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The UK has abandoned projects worth tens of millions of pounds that were meant to help protect Congo rainforests and support local people.

Together, these initiatives would have made up around half of the £200m that the UK pledged to support conservation in the Congo basin – the world’s second-largest rainforest.

When it hosted COP26 in Glasgow, the UK led a new initiative to end forest loss, which included a collective pledge by 12 donors of “at least” $1.5bn (£1.1bn) for Congo rainforest nations by 2025.

Development minister Jenny Chapman revealed last week that, as of 2024, the UK had only provided £39.8m towards this goal.

Alongside the US and much of Europe, the UK has significantly cut its aid budget in recent years, leading to much of its Congo rainforest spending being cancelled or reappraised.

The government says it still plans to “prioritise” rainforest regions, including the Congo basin, but civil society groups and MPs are concerned about the lack of “ring-fenced” forest funding in the UK’s new aid strategy.

COP pledge

At COP26, the UK – led by then prime minister Boris Johnson – launched the “Glasgow leaders’ declaration”, with a goal to “halt and reverse forest loss” by 2030. This was backed by more than 140 nations.

The UK also made various funding pledges, including £200m to protect the Congo basin, £350m for tropical forests in Indonesia and “up to £300m” for the Amazon.

These commitments target the world’s three largest rainforests, all of which face major forest loss due to threats such as agriculture, logging and climate change. 

The Congo basin is the planet’s largest forested carbon sink. Yet, its six host nations are among the poorest in the world and face significant funding barriers.

This has global ramifications. An official UK assessment warned that “degradation or collapse” of the Amazon or Congo rainforests “threaten UK national security and prosperity”.

Forest cuts

Following successive aid cuts introduced by both the Conservative and then Labour governments – tracking a global trend – the UK’s Congo funding is under threat.

The Congo basin forest action programme (CBFA) was launched by the UK at COP27. It was explicitly set up to provide “roughly half” of the UK’s £200m Congo pledge.

CBFA set out to “empower central African nations”, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with support for “community forests” and other measures to curb forest loss.

Now, after reporting delays, the UK has slashed the CBFA as part of the Labour government’s recent aid cuts, intended to free up money for defence spending. 

Its original £90m budget has now been reduced to £18.8m. Government data shows that £15m of this has already been spent.

This is not the only Congo project that has been dropped due to this latest round of aid cuts.

The Congo part of the biodiverse landscapes fund – championed by the previous government and worth at least £12.3m – has been closed, just two years into its seven-year schedule.

Government documents reveal more Congo forest funding is at risk as the UK scales back its aid budget, including the UK’s two largest remaining projects in the region. 

One initiative, intended to “incubate forest-friendly enterprises” in DRC, faces “reduc[ed] budgets”. Officials working on the other, while more optimistic, reported that the project may be forced to operate in fewer countries as the cuts set in.

Documents also reveal the difficulties that come when operating in the Congo, including “complex political economies” and, in Gabon, a military coup – which “complicated matters”.

‘Breaking promises’

Damian Fleming, a senior director of forests at WWF International tells Carbon Brief:

“Tropical forest countries are making long-term policy and development choices in expectation that international partners will honour their commitments.”

In a series of recent parliamentary responses, Chapman revealed that the UK had only spent £39.8m on Congo forest finance, as of 2024. (She declined to provide any information on the Indonesia and Amazon regional goals.) 

Despite being presented as the UK’s “contribution” to the £1.1bn-by-2025 global goal agreed at COP26, the £200m target has a deadline of 2029. 

Therefore, while the collective goal has been met, the UK’s contribution so far has been relatively small.

Zac Goldsmith, a former Conservative minister who oversaw the forest targets at COP26, tells Carbon Brief that, in his view, the UK has “discarded” its regional pledges:

“We have gone from being perhaps the leader on protecting nature internationally to breaking promises to countries around the world for whom the environment is an existential issue.”

Future targets

The Labour government says it has met the five-year “climate finance” target of £11.6bn that expires this year.

Ministers also say the government has met “and exceeded” the £3bn and £1.5bn sub-goals for “preserving nature” and forests, respectively, within the £11.6bn. These are the funding streams that include support for the Congo basin and other rainforests.

The UK has funded a variety of projects in line with its forest goals, including mangrove restoration in Indonesia, support for carbon-offsetting projects in Brazil and promoting “forest stewardship” among farmers in Cameroon.

Chapman has stated that the UK will continue to “prioritise” the Congo rainforest, in line with its new plan for aid spending in Africa. The UK even helped to launch a new “call to action” for Congo basin funding at COP30 last year.

The UK government also says it supported the creation of Brazil’s flagship “Tropical Forest Forever Facility” (TFFF). However, so far it has not provided any funding for the facility.

When the government announced a new climate finance pledge for 2026 onwards, it stressed that nature would still be a “focus” and said it would also generate billions in “climate and nature positive investments”. Nevertheless, it dropped the “ring-fenced” amounts for nature and forests that had appeared in its previous pledge.

The UK, alongside other developed countries, has pledged to provide biodiversity finance to developing countries, under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) – a non-binding global pact to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. 

Sarah Champion, chair of the international development committee of MPs, says “sub-pledges” for nature and forests are a “cost-effective and impactful” way to ensure this finance is provided, alongside climate finance. She tells Carbon Brief that she was “concerned” about the move away from this approach:

“When the minister recently appeared before the international development committee, I was concerned to hear her characterise this shift as a ‘gamble’.”

A government spokesperson tells Carbon Brief:

“We remain committed to providing finance for forests, including in the Congo basin, as a core element of our overall climate funding.”

A shorter version of this article was first published in Cropped, Carbon Brief’s fortnightly newsletter that provides a digest of food, land and nature news, on 15 July 2026. Subscribe for free.

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The post UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo  appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Wildfires are becoming a familiar part of the European summer, from the hills of Wales to the forests of Spain and southern France. And whenever they make the news, the counter argument tends to follow: wildfires aren’t really a climate story, because most of them are started by people.  More often, it’s a dropped cigarette. A barbecue left unattended. Arson. A spark from machinery, or even broken glass catching the sun just right.

It’s true. Almost all wildfires are triggered by human activity in one way or another, accidental or deliberate. But using that fact to wave away the climate connection misses the point entirely.

Fires need three things to get going, the fire triangle,  fuel, oxygen, and a source of ignition. Humans have always provided plenty of that third ingredient, and always will; cigarettes, barbecues, campfires and careless machinery aren’t going anywhere, in Britain or anywhere else. What’s changed is the first ingredient: fuel.

The hotter and drier the weather, the drier the scrub, grass and woodland become. Dry vegetation doesn’t just burn more easily, it burns faster, spreads further, and is far harder to bring under control once it’s alight. A spark that would once have fizzled out on damp ground can now, in tinder-dry conditions, become a fire that spreads across dozens or hundreds of hectares before crews can contain it.

That’s the shift climate change is driving, it’s turning the landscape into fuel. By early July 2026, wildfires had already burned around 170,000 hectares across the EU, well above the long-term average, following the hottest June ever recorded for Western Europe. France recorded its hottest day since national records began in 1947. In southern Spain, temperatures hit as high as 45°C. Scientists have linked the intensity of that heat directly to human-caused climate change.

The human cost has been severe. In Spain’s Andalusia region, a wildfire near Almería and Bédar became the deadliest the country has seen in roughly two decades, killing at least a dozen people, many caught trying to flee. Across the continent, wildfires have killed more than a dozen people this year alone, while the heat itself, separate from the flames, has been linked to thousands of excess deaths. Portugal, Greece and Turkey have also battled major blazes, and Europe has mounted its largest firefighting mobilisation yet in response.

So, who struck the match is’nt really the  question, It’s about why the ground around it is so ready to burn. And that’s a question with a clear answer: a hotter, drier climate, driven by the continued burning of fossil fuels, is loading the dice for every spark that was always going to happen anyway, whether that spark falls in Wales, Andalusia, or the Var.

If we want fewer, smaller, less destructive wildfires, tackling the ignition source is only ever going to be half the job. The rest means tackling the reason our landscapes are drying out in the first place, and holding the industry driving that heat accountable for the damage it’s causing.

The post Beyond the spark: Why wildfires across Europe are getting worse appeared first on 350.

In 2019 a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup conducted a major test of technology designed to remove plastic pollution from the water.

It appeared to work, and the nonprofit released photos proclaiming its success.

But some scientists noticed something else among the accumulated plastic in the Ocean Cleanup’s publicity photos.

“Earlier this year I warned that @TheOceanCleanup would catch and kill floating marine life,” marine ecologist Dr. Rebecca Helm wrote on the social media platform then known as Twitter. “This week they announced they’re collecting plastic, and their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.”

The Ocean Cleanup team appeared to be oblivious to this consequence of their test before this public criticism.

It’s not surprising that any attempt to remove plastic from here would catch, and likely kill, many marine organisms, because the waters of this region aren’t a trash-filled biological desert. The area is full of neuston, marine life that lives right at the sea surface — species that may not be as charismatic as dolphins or sea turtles but are extremely ecologically important.

“This region in general has very high densities of several key species,” says Helm, now an affiliate faculty member at Georgetown University. “This ecosystem is ecologically important to species that we do care about. We can’t just go disrupting it in the name of conservation and imagine that everything is OK and that you’re doing a good thing.”

Other scientists agreed.

“Honestly, if that was me, I would have totally stopped,” Dr. Kim Martini, a physical oceanographer and founder of the oceanography equipment designer and supplier Tini Scientific, says of the incident. “Because the whole point is supposed to be about how you’re saving animals that live in the ocean.”

But while Ocean Cleanup adapted — the organization claims its latest designs have a “low adverse impact” on ocean wildlife (something its own data contradicts) — it hasn’t stopped. It continues to conduct plastic-removal operations at great financial cost, garner worldwide publicity and social media attention, and attract millions of dollars of donations.

All for an idea that, almost from the day it was announced, scientists have warned could do more harm than good.

A Meteoric Launch

It all began in 2012, when Boyan Slat, an 18-year-old Dutch aerospace engineering student, gave a TED talk announcing a bold scheme to scoop plastic trash out of the ocean. Slat envisioned building what would be the largest human-made structure ever deployed in the ocean (by far), a device that would collect plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and remove it, saving countless marine organisms.

This idea has since attracted a loyal social media following and become a nonprofit that generates millions of dollars in donations a year, a fundraising and media juggernaut in the ocean conservation space.

What you wouldn’t know from most of the media coverage and social media posts is that experts in ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering have long been skeptical of Slat’s model, raising concerns about a fundamental misunderstanding of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and local ecology, a misunderstanding of why plastic pollution is a problem, and a lack of experience with the complex marine engineering required to pull off something like this.

That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup, despite the fact that to date it hasn’t accomplished what it set out to do, for exactly the reasons that ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering experts said it wouldn’t work.

After building and testing expensive prototypes that led to failed tests — which failed exactly the way ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering experts said they would — the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015. Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website and generates praise-filled uncritical media coverage.

