers that most heavily influence emissions, the challenge of aligning multiple intermediaries around price and volume in complex value chains can be avoided.
2. Geographic Aggregation: Book and claim provides an additional benefit, particularly in the early innings of the net-zero transition when access to low-emissions products remain Creating an EAC distinct from the physical product means that a producer is no longer constrained to finding customers willing to pay a premium for a low-emissions product near its production plant. Instead, they can sell the physical product locally at commodity prices and cover the green premium by selling an EAC to any downstream user of the product, regardless of geography.
3. Product Aggregation: By focusing a book and claim system on high-value chemicals, a third benefit can be realized. A traditional demand aggregation approach would need to find buyers procuring identical products. However, book and claim enables demand aggregation across any product that contains a particular molecule. For example, demand for low-emissions ethylene can be aggregated across apparel companies using polyester for textiles, pharmaceutical companies sourcing polyethylene for syringes, and personal care companies using multiple types of plastic for everyday household goods. By focusing on a common and consistent upstream input, substantially more demand can be aggregated and transacted in a single procurement.

Given the immense challenges associated with decarbonizing chemical production, leveraging novel mechanisms to catalyze investment in low-emissions production will be essential. Combining demand aggregation with book and claim in the form of a buyers alliance for EACs offers a unique opportunity to reduce risk for both buyers and suppliers, while driving real investment decisions.

GMA and RMI’s Low-Emissions Chemicals Initiative

An emerging initiative from GMA and RMI to procure low-emissions high-value chemicals leverages these approaches to tackle emissions in the chemicals sector. Multiple downstream brands that use chemicals in their products have come together to procure environmental attributes for low-emissions ethylene, with plans to expand this approach to other molecules in the future. In the process, they will provide demand certainty for low-emissions projects while simultaneously finding a pathway to address upstream Scope 3 emissions that had previously been out of reach due to complex, multi-tiered value chains.

Prior efforts from GMA and RMI to pool advanced commitments for low-emissions products in heavy industry sectors have demonstrated how aggregated demand can generate confidence for suppliers and investors. Sectoral buyers alliances such as the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA), managed by Environmental Defense Fund, GMA, and RMI, have shown how standardized frameworks and collective purchasing can accelerate the deployment of next-generation technologies. Launched in 2021, this effort has evolved from one-year advanced commitments to purchase bio-based sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to a scaled marketplace and targeted 5+ year offtakes at scale for next generation fuels.

Without credible demand signals and effective mechanisms to translate that demand into firm offtake agreements, the transition will stall. GMA and RMI are working to bring these pieces together—aggregating demand and developing mechanisms to more efficiently enable offtake—to ensure that novel pathways to produce low-emission chemicals are developed. Together with active engagement from buyers and support from the broader ecosystem, these actions can provide the demand certainty needed to unlock investment and enable the chemical sector to accelerate its transition to a net-zero future.

If you are interested in learning more about the GMA-RMI low-emissions chemical procurement spotlighted in this article, please reach out to chemicals@rmi.org,

 

The post Harnessing Green Demand to Drive Sustainable Chemicals Production appeared first on RMI.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, bringing the country one step closer to a new Farm Bill.

After fierce debates over issues including the year-round sale of E15—a fuel blend of 15 percent ethanol—and pesticide provisions, reports emerged that the vote on the legislation would be delayed. But lawmakers were able to reach a consensus and passed the Bill with a bipartisan vote of 224-200. 

Anti-hunger advocates had hoped the House would revisit changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) seen in the tax and spending bill last summer, but those have remained in place. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that one in eight participants will lose access to some food relief as a result. 

“People don’t understand how bad it’s going to be,” Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University, tells Food Tank. Across her home state of Arizona, food pantries are already seeing lines grow longer. But because the worst won’t be felt for months to come, it will likely take a while for the effects to sink in. “A lot of people who are going out to vote in November won’t realize that the safety net is pulled out from under them.”

Representatives did, however, remove a provision designed to shield pesticide manufacturers from health-related lawsuits tied to their products. 

“I don’t like a lot of what’s in this Farm Bill. It doesn’t excite me,” Merrigan tells Food Tank. “But I have to say that pesticide victory was sweet.” The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement likely played a role in this win, she acknowledges.

“We’re seeing this pesticide issue being a tipping point right now in food and agriculture policy,” Merrigan says. “And a lot of this has really bubbled up through the MAHA movement.”

From here, the Senate will take up the Farm Bill, with a markup expected in late May or early June. If they succeed in passing the legislative package, it will be the first Farm Bill since 2018. “They typically are on an every five year timeline,” Merrigan explains. “We’re very much overdue at this point.”

But Merrigan believes that a new Farm Bill isn’t something to celebrate if it’s compromised, and she hopes that lawmakers will act to protect farmers and eaters. “I would say the costs of having success in the Farm Bill—if the Farm Bill looks like what just passed in the House—is not worth it. We need to stand tall.”

Listen to the full conversation with Kathleen Merrigan on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg to hear more about what else may change with this legislation, the impending impacts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s reorganization plans, and what lies at the heart of a successful Farm Bill. 

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of James Baltz, Unsplash

The post What the House Farm Bill Means for SNAP, Pesticides, and U.S. Food Policy appeared first on Food Tank.

During the month of April, La Via Campesina once again strongly raised the memory, resistance, and hope of peasants within the framework of the International Day of Peasant Struggles, commemorated every April 17. This year, we marked 30 years since the Eldorado do Carajás Massacre.

The post 2026 | April News Wrap: Updates from LVC members worldwide appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £1.7bn since the start of the Iran war, as a result of record electricity generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis.

The surge in wind and solar output is cutting the need for gas-fired generation, which has been nearly a third lower than last year and fell to record lows in both March and April 2026.

The figure below shows that wind and solar have generated a record 21 terawatt hours (TWh) on the island of Great Britain since the end of February 2026, when the US and Israel first attacked Iran.

Monthly generation from wind and solar in terawatt hours on the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), which has a separate electricity system from the island of Ireland, including Northern Ireland. Source: National Energy System Operator (NESO) and Carbon Brief analysis.

Amid another fossil-fuel price crisis, the record wind and solar output since the start of the Iran war avoided the need to import 41TWh of gas – roughly 34 tankers of liquified natural gas (LNG).

Importing those 34 tankers of LNG would have cost around £1.7bn, given the high gas prices triggered by the conflict.

At the same time, record wind and solar helped to cut electricity generation from gas by around a third year-on-year to the lowest levels ever recorded for the months of March and April, as shown in the figure below.

Monthly generation from gas in terawatt hours on the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), which has a separate electricity system from the island of Ireland, includingNorthern Ireland. Source: National Energy System Operator (NESO) and Carbon Brief analysis.

Together, wind and solar have generated more than twice as much electricity as fossil fuels over the period since the Iran war began. The country’s electricity mix has now flipped: a decade ago, fossil fuels were generating more than four times as much electricity as wind and solar.

Indeed, wind and solar have generated more electricity than fossil fuels for a record 15 months in a row. As shown in the figure below, this included a full winter season for the first time in 2025-26.

Monthly generation from fossil fuels (red) vs wind and solar (blue) in terawatt hours on the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), which has a separate electricity system from the island of Ireland, includingNorthern Ireland. Source: National Energy System Operator (NESO) and Carbon Brief analysis.

This meant that gas was setting the price of electricity roughly 25% less often in both March 2026 and April 2026 than in the same month in 2022, when fossil-fuel prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

April 2026 also marked a series of other records for the GB electricity system.

For half an hour between 15.30 and 16:00 on 22 April, a record 98.8% of the electricity feeding into the country’s main “transmission” grid came from zero-carbon sources, according to the National Energy System Operator (NESO).

In addition, solar generation hit a series of new record-highs, ultimately reaching 15.4 gigawatts (GW) on the afternoon of 23 April. Wind set a new record of 23.9GW on 25 March.

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The post Analysis: Wind and solar have saved UK from gas imports worth £1.7bn since Iran war began appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Every year, the forestry and timber industries produce vast quantities of tree bark as a byproduct. Most of this material is burned, discarded, or left to decompose. At the same time, there is an urgent need to develop scalable and affordable technologies to capture carbon dioxide.

“Our research brings these two issues together through a simple but impactful idea, transforming waste into a resource,” says Suresh Bhargava, director of the Centre for Advanced Materials and Industrial Chemistry at RMIT University.