Experts say The Ocean Cleanup’s history and current reality represent a useful case study in the role of evidence and expertise in solving complex global environmental problems, and why we should be skeptical of “Only I can fix it” public figures and their self-proclaimed revolutionary inventions.

Misunderstanding of the Background Issues: Ocean Plastic Pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

There’s no doubt that ocean plastic pollution is a huge problem. Some organisms ingest smaller pieces of plastic, which will either choke them, poison them, or block their digestive tracts (essentially filling their stomachs with items they can’t digest so there’s no room for actual food). Larger pieces of plastic pose entanglement hazards, immobilizing and drowning marine life. This plastic has been found all over the world, and thanks to patterns of global ocean currents, it aggregates in regions called gyres.

But when most people think about the ocean plastic pollution problem and the famous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” they picture a huge and dense plastic island so thick that you can walk on it. That’s not the case — it’s more like a soup full of tiny bits of plastic, sometimes so small that they’re invisible to the naked eye.

“If you go to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, what you see is not a big collection of trash, but ocean, and it looks pretty normal,” says Dr. Miriam Goldstein, who did her Ph.D. on this region and is now the executive director of the National Ocean Protection Coalition. “When I was doing research out there, we were looking at many, many pieces of plastic — each about the size of a crumb.”

In any situation, if you don’t understand the problem, you’re unlikely to come up with a workable solution. For example, if you incorrectly believe that there are giant mountains of dense plastic floating in the ocean, it’s easier to wrongly believe that we can engineer a way to easily just scoop that plastic out of the ocean. It’s much harder to remove lots of tiny crumb-sized pieces of plastic … at least if your goal is avoiding killing everything else that’s swimming and living nearby.

“I was extremely skeptical of the whole idea, in part because the original TED talk was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Pacific Garbage Patch and gyres,” says Dr. Clark Richards, a physical oceanographer with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “That’s the kind of picture that you get from introductory textbooks.”

It’s Hard to Build Things That Can Survive in the Ocean

A major reason why experts were skeptical of the Ocean Cleanup from the beginning was the team’s lack of experience with ocean engineering.

For one thing, the ocean is a rough environment, and it destroys human-made structures.

“You have a lot of concerns for any kind of instrumentation or large hardware that goes into the ocean,” says Dr. Martini. “Waves put a really large stress on anything mechanical. And you have issues with biofouling; anything you put in the ocean acts like a little raft and everything likes to grow on it, which makes it heavy and pulls it down.”

Dr. Richards also stressed the corrosive effect of seawater on anything metal and pointed out the complexity and expense of even getting a large structure in place.

“Equipment capable of being moored in the open ocean must be deployed from large capable offshore vessels, which typically cost about $100,000 per day,” he says.

In other words, there’s a reason why no one had built an object as large as the original vision for the Ocean Cleanup before, and it’s not because no one else had ever thought of it before.

“When I first saw the idea, I thought ‘This is very well-intentioned and heartfelt, but it won’t scale, it won’t work,’ ” Dr. Goldstein says.

At the time Goldstein and Martini, writing for the ocean blog Deep Sea News, performed a detailed technical review of proposed plans for the Ocean Cleanup, using their expertise to point out why the device could not function as claimed.

“We were trying to do them the courtesy of taking them seriously,” Dr. Goldstein said. “And also, as ocean communication people, we thought it was our duty to talk about this, since it was getting so much attention.”

Sure enough, a 2016 test run of a small-scale prototype broke for exactly the reasons Dr. Martini said it would and failed to collect a significant amount of plastic for exactly the reasons Dr. Richards said it would.

And by breaking, the Ocean Cleanup system itself became ocean pollution.

A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they were receptive to expert criticism they received and made substantive changes to the design based on that criticism. The experts I interviewed for this article disagree.

More Issues

After fixing some of the structural issues, subsequent Ocean Cleanup designs began to collect small amounts of plastic trash — nowhere near the amount they claimed they were going to be removing and nowhere near enough to make a substantive difference — while also apparently killing enormous numbers of marine organisms.

Dr. Miriam Goldstein was not surprised by this.

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you try and catch things in that part of the ocean,” she says. “This was wholly predictable from a basic knowledge of that ecosystem — predictable and predicted. Our concern was a lack of fundamental understanding of both the oceanography and the animals that live among the plastic.”

A representative for the Ocean Cleanup acknowledged via email that their efforts kill some marine life but asserted that their research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests plastic pollution kills more marine life than their cleanup attempts. They further claimed that “a majority of species caught as bycatch are invasive species.” The experts interviewed for this article did not agree with either claim.

The supplementary materials of their Scientific Reports paper, meanwhile, catalogued thousands of marine animals killed during Ocean Cleanup operations, including threatened species of sharks, bony fish, and sea turtles — none of whom are invasive. It found that 84% of animals identified as “incidental catch” in their cleanup efforts were fish, including three species of sharks. The paper also detailed how “Species classified as Vulnerable or Endangered, such as sea turtles (e.g., loggerhead, green and olive ridley), have also been encountered as incidental catch during cleanup.”

Pivots

Later designs of the Ocean Cleanup moved on from the free-floating boom and net design and transitioned into what it called System 002 and System 03 — essentially a large net towed behind a pair of boats. Ocean plastic pollution experts, once again, were not impressed. Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, this new design was just slightly modified fishing gear.

“This organization was so focused on ‘technology development’ that they would adopt whatever they found and claim that they invented it, such as rebranding trawl fishing as trash removal technology,” Dr. Richards says.

In 2019 the Ocean Cleanup team also added a new element to their portfolio: trying to stop plastic from entering the ocean by intercepting it at river mouths.

While intercepting trash in this way is a good idea (and one that had been suggested by critics of earlier designs for years), the way they went about it left a sour test in many people’s mouths.

“The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions” like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. “Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators.”

A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that their river interceptors are custom-designed for each river.

Other Solutions

So if we can’t scoop all the plastic trash out of the ocean without killing large numbers of marine animals, what can we do instead?

One effective (and cost-effective) solution is the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. This amazing program has removed more than 400 million pounds of trash from beaches, where it’s much easier to access than in the middle of the ocean, before it gets swept back to sea. They do this at incredibly low cost, because more than 19 million people around the world have volunteered to help.

“Our total annual budget for all our plastics advocacy work, which includes cleanup, science and policy efforts, is about $6 million,” says Jordana Lewis, director of communications for the Ocean Conservancy Director of Communications. “Every organization contributing to the International Coastal Cleanup does things a little differently, but for every $2 invested Ocean Conservancy can remove a pound of trash from the environment and invest in scientific research and upstream policy solutions to prevent plastics from being produced and/or entering our ocean in the first place.”

As of this writing, The Ocean Cleanup reports it has removed 117.3 million pounds of waste from the ocean and (mostly) rivers. The nonprofit spent more than $72 million across its 2022-2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings.

Meanwhile Dr. Richards points out that in 2024 Ocean Cleanup’s System 002 “was out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day, picking up less plastic than a bunch of volunteers on beaches.” (A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they are working on improving the cost efficiency of their operations.)

Ultimately the solution to the ocean plastic pollution crisis is going to be changes to our manufacturing and waste storage and treatment processes, which will take international agreements and lots of hard work. Or we could use less plastic — which would solve all these problems at the source.

Lessons Learned?

One of the most important lessons from this is that it shows the public understands the problems that plastic pollution poses to marine life — and that they’re willing to support solutions.

Unfortunately, it also shows how some people can take certain ideas too closely to heart — and take it personally when those ideas are criticized. When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.” (Note that this was being said to people who devoted their lives and careers to evidence-based solutions to cleaning up the ocean).

Another recurring theme was “You’re just jealous that someone solved a problem you didn’t.” (Of course, this was being said to people pointing out that the Ocean Cleanup had not solved the problem).

Ironically the criticism seemed to cause defenders to double-down on Ocean Cleanup.

“We were cast as the haters who just didn’t want to believe, and there’s a certain personality that sees criticism itself as validation that the idea is a good one,” Dr. Goldstein said.

Of course, sometimes when experts say something doesn’t work, it’s because it doesn’t work — not because critics are jealous of an idea.

Critically, trying to help is not the same thing as actually helping, and some popular solutions either make problems worse, or fail to solve them while squandering limited resources. For example, much “Save the bees” rhetoric focuses on nonnative honeybees and not the native species that are actually endangered; far too many well-intentioned online petitions aim to solve problems that have already been solved.

Dr. Helm, who worked on the United Nations High Seas treaty as a scientific advisor, knows how complicated effective solutions to complex issues really are. There are no shortcuts to putting in the work.

“There was this spirit at the time that a few well-meaning young people with a lot of passion would find solutions, but for complex problems like this one, the teenage geniuses and their billionaire backers aren’t going to save us, and they’re going to take us on a wild and expensive ride along the way,” Helm says.

Indeed, very few complex global problems will be solved by “imported magic,” a silver bullet technological solution that requires no one to make any sacrifices or changes.

Fixing these problems will require hard work, cooperation, expertise, and evidence. It may not make for snappy social media posts, but in the end, it’s the only thing that will help.

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

Reflections on What Endures in Conservation

The post Why The Ocean Cleanup Hasn’t Solved the Plastic Pollution Crisis appeared first on The Revelator.

We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.

Key developments Global drought and heat 

DRY THEN WET: A recent heatwave and months of low rainfall has led to a prolonged drought for Uganda, resulting in at least 16 deaths from hunger and significant crop losses, reported BBC News. Bastille Post Global suggested that “a developing El Niño later this year could bring heavier rainfall to parts of the region, raising the risk of flooding in areas now struggling with drought”. 

FUNDING FOOD: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) have appealed for $200m in funding to help African nations deal with the impact of El Niño, stated Deutsche Welle. This would target 22 high-risk countries with measures, including “cash transfers, climate-resilient seeds, livestock protection and flood control.” The Guardian explained how El Niño could still “cause a severe shock to global food prices lasting into 2028”. 

FARMING FEARS: Extreme weather has devastated agriculture across the world. India saw its driest June in 12 years, reported BBC News, and France has had a “double-digit production” decline, according to Le Monde. The Financial Times reported that farmers in the UK are mitigating the impacts of extreme heat by eliminating “chemicals and intensive ploughing to improve soil quality so it retains water”.

EURO FIRES: Wildfires have spread across Europe, with Spain reporting at least 12 deaths so far, according to the Guardian, and France experiencing road closures, said Reuters. Wildfire Today reported that the most extreme conditions are “across France, Spain and northern Portugal, the Alpine arc extending into northern Italy, the south of the UK and south-east Ireland”. CNN explained how “the climate crisis is driving hotter, drier weather, which is setting the stage for fiercer fire seasons”.

Endangering species 

REDEFINING HARM: The Trump administration “reversed decades of longstanding environmental law protecting endangered species…opening up sensitive habitats…to drilling, mining, farming and real estate development”, reported CNN.  According to the story, the change “redefines what constitutes ‘harm’” to endangered species, which historically prohibited habitat modification or degradation. Agence France-Presse reported that US environmental groups sued the Trump government over the move, arguing that it had violated “common sense, biological science and federal law”. 

OPEN SEASON: Reuters reported that the change “limits the reach of the 50-year-old Endangered Species Act” (ESA), which is a “key regulatory consideration” when granting permits for “oil and gas, mining, electric transmission and ​other operations on federal lands and water”. Legal scholars told the New York Times the US government “was acting without conducting scientific research into the impact” of the change, while the National Mining Association “applauded the announcement”. 

News and views

• INTERNATIONAL WATERS: After a significant delay, the UK ratified the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (BBNJ), also known as the High Seas Treaty. Oceanographic detailed how this will allow for “marine protected areas across international waters for the first time”, but also stressed that the “hard part” starts now. 
• SCOPE-FREE: The world’s largest meat supplier JBS “scrapped a key climate goal” in its net-zero plan that accounts for its suppliers’ emissions, “which make up the vast bulk of the company’s environmental footprint”, reported the Financial Times. The company told the paper it was difficult to control these “indirect” emissions.
• DEEP TROUBLE: Pacific gray whales are facing a “catastrophic die-off” as sea-ice loss threatens their food sources, said the Guardian. Separately, conservationists warned that more than half of all molluscs that “cluster around underwater vents” could face extinction from deep-sea mining, reported Reuters.
• ETHANOL PUSHBACK: India’s new rules to promote 100% ethanol fuel and make ethanol-blended fuel mandatory at pumps “triggered a political row”, reported the Times of India. While the Indian government defended the push to automobile owners, a Hindu editorial and an Indian Express comment warned against incentivising fuels made from “water-intensive” sugarcane and rice. 
• AMAZON ACTION: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell to its lowest level in a decade, but president Lula’s plans to “end illegal deforestation by 2030” could be hampered if he is not re-elected, reported Al Jazeera. Meanwhile, Colombia’s outgoing environment minister warned of greater environmental and climate risk under the incoming government, said the Associated Press. 
• WAR WORRIES: The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned of the impact of the Iran war on Africa’s clean cooking efforts as disruption in the strait of Hormuz has stunted supplies and increased prices of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), explained Climate Home News. 

Spotlight UK ‘discards’ Congo rainforest funding

Amid worldwide cuts to aid spending, Carbon Brief explores how the UK is backtracking on funding for the Congo basin – the world’s second-largest rainforest.

The UK has abandoned projects worth tens of millions of pounds that were meant to help protect Congo rainforests and support local people. 

Together, these initiatives would have made up half of the £200m that the UK pledged to support forest conservation in the Congo basin.

When it hosted COP26 in Glasgow, the UK led a new initiative to end forest loss, which included a collective pledge of “at least” $1.5bn (£1.1bn) for Congo rainforest nations by 2025.

Development minister Jenny Chapman revealed last week that, as of 2024, the UK had only provided £39.8m towards this goal.

COP pledge

At COP26, the UK – led by then prime minister Boris Johnson – launched the “Glasgow leaders’ declaration”, with a goal to “halt and reverse forest loss” by 2030.

The UK also made various regional funding pledges, including £200m for the Congo basin, £350m for tropical forests in Indonesia and “up to £300m” for the Amazon.

All of these rainforests face major forest loss. The Congo basin is the planet’s largest forested carbon sink, but its six host nations are among the poorest in the world and face significant funding barriers.

This has global ramifications. An official UK assessment warned that “degradation or collapse” of the Amazon or Congo rainforests “threaten UK national security and prosperity”.

African elephant pictured in Congo. Credit: BIOSPHOTO / Alamy Stock Photo Forest cuts

Following successive aid cuts introduced by both Conservative and Labour governments – tracking a global trend – the UK’s Congo funding is under threat.

The Congo basin forest action programme (CBFA) was explicitly set up to provide “roughly half” of the UK’s £200m Congo pledge.

Now, after reporting delays, the UK has slashed the CBFA as part of the Labour government’s aid cuts. Its £90m budget has been “quietly reduced by 79% to £18.8m”, according to the Times.

This is not the only Congo project that has been dropped due to aid cuts. The Congo part of the biodiverse landscapes fund – worth at least £12.3m – has closed five years early.

Official documents reveal more Congo forest funding is at risk, including the UK’s two largest remaining projects in the region. One initiative, intended to “incubate forest-friendly enterprises” in DRC, faces “reduc[ed] budgets”.

Documents also show the difficulties operating in the Congo, including “complex political economies” and, in Gabon, a military coup – which “complicated matters”.

‘Breaking promises’

Damian Fleming, a senior forests director at WWF International told Carbon Brief:

“Tropical forest countries are making long-term policy and development choices in expectation that international partners will honour their commitments.”

In a parliamentary response, Chapman said that the UK had spent £39.8m towards its £200m Congo target, as of 2024. 

Despite being described as the UK’s contribution to the £1.1bn-by-2025 global goal agreed at COP26, the £200m target has a deadline of 2029. Therefore, while the collective goal has been met, the UK’s contribution was relatively small.

Zac Goldsmith, a former Conservative minister who oversaw the forest targets at COP26, told Carbon Brief that, in his view, the UK has “discarded” its regional pledges:

“We have gone from being perhaps the leader on protecting nature internationally to breaking promises to countries around the world.”

The Labour government says it has met its overarching “climate finance” goals and still intends to “prioritise” the Congo rainforest. 

However, civil society groups and MPs are concerned about the lack of “ring-fenced” forest funding in the UK’s new aid strategy.

Watch, read, listen

TOXIC TROUBLES: DeSmog unpacked a new report that said Northern Ireland is being turned into a “toxic” pig and poultry farming “sacrifice zone” to satiate the UK’s meat appetite.

NEED TO NOAA: Laid-off scientists from the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched Climate.Us – an independent, public-backed version of the climate information website shut down by Trump last year.

DRY FRUIT: A Dialogue Earth long read looked at how climate change is impacting apricot harvests in the “stark, high-altitude desert” region of Ladakh, India. 

READING ALOUD: A London Review of Books podcast discussed Robin Wall Kimmerer’s influential book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, weighing its compelling themes and where it veers into “scientific overreach”. 

New science

• Climate change could cause Indigenous peoples in the Amazon to lose 28-34% of their plant species and 18-23% of their associated services | Nature
• Biodiversity in forests can act as a “buffer” against compound extreme weather events | Nature Communications
• Zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia’s palm oil sector have had “no additional impacts” on reducing forest loss | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In the diary

• 7-15 July: High-level political forum on sustainable development | New York City 
• 13-31 July: Meeting of the International Seabed Authority assembly and council | Kingston, Jamaica
• 16 July: International Energy Agency critical minerals outlook 2026, online
• 27 July-1 August: Scientific and technical subsidiary body meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity | Nairobi, Kenya

This edition of Cropped was written by Jess Milligan, Josh Gabbatiss and Aruna Chandrasekhar. Cropped is edited by Dr Giuliana Viglione. This edition was edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org.

Cropped 1 July 2026: Heatwave scorches Europe | UK 2050 farm plan | What’s next for the High Seas Treaty

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Cropped 17 June 2026: Coral reef ‘hope’ | Ocean talks | Plant flowering times ‘shift’

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Cropped 3 June 2026: Highway through the Amazon | El Niño impact | State of CO2 removal

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Cropped 20 May 2026: Deforestation roadmap | Melanesian Ocean Summit | Returning pet parrots to the wild

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The post Cropped 15 July 2026: Uganda starves | Trump opens endangered habitats | UK cuts rainforest aid appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Climate and environment campaigners have urged the Kenyan government to halt plans for a proposed 700,000-barrel-per-day oil refinery backed by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, warning the project threatens one of East Africa’s most ecologically sensitive coastlines. 

The refinery, which is planned to be situated in Lamu County on Kenya’s northern coast, will be East Africa’s largest refining project and is expected to take up to three years to build. Once finished, it would supply refined petroleum products to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, among others, helping to reduce the region’s dependence on imported fuels.

Campaigners are questioning the viability of such a large refinery at a time when renewable energy and electric transportation are expanding rapidly. 

Mohamed Adow, director of a Kenya-based climate and energy think-tank Power Shift Africa, said the decision to give Dangote the green light for the refinery is “an extraordinary act of environmental recklessness and economic short-sightedness”, arguing it would tie Kenya to “yesterday’s energy system” just as global demand for petroleum products faces increasing uncertainty. 

• Feb 19, 2026 News Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls Analysts warn that the government’s plan to fund development from its nascent oil industry is a risky strategy due to projections of cost overruns and over-supplied markets Read more
• Sep 25, 2025 News Nigeria gives fossil gas a bigger role as “transition fuel” in climate plan Officials say the country needs time and money to ramp up renewables, but critics say betting on gas is a risky strategy that could prolong the “oil curse” Read more
• Feb 5, 2026 Investigations Gas flaring soars in Niger Delta post-Shell, afflicting communities   Since the multinational sold its assets in Nigeria’s oil hub, data analysis for Climate Home News shows flaring has risen, harming locals and the climate Read more

Campaigners argue the refinery risks coming online just as transport – the largest market for petrol and diesel – is beginning to electrify across the continent.

Kenya launched a National Electric Mobility Policy earlier this year to speed up the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) and reduce the country’s roughly $5 billion annual fuel import bill. Ethiopia has already banned imports of non-electric vehicles and now has more than 100,000 EVs on its roads, while Rwanda is expanding its electric mobility programme with plans to convert its fleet of around 100,000 motorcycles to electric.

Adow said the project risks billions of dollars in investment in infrastructure that could become obsolete as the world moves away from oil.

“Building a refinery today assumes decades of robust demand for fuels that much of the world is actively trying to phase out,” he said in a statement. 

Ecological concerns

Lamu – the proposed site for the project – is home to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Lamu Old Town and an archipelago containing extensive mangrove forests, coral reefs and seagrass beds that support fisheries, tourism and coastal livelihoods.

Locating the refinery in Lamu would “place one of Africa’s largest fossil fuel developments in one of the continent’s most ecologically sensitive and culturally significant coastal regions,” Power Shift Africa said.

Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

Sherelee Odayar, oil and gas campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, warned that a refinery of this scale could increase the risk of habitat destruction, marine pollution, oil spills and air pollution in one of East Africa’s most fragile coastal ecosystems.

She said the risks stem not only from the refinery itself – including storage tanks, pipelines and fuel handling facilities – but also from the large volumes of crude oil that would need to be shipped into Lamu and refined products exported by sea. Increased tanker traffic and fuel transfers, she said, would raise the likelihood of accidents in ecologically sensitive coastal waters.

Odayar added that Lamu’s low-lying, flood-prone coastline could compound those risks by damaging infrastructure and carrying contaminants from storage facilities into nearby fishing grounds and marine ecosystems.

“Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass beds are not expendable; they support fisheries, livelihoods and coastal protection,” Odayar added. 