Bhargava and his colleagues have converted the bark of the eucalyptus tree into a porous carbon material that can help clean water, filter air and capture carbon dioxide. They reported their simple two-step method in a paper published in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy.

Porous carbon materials, which contain a sophisticated network of pores, are already used in filtration and gas treatment systems. Their pores capture contaminants or targeted molecules as water or air pass through. But, says Bhargava, “conventional methods for producing porous carbon materials are often energy-intensive, requiring high temperatures and multiple processing steps, which limits scalability.”

The RMIT team developed a simple and scalable synthesis approach to make their carbon filter from eucalyptus bark. They first make a carbon-rich material called a hydrochar by heating wet bark at low temperature under pressure. Then they physically mixed the hydrochar with zinc chloride.

 

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This results in a highly porous carbon material with a surface area of approximately 2,210 square meters per gram of the material. The porous material captures around 7 millimoles per gram of CO₂, placing it among competitive carbon capture materials, Bhargava says.

“The choice of eucalyptus bark is both practical and scientifically grounded,” he adds. Eucalyptus bark is a widely available, low-cost resource. Australia is home to more than 900 species of eucalyptus and related trees, and eucalyptus is also cultivated widely around the world.

The bark contains lignin and cellulose that lead to the formation of stable carbon frameworks with well-developed porosity. Compared to other biomass sources, it produces materials with higher surface area and better CO₂ adsorption performance.

The abundance of the raw materials and the simplicity of the synthesis process makes this approach inherently scalable. The researchers are now trying to evaluate long-term durability, regeneration, and performance under real operating conditions. And they are seeking industry collaborations to explore commercialization opportunities.

“While further work is needed to evaluate long-term durability and large-scale deployment,” says Bhargava, “this study provides a clear pathway toward more sustainable and economically viable carbon capture technologies.”

Source: Pallavi Saini et al. Sustainable valorisation of eucalyptus bark waste into microporous carbon materials for efficient CO2 capture. Biomass and Bioenergy, 2026.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Headline News:

• “AI Data Centers Need Big Batteries But Lithium Isn’t Fit-For-Purpose” • As AI-driven data centers scale, the grid challenge is no longer simply how much electricity they consume. Their demand is unpredictable, coming in bursts. They need a system with enough buffering for sudden power surges and dips. They are hard on lithium-ion batteries. [CleanTechnica]

Google data center in Oregon (Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0)

• “German Parliament Rejects Return To Nuclear Power” • The Bundestag rejected returning to nuclear energy as an alternative to overcome fuel-related crises, most notably the war with Iran and tensions in the Middle East. The Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy said that the proposal to return to peaceful nuclear reactors was rejected. [Gulf Times]
• “How Do Solar Batteries Work And Are They Worth The Investment?” • With the war on Iran, home-grown renewables help cushion European households from fossil fuel shocks. The UK is the latest European country to greenlight the commercial sale of plug-in solar panels. Interest in batteries has grown apace. Battery costs have fallen 90% since 2010. [Euronews]
• “Sierra Club Endorses Tom Steyer For California Governor” • The Sierra Club has announced its endorsement of Tom Steyer for Governor of California. Doing so, it is backing a candidate with a long record of investing in climate solutions, taking on Big Oil, and helping build the coalitions needed to win significant environmental fights. [CleanTechnica]
• “IEEFA Warns Germany Over Hydrogen Costs” • Germany risks overbuilding its hydrogen network and wasting tens of billions of euros by relying on overoptimistic hydrogen demand projections, research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis shows. It says German hydrogen demand is likely to fall short of official projections. [reNews]
• “700 MW Power Link Celtic Between France and Ireland Progressing” • Construction of the planned Celtic Interconnector power link between France and Ireland continues to advance on both sides. With the start of key infrastructure works in Brittany, the 700 MW large-scale project is entering a new phase in its implementation. [Renewable Energy Industry]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

Scientists are increasingly worried that a vast system of ocean circulation, which delivers warmth to northern Europe and impacts climate globally, is at risk of collapse. Mounting evidence suggests it may be nearing a tipping point, though the research is far from certain.

Read more on E360 →

As global oil prices rocket due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, traditional jet fuel has become hard to come by and has nearly doubled in price, leading airlines across much of the world to raise ticket prices or cancel flights.

While greener fuels produced from plants or green hydrogen remain more expensive, the cost gap has narrowed and experts told Climate Home News that this could boost demand in the struggling sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) industry.

Matt Ridley, sustainability and innovation director at the OneWorld airline alliance told Climate Home News that “higher jet fuel prices narrow the green premium, reinforcing the role of SAF in cutting lifecycle emissions while reducing exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.”

Marie Owens Thomsen, chief economist and sustainability lead at the International Air Transport Association (IATA), a trade group for airlines, said the world is currently seeing “the highest jet fuel prices that we’ve ever had in the history of jet travel”.

• Jun 18, 2025 What is Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)? Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is seen as the main way to decarbonise air travel – but is it as green as its backers claim? Read more
• Jun 18, 2025 Aviation’s Green Dream Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy? Suspicions of fraud, ‘ridiculous’ data and a dearth of supplies – our investigation exposes the flaws in the airline industry’s big green hope: sustainable aviation fuel Read more
• Jun 18, 2025 Aviation’s Green Dream Air travel’s ‘holy grail’: Jet fuel made from CO2 and water prepares for take-off Synthetic jet fuel companies think they have the answer to tackling aviation emissions despite concerns about the cost of producing energy-hungry e-SAF Read more

The problem predates the war but has been worsened by it, she said, adding that as demand for oil-based products like diesel has declined because of the electrification of road transport, many of the oil refineries that produce jet fuel were struggling to make a profit.

The crisis could “wake people up” to the problem of depending on “oil monopolies in the Middle East”, she said, adding that ramping up SAF production is critical for energy security.

“Khaki is the new green”

Some in the military sector seem to be taking note. Rheinmetall, a long-term supplier of the German air force, has partnered with a company called Ineratec which is developing technology to produce e-SAF based on hydrogen. And during the Biden administration, the US Department of Defense invested $65 million in an American e-SAF startup called Air Company.

Summing up the changing reasons for interest in SAF, Marcella Franchi from SAF producer Haffner Energy told the SAF Investor Summit in February that “khaki is the new green”. Speaking before the US bombed Iran, she gave the example of Canada, which she said is pursuing SAF production to avoid reliance on oil-based jet fuel from its “very unsettling neighbours”.

Since conflict has flared in the Middle East, Susan van Dyk, a former academic turned SAF consultant, told Climate Home News that a temporary narrowing of the cost gap is not, by itself, enough to make SAF take off. But the energy crisis may push governments to support SAF, she said.

The European Union and the UK have both mandated that, from January 2025, fuel suppliers at their airports must blend at least 2% SAF with oil-based kerosene. The blending requirement will gradually increase to reach 32% in the EU and 22% in the UK by 2040.

But, at least before the latest oil crisis, the EU and UK faced pressure from some airline and fossil fuel executives to water down these rules. The uncertainty these calls have created is damaging investment in production, SAF producers have said.

Book and claim

Speaking at the SAF Investor Conference in February, African airline executives and SAF producers said the design of the EU and UK mandates hinders non-European producers from contributing.

Under current rules, the SAF has to be physically delivered to planes at EU and UK airports to count towards the mandate, which favours SAF produced in or close to European airports – even though the raw materials to make it, such as waste oil, are often imported from regions like Southeast Asia.

Wakina Mutembei, Kenya Airways’ sustainability and innovations lead, told the conference that the EU and UK should adopt what is known as a book-and-claim system, where SAF supplied to planes outside of Europe can count towards a fuel supplier’s compliance with the EU and UK’s mandates.

Wakina Mutembei speaks at the SAF Investor conference in London (Photo: SAF Investor)

This would be a “business opportunity”, she told the London audience, to use abundant Kenyan crops and used cooking oil and lower production costs “to produce SAF that is cheaper for the European market and the UK market”.

“If we are all complaining that the cost of SAF is higher, why not go to a market where it’s cheaper to produce it?” she asked, noting that this would create jobs in Africa and earn foreign currency.

Francis Mwangi, senior engineer at Kenya’s Civil Aviation Authority, told Climate Home News in an interview that if SAF is produced in Africa “you might find that, even relatively, the price might not be as far from the normal Jet A1 [oil-based jet fuel]”.

IATA’s Thomsen also called for a book-and-claim system, saying it “is definitely a way of making this teeny-tiny, bespoke, private-deal kind of market grow into a global market” by removing geographical constraints.