She said Kenyan authorities should suspend any approvals until an independent environmental and social impact assessment is completed, with genuine public participation and transparent scrutiny of the long-term economic, health and ecological risks.

“Any review must assess cumulative impacts on Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds and fishing livelihoods, alongside the wider economic risk of locking Kenya into costly fossil fuel infrastructure as the global energy transition accelerates”.

Dangote Group declined to answer questions from Climate Home News when contacted by phone.

Technological change threaten project’s future

The Kenya refinery would replicate Dangote’s 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Lagos, currently Africa’s largest, which has plans to more than double capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028.

Adow of Power Shift Africa said projects like this represent “a breathtaking failure to recognise where the global economy is heading”, pointing out that the East African refinery risks arriving when Africa is experiencing an unprecedented clean energy boom. 

Referencing Africa’s solar boom, global electric vehicles uptake and the International Energy Agency’s projection that global oil demand is set to enter a decline later this decade, the think-tank founder said African governments risk anchoring the continent’s future to an industry facing mounting economic uncertainty.

Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

The organisation said the project faces a bigger threat aside from environmental opposition and that is technological change. “The danger is not simply that the refinery will pollute, it is that it will become obsolete long before it has paid for itself,” he added.

Kenyan President William Ruto said the project will create about 60,000 jobs for Kenyans and supply refined fuel to eight East and Central African countries.

GreenPeace Africa’s Odayar said the promise of ‘thousands of jobs’ cannot be used to hide the true cost of the investment which is that large fossil fuel projects often create temporary jobs while undermining existing livelihoods in fishing, tourism and small-scale local economies.

“The enormous capital required for a project of this scale could instead help accelerate Kenya’s renewable energy future through solar, wind, geothermal, storage and better energy access,” she added.

The post Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks appeared first on Climate Home News.

The following is a statement from Alex Lawson, Executive Director of Social Security Works:

“Tomorrow, the Senate will vote on a Democratic-led Congressional Review Act resolution to stop the Trump administration’s so-called “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model,” which is introducing AI care denials to Traditional Medicare.

WISeR is not wise at all. It is a dangerous, profit-motivated experiment that allows private third parties to use artificial intelligence to delay and deny seniors’ medical care.

Under the WISeR pilot program, which went live in January 2026, reports already show Medicare beneficiaries are waiting 2 to 4 times longer to access certain care. This is just one more example of the harm that Republicans’ disastrous healthcare agenda has already waged on American patients. Last year, Republicans slashed $1 trillion in Medicaid and Affordable Care Act spending to line their cronies’ pockets. Now, they are importing the worst parts of Medicare Advantage — automated care denials — into Traditional Medicare.

The bottom line is this: Seniors who choose Traditional Medicare should not have their care blocked by AI. Social Security Works urges Senators to support Chairman Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) resolution, S.J.Res. 198, to protect seniors' access to care.”

Nakonde Airport is a an airport project that is being developed by the Zambian National Service, part of the Zambian military. Despite the opposition of the local community, who will be the most impacted by the project, the construction is going ahead. Here, members of the local community, along with some words by Stay Grounded Campaigner, Hannah Lawrence, explain more about the situation there.

Source

A farmworker takes a break to drink water. FFP farms comply with mandatory heat stress protections that include the provision of shade, water, electrolytes, rest breaks, training, and the ability to stop work and seek medical treatment without fear of retaliation

Every summer, extreme heat threatens the lives and health of the people who harvest our food. But the risks farmworkers face don’t disappear when temperatures cool. Long days of physically demanding work continue to strain the body throughout the year, in soaring temperatures and on cooler days alike.

That’s why, beginning August 1 of this year, every Fair Food Program participating grower will be required to provide electrolyte beverages or electrolyte supplements to workers year-round, further strengthening the Program’s industry-leading heat protections.

The new standard builds on what The Washington Post called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules,” and what Reuters just singled out as a successful cross-sector initiative amidst ever-rising temperatures. Workers on Fair Food Program farms already have what so many are fighting for: shade, clean drinking water, paid rest breaks, heat illness training, and the right to seek medical attention without fear of retaliation. Now, they will also have year-round access to electrolytes—an increasingly important safeguard as scientific research links prolonged heat exposure to chronic kidney disease and other serious health conditions.

This is how the Fair Food Program has always advanced over its 16 years in operation: Workers and growers identify problems, they collaborate on solutions, and together they raise the standards for an entire industry. For going on two decades now, that partnership has transformed agriculture time and time again, be it with the development of groundbreaking field truck safety standards or the carving out of a clean channel for H-2A worker recruitment. Today, tens of thousands of farmworkers across 22 states and three countries are protected by a worker-driven system of education, independent monitoring, rigorous audits, and legally binding market enforcement that has effectively eliminated forced labor, sexual violence, and other severe abuses from participating farms.

And the impact of that pioneering worker-driven approach is expanding every single day.

Worker organizations in industries ranging from construction to sugarcane, bananas, and the plant nursery industry are partnering with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to bring the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model to millions more workers across the country and around the globe.

That growth depends on people like you.

Every new protection the Fair Food Program wins—and every new industry where workers, suppliers, and corporate buyers plant the flag of this proven model—requires sustained support from people like you, people who believe a world without exploitation and abuse behind every product we consume is possible. 

That’s why we’re asking you to become a Fair Food Sustainer today.

Your monthly gift provides the reliable support that allows workers to organize, educate their coworkers, strengthen protections like this new electrolyte standard, and bring the Fair Food Program to new industries and countries. One-time donations make a difference. Monthly giving builds movements.

Now is the time to bring that model to millions more workers… but we can’t do it without you.

Click here to become a Sustainer.

En la seva ambició de convertir el futbol en un esport veritablement global, la FIFA s’acosta cada vegada més als autòcrates i els avala obertament. Tanmateix, no són només els règims els que estan remodelant el futbol. El neoliberalisme també està transformant el joc i la relació entre els aficionats i els seus clubs. Hem parlat amb el politòleg i autodeclarat nostàlgic del futbol Cas Mudde.

Alessio Giussani: El 2025, poc abans que Trump comencés a bombardejar l’Iran, la FIFA li va concedir el seu premi de la pau. El president de la FIFA, Gianni Infantino, també va aparèixer a l’anomenada “junta de la pau” amb una gorra de Trump. Mentrestant, els aficionats normals són expulsats pels preus. Continua sent aquest el joc del poble?

Cas Mudde: El futbol mundial està cada vegada més capturat pels diners i per persones i règims dubtosos. La FIFA no és una excepció, sinó un cas extrem.

El Mundial de 2018 a Rússia va ser un torneig problemàtic, però no va generar gaire publicitat negativa. El 2022, a Qatar, era impossible ignorar la connexió entre futbol i  política. Tot i això, el règim qatarià va acabar obtenint una imatge pública força positiva: la gent es va oblidar de les vulneracions dels drets humans i de la quantitat desmesurada de diners gastada en estadis que pràcticament no tindrien utilitat després del torneig, i es va quedar amb la idea que havia estat un gran Mundial. Això és el que ha passat, pràcticament, amb tots els règims, democràtics o no, que han organitzat una Copa del Món. Aquest any, sospito, serà la primera vegada que els països amfitrions rebran més publicitat negativa que positiva.

Això no importa gaire a un país tan gran i poderós com els Estats Units, i encara menys a Trump, la base electoral del qual ni tan sols té interès pel futbol. Deixarà de preocupar-se pel torneig tan bon punt deixi de ser-li útil. Però això sí que perjudicarà la manera com la gent percep el futbol mundial.

Almenys sobre el paper, aquest no és el “Mundial MAGA”. L’organitzen tres nacions —els EUA, el Canadà i Mèxic— que representen tres espais diferents de la política mundial: els defensors dels combustibles fòssils, el liberalisme ultracentrista i el socialisme del Sud global. Quin significat li atribueixes a això?

Mark Carney també és defensor dels combustibles fòssils. El que és interessant és que aquest Mundial es coneixia inicialment com «la candidatura unificada», però en qüestió de mesos es va convertir, de fet, en el Mundial MAGA: tot gira al voltant dels Estats Units i de Trump. Això representava un repte, però també una gran oportunitat per al Canadà i Mèxic. El Canadà hauria pogut demostrar que és el bon noi de l’Amèrica del Nord; Mèxic hauria pogut demostrar que és el veritable país del futbol. El llistó és tan baix que fer el que tothom sol fer ja et fa quedar bé.

“La FIFA és, en molts sentits, un projecte increïblement colonial, que aposta per totes les coses dolentes que el colonialisme ha deixat enrere, incloses la corrupció i el lideratge personalista.

En canvi, Canadà i Mèxic no han dit res sobre el premi de la pau, del tracte a l’equip iranià i Omar Artan, i sobre l’àrbitre somali a qui es va denegar el visat. L’únic que fan és facilitar les coses a Trump i intentar suavitzar la situació quan fa alguna cosa dolenta, per això crec que també afrontaran crítiques. En general, no tinc la sensació que cap dels països amfitrions estigui particularment entusiasmat amb aquest Mundial. Claudia Sheinbaum ha impulsat algunes iniciatives realment bones a Mèxic, com ara construir centenars de camps comunitaris, però no hi veig un impuls real.

L’edició del Mundial de 2022 va ser una de les edicions més globals fins a la data, amb Qatar com a amfitrió i el Marroc arribant a les semifinals. L’edició d’enguany s’ha ampliat per incloure 48 equips en lloc de 32. Hi ha algun mèrit decolonial en l’ambició d’Infantino de fer que el futbol mundial sigui veritablement global?

El projecte d’Infantino és aconseguir la seva reelecció. Com més associacions nacionals de futbol estiguin representades al Mundial, més satisfetes estaran amb el seu lideratge. Si realment volgués decolonitzar el futbol, podria haver canviat la representació proporcional entre continents. En canvi, només va ampliar el nombre de participants sense canviar els criteris subjacents. Això vol dir tenir encara més països d’Europa, perquè són rics, i això és el que volen els patrocinadors.

La FIFA és, en molts sentits, un projecte increïblement colonial, que beneficia tots els elements negatius que el colonialisme ha deixat enrere, incloses la corrupció i el lideratge personalista. Essencialment, la FIFA dona diners a les associacions nacionals de futbol perquè els gastin com considerin millor per al progrés del futbol als seus països. Per descomptat, molts règims simplement agafen aquests diners i se’ls embutxaquen, deixant el futbol sense desenvolupar. Però a la FIFA això no li importa gaire.

La política de la FIFA també està empitjorant. El 2018, no es va pronunciar contra les polítiques russes contràries als drets LGBTQIA+, però tampoc els va donar suport. A Qatar, es va prohibir als capitans dels equips portar braçalets amb els colors de l’arc de Sant Martí. Ara, la FIFA defensa activament Trump i fins i tot el celebra.

Només una fracció de les nacions que participen al Mundial són democràcies —i encara menys liberals—, i el mateix s’aplica al conjunt dels membres de la FIFA. Hi ha maneres de defensar els valors liberals sense el postureig civilitzacional?

Si vols ser coherent, hauries de deixar la política al marge tant com puguis, perquè si converteixes la FIFA i el Mundial en un projecte liberal-democràtic, aleshores et dirigeixes a una minoria d’estats, i mai no seràs veritablement global. Es podria argumentar que ser polític, encara que de vegades siguis hipòcrita o incoherent, és millor que mantenir-se al marge de la política. Però ja no estic segur que sigui així, perquè les campanyes d’inclusió de la FIFA s’han tornat tan buides, tan vagues i tan plenes de pinkwashing que l’únic missatge que arriba és que tot el que diuen sobre política és una collonada. [Nota de la traductora: “pinkwashing” es manté en anglès perquè és un terme d’ús habitual per descriure l’ús instrumental de causes LGTBIQ+ per millorar la imatge d’una institució.]

Al mateix temps, és clar, la política sempre hi és. Organitzar un Mundial és una gran oportunitat per a qualsevol règim, i la neutralitat no fa que l’esdeveniment deixi de ser polític. Però sí que tinc un problema amb fixar expectatives elevades i no estar mai a l’altura —que és precisament el que ha fet la FIFA amb la seva agenda de drets humans i els seus grans compromisos amb la sostenibilitat. No pot existir un Mundial sostenible, i sempre hi haurà participants que no respectin els drets humans. Aleshores, per què la FIFA no introdueix una agenda menys ambiciosa però que realment compleixi?

Vivim un moment de ressorgiment del nativisme i del nacionalisme, amb l’extrema dreta en ascens arreu del món. Alimenta un Mundial farcit de política aquestes dinàmiques, o el futbol pot canalitzar el nacionalisme cap a alguna cosa més afable, fins i tot unificadora?

El sociòleg britànic Michael Billig va encunyar el terme “nacionalisme banal” per descriure les representacions quotidianes d’una nació, que construeixen un sentit compartit d’identitat nacional. Es tracta, per exemple, de banderes nacionals penjades a l’exterior dels edificis públics. El nacionalisme esportiu entra dins d’aquesta categoria, i té elements negatius. Al meu país, els Països Baixos, una part del nostre sentiment antigermànic no provenia de la Segona Guerra Mundial, sinó del futbol. Al mateix temps, els equips de futbol en molts països són més multiculturals que les societats, i jugadors de diferents ètnies esdevenen herois i models per a molts —almenys mentre guanyen.

El que és peculiar del futbol és l’emoció i la intensitat que afegeix al nacionalisme banal, fent que el nacionalisme sigui una mica secundari. Guanyar vol dir guanyar un partit, no que la teva nació domini una altra. Per molt que em desagradin les banderes, crec que hi ha un pànic moral al voltant del nacionalisme i el hooliganisme en el futbol. Hi ha elements inclusius i exclusius: pot ser tant bo com dolent.

Imparteixes un curs sobre futbol i política. Com interpretes aquesta relació, i com veus que evoluciona?

Gran part de l’atenció se centra en l’alta política: institucions, governs, partits, etcètera. A mi m’interessa més la ‘baixa’ política de l’esport, la música, la cultura, etc. Faig servir el futbol per ensenyar política, perquè el futbol reflecteix la societat de moltes maneres. Curiosament, aquest és un dels cursos més radicals que he impartit. Llegim Judith Butler i la performativitat de gènere, i parlem molt d’identitat i globalització.

Pensa en la rellevància creixent dels “equips de la diàspora”, aquelles seleccions nacionals que  estan més  formades cada vegada més per jugadors nacionals “de sang” encara que no hagin nascut ni crescut al país que representen. Senegal n’és un exemple paradigmàtic, amb gairebé la meitat dels jugadors nascuts o criats fora del país —principalment a França, la seva antiga potència colonial. Els equips de la diàspora són, en certa manera, el contrari dels “equips cívics”, formats per jugadors de minories nascuts i criats en un país, com els alemanys d’origen turc. Això mostra que fins i tot els estats molt restrictius amb la immigració poden ser molt flexibles quan es tracta d’esportistes d’elit, i que les persones antiimmigració no tenen cap problema amb això.

La UE també ha tingut un paper important en la configuració del futbol modern. La sentència Bosman del Tribunal de Justícia de la Unió Europea, el 1995 va sacsejar el sistema europeu de traspassos futbolístics per alinear-lo amb les normes del mercat únic. I com que Europa és tan dominant en el futbol global, la sentència va canviar el sistema mundial.

Interpretes el futbol com a part de la societat civil. Quin és el raonament darrere d’aquesta associació?

Solia treballar sobre la societat civil a l’Europa postcomunista a finals dels anys noranta i principis dels 2000, hi havia una associació positiva entre una societat civil forta i una democràcia saludable. Però el discurs tenia un enfocament molt limitat en grups prooccidentals, grups feministes, etcètera. M’interessaven els anomenats grups de la societat “incivilitzada”, que no eren necessàriament prodemocràtics, però que unien molt a les persones i eren políticament actius. Els hooligans i els ultres sovint tenen dues cares: tenen mala reputació, particularment a Europa, però també són actius en bones causes, com ajudar persones pobres o comunitats locals després de terratrèmols o altres desastres naturals. M’agrada aquesta complexitat.

Com ha canviat el neoliberalisme el futbol?

Per donar resposta a aquesta pregunta sovint faig servir el club al que dono suport, el PSV Eindhoven. El PSV va ser fundat per treballadors de Philips. Era, en molts sentits, una representació de l’economia industrial, d’una forma de capitalisme arrelat. Philips tenia una connexió amb Eindhoven perquè tenia fàbriques a la ciutat, i senzillament no pots  agafar fàbriques i traslladar-les a un altre lloc. Ara tens clubs, com el Manchester City, que són un reflex perfecte del neoliberalisme global. Un règim estranger decideix invertir en un club no perquè tingui una connexió amb una comunitat local, sinó perquè aquest club és una marca global i et dona accés a una audiència global. La connexió entre capitalisme i futbol sempre hi ha estat, però el capitalisme ha canviat, i el futbol està canviant amb ell.

La majoria dels aficionats al futbol no volen seure en un estadi asèptic i vigilat. Volen seure en un lloc que encara tingui atmosfera i autenticitat sense el racisme i el sexisme. I això és possible.

Sent nostàlgic, he de recordar que els vells temps no sempre van ser tan purs. Abans dels fons d’inversió, hi havia l’oligarca rus Roman Abramóvitx que va comprar el Chelsea. En contextos més petits, hi havia el venedor de cotxes de segona mà que dirigia el club local. L’escala era més petita i més local, però aquell tipus també era dubtós i feia servir el futbol per elevar la seva pròpia imatge.

El que em preocupa des del punt de vista de la societat civil és que, tot i que sempre hi va haver explotació i jerarquia, també hi havia una connexió amb la comunitat. Philips depenia d’Eindhoven. Els capitalistes d’avui no tenen aquesta connexió, i la comunitat local gairebé ja no té veu. Els grans clubs ja no depenen de la venda d’entrades com a part important dels seus ingressos. Ara els diners provenen dels drets de retransmissió i dels patrocinadors.

Els aficionats són a temps de salvar el joc en el qual s’ha convertit?

Els aficionats són una mica com els addictes: tenen el poder de destruir el sistema demà mateix si deixen d’alimentar la maquinària. Ningú no invertirà diners en el futbol si ningú no el mira. Però, si ho fan, també hi surten perdent. Per això tenen poques opcions per plantar cara. Poden resistir la mercantilització des de dins del sistema. A Alemanya, per exemple, van aconseguir frenar la implantació dels partits dels dilluns al vespre. O bé poden abandonar el sistema del tot i crear clubs alternatius propietat dels aficionats, però aquests clubs no poden competir al màxim nivell.

No soc particularment optimista perquè veig que el futbol modern es destrueix a si mateix de la mateixa manera que ho fa el capitalisme. S’expandeix a nivells insostenibles, com un esquema piramidal en què el valor es va aprimant cada cop més. Les firmes de capital privat i els règims estan injectant diners al sistema perquè esperen alguna cosa a canvi, ja sigui benefici o victòries diplomàtiques. Però poden retirar-se tan ràpidament com hi van entrar si s’adonen que ja no els queda res a guanyar. I quan la bombolla esclata, no tornem al punt on érem abans, perquè les lleialtats han desaparegut. La generació d’anglesos que ha quedat exclosa dels estadis de la Premier League pels preus no tornarà així com així.

Molts clubs de futbol es troben entre les institucions més antigues que existeixen. Han existit durant més d’un segle, i han donat sentit al fet de ser d’algun lloc. Quan una antiga ciutat minera perd un equip de futbol, és una pèrdua important per a la comunitat.

Malgrat tot, el futbol encara és capaç de crear comunitat i connexió. Hi ha res que els partits polítics o les organitzacions de la societat civil en puguin aprendre?

El tipus de relació que tens amb un club que segueixes és profundament irracional. No pots recrear aquesta relació artificialment.

Una cosa que se’n pot aprendre és la importància de l’arrelament. Si la gent continua donant suport a un club fins i tot quan perd o baixa de categoria, és perquè s’hi sent connectada. Molts clubs locals funcionen gràcies a voluntaris i persones que no en treuen diners. La professionalització creixent i la manca d’arrelament són cada vegada més febleses comuns dels moviments progressistes, i veig que una cosa semblant passarà en el futbol modern.

Si no et reconeixen com a part de la comunitat, la gent sent que has perdut el contacte. La majoria d’ONG avui dia no tenen voluntaris; tenen professionals. I per als professionals, la institució importa més que la causa. Si el que t’importa principalment és una causa, trobes maneres de fer la feina fins i tot quan s’acaben els diners. Però si el que t’importa principalment és la institució, passaràs a una altra cosa i trobaràs una altra feina. Les grans ONG s’han convertit en negocis amb llocs de treball molt ben pagats ocupats per persones que passen d’una organització a una altra. El mateix està passant al futbol.

Pel costat positiu, el futbol no s’ha tornat també més inclusiu?

Absolutament. Als anys vuitanta i noranta, les dones o les persones queer no se sentirien segures en un estadi de la Premier League, i ara sí. En certa manera, la gentrificació ha fet el futbol més accessible per a alguns grups. És clar que ha exclòs una part de la classe treballadora blanca, però una part de la classe treballadora blanca abans excloïa altres grups. Hi he pensat molt, perquè com qualsevol nostàlgic, hi havia una part que no veia. Com a home blanc heterosexual, formo part del grup que abans posseïa l’estadi, i per això mai no vaig experimentar l’exclusió.

Però la securitització i l’expulsió de la gent pels preus no són les úniques opcions per combatre la discriminació, i els aficionats més rics no són necessàriament menys racistes. Molt del sexisme, l’homofòbia i el racisme que veus als estadis és performatiu. Per tant, el camí a seguir és redefinir el paper de l’aficionat. Alemanya mostra que es poden tenir estadis assequibles que també siguin més inclusius. Funciona millor quan són els mateixos aficionats els qui es controlen i es moderen mútuament. El Borussia Dortmund, per exemple, tenia un problema important amb neonazis als anys vuitanta i, en gran mesura, va aconseguir expulsar-los.