Shipping SAF long distances to be pumped into planes is inefficient, she said, adding that “without book and claim, this market will not scale”.

The post Oil crisis could boost struggling sustainable aviation fuel industry appeared first on Climate Home News.

Regulator says surge in home battery and rooftop PV installations puts the 82 pct renewables target back in reach because it reduces the burden on large scale projects.

The post “Blows your mind:” Regulator says boom in home batteries and PV puts 82 pct renewables within reach appeared first on Renew Economy.

Frontline leaders from across the country are calling on The Home Depot to lead the industry away from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic, highlighted in a new “photo quilt” unveiled by Toxic-Free Future and partners nationwide. 

The post Groups call on The Home Depot to phase out PVC plastics ahead of shareholder meeting appeared first on Toxic-Free Future.

The post The Geothermal Supply Chain Is America’s to Gain — or Lose appeared first on RMI.

Flooding across northern Michigan last month pushed rivers to record levels, testing the limits of the state’s aging dams so severely that officials in one city nearly ordered evacuations as water threatened to spill over the top of a key barrier — a close call that highlights the growing risk that intensifying storms pose to similar infrastructure around the country.

Nationwide, the average dam is 64 years old and most were built for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect today’s changing climate. Thousands are classified as high hazard, meaning their failure could result in the loss of life. Dam safety experts say inspections are uneven and improvements often underfunded.

More than half of Michigan’s dams are beyond their 50-year design life, and the risks became clear as snowmelt and weeks of heavy rain swelled rivers. Rising water came within 5 inches of flowing over Cheboygan Dam in Cheboygan, a city of about 4,700 people, on April 16. In Bellaire, officials deployed about 1,000 sandbags to shore up a century-old dam.

“This needs to be considered not the worst we can experience. This needs to be considered as typical of the future,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change.

There are about 92,000 dams in the United States. About 18 percent are considered high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates repairing all of these aging structures will cost more than $165.2 billion. In Michigan, that estimate is $1 billion.

Communities facing these risks are left with difficult choices. Given the cost of repairing and upgrading dams to withstand stronger storms, removing them is often cheaper. That can reduce long-term risk and restore rivers to a more natural state. But it often faces resistance from property owners and communities with economies built around the reservoirs those dams created.

As floodwaters recede across Michigan, local leaders, dam safety advocates, and experts are renewing calls to bolster safety regulations and deal with aging dams.

Bellaire Dam in Bellaire, Michigan, on April 13, 2026.
Austin Rowlader / IPR News

Bob Stuber, executive director of the Michigan Hydro Relicensing Commission, considers the April flooding a wake-up call and believes the solution is clear: upgrades where feasible and removal where it makes sense. 

“I think every opportunity we have to remove an aging dam, we should take advantage of it because it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

Officials in Traverse City came to that conclusion in 2024 and removed the Union Street Dam along the Boardman-Ottaway River as part of a decades-long restoration project that includes FishPass, which will allow key species to pass while blocking harmful invaders like sea lamprey. Engineers said that removal and upgrade most likely reduced flooding impacts when waters surged to near-record levels last month, falling just short of a 500-year flood.

“Upstream would have been under 2 more feet of water, which would have been quite devastating,” said Daniel Zielinski, a principal engineer for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “We actually had a really great stress test of the system. It functioned really well.” 

Removals are increasing across the country, according to data from American Rivers. Since 2000, more dams have come down than gone up, and that pace is accelerating as aging infrastructure, safety concerns, and environmental benefits reshape how communities weigh their value. 

In northern Michigan, conservation groups like Huron Pines help dam owners make that decision. It has managed nine removals in the last 13 years and has seen growing interest after the recent flooding, said Josh Leisen, a senior project manager for the organization. Removal reconnects river ecosystems and eliminates the need for expensive upkeep of aging structures, he said.

“There are costs associated with repair and there are risks associated with having a dam,” Leisen said. “Even if it seems to be in good condition, you get extreme weather events like we just had.”

Removing dams is not always straightforward. Beyond the technical challenges, many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts those structures create.

“There’s this emotional attachment to that impoundment,” said Daniel Brown, a climate resilience strategist at the Michigan-based Huron River Watershed Council.

In other cases, dismantling isn’t practical. Some dams provide electricity or drinking water, linking them to local economies and infrastructure. “[Removal] is not really something that’s on the table because they are connected in this very practical way,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, there are limits to how much aging structures can be adapted to a warming world. “[A dam] is this very long-term, huge, expensive infrastructure that you’ve put on the landscape that’s going to stay there. And that is not how climate change or nature or rivers behave,” Brown said.

Dismantling dams, like upgrading them, can come with steep costs. The Boardman-Ottaway River project — which removed three dams in the largest removal effort in state history — cost $25 million. Huron Pines is managing the removal of Sanback Dam in Rose City next month, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Half of the expense is funded through a grant program from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, launched in response to the 2020 Edenville Dam failure which overwhelmed the downstream Sanford Dam. The twin catastrophes forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, destroyed thousands of homes, and flooded ecosystems in a disaster that investigators later found was avoidable. The $44 million state program funded several dam removals, upgrades, and engineering studies before it ended last year. 

Neil Hawk and his wife Dawn take a rowboat out to a residential part of Sanford, Michigan, to inspect the damage to their neighborhood following extreme flooding throughout central Michigan in May 2020.
Matthew Hatcher / Getty Images

Federal funding is available through programs administered by agencies such as FEMA or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But those resources fall short of the estimated $165.2 billion needed to address the issue, and some are at risk of elimination.

State governments regulate roughly 70 percent of the dams in the United States, with the federal government regulating hydropower dams and providing funding and guidance. This means inspection standards, regulations, enforcement, and resources can vary widely.

In Michigan, about 1,000 dams fall under state oversight, while 99 hydroelectric dams are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The remaining 1,500 are smaller barriers that don’t fit the criteria for state regulation, according to the Michigan Dam Inventory.

Now, state officials are renewing calls for more money and stronger regulations. “Dam safety may be an issue that isn’t partisan,” said Phil Roos, director of EGLE.

Proposed state legislation would bolster inspection rules, address private ownership, update design standards, and create more funding opportunities for upgrades or removals. “It’s so important to our state that we can come together, and whether it’s passing the legislation that was proposed, or improving procedures, or ultimately funding,” Roos said.

Michigan state Senator John Damoose has expressed concern about private dam ownership since the close call at Cheboygan Dam, which is under both state and private control. About 75 percent of the dams Michigan regulates are privately owned.

“Somebody made a point, ‘Well, we can’t have private companies owning these things.’ I tend to believe in private ownership but they might be right,” Damooose said during a Traverse City roundtable discussion on dam safety.

It’s not just a Michigan issue. Most dams in the United States are privately owned, meaning responsibility for maintenance, upkeep, and potential failure falls on individuals, not governmental agencies, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. 

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense storms. As the world warms, the atmosphere holds more moisture, fueling more intense precipitation, according to Rood at the University of Michigan.

Recent flooding “has shown an incredible vulnerability,” he said. “[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Luke Trumble, chief of dam safety for Michigan, said the state is already dealing with conditions that many dams were never designed to withstand.

“It’s a little bit of a misconception that if we fix the dam issue, there’ll be no more flooding,” Trumble said. “There’s still going to be flooding on rivers whenever we get rain like this, or rain on snow.

“What we can do with dam safety legislation is help ensure that flooding is not made worse by a dam failure,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Close calls at Michigan’s dams are a climate warning to America on May 7, 2026.

As the harmful effects of social media platforms have become undeniable, the exciting promise of a globalised public square has given way to growing anxieties over uncontrolled digital addiction. Children, with their hyperactive cerebral reward system, are especially vulnerable to algorithms designed to grab users’ attention at any cost. A number of countries, both within and outside Europe, are weighing whether to ban minors from social media. However, some argue that such restrictions will not solve the problem.

This article is part of the Green European Journal’s upcoming print edition on demographic futures, out in early June. Subscribe now and get it delivered straight to your door.

Social media has shaped generations in ways both exciting and unsettling. For Guilherme Alexandre Jorge (24 years old, member of Volt Europa in Portugal) and Anna Mazzei (23 years old, member of the Italian Young Greens), it began as a gateway to knowledge and connection. Jorge joined Twitter at 15: “I started following people, then exploring what different topics meant, and I started becoming more aware of issues both globally and locally.” Mazzei, who began using social media at 14, followed pages run by younger creators rather than traditional media, finding them more engaging. “Once I got into activism,” she recalls, “it was also a way to see who shared my views and to follow green activists in Italy and abroad. It helped me to feel part of something”.  