La majoria dels aficionats al futbol no volen seure en un estadi asèptic i vigilat. Volen seure en un lloc que encara tingui atmosfera i autenticitat sense el racisme i el sexisme. I això és possible.

La popularitat del futbol femení està explotant. Pot ser una alternativa més saludable a les dinàmiques que has estat descrivint?

Sovint recorrem a les dones per resoldre els problemes que han creat els homes. Diem que els homes són així, de manera que necessitem més dones, perquè les dones són diferents. Però les dones no són necessàriament millors que els homes. Si l’estructura t’empeny en una determinada direcció, no importa qui siguis. En l’estructura actual, que el futbol femení continuï sent “pur” també voldria dir que les dones continuïn cobrant molt menys que els homes en nom d’algun ideal, i no crec que això sigui just.

En qualsevol cas, sembla que el futbol femení s’està transformant ràpidament al futbol modern i avança en la mateixa direcció que el futbol masculí —potencialment fins i tot més de pressa. La propietat de varis clubs ja és una realitat. Als EUA, un club de Columbus, Ohio, ha pagat recentment 200 milions de dòlars a la National Women’s Soccer League per incorporar-se a la lliga el 2028. Això són molts més diners del que s’està gastant en les jugadores.

Tot i així, molts clubs de futbol femení són més actius políticament que els clubs masculins, perquè les jugadores són més explícites. Ser futbolista dona encara es veu com una transgressió, de manera que tendeixes a estar més compromesa políticament. Però quant menys transgressor i més mercantilitzat es torni el futbol femení, menys polític serà. De moment, continua sent una via d’escapament per a molts aficionats perquè és més assequible i més divertit —sens dubte per als grups minoritaris, i particularment per a les persones queer.

On se situa el futbol femení pel que fa a la seva dimensió comunitària i de societat civil?

Gairebé tots els clubs femenins han estat fundats per clubs masculins, de manera que molt pocs són realment l’expressió d’una comunitat. Hi ha excepcions, com el Turbine Potsdam a Alemanya, que és un dels equips femenins amb més èxit del país. Però ara han estat  superats per clubs com el Bayern de Munic i el Wolfsburg, perquè no pots competir amb els gegants.

Tanmateix, la majoria dels aficionats al futbol femení tenen un propòsit polític, i en aquest sentit són l’expressió d’una comunitat. Molts aficionats subratllen que hi són per donar suport a l’esport femení, no a un club concret. Ningú no va a un partit de futbol masculí per donar suport al moviment. Per tant, hi ha un element de comunitat.

Translated by Sandra Cruz

How hot is too hot?

Photo by Rajiv Bajaj on Unsplash

By Paul Atkin

Mad dogs and Englishmen, go out in the mid-day sun

Noel Coward.

The heatwaves in May and June have so far caused 2,700 excess deaths. There are likely to be more before Summer is out. 

And with the current El Nino giving a violent upward spike to the underlying heat accumulation being steadily built by greenhouse gases, we can expect worse next year. And worse the year after that. This is what climate change is.

To put the deadly consequences into perspective, 2,700 excess deaths is 

• more than five times the number of people murdered in the year ending March 2025; which was 522.
• almost double the road accident total for 2025; which was 1,556 
• and three quarters as many as the total deaths during the thirty years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998; which was 3,489.

Some of the people who died will have read articles in the press playing down the severity of the heatwaves – claiming that Red and Amber heat warnings are not a sober health warning, but just another symptom of a society that no longer has what it takes even to get through “gorgeous weather” – believed them, and acted accordingly.

The TUC supports a maximum workplace temperature. 

Giving Hannah Spencer’s maximum workplace temperature bill government time to make sure it doesn’t get talked out, would be a good way for Andy Burnham to show he is serious about improving people’s lives. 

The bill, if passed, would create an independent body to recommend maximum safe workplace temperatures and set out how the recommendations should be implemented. 

In the coming months, while pressing for this legislation, we will have to struggle with unbearably hot workplaces, often with managers in air conditioned offices playing it down. 

• In August, UNISON is making heat its theme of the month for its Year of Green Action
• The TUC is hosting a heatwave organising call at 1pm on Wednesday 29 July, to share advice on how to keep your workplace cool — with actions you can take to win protections now and build towards a national maximum temperature.
• There’s a lot of useful resources on the Heat Strike site.  

This graph from the Met Office shows the trend and points to where we are heading. When Eurostar puts out a spec for a train capable of running in 55C heat, do they consider whether their crew and passengers would be able to get to or from the train if it was that hot outside?

 

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The post How hot is too hot? first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.

What happens when the global economy depends on fish traveling 10,000 miles, oil flowing through a single strait, and enough cheap fossil fuel energy to build civilizations that previous generations couldn't even imagine?

Sometimes a big story can be told with a very small object.

Take the hazards of plastic pollution in the ocean, and a single bottle cap floating in the Pacific Ocean near Japan.

Captured in a net by scientists aboard a Japanese research vessel in 2023, this plastic cap had been transformed into a tiny ecosystem of hundreds of creatures. Through careful detective work, scientists unraveled a journey that brought the cap, and its stowaways from tropical waters far to the south.

The discovery, detailed in a new paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin, underscores the ways in which life is adapting to an increasingly plastic-filled ocean, and the potential for buoyant, virtually indestructible bits of trash to serve as rafts for invasive species.

“We found organisms that normally live in southern tropical waters,” said Naoto Jimi, the lead author and a scientist at Nagoya University. “Geographic range extensions of some species may be occurring under the radar.”

The potential for ocean-borne plastic to act as a raft for enterprising species has been a concern for some time. Famously, Japanese flotsam from a 2011 tsunami washed ashore in North America bearing nearly 300 coastal species. Scientists have surmised that tiny floating islands of plastic in the middle of the ocean are creating novel ecosystems of their own.

In the case of the bottle cap, that ecosystem was just 35 millimeters in diameter. Despite its small size, when scientists inspected the cap they discovered a little world inhabited by 307 individual organisms representing 9 different taxa. Perhaps most impressive was a Eunice bipapillata, a type of polychaete. This particular species of bottom-dwelling worm resembles a millipede with a slender, flat ribbon of a body lined by dozens of short legs.

 

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The worm had built a protective mucus shell, which in turn offered a landscape to be colonized by a marine menagerie, what the scientists described as “a miniature reef.” The residents’ identities provided some clue about the cap’s distant origins. The worm normally is found in the tropical western Pacific.

A closer analysis of some of the organisms offered a more detailed account of their travels. The shells of foraminifera, tiny organisms commonly known as forams, provide a temperature record of the surrounding ocean water in which different parts of the shell are made, much like tree rings vary from year to year depending on rainfall. Scientists can measure ratios of two isotopes of oxygen in the parts of the shell to determine water temperature.

Two of the foram shells revealed a movement from warmer to cooler waters, with a peak of nearly 30°C down to around 22°C – roughly the water temperature where the cap was caught.

The scientists traced the movement with still more detail by using a computer model of regional ocean currents. Simulations of a tiny object dropped in the ocean arriving at the spot where it was caught revealed a likely origin in the Philippines, a journey of some 70 days and more than 1,500 kilometers. That route was a match for marks on the cap, tracing to a Philippine beverage brand.

The findings illustrate that “the marine plastic problem should therefore be considered not only from the perspectives of aesthetic damage, ingestion, and entanglement, but also from those of biogeography and invasive species risk,” said Jimi.

With an estimated 30 million metric tons of plastic already floating in the ocean, and more arriving every day, that’s a lot of bottle caps waiting to be turned into mini-reefs.

Jimi, et. al. “Multi-proxy reconstruction of bottle-cap rafting using biofouling communities, stable isotopes and drift modeling.” Marine Pollution Bulletin. July 7, 2026.

Photo: Inside a 3.5 cm plastic bottle cap: A miniature ecosystem of 307 organisms drifted from the Philippines to waters south of Japan.© Sugashima Marine Biological Laboratory, Nagoya University

Lindsay Fenlock is a senior researcher in the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). Nikki Reisch is a human rights lawyer and social justice advocate who leads the Climate & Energy Program at CIEL.

Much has been written about when fossil fuel companies knew their products cause harm to the climate, public health, and the environment. Less attention has been paid to just how long governments have known, too, and what they did or failed to do with that knowledge. That information is not just a matter of historical record – it’s a matter of legal responsibility. 

A year ago this month, the world’s highest court affirmed that countries have been under an obligation to curb climate change since they knew about the foreseeable risks it posed and to remedy its harms. This historic advisory opinion opened the door for States to be held accountable not only for failing to act on climate change, but also for making it worse by perpetuating its primary cause: fossil fuel production and use.

While the ruling is clear about the content of climate duties under international law, it is silent on when those duties first applied to specific countries or how long they have been breaching them. The earlier governments knew about the drivers and dangers of climate change, the longer they have been under an obligation to prevent it, and the greater their potential liability for the resulting harms.

Once they were informed of the risks fossil fuels posed to the climate, States had a duty to do everything in their power to prevent those risks from materializing – and at a minimum, to refrain from exacerbating them. But, as trends in fossil fuel dependence and climate destruction make clear, they did not.

• Jul 9, 2026 Comment The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice The fledgling fund must also help vulnerable communities take action to recover from disasters by giving them direct access to grants Read more
• Jul 6, 2026 Comment A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready? We need to urgently build resilience to more extreme weather and rising seas, protecting nature as an ally in adapting to climate impacts Read more

Early knowledge

A new report from the Center for International Environmental Law shows that the governments of many major emitting countries have known since at least the 1960s that fossil fuel use was warming the planet and, if continued, could lead to dire impacts –  including melting of the polar ice caps, catastrophic sea level rise, and extreme heat.

Yet some of the countries responsible for the largest cumulative shares of carbon emissions have claimed that global awareness of climate change emerged only in the late 1980s, around the time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established and negotiations of a climate convention began.

Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

Why? Because admitting that they have known about the chief causes and foreseeable consequences of climate change for the better part of a century would mean they had a duty to prevent it that they’ve been flouting for decades.

Drawing  on a wide range of publicly available government records and scientific studies, CIEL’s research exposes when knowledge of climate change made its way onto policymakers’ desks and into public discourse. The report synthesizes some of the groundbreaking research by scholars such as Naomi Oreskes on the history of American climate science, putting their findings into a legal context and broadening the discussion to other countries.

First findings in 19th century

The origins of the climate harms the world is experiencing today – more extreme storms, deadly heat waves, floods, and sea level rise – stem from around 1850, when industry began burning so much fossil fuel that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise.

Scientists figured out quite quickly that the release of these ancient carbon stores could warm Earth. The first paper that modeled the potential warming impact of fossil fuel use, for example, came out in 1896, while the first studies that confirmed global temperatures were rising came out before World War II. 