More than a decade ago, social media was largely celebrated as a portal to a globalised world: fast access to news, digital encounters with loved ones abroad, and communities bound by shared interests. In 2010, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was named Time’s Person of the Year, emblematic of the promise of this new digital era. Those years now feel distant, and social media has gone from being seen as a revolutionary communication tool to being treated by courts and regulators as a system that maximises attention through aggressive algorithms at the expense of users’ mental health. In 2026, Zuckerberg is more likely to make headlines for legal cases and fines imposed on his company, Meta. 

Over 90 per cent of Europeans see an urgent need to protect children online.

According to the 2025 Eurobarometer, over 90 per cent of Europeans see an urgent need to protect children online, citing its negative impact on mental health (93 per cent), cyberbullying (92 per cent), and the importance of restricting access to age-inappropriate content (92 per cent). In response to citizens’ concerns, governments have begun taking action. In December 2025, Australia became the first country globally to enforce a law banning access to social media for users under 16, requiring platforms to implement age detection systems. In Europe, France has passed legislation restricting access for minors under 15 unless parental consent is provided, while Spain is currently advancing a law to ban access for those under 16, with mandatory platform-based age verification. Other countries, including Portugal, Germany, Norway, and Italy, rely primarily on parental consent models for regulating minors’ access.  

The European Parliament, too, overwhelmingly backs restricting children’s access to social media. At the end of 2025, it passed a non-binding resolution stating that minors shouldn’t access social media before the age of 16, although parents could give consent from age 13. While the document has no legal force, it places political pressure on the European Commission, which now holds the power to turn these recommendations into actual EU legislation. 

Digital drug 

These developments respond to growing concerns among experts, teachers, and families about excessive smartphone use and the risks social media poses to young people, particularly in terms of mental health, exposure to harmful content, and cyberbullying. While there is broad, across-the-board agreement that social media presents a genuine and pressing challenge, there is far less consensus on how best to address it. Some advocate strict measures like age-based bans, whereas others favour solutions centred on education, digital literacy, and platform accountability, reflecting broader tensions between protection and autonomy and differing views on who should bear responsibility. Consequently, the measures banning social media use for minors have sparked scepticism and debate over whether such restrictions address the root of the problem or merely act as a partial and potentially ineffective fix, raising broader questions about enforcement, privacy, and the role of platforms themselves.  

Right before it proposed the law to restrict access in November 2025, the Government of Spain presented the most comprehensive research worldwide on the impact of technology on childhood and adolescence. The study “Childhood, Adolescence, and Digital Wellbeing”, published by Red.es, UNICEF Spain, the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the General Council of Colleges of Computer Engineering, gathers the voices of nearly 100,000 children and adolescents in Spain. According to the research, 41 per cent of children have their own smartphone at age 10, and 76 per cent by age 12. Nearly 20 per cent of boys and girls aged 10 to 20 say they spend more than five hours a day on social media on weekends, and intensive use is associated with higher anxiety, lower quality of life, and greater exposure to harassment, cyberbullying, or digital control in romantic relationships.  

Further evidence suggests that by delaying the introduction of smartphones to children until they are 13 or 14 – rather than at 10.8 years, which is the average age in Spain – problems such as video game addiction, exposure to sexting and pornography, and contact with strangers are reduced by half.  

“The scientific evidence we have shows that the increasingly early introduction of smartphones, and social media in particular, into the lives of minors is not harmless. It takes away more than it gives,” summarises Antonio Rial, co‑leader of the national study, senior lecturer in social psychology at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, and a leading expert on adolescent behaviour, digital media, and non‑substance addictions.  

The adolescent brain, with a hyperactive reward system and still-immature executive control, is highly vulnerable to social media mechanisms designed to capture users’ attention at all costs. Anna Lembke, one of the first researchers to document this effect, wrote in her 2021 book Dopamine Nation: “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.” 

In other words, parents have good reasons to worry. María Gijón, author of Tú puedes dejar tu móvil si sabes cómo (“You Can Quit Your Phone if You Know How”, 2026) and mother of a 12-year-old, directs the Madrid branch of Adolescencia Libre de Móviles (“Smartphone-Free Adolescence”). The movement began in 2023 with a conversation among concerned mothers in a park in Barcelona’s Poblenou district, and has since grown into a nationwide initiative. Its goal is to bring families together around delaying smartphone use for children. “The idea is that if we all agree to give them later, it becomes easier to resist the social pressure we used to feel to hand over a smartphone at age 12,” Gijón explains. The association, unsurprisingly, supports the Spanish government’s proposed measures to limit minors’ access to social media. 

Gijón believes that minors and adolescents don’t use their phones for activities like learning how to play the piano or studying three languages. “Those cases are a needle in a haystack,” she explains: “What we are talking about here is public health, and in public health we have to focus on the majority.” Rial and Gijón both emphasise that banning social media use for minors under 16 will particularly protect economically vulnerable families, whose children tend to use digital devices more excessively than others. While digital addiction is a global problem that does not differ by socioeconomic status, race, or gender, not every child has the opportunity to attend a good school where they can be guided in the proper use of technology. “The lower the socioeconomic level, the greater the misinformation and, likely, the greater the harm. This makes preventive action through legislation even more necessary,” says Rial.  

The expert´s position is clear: social media should be illegal for minors, just as alcohol and tobacco are. “For once and for all, policymakers have sided with minors, who need to be protected. They have sided with families, who need support and guidance. And they have called out the tech industry, making it clear that the greatest share of responsibility lies with them, not with the children or their families,” he says.  

Disease and cure 

As governments move to regulate platforms, the tech industry has responded shrewdly, flooding public discourse with content that highlights the benefits of social media and presents digital education as the primary solution to mitigate its shortcomings. But there have also been experts who, despite criticising the way these platforms operate, oppose measures that restrict minors’ access, arguing that the cure may be worse than the disease. 

Those who believe minors should retain access argue that social media provides adolescents with information, connection, and role models they might not encounter in their family or school environments. For many marginalised groups, these social platforms have served as a vital space for self-expression and finding community. “If we pursue bans without exploring alternatives, we end up depriving them of participation in public life, as well as a wide range of opportunities for connection and learning,” says Marta G. Franco, a journalist, social media expert, and author of Las redes son nuestras (“Social Media Is Ours”), who describes herself as “citizen of the internet since 1999”. 

Alexandra Geese, a Green member of the European Parliament who works on digital issues, agrees: “We shouldn’t punish kids instead of the platforms. A ban should address specific social media platforms that don’t comply with the rules for the protection of minors.” At the same time, she says, “We should support initiatives to build a better internet. They could offer safe spaces for kids and should not be affected by a ban.” 

Franco points out that despite growing calls to restrict social media, government officials continue to rely on these platforms for real-time information. She notes, for instance, that following a major train accident in January, the Spanish Minister of Transport shared live updates on rail services via Twitter, underscoring the state’s dependence on social media as an instant communication tool. 

Moreover, critics warn that bans would undermine efforts to enhance youth engagement in politics. Mazzei points to a paradox: if 16-year-olds are allowed to vote, as is the case in a growing number of European countries, does it make sense to restrict their access to information on social media until then? 

Franco also cautions against drawing sweeping conclusions from studies. While youth anxiety and depression increased around the same time social media became widespread, between 2010 and 2015, other factors – such as the global economic crisis – may have contributed to that outcome. Franco adds that in the United States, where many of these studies originate, screenings began to be conducted among adolescents around the same time, potentially creating the impression of a surge in mental health issues. “Just because two things happen at the same time does not necessarily mean one causes the other. It is even worth asking whether the reverse could be true: that psychological problems may lead to increased social media use,” she notes. 

If 16-year-olds are allowed to vote, as is the case in a growing number of European countries, does it make sense to restrict their access to information on social media until then? 

Rial disagrees: “Levels of anxiety, somatisation, and depression triple, and the risk of suicide quadruples among adolescents who clearly show a pattern of maladaptive social media use. Could it be that a young person with emotional deficiencies, or an existing mental health problem, is more likely to develop maladaptive social media use? Of course. The relationship is bidirectional, but that does not exclude the existence of the first direction.”  