Government records show international cooperation on climate change research picking up around 1957, when countries worldwide coordinated funding for thousands of research projects as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY).

The IGY spawned the world’s first program to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the 69 participating governments were apprised of the results. By this time, governmental scientific organizations in most of the world knew that continued fossil fuel use could heat the planet dramatically, with potentially significant adverse impacts. Many countries also became aware of industry research on climate change during this decade through their state-owned oil companies.

Big emitters knew

In the 1960s, the world’s top atmospheric scientists, chemists, and geophysicists concluded that fossil fuel emissions not only could warm the earth, but they were already doing so. They also concluded that continuing to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was likely to cause serious harm to food systems, ecosystems, human health, and communities, including through sea level rise and deadly extreme weather events. By the 1960s and 1970s, many governments had ample warning that continued reliance on fossil fuels could have profoundly dangerous global consequences. 

Evidence indicates that this information reached public officials —  in some cases at the highest echelons of government. In the United States –  the largest historic emitter of carbon dioxide –  White House officials exchanged memos over what to do about the “carbon dioxide problem” during the 1960s and a presidential report published in 1965 unequivocally attributed warming to fossil fuels and warned about catastrophic levels of temperature and sea level rise if trends continued. 

Excerpt from a letter sent by US diplomat Daniel Moynihan to President Richard Nixon’s administration Excerpt from a letter sent by US diplomat Daniel Moynihan to President Richard Nixon’s administration

In the United Kingdom, the greenhouse effect was first raised in a parliamentary debate in 1969, and in France, a state-owned oil company published a magazine article about the dangers of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1971, while the Canadian environment ministry regularly published articles about climate change in its employee magazine throughout the 1970s and 80s. 

Even the most generous reading of this information shows that many of the world’s largest contributors to climate change, including the United States, Canada, Germany, and Australia,  knew enough to change course over two decades before the first meeting of the IPCC  in 1988, if not far earlier. 

The story does not end there. As an illustrative compilation of publicly available, English-language evidence, CIEL’s report is not a complete survey of what all major emitters knew.  And facts about what a given country knew are not, on their own, sufficient to secure accountability. But, together with evidence about how that knowledge was subsequently acted upon –  or, as was often the case, denied, dismissed, and distorted – and about how climate impacts have unfolded, they solidify foundations for climate justice and repair. 

The post Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed appeared first on Climate Home News.

Headline News:

• “Environmentalists Decry Trump Administration’s Changing Of ‘Harm’ In Endangered Species Act” • The Departments of Interior and Commerce made a change to the language of the Endangered Species Act that environmental groups believe could open protected habitats to development. The definition of the word “harm” is to be rescinded from the Act. [ABC News]

Whooping cranes (US FWS, public domain)

• “Fastest Renewable Energy Growth Ever” • Renewable Energy Statistics 2026 released by the International Renewable Energy Agency shows that renewable electricity generation grew by 9.8% in 2024. This is significantly higher than the growth recorded in 2023. Overall, renewables accounted for 31.7% of the electricity generation globally in 2024. [CleanTechnica]
• “Solar PV Offers Finland Big Untapped Potential” • Despite its high-latitude, Finland is poised to build nearly 70 GW of solar PV that complements rich wind resources and outcompetes new nuclear power. A stream of energy system research reveals how the “midnight sun” and deep sector coupling gives solar PV an important edge. [pv magazine Global]
• “Cuba Plunged Into Third Nationwide Blackout In Two Weeks As Power Grid Collapses” • Cuba has suffered another blackout of the National Electric System, or SEN, leaving the entire island country without power, officials said, in what was the third such incident in less than two weeks as a US oil embargo stresses the island’s grid. [Euronews]
• “Oil Prices Are Spiking Again. Here’s What It Means For Gas Prices” • Oil prices soared in recent days as fighting in the Middle East escalated, threatening to end a weeks-long stretch of relief for drivers at the pump. Brent crude futures, a benchmark index for worldwide trading, rose to $84.50 a barrel, marking a roughly 12% increase in three days. [ABC News]
• “‘Gigascale’ 5.2-GW, 19-GWh Solar + Storage Project Moves Forward” • Masdar reached financial close on what it calls the “world’s first gigascale round-the-clock renewable energy project.” This project will have a 5.2-GW solar plant, firmed by 19 GWh of battery storage. It will provide 1 GW of clean power continuously, 24 hours a day. [CleanTechnica]

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

They wanted to hold Exxon accountable. Then they got hacked. A decade after climate activists’ emails were breached, a court case is shedding new light on who allegedly orchestrated the hacking.

By Matt Simon

Illustration by Grist / Getty Images​​

Jul 23, 2026

Topic

Climate + Transportation

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This story is published in partnership with the Guardian.​

On a cold January morning in 2016, Kert Davies joined a group of climate advocates and lawyers at the Rockefeller Family Fund’s office in Upper Manhattan to discuss an audacious goal: holding Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, accountable for climate change. A few months earlier, a set of explosive media reports had revealed that the company’s own scientists determined as early as 1982 that the extraction and burning of fossil fuels caused climate change — but Exxon went on to fund climate denial campaigns anyway.

For Exxon, it was a public relations crisis that carried potentially devastating legal consequences. Davies, the founder of the Climate Investigations Center, a group that monitors the fossil fuel industry, had been strategizing with other climate advocates to make those consequences stick, using the hashtag #ExxonKnew to raise public awareness.

About a month after the meeting in Manhattan, Davies received the first fishy email. It appeared to be from Facebook and said, “Kert, you have 5 poke.” Similar messages arrived over the next few days — emails that looked like notifications from people on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Not realizing he was being phished, Davies clicked some of the links embedded in the strange messages. But he soon felt a creeping sense of dread. In early March, he asked his colleagues on a climate activist listserv: “Has anybody received weird emails?” They replied that they had. Some had clicked links and entered their passwords.

Inundated with ominous emails, the feeling of constant danger started to stifle the group’s communication. Then, the following month, a Wall Street Journal reporter reached out to Davies about a detailed agenda she had obtained for the January meeting he’d attended at the Rockefeller Family Fund’s office. In April 2016, details from the email were published by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news publication, which alleged “secret coordination” against Exxon by climate activists. 

Although Davies didn’t think it was unusual for environmental advocates to meet to strategize against one of the world’s largest polluters, Exxon soon latched onto the media reports to fight subpoenas and lawsuits it was now facing from 17 attorneys general. Defending itself from the investigations, Exxon quoted the meeting agenda in its court filings to argue that activists were conspiring against the company.

A criminal investigation would later reveal that the email obtained by the two publications had been hacked. But details about who ordered the hack have long been a mystery. Now, court documents allege that the hack was ordered by a firm representing Exxon itself — the very company Davies and others were trying to hold accountable for climate deception.  

An Exxon Mobil gas refinery, as seen in March 2006 in Baytown, Texas. Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images

The potential link to the oil company came to light last year, after the U.S. government issued an arrest warrant and attempted to extradite Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit from the U.K. Suddenly, Forlit was facing hacking and wire fraud charges that could land him in prison for up to 45 years. In the indictment from the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, which was unsealed earlier this year, prosecutors alleged that a public affairs firm working on behalf of an oil giant matching Exxon’s description hired Forlit to execute a project that involved hacking climate activists. In court documents, Forlit referenced the indictment and alleged that the hacking was commissioned by DCI group, a public affairs firm with a longtime relationship with Exxon. Separately, Reuters reported that the FBI had investigated DCI Group regarding the hacking operation.

DCI Group and Exxon deny involvement. Exxon Mobil did not reply to a request for comment, however, the company has previously said it has not been “involved in, nor are we aware of, any hacking activities. If there was any hacking involved, we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” The company has said it acknowledges “climate change is real, and we have an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions.”

“We do and always have directed all our employees and consultants to comply with the law,” Craig Stevens, a partner at DCI Group, wrote in an email. He added that his firm has “been told by the government that neither DCI nor any of its personnel are under investigation” and that they had “no knowledge or understanding” of the alleged hacking activity. “Any insinuation otherwise is completely false and unsubstantiated,” he wrote.

Through his lawyer, Forlit declined to comment. He has pleaded not guilty.

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Today, as a direct result of the revelations about what Exxon knew about climate change and when, the fossil fuel giant and others are fighting lawsuits brought by states and cities that could result in hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. And in the past decade, threats to climate advocates have only grown more dangerous; fossil fuel companies have worked with security firms or police to surveil activists who opposed pipeline projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline and Line 3. Cybercrime has grown more sophisticated, and a global hack-for-hire industry has, so far, faced few consequences.

Davies, who is still monitoring Exxon, hopes the Forlit case will reveal whether the oil giant was involved in the hack. “None of that has been proven yet. So any furtherance of that story and that proof is really important to me, personally, and to a lot of the people who were attacked by this operation 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s personal, because I really don’t like bullies or liars or cheaters.”

About a year after Davies began receiving those strange messages, an investigative reporter who was covering financial fraud in Germany began receiving similar emails and flagged them to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which investigates efforts to surveil civil society. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the lab, quickly determined they were phishing attacks. Citizen Lab researchers noticed that the links in the emails used a custom URL shortener. They then developed a technique to figure out the full unshortened URLs containing target email addresses, giving them a comprehensive list of those targeted.

Many of the victims were people at environmental groups and advocates campaigning against Exxon, but Scott-Railton and his colleagues found that the hundreds of targets also included the families and friends of activists. Non-environmental groups — for example, hedge funds, short sellers, and financial journalists — were targeted as well.

“We began toying with the idea that perhaps this was a mercenary group and they were taking commissions,” Scott-Railton said.

Scott-Railton contacted Davies in the fall of 2017. By then, Davies was experiencing another wave of phishing attacks. This time, a number of emails mentioned Exxon, including one pretending to be his colleague sharing a Dropbox document titled “ExxonMobil (confidential).docx”.

Davies still had no idea where the messages were coming from. When he met with Scott-Railton, the researcher showed Davies that he was on a long list of targets — one that included far more activists than just those in his circle of Exxon critics.

“It was really a relief to know that I wasn’t imagining that we were being targeted,” Davies recalled.

As he investigated the hacking group, Scott-Railton helped Davies and other potential targets search their inboxes for evidence that the strange messages were phishing attempts that could be traced to a single hacking group. Davies alone had received more than 80 such emails. Armed with this evidence, several targets of the phishing attacks shared Citizen Lab’s findings with the Department of Justice, or DOJ, which then began gathering evidence of a coordinated scheme. 

The Justice Department uncovered correspondence that showed a group of unnamed co-conspirators had emailed Israeli private investigator Aviram Azari, suggesting “we can make some money working together” and inviting him to a business meeting in India. The group then used phishing attacks to successfully hack into the email accounts of various targets located in the U.S. Based on this evidence, in September 2019, federal agents arrested Azari at the John F. Kennedy International Airport while he was on his way to Disneyland with his family. He was charged with managing hacking projects and pleaded not guilty. (Azari’s attorney did not reply to requests for comment.)

As the government continued to build its case, Davies met with DOJ investigators in early 2020 and told them everything he knew. A few months later, Citizen Lab published a groundbreaking report revealing that the phishing emails came from Dark Basin, a hack-for-hire group based in India. The climate advocates were just one group of targets among many; the hackers had attacked thousands of people across six continents, including politicians, prosecutors, CEOs, journalists, and human rights defenders. The report revealed the hackers had a highly detailed understanding of the Exxon critics and their relationships — suggesting they’d been provided with instructions. But the client who ordered the hack was still unknown.

Climate activists protest on the first day of the Exxon Mobil trial outside the New York State Supreme Court building in October 2019. Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images

After languishing in a New York prison for years awaiting trial, Azari pleaded guilty to the hacking charges in 2022, but denied knowledge of the client. Sentencing documents revealed that he played a crucial role in a global hacking campaign that targeted thousands of people — stretching well beyond the #ExxonKnew campaign — with clients paying him more than $4.8 million over almost five years for managing intelligence-gathering and phishing campaigns. He directed hackers, including the group in India, to target specific victims’ online accounts. 

The DOJ investigation confirmed the successful hacking of more than 100 of Azari’s victims, including those involved in the #ExxonKnew campaign. The government’s sentencing memo said that some of the hacked documents that were stolen from climate advocates’ online accounts were leaked to the press, and that articles about those hacked documents were incorporated into Exxon’s court filings as it battled state attorneys general investigations. DOJ investigators also asked Davies and others to write victim impact statements for Azari’s sentencing. Davies wrote that the attack had caused “anxiety, paranoia, depression, sleeplessness, and fear.”

But despite the revelations from the Azari case, the client who allegedly ordered the hack remained unknown — until the DOJ issued a warrant for the arrest of Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit and requested his extradition.

Forlit’s extradition case sent shockwaves through the U.S. climate community and began providing the answers Davies and others had been waiting for. Davies knew that Exxon had a long working relationship with DCI Group, a strategic communications firm based in Washington, D.C. Public documents show Exxon was a major client of DCI Group, spending more than $3 million on lobbying, including $320,000 in 2015, the year the hacking was allegedly commissioned.

In a filing arguing against his extradition last year, Forlit’s lawyer named the alleged client for the first time: “The hacking is alleged to have been commissioned by DCI Group, a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.” 

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Davies was elated. Finally, what he had suspected all along was trickling out in court documents. “There’s been periods of time where I thought, ‘Oh, that’s over. There’s no way to ever figure it out.’ And then all of a sudden — this breakthrough,” he said.

With Forlit potentially facing decades in prison if extradited to the U.S., his lawyer referenced the then-sealed DOJ indictment and named the companies in a legal filing. The lawyer argued that one of the reasons for his prosecution in the U.S. was to “advance the politically-motivated case of pursuing ExxonMobil, with Mr. Forlit a form of collateral damage in that endeavor.” But the court didn’t find this argument persuasive, and in April, Forlit was extradited to the U.S.

The U.S. indictment was unsealed in April, offering tantalizing new details. It alleged Forlit was “a leader of a sprawling cybercriminal enterprise” via Israel-based intelligence-gathering firms, and that his actions involved co-conspirators in the U.S., U.K., Israel, and India. The indictment says the operation targeting climate activists was carried out on behalf of a client: “one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, with headquarters in Irving, Texas.” (When the indictment was first filed in 2022, Exxon Mobil was the only major global oil company with headquarters in Irving, Texas.)

The exterior of Exxon Mobil’s campus on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, where the company relocated its headquarters from Irving, photographed in February 2022. Brandon Bell / Getty Images

The indictment described allegations using ciphers instead of specific names of people and companies, but the names were clear to anyone who had read Forlit’s U.K. court filings opposing his extradition. The indictment laid out a chain of events connecting Forlit and Azari to a “lobbying firm” — which Forlit’s U.K. filings say was DCI Group — and in turn the lobbying firm’s “client,” which the U.K. filings say was Exxon Mobil. The indictment alleged that in October 2015, the client asked the lobbying firm for help responding to civil investigations it was facing related to climate change. 

According to the indictment, a principal at the lobbying firm contacted Forlit about a project that would target people working on climate and environmental issues. In a memo to Forlit, the principal laid out a plan for how they “would operationalize the research on the bad guys.” The principal sent the memo to Forlit with a cover email that said: “This is what I gave the client yesterday.” The memo referenced “recent attacks” on the client — the oil and gas company in Irving, Texas — “over climate change by groups on the left” and the “opportunity to go ‘on offense.’”

Prosecutors alleged that Forlit then emailed the principal a proposal for the climate change project, with a $125,000 monthly budget, outlining how his firms would gather intelligence for the client’s use in lobbying and legal proceedings. Forlit then allegedly contracted Azari and others who, in turn, hired hackers. 

The indictment alleges that the hackers successfully breached the accounts of two targets who worked for a climate advocacy nonprofit in February and March of 2016 (around the time that Davies heard from the Wall Street Journal reporter) and continued their phishing spree, successfully hacking more targets, until late 2017. The indictment alleges the stolen materials were funneled through Azari and Forlit to the principal at the lobbying firm and ultimately used in lobbying work and climate litigation filings for the client. Between 2014 and 2017, Forlit’s firms allegedly earned $7 million through the scheme, including work on the climate hack.

A decade after they received a flood of phishing attempts, the targets are now poring over the unsealed indictment, trying to piece together the identity and motivations of those who attacked them a decade ago. Although the government investigation confirmed the successful hacking of 100 victims, the Forlit indictment focuses on five unnamed victims.

Lee Wasserman, director and secretary of the Rockefeller Family Foundation, has reason to believe he is “Victim 5.” He and others received letters from the DOJ stating that they were victims of the scheme, although the government never confirmed to them whether they were successfully hacked.

Wasserman believes he was targeted because he supported a Columbia Journalism School investigation into what Exxon knew about climate change that was published in the Los Angeles Times. He also met with the New York attorney general to talk about Exxon. “We think Exxon and their allies’ conduct was the most consequential corporate deception of all time,” Wasserman said. 

But the phishing attempts had a chilling effect on their accountability efforts, he added. They switched from email to phone calls, and at times, Wasserman found himself whispering because he wondered if someone had bugged his office or home. He pondered whether cars could be lurking outside to follow him or his colleagues.

A Mobil logo is seen on a gas station in Los Angeles in November 2023. Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty Images

Wasserman hopes the court process will reveal how the idea was hatched, who directed the operation, and who paid for it. “We’re all sitting on the edge of our seats waiting to see if we hear that at trial,” he said.

In 2016, Jennifer Cunningham was a partner with SKDKnickerbocker, a public affairs firm, and a policy consultant to the New York Attorney General. She was involved in the climate litigation work and recalled receiving phishing emails, which she believes were attempts to obtain information about the litigation strategy.

In an interview with Grist, she initially said the hackers were not successful. “I remember there were a couple that I really narrowly avoided, because [they appeared to be] from a colleague,” she said. Her office turned over the phishing emails to federal prosecutors.

But later, after reviewing the Forlit indictment, she was fairly certain she recognized herself in it. “Wait — I must be Victim 3?” she wrote in a text message. “If so, I guess they were successful in hacking in, which I never knew.” She hopes the court case will reveal more details, including the communication between the companies and the hackers.

Scott-Railton, who first exposed the hacking operation, said, “The #ExxonKnew hacking campaign stands out, in my mind, as one of the largest and most brazen hacking attempts I’ve ever seen against environmental organizations — or for that matter, U.S. advocacy organizations in general.” These groups continue to face digital threats, he explained; phishing attempts still occur, and hacking has progressed to include more sophisticated methods of intrusion that don’t require targets to click on anything. For instance, the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware had been used to target human rights defenders and journalists. “I have no doubt that a version of this is going to come again,” he said.

This year, Davies received a letter from the DOJ stating that he was a “victim” in the Forlit case. He hopes that the people who ordered the hacking operation are named and held accountable.

“I still live not knowing if I was hacked,” Davies said. “I don’t have proof that they did hack me, that they did get my password. I don’t have proof that they didn’t. And that’s the thing that still rests with me: Am I secure?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline They wanted to hold Exxon accountable. Then they got hacked. on Jul 15, 2026.

On Saturday, June 20, over 3,000 people from across Europe and around the world gathered in Central Hall Westminster in London, UK for the International...

The post Lessons from the London International Conference Against War first appeared on Spring.

Hadirnya koleksi game yang semakin lengkap membuka kesempatan bagi pemain untuk mengenal berbagai konsep permainan dalam satu platform. Mulai dari tema petualangan, mitologi, budaya Asia, hingga dunia fantasi modern, setiap permainan memiliki karakteristik dan mekanisme yang berbeda. Variasi ini menjadi salah satu alasan mengapa banyak pengguna tertarik menjelajahi berbagai pilihan yang tersedia.

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Istilah “slot gacor” sendiri kerap digunakan oleh komunitas pemain sebagai sebutan populer untuk permainan yang dianggap memberikan pengalaman bermain yang menyenangkan berdasarkan persepsi maupun pengalaman masing-masing pengguna. Perlu dipahami bahwa hasil dalam permainan berbasis sistem acak tetap bersifat acak, sehingga tidak ada jaminan hasil tertentu pada setiap putaran. Karena itu, istilah tersebut lebih mencerminkan tren pembicaraan di kalangan komunitas daripada sebuah kepastian.

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Berbagai komunitas daring juga turut berperan dalam memperkenalkan permainan-permainan yang sedang menjadi perbincangan. Melalui forum diskusi maupun media sosial, para pemain saling berbagi pengalaman mengenai fitur permainan, tampilan grafis, hingga mekanisme bonus yang mereka anggap menarik. Aktivitas tersebut menciptakan ekosistem informasi yang membantu pemain mengenal lebih banyak pilihan game.

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Secara keseluruhan, hadirnya game yang semakin beragam telah membuka cakrawala baru bagi pencinta permainan slot digital. Variasi tema, teknologi yang terus berkembang, serta inovasi fitur menjadi daya tarik utama yang membuat kategori permainan ini terus diperbincangkan. Dengan memilih permainan sesuai preferensi pribadi dan menikmati hiburan secara bertanggung jawab, pengguna dapat merasakan pengalaman bermain yang lebih nyaman, informatif, dan menyenangkan.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a 6,500-acre agricultural research station in Maryland that is home to the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub. The closure comes at a critical moment for bees.

Issue 94, Green Energy Times’ July –October 2026 Edition, has gone to press and will soon be available at the usual locations.

It can be downloaded as a pdf file HERE.

Individual articles will soon be available. 

"The effects on farmers, livestock and crops have been catastrophic. The AGRIFISH Council, which is due to meet on 13 July 2026, must include measures to tackle this situation."

The post ECVC: The AGRIFISH Council Must Take Action to Tackle the Intense Heatwave Situation appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.