Like Rial, Franco is critical of digital spaces created by private companies and designed to extract maximum profit from our data, and in her work, she advocates for alternative environments that foster healthier interactions. However, she thinks banning access altogether means throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 

Asking the right question 

Nicoletta Prutean, Senior Governance Analyst at the Centre for Future Generations (CFG) and an expert in brain science and psychology, works on shaping policies to safeguard mental health in the era of technological acceleration. She believes that age-based restrictions are a political response to an ill-posed question. “The question ‘does social media harm mental health?’ sounds to me very much like asking ‘does food harm physical health?’ Food can be good, but also bad.” In her view, the right approach is to ask which features in the design of social media are harmful. “The answers would be the recommender system features, the interface features, the infinite scrolling, the autoplay, the variable rewards that exploit our attention capacity and our reward sensitivity,” she notes. Disregarding the fact that the problems of social media are at the design level risks leaving us vulnerable to new technologies – such as generative AI – that may replicate those features. “If we keep focusing just on social media as a whole and not on the mechanisms, we will miss other technologies where these mechanisms are even stronger.”  

Current EU legislation specifically addresses the features of digital platforms that are known to disrupt mental health. “The Digital Service Act (DSA) looks at the right objects, it acknowledges that the design of the systems has a very important role to play and has a financial penalty,” Prutean explains. In February, The European Commission disclosed preliminary DSA findings about TikTok, concluding that its addictive features – such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and highly personalised recommendations – may violate the law by failing to mitigate risks to users’ wellbeing. If confirmed, TikTok could face fines of up to 6 per cent of its global annual turnover, the DSA’s maximum for serious violations. 

Disregarding the fact that the problems of social media are at the design level risks leaving us vulnerable to new technologies – such as generative AI – that may replicate those features. 

Geese also calls for targeting specific platform practices. “Rather than discussing a general social media ban, we should single out problematic practices like algorithms privileging borderline content, targeting, and addictive features. On the basis of the Digital Services Act, the European Commission could already enforce better rules for social media.” 

However, Prutean argues, both the measures restricting minors’ access to social media and the DSA overlook the broader spectrum of mental wellbeing. The former reduces it to the absence of pain: “Being healthy mentally also means being empowered, for example. We shouldn’t hope for future generations just to not be depressed or anxious; we should hope for more.” In the case of the DSA, she notes that harm often occurs long before a clinical pathology emerges. “This is not clearly explicit [in the legislation]. Broadening the definition of mental harm and providing scientific evidence and benchmarks would make these laws more enforceable. The reference to mental health is there, but the threshold for what constitutes harm is just not very clear, making enforcement difficult.”  

For Franco, “It’s somewhat paradoxical that we are constantly hearing calls to create new laws, while at the same time Spain is one of the countries [along with Germany and France] supporting the deregulation of data protection laws through the Digital Omnibus, which is currently being debated in the European Commission.” She notes that Spain is also behind in transposing the DSA, which mandates the establishment of a national authority for its implementation. 

Holding platforms accountable 

A central challenge of measures restricting minors’ access is the age verification system. Australia’s world‑first ban has struggled in practice: the law does not mandate specific technology, leaving platforms to choose their methods. While millions of underage accounts have been closed, many minors remain active because verification tools are imperfect and platforms allow multiple workarounds. In contrast, Spain (and more broadly, the EU) is developing a privacy‑preserving protocol by which users would hold a cryptographic credential – similar to a digital ID – that proves their age without revealing personal details. Stored in a digital wallet, the credential is presented securely to platforms, which learn only that the user meets the age requirement, not their full identity. 

While Gijón stresses the need to accompany restrictions with an effective age verification system that ensures compliance from platforms (including through penalties severe enough to deter rule-breaking) and prevents minors from easily circumventing the measures, Franco is wary of the risk of online activities being tracked to users’ legal identity. She warns: “No matter how much we are told that it will be handled in a way that doesn’t involve sharing our identity with the platform, any data we leave behind is extremely risky and can potentially be captured in some way.” Geese has similar concerns: “It is vital that no additional data – and in particular, no biometric data – is used. Biometric data can be used for sexualised images or for political surveillance many years later.” 

The people interviewed for this article offered different solutions for the social media problem, but they all agreed on two points: that the way social media is currently designed does not exclusively affect minors, and that major tech companies should be held accountable. Jorge notes that while limiting minors’ screen addiction would bring clear benefits, the issue cannot be framed as affecting children alone, and that is why intervention needs to focus on the algorithms that drive compulsive engagement. “I’m 24 now and I am still glued to my phone,” he says. Mazzei, meanwhile, highlights the importance of enabling young people to participate in a digital society, even as she warns against an “unmanaged algorithm”. She does not take a firm position on the debate, but cautions against outright bans, suggesting that “banning” may be the wrong approach: “Maybe restricting or moderating access is better.” 

Rial, meanwhile, situates the debate within a wider democratic concern, asking: “If we look at the problem deeper, this is a question about the quality of democracy. Studies in the US show that 80 per cent of hate speech is driven by just 20 per cent of users or accounts. What happens with that?” 

The digital space, once celebrated as a democratic public forum, today resembles more a shopping mall than a town square. The alternative, Franco argues, lies in fostering different digital environments: “This means greater public collaboration with companies and citizens to build digital spaces based on open-source software and other guiding principles.”  

While such collaboration is attempted, “the mental, physical, and social health of children and adolescents continues to decline,” Gijón worries. “Technology is advancing far faster than legislation, and the only way to protect minors – who lack the capacity to self-regulate in the face of addictive designs or tools – is to delay their age of access.”  

Joie Chowdhury is senior attorney and climate justice and accountability manager at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and Jule Schnakenberg is director of World’s Youth for Climate Justice (WYCJ).

A resolution that will come before the UN General Assembly (UNGA) later this month brings a reckoning for multilateralism: will governments stand behind international law or not? 

On May 20, UN member states will consider a resolution to welcome and operationalise the International Court of Justice’s historic Advisory Opinion (ICJ AO) on states’ obligations in respect of climate change, which clarified that they have binding legal duties to prevent and repair climate harm. 

Translating that clarity into action should be straightforward. That the resolution is instead contested exposes efforts to evade responsibility. Those most responsible for the crisis will often be the first to resist accountability – that’s predictable, but it’s not acceptable. 

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At a time when multilateral cooperation is under strain, the resolution’s backing by a strong majority of countries, or its passing by consensus, holds power. It would send a clear signal: governments remain committed to the rule of law and to collective action to protect the climate, a shared foundation on which all life depends.

State of play

Led by Vanuatu, with support from a core group of diverse countries including the Netherlands, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Barbados, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Jamaica, the Philippines and Burkina Faso, the resolution, now open for co-sponsorship, has already secured broad cross-regional backing – especially from countries at the sharp edge of climate change. 

The final text of the draft resolution faithfully reflects the full breadth of legal obligations articulated in the advisory opinion. It affirms the imperative of a just transition away from fossil fuels, the stability of legal entitlements for countries facing sea-level rise, and the duty to provide full reparation for climate-related harm under international law. It also underscores the centrality of equity and provides for structured follow-up for implementation, including a report on ways to do that from the UN Secretary-General.

While the final resolution text could have gone further on critical justice dimensions, it reflects a carefully balanced outcome, integrating diverse perspectives emerging from the genuine engagement of over a hundred states.

Vanuatu pushes new UN resolution demanding full climate compensation

In negotiations, resistance tracked a familiar set of arguments to protect fossil fuel interests and evade accountability. Many of the usual suspects – polluters with disproportionately high historical and current responsibility for the climate crisis, including major oil producers – have engaged actively, but with the aim of weakening the authority of the Court’s opinion, or references to fossil fuels in the resolution. 

There is still time for things to shift. For the incoming COP presidencies of Australia, Türkiye and Ethiopia, and European states that profess their climate leadership, positioning on this resolution is a litmus test of their commitment to ensuring that climate action accords with the law. 

Closing the accountability gap 

Claims from countries with a disproportionate share of emissions that the resolution duplicates existing processes, particularly under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), miss the point. The climate treaty regime has yet to deliver accountability. It has not delivered on ambition, nor on the imperative to phase out fossil fuels, and certainly not on tackling loss and damage. The draft resolution text explicitly seeks to ensure coordination, coherence and complementarity with existing processes, while closing the accountability gap.

Assertions that the resolution “reinterprets” or “goes beyond” the advisory opinion similarly ring hollow. This is standard UN practice: General Assembly resolutions give effect to legal norms clarified by the Court. The text does not create new law; it reflects existing obligations in the Court’s own terms. 

ICJ ruling expected to shape US climate lawsuits in defiance of Trump

It is also important to be clear: the advisory opinion itself stands as the most authoritative clarification of international law on climate change. Its weight or persuasiveness does not depend on this resolution. Since its delivery, it has been taken up by courts and policymakers worldwide. What is at stake is not whether states will act, but whether they will do so in good faith or under mounting pressure. 

Consensus carries weight

The advisory opinion carries exceptional legitimacy: requested through a resolution adopted by consensus, following legal proceedings with record participation, and delivered unanimously. Against this backdrop, there is no credible basis for opposing a resolution that seeks to welcome and advance the AO.

Consensus would send a powerful message of states’ commitment to climate action and the rule of law, but the resolution does not require unanimity to pass. As precedents show, including the Ghana-led General Assembly resolution recognising the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity, global majority support can carry decisive weight, even in the face of resistance from powerful states.

From the outset, the ICJ advisory opinion process has been driven and deeply shaped by youth leadership, and responding to their call now requires completing the task the General Assembly set for itself in 2023 by requesting an advisory opinion from the ICJ.

A vote for climate justice

In a powerful poem, Pacific environmental advocate Dylan Kava writes:

“….They call it negotiation.
We know it as survival.
While they draft options
our coastlines disappear…”

The survival and dignity of people facing escalating climate harm is not a matter of political convenience. It is a matter of existing law; a matter of political responsibility, moral courage and actual leadership. 

We urge all member states to support the resolution as presented on May 20, with a view to adoption by consensus. History will not judge those in power by how forcefully they defended the status quo, but by whether they rose to meet a crisis that threatens us all. 

The post ICJ follow-up resolution is a test of climate leadership at the UN appeared first on Climate Home News.

Right to repair legislation is currently being presented in the Manitoba Legislature, and though the bill is Manitoba-specific, it carries significance for farmers across the country.

The post Canada: How Manitoba’s new right to repair legislation could work for farmers appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The possibility of peace Channel Comment brendan 7th May 2026 Teaser Media

The UAE’s ruling royal family is benefiting from tens of millions in EU subsidies to grow crops destined for the Gulf, it can be revealed.

A new cross-border investigation, shared with The Guardian, found that subsidiaries controlled by the Al Nahyans collected over €71 million (£61 million) in just six years for farmland it controls in Romania, Italy and Spain.

The Al Nahyan family is the second richest in the world, with an estimated wealth of more than $320 billion (£235 billion), mostly derived from the emirates’ vast oil reserves. 

Subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) make up a third of the EU’s entire budget, paying out around €54 billion (£46.6 billion) each year to farmers and rural areas across the bloc. But an unknown proportion of this ends up in the hands of foreign investors — including those controlled by autocratic states.

This story was published in partnership with The Guardian, eldiario, and G4media.

DeSmog, in partnership with El Diario and G4Media, reviewed data for thousands of CAP beneficiaries between 2019 and 2024, tracing 110 European subsidy payments to a network of companies and subsidiaries controlled by the UAE’s Al Nahyan family and one of its sovereign wealth funds, ADQ.

The largest of these payments came through the Romanian agricultural company Agricost, which owns the EU’s single largest farm, measuring 57,000 hectares, five times the size of Paris.

EU farm subsidies disproportionately benefit large landowners. In 2024 alone, Agricost received €10.5 (£9 million) in direct payments — more than 1,600 times the amount collected by the average EU farm.

Campaigners have expressed alarm that the UAE, which has been widely condemned for jailing activists, criminalising homosexuality and multiple allegations of torture – repeatedly denied by the UAE – benefits from regular EU farm payouts.

The Al Nahyans and companies named in this article did not respond to multiple requests for comment. ADQ declined to respond. 

The findings come as policymakers debate the future of the subsidy scheme. In July, the European Commission published a proposal for the next round of CAP payments for 2028 to 2034 — which could cap land-based payments to €100,000 per farmer each year. The proposal has been met with fierce opposition from European ministers, some MEPs, and industry lobby groups.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told DeSmog via email that it believed income support through CAP payments “should be better targeted including by reducing and capping payments for the bigger farms”, and is calling on the European Parliament and Council to support its proposed changes to the subsidy system.

“The CAP is not helping EU farmers; it continues to enrich the wealthiest landowners,” said Faustine Bas-Defossez, director for nature, health and environment at the Brussels-based advocacy group the European Environment Bureau. “And now, even worse, it is fuelling autocratic regimes.”

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Agricultural Acquisitions

The Al Nahyans are the most powerful monarchy in the United Arab Emirates, which is made up of seven federated states, each with its own royal family. At the helm is Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE.

In just over 15 years, the Emirati dynasty has established itself as a major global agricultural player, acquiring swathes of land and agribusiness companies across Africa, South America and Europe. The UAE now controls around 960,000 hectares of farmland worldwide.

This expansion forms part of the Emirates’ wider food security strategy, aimed at securing supplies for a country where high temperatures, water scarcity, and sandy soil make growing crops a major challenge. The UAE currently imports up to 90 percent of its food.

The investigation found that in the EU, the expansion has been channelled through three main companies — in Spain, Italy and Romania. 

Agricost, Romania’s vast farm, was bought by the Al Nahyans in 2018 for an estimated €230 million (£198 million) through Al Dahra, the UAE agribusiness group. Al Dahra was founded by the president’s brother Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, before Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, ADQ, purchased 50 percent of the firm in 2020.

No information on Al Dahra’s current ownership structure is publicly available, but DeSmog understands that it remains linked to individuals on the board, which is chaired by Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed, and his son, Sheikh Zayed Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, who is married to the UAE president’s daughter.

Since 2012, Al Dahra has also acquired multiple farm companies in Spain, responsible for over 8,000 hectares of land. Together, these received more than €5 million (£4.3 million) in CAP subsidies between 2015 and 2024, DeSmog found.

The UAE’s Spanish and Romanian farms both cultivate alfalfa and other crops for animal feed, with the majority of produce designed for export, including to the Gulf. Al Dahra holds a long-term contract with the UAE government to supply animal feed for the country, partly used for its rapidly growing dairy sector.

In 2022, sovereign wealth fund ADQ also purchased Unifrutti, a fruit producer with an estimated worth of $830 million (£610 million). According to DeSmog’s analysis, Unifrutti’s Italian farms received at least €186,000 in CAP subsidies in the three years following the sale. 

The size of payouts to the UAE reflects major issues with the way CAP subsidies are calculated, which are largely based on the area of land farmed. The European Commission’s proposal to cap direct payments would impact only a fraction (0.5 percent) of the EU’s top landowners, who currently capture 16 percent of the entire CAP budget. The UAE’s receipt of EU subsidies is “a scandal hiding in plain sight”, says Thomas Waitz, an Austrian Green Party MEP and party coordinator for the agriculture committee.

“Ninety-nine percent of real European farmers receive less than €100,000 in subsidies. That money was never meant for fossil fuel dynasties, it’s meant to strengthen real European farmers.”

Credit: eldiario.es Al Nahyan Control

The subsidised farms make up just one strand of Al Dahra and ADQ’s agricultural push in Europe — an expansion which includes grain mills in Greece and Bulgaria, as well as massive dairy farms in Serbia.

Despite technically being state-owned, ADQ is closely controlled by the UAE’s ruling royal family, experts say. 

“There is no clear boundary between the state and family coffers,” Marc Valeri, associate professor in political economy of the Middle East at the University of Exeter, told DeSmog. “This is a very authoritarian and centralised regime, and the difference between state budgets and family budgets is completely blurred.”

The UAE has some of the largest sovereign assets in the world — as of 2025 its seven wealth funds hold almost $2.5 trillion (£1.84 trillion). 

These assets are largely managed by close relatives of the president. Between 2023 and January 2026, ADQ was chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president’s brother and the country’s national security advisor. Tahnoon is known as the “spy sheikh” over accusations that he has orchestrated cyberwarfare against dissidents, and individuals and institutions overseas, including in the UK. Tahnoon has never publicly addressed these claims.

Since January, ADQ has become part of Abu Dhabi’s newest sovereign wealth fund L’imad Holding, which is chaired by the Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the president’s eldest son and likely successor. 

‘Monopoly’

The subsidies traced by DeSmog may provide just a snapshot of the total EU payments benefiting Gulf royals, due to patchy official data and a lack of transparency by UAE corporations. 

All EU countries are required to publish information on the farms and farm owners receiving CAP subsidies. However, the entries only name the direct recipient — making it difficult or sometimes impossible to identify the ultimate owners and investors benefiting from the funds. Unifrutti, for example, owns farms in Sicily and the Almeria region of Spain, but no information about the subsidies received by these companies could be found. 

Experts say that these kinds of large-scale foreign investments have contributed to major shifts in the EU’s farming landscape. 

Official figures show that the EU lost 5.6 million farms between 2005 and 2023, the vast majority of which were small-scale, with many bought out by larger producers. Romania saw the greatest decline of all member states.

In Spain, farmers selling alfalfa to be processed by Al Dahra said that the company’s control over the region poses major risks for their income. 

“Here in the village they have a lot of power; we all end up having to go through Al Dahra. They set the price, and that’s that,” Josep Ripoll, a farmer in Fondarella, Catalonia, home to Al Dahra Europe’s headquarters, told El Diario. 

“It’s a monopoly — [we have to] take it or leave it. I was much better off before they arrived.”

Christian Henderson, lecturer in modern Middle East studies at the University of Leiden, says that these kinds of large-scale foreign investments in land can also pose major challenges for countries like Romania, which has been hit by a major cost of living crisis in recent years, with soaring food prices.

“What does it mean for a society when [agricultural] resources are turned over to foreign investors? Most of the commodities are immediately exported.”

Morgan Ody, general coordinator of the smallholder union La Via Campesina and a vegetable farmer in Brittany, France, describes the flow of subsidies to the UAE as “a waste of public money”.

“This is not how European citizens want their money to be spent — these farms aren’t even producing food for them,” she told DeSmog.

“This kind of scandalous spending of EU money shows the failure of the current CAP system, where payments are based on the farm area. We need to refocus CAP on land workers, on those who work the land and produce food.”

This investigation was published in partnership with The Guardian, eldiario.es and G4Media.

Fact-checking and additional reporting by Brigitte Wear
Editing by Phoebe Cooke

The post Gulf Royal Family Banks Over €70 Million in EU Farming Funds appeared first on DeSmog.

• The U.S. lags so far behind other global cities on transit that it would cost $4.6 trillion to catch up. For example, Houston is about the same size as Paris, but Paris has 10 times the number of buses and light rail cars per capita. New York City has the best transit system in the U.S., but it’s not as good as Tehran’s. Instead of improving transit, we just build more roads and parking as cities sprawl. (The Guardian)
• Often overlooked in the furor over urban highways is the way traffic engineers turned downtown streets into one-way speedways to get car commuters home faster. Cities are now reverting to two-way streets that are safer for pedestrians and benefit small retailers. (Governing)
• No neighborhood is truly walkable without a good old-fashioned corner store. (The Third Place)
• Speeding in San Francisco dropped by 80 percent after the city installed enforcement cameras. (Examiner)
• After several years of an impasse over transit funding in Pennsylvania, some state lawmakers are looking to public-private partnerships to help sustain transit agencies. (Pittsburgh City Paper)
• Oregon Public Broadcasting interviewed Portland-based transit consultant Jarrett Walker about the state of transit in Rip City.
• The Portland Bureau of Transportation is replacing its 3,000-strong fleet of shared bikes with “zippier” models. (Axios)
• A Seattle driver was arrested on DUI charges after allegedly trying to run down a child riding a bike on the sidewalk. (MyNorthwest)
• Sound Transit voted to finish the West Seattle and Ballard light rail extensions despite a $35 billion shortfall for capital projects (My Ballard). But Mayor Katie Wilson refused to answer questions about those projects’ future (KOMO).
• St. Louis residents have the opportunity to weigh in on proposed routes for a $400 million bus rapid transit line. (KSDK)
• In Savannah, Chatham Area Transit faces an $8 million budget deficit, and is asking the county commission to raise property taxes. (WSAV)
• Fayetteville, Arkansas, is seeking public input on two complete streets projects funded by the Biden administration. (KNWA)
• Three-quarters of European cities that lowered speed limits to about 20 miles per hour saw reductions in traffic deaths and injuries. (Cities Today)
• Toronto rideshare drivers spend half their time deadheading, or riding around without a passenger. (Globe and Mail; paywall)
• Brandon Donnelly describes Toronto’s plans for a 16-block pedestrians-only street.

The Trump administration is deepening the national affordability crisis by withholding badly-needed funds for affordable transportation options — and advocates say Congress should refuse to negotiate the bill that will dictate America’s transportation future until the White House stops holding our transportation present hostage.

Washington lawmakers are reportedly abuzz over a recent letter lead by the National Campaign for Transit Justice, which called on Congress “to exercise its oversight responsibility” over the implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — and demanded that the Trump administration release an estimated $2.8 billion in competitive grants for affordable transportation options before the bill expires on Sept. 30.

Trump’s executive orders and press releases from Secretary Sean Duffy’s USDOT have both repeatedly maligned grants for transit, walking and biking as little more than “woke” Biden-era larks or symptoms of the “Green New Scam.” In reality, these grants are a critical tool for easing the staggering burden of America’s household transportation costs, which consume 17 percent of the average paycheck, largely because mass car ownership is so inherently unaffordable.

Recommended Trump’s Funding Freeze Has Derailed Transit, Undermining Growth and Economic Opportunity For All Americans Kea Wilson March 11, 2026

And those funding freezes are only the tip of the iceberg.

The letter’s authors pointed out that after Trump reclaimed the Oval Office, his Office of Management and Budget withheld another $4.9 billion for multimodal transportation authorized under the Capital Investments Grant Program. And that’s in addition to millions more in affordable transportation dollars that Congress rescinded last fall, after the White House essentially ran out the clock on the process of finalizing a raft of Biden-era grants.

Collectively, all of these stalled, rescinded, and clawed-back funds were supposed to throw a lifeline to struggling U.S. families, many of whom are forced to own cars they can’t afford for lack of any other viable options, the authors argued. And they say that unless Congressional lawmakers can finally force the White House to disburse the money, they shouldn’t even think of passing a new federal transportation bill to replace the one that Trump has so flagrantly refused to implement.

“[We’re in a] crisis for working families across the US,” said Giancarlo Valdetaro, the Campaign’s senior transit organizer. “With the increase in gas prices recently, it is more expensive than ever to get around by driving. And at the same time, transit is still an underfunded mode of transportation.”

“We need [Congress] to be more aggressive and firm about releasing funds that they decided should be distributed to communities across the country through the IIJA, which the Trump administration is currently refusing to distribute,” Valdetaro continued. “[And they also need to be] proactively putting guardrails in the next surface transportation reauthorization to ensure that we don’t get these delays and outright cancelations of projects in the future.”

Recommended The ‘Affordability Crisis’ Conversation Can’t Leave Out the Cost of Cars Kea Wilson January 7, 2026

Of course, there are some guardrails to prevent a hostile White House from denying communities the federal transportation dollars they’re owed — even if the Trump administration has tried just about every trick in the book to leap over them, even when doing so has landed them on the losing side of litigation.

“There are provisions in existing law that are meant to prevent waste and abuse — and ironically enough, they’re being abused by this administration to warp Congress’s intent, [and] to keep money from going to certain projects,” he added. “[We need] changes to keep an administration from capriciously and maliciously using their own priorities to keep money from going out the door, to places they don’t want it to go to.”

In addition to better guardrails to ensure that discretionary grants actually get out the door, the authors of the letter say transit also needs more money that isn’t subject to the whims of whoever’s in the White House — in the form of more funds guaranteed directly to transit agencies by federal formulas.

Formula money for transit operations is particularly important, like the $20 million a year that would flow to agencies under the Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act introduced by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), which received a shout-out in the letter.

“Consistent support from the federal government for transit agencies has been missing for decades, and it’s part of why so many people don’t get the transit that they deserve in their communities,” said Valdetaro. “It’s all part of the same conversation.”

Recommended Could This Bill Finally Give Transit Agencies the Operations Funding They Need? Kea Wilson February 1, 2024

With a laundry list of virtually every major transportation advocacy group signed on, Valdetaro is hopeful the letter will compel lawmakers to co-sponsor Johnson’s bill and raise their voices about unfreezing IIJA funds — not to mention insulating the next federal transportation bill from executive interference.

And whether or not Congress heeds that call, he’s hopeful that America’s affordable transportation revolution can still get back on track — even if it seems like the Trump administration will always find new ways to quash it.

“The federal government has not been pulling its weight [to support transit] for decades, and yet we see [communities] putting forward these projects year after year,” he said. “No matter what happens with any single grant decision, or the specifics of what gets into the [next federal transportation] bill, people still need to be able to cross the street safely. People still need to be able to get to work and the doctor’s office and the grocery store.”

“One grant decision from an administration that will be over January 20, 2029 is not going to change that,” Valdetaro added. “And it’s not going to discourage people from fighting for the transportation and transit systems they deserve.”

Jordan: I live in Los Angeles, so I see autonomous vehicles every day. I ride in them. I also watch them stop in active travel lanes, idle in red zones, and sit at the curb in metered spaces for which they don’t pay, at which they can’t be ticketed, and that don’t appear in any city system as occupied. The car is physically present, but administratively it is largely invisible, unlike most other vehicles today where cities have at a minimum mechanisms for them to pay for curb use and receive citations for non-compliance.

Gabe: I live in D.C. and AV legislation for commercial service is just being introduced. We currently have robo-taxis testing on the streets, and myriad delivery and ride-hail services are visible throughout the city. The gap between what’s on the street and what cities can actually see, price, or enforce is the defining curb management problem of the next decade. And almost no one is treating it with the urgency it deserves.

Cities are underestimating VMTs

Enforcement is about to get much harder. By BloombergNEF’s count, highly automated vehicles are already operating in 103 cities globally, intermingling with around 310 million people daily. A peer-reviewed study published this year in Travel Behaviour and Society found that automated vehicles in US cities are associated with a roughly 6-percent increase in vehicle miles traveled — driven in part by AVs traveling empty between trips, searching for parking, or returning home after dropping off passengers. That’s not a forecast. That’s a measured effect at today’s deployment levels.

The economics push the curve up sharply from here. Fire the driver — historically the highest single cost in a for-hire trip — and per-mile prices fall. Demand at lower prices rises. Fleets scale to meet it. This is Econ 101, and it’s why we think most municipal planners are working off an expected volume of robotaxis on the street that will look far too low by 2030.

The usual playbook won’t work

Cities learned a hard lesson with shared scooters and bikes: get permitting, data sharing, and curb rules in place before the inventory shows up, or spend years chasing it. With AVs, the equivalent move is largely off the table. State pre-emption in California and elsewhere puts AV regulation with the state not with cities. Most local governments cannot cap AV fleet sizes the way they cap scooter permits. They cannot mandate the granular operational data for AV’s that they extract from micromobility operators today.

And even when they can request it, they’ll be negotiating with Waymo, Zoox, Tesla, Nuro, Uber, Motional, and many others — each with different software, routing logic, parking behaviors, and APIs.

You’re not going to manage a multi-vendor robotic fleet by writing a memo to each company. The data asymmetry is too wide and the political leverage too narrow. Not to mention that every time a new “driver” is downloaded, the entire tech stack can be altered, and the vehicles may behave differently than minutes before.

What’s worse, the enforcement model itself is currently unworkable for AVs in many jurisdictions. Under California law, robotaxis are immune from moving violations because tickets must be issued to a human driver, though that changes in July 2026 when law enforcement will be able to issue “notices of autonomous vehicle non-compliance” to the companies themselves. D.C. plans the same. Even then, parking citations remain the primary enforcement lever, and they’re issued by humans walking up to vehicles with paper. That doesn’t scale to the fleet sizes coming.

The opportunity hiding inside the problem

Here’s where we want to push back on the doom framing, because there is a real opportunity in this — and it’s the opportunity Donald Shoup made the case for in The High Cost of Free Parking and Henry Grabar extended in Paved Paradise: cities have been largely giving away the right-of-way for almost a century, mostly to private passenger vehicles, mostly for political reasons, and mostly at enormous discount to the actual value. Curb space is some of the most valuable real estate a city owns, and it’s been priced as if it were nearly worthless.

AVs are forcing the conversation that should have happened decades ago. A robo-taxi sitting in a metered space all morning is functionally no different from a private car doing the same thing — it’s just more visible, more obviously commercial, and harder to politically defend. That visibility is leverage. It’s the wedge that lets cities finally price and manage curb access at something closer to its real economic value, and use the revenue to fund transit, road redesigns for safety, and the maintenance backlog that’s been deferred for decades. 

The best news? The robo-taxi companies want to pay for the time and space they use, but lack a mechanism. And if they pay, then everyone should, driver or no driver. You can only capture that opportunity if you have the infrastructure to actually do the pricing and enforcement. But time is of the essence. We learned that once America had “freeways,” it was nearly impossible to charge for their usage.

Cities most automate the curb (AI for AI)

If cities can’t realistically regulate AVs vehicle-by-vehicle or company-by-company, the strategic move is to manage the right-of-way itself, unilaterally, with a standard set of business rules that apply equally to every actor at the curb — human, commercial fleet, or autonomous. Essentially, a car is a car is a car. AI is not just for the private sector; the government needs to scale up its use quickly to handle the influx of new technologies and services that will automate a litany of tasks and mobility options and need a way to pay for usage.

That means three things:

Common rules, not per-operator negotiations. The city defines the business rules — at what price, where and when can companies operate, and for how long. Every vehicle in the right-of-way operates with the same rules. AV companies don’t get a special carve-out, and they don’t get to negotiate the data exchange on a fleet-by-fleet basis.

Automated curb payment. Every vehicle that occupies a curb space — whether it’s a Waymo dropping off a passenger, an Amazon van loading a package, or a private car parking for lunch — should be billed for the time it occupies that publicly owned space, automatically. No app required. No meter required. No officer is required to confirm the transaction. The infrastructure recognizes the vehicle and the duration, and posts the charge.

Automated curb enforcement. The same infrastructure that prices legal use should detect and cite illegal use — double parking, blocking a bike lane, overstaying a loading zone, parking in a no-stopping zone. Enforcement at the speed of the violation, not the speed of a parking officer’s walking route. We should be at nearly 100 percent compliance for proper use of the curb, and AV’s can be programmed to meet this standard if the right costs and feedback loop are baked into the system.

Pole-based cameras with computer vision is, in our view, the only technology that scales to do this across an entire city. It’s vehicle-agnostic, it works on existing infrastructure, it produces an evidentiary record sufficient for citation, and it doesn’t depend on each fleet voluntarily handing over telematics. It’s also the same approach a growing list of cities — Miami, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Portland, Los Angeles, Sacramento International Airport — are already using to manage commercial activity from Amazon, DoorDash, and Uber and Lyft via Smart Loading Zones. The use case is identical. AVs just make the need impossible to ignore.

Airports are a testing ground

If cities are the long-term battleground, airports are where the conflict is most acute right now. By some industry estimates, airport trips can generate up to 60 percent of taxi profit from approximately 15 percent of trip volume — meaning the curb in front of a terminal is one of the most economically intense roadways in the country, and AV fleets are entering it with the same playbook they’re running in cities. Cities that may be subject to state regulation for robo-taxis and Ubers, in many cases, do control the airport from the mayor’s office, like Los Angeles, and therefore have a real opportunity to think holistically about curbside management.

At the same time, the airport business model is being squeezed from the other side. Parking revenue — which has historically funded a large share of airport operations — has been in decline as travelers shift from self-parking to drop-off and ride-hail. Add AV trips on top of that, and the revenue line keeps falling while curb volume keeps climbing. That’s not a sustainable equation without a new way to monetize and manage the curb.

This is exactly the gap automated curb management is built to close. At Sacramento International Airport, Terminal A handles more than 175,000 vehicles a month at the curb. After deploying computer-vision-based monitoring automated enforcement, the airport went from 40 percent of vehicles dwelling at the curb longer than policy allows to only 11 percent — a substantial behavior change without adding enforcement headcount.

The same dynamic that makes airports the highest-value testing ground today makes them the most exposed to AV growth tomorrow. 

The window is closing quickly

The vehicles are scaling now. The miles are being driven now. The behaviors that San Francisco transit operators are documenting — stalled robo-taxis blocking public streets, problems that can take as long as an hour to resolve, requiring transit dispatchers to call Waymo’s call center or even police to clear the vehicle — are early symptoms of a much larger operational reality coming to every major city in the country.

Cities that build automated curb management infrastructure in the next two to three years will have priced, rule-based control over their right of way before the AV inventory peaks. Cities that wait will be doing it reactively, under pressure, with less leverage and less revenue. Additionally, if costs are lower for robotaxis than traditional Ubers and Lyfts, then the delta is important to be able to price, to assure that the best tool is used for the best trip (walk, transit, bike), and right-of-way pricing will be the mechanism most cities will have left to influence this. Think of it as congestion pricing-lite.

The right-of-way is the city’s. The decision about whether to actively manage it is, too — for now.