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The Marigold Energy Center, about 45 miles south of Phoenix, would include 400 MW of battery storage, 600 MW of solar generation, up to 675 MW of gas generation and a new substation.

Residents of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” have defeated plans for what could have been the largest carbon sequestration and storage project in the world, adding to a long list of carbon dioxide facilities and pipelines across the state that communities have fought and defeated.

Hundreds of residents packed public hearings to share their opinions about the Air Products carbon capture pipeline.

On July 30, Air Products announced they abandoned their so-called Louisiana “Clean” Energy  Project, citing “expected financial returns not meeting stringent return criteria.” But we know the truth. Ever since the multi-billion-dollar project was announced more than four years ago, River Parish residents have demonstrated strong opposition to the project because of the considerable risks it would bring to communities, including: 

• Building an ammonia plant and carbon dioxide pipeline right next door to a primary school, putting children and teachers at risk of pollution and leaks.
• Industrializing Lake Maurepas, turning a beloved lake and important ecosystem into a toxic wasteland.
• Being built on the site of the former Orange Grove sugar plantation, where local communities raised the alarm regarding the presence of unmarked graves of people who had been enslaved on the property. 
• Using an unproven technology to bury carbon dioxide deep underground, turning communities and environment into testing grounds for something not guaranteed to work. 

The project would have injected carbon dioxide under Lake Maurepas for “permanent storage,” risking the livelihoods of residents nearby and people who trap, hunt, and fish as a living. 

Kaitlyn Joshua and Logan Wolf, Earthworks’ organizers who both live in River Parishes, have helped build opposition to the project since it was first proposed with many partners, building common ground across a diverse group of stakeholders. All the town halls, door knocking, public hearings and comment writing workshops eventually led to this win, further demonstrating to the petrochemical and carbon capture industry that their era of unchecked expansion in communities is over.

Earthworks’ organizers coordinated hundreds of door knocking events to educate residents on the project, its harms, and opportunities to engage with decision makers about their concerns for the project. 

We sat down with Kaitlyn to hear more about this win, the carbon capture scheme, and how community voices shaped this outcome. 

“So what I’m really noticing in this moment, and I think a lot of people can agree with this, is that it’s not a white, Black, Democrat, Republican issue,” Joshua says. “It is literally everybody’s issue at this point when it comes to CO2 build out across the state of Louisiana.”

Q: What does the blue hydrogen project being cancelled mean to the River Parishes and you personally?

A: Essentially, this particular halt of this project means that the work that we’ve been doing for years has merit, it has value, the grassroots organizing that we’ve been doing in these communities really does work. And most importantly it does mean that these industries are hearing our plea and understanding that folks are concerned about the impacts of carbon capture and storage and what CO2 pipelines could mean for the communities that they love, for the people that they love, for the kids that attend the schools, and for the neighborhoods that exist near these proposed pipelines.

Q: Why should people care about blue hydrogen and carbon capture?

A: I think that the reason why I’m so just committed to helping people understand why they should care about this particular technology is because it’s something that doesn’t work. It’s something that is kind of taking the focus off of something that could work and essentially put a place like Louisiana in a position to be able to address the climate crisis as we are seeing more aggressive hurricanes every single year, we’re seeing higher temperatures, more extreme weather. We used to not get tornado watches nearly as much as uh as much as we do now, and that’s something that’s extremely alarming and we need to be sounding the alarm — for lack of a better term — and helping industry understand that they play a major role in these climate crisis pieces and if we want to kinda make any type of change in this particular arena, then we’re definitely gonna have to work together to try and solve it instead of constantly coming up with fake solutions or false solutions.

Q: What’s the real impact on frontline communities?

A: Frontline communities stand to gain the least when it comes to carbon capture and storage. I know that the communities that I organize enjoy beautiful waterways and bodies of water across the state of Louisiana where we fish in, that we boat in. A lot of people have beautiful residential homes and retirement homes situated on these lakes and waterways and those would be completely dilapidated as a result of carbon capture storage. Literally — pipelines being constructed in the middle of these different bodies of water across the state.

We literally couldn’t have both anymore and I think what’s so sad about that is we’ve really done the work in south Louisiana to try to revitalize a lot of these different lakes and rivers so that people can enjoy them, so fishermen can continue their livelihoods, and that would be jeopardized as a result of CO2 pipelines being constructed, wells being drilled miles and miles underneath the lake and to what end? Right. And I think the moment that you allow one facility to take this on you’re allowing hundreds of facilities to take this on as Louisiana has already been coined as a breeding ground for CO2 pipelines. And that’s not just in south Louisiana unfortunately. We’re seeing that happen in central and making its way up to north Louisiana as well.

So what I’m really noticing in this moment, and I think a lot of people can agree with this, is that it’s not a white, Black, Democrat, Republican issue. It is literally everybody’s issue at this point when it comes to CO2 build out across the state of Louisiana. At this point everyone is becoming a frontline community. And I think that’s kind of in a weird way the beauty of us kind of coming together around this one particular issue that we have in common and being able to come up with creative ways to push back on it. 

Q: You’ve been organizing on the ground for years—can you describe what that looks like and how community voices shaped this moment?

A: I’ve been organizing on the ground for a few years now and can describe a little bit what that looks like and how community voices have shaped this moment. And it’s been a delicate dance, if you will.

First, I’ll start by saying Earthworks supported on the lake side, so in particular around the Air Products blue hydrogen facility. That fight started on the Lake Mareupas side which is situated in Tangipahoa and Livingston Parish which is southeast Louisiana and essentially a very affluent part of the district, if you will, and typically very conservative, if you will, and a lot of time a lot of these folks don’t necessarily have to deal with an industrial build out or petrochemical build out as it is, and this was their first time ever fighting industry. You wouldn’t necessarily find them as — they’re definitely unsuspecting allies for sure.

Lake Maurepas to be exact, to be specific, was the main kind of common denominator if you will around organizing on the lake side and we had a um term or like a campaign, if you will, that was “Save the Lake” that Earthworks was really instrumental on helping with and really excited to support the folks within Lake Maurepas Preservation Society, which started out about three years ago.

The momentum kind of built two years ago around legislative session but also at the local level where the lake side folks were able to pass resolutions on the local level in Livingston Parish, Tangipahoa, and I believe one more. Where basically, local governing bodies, we have city councils and Parish councils, who pass resolutions saying they did not want Air Products to come into Lake Maurepas, destroy it.

As I already alluded to earlier, Lake Maurepas took years or advocates took years to revitalize and constantly try to advocate on behalf of the lake which led it to becoming a wildlife management center officially. And so that fight was very interesting.

It was very much like, if it can be quite candid, a lot of white folks just, you know, advocating on behalf of the lake and, you know, us, you know, people of color, we have a very diverse group of folks organizing with Earthworks, supporting that work and we had to, you know, be very cautious in the way that we were organizing as we didn’t wanna kinda overlay the plan that we’ve used in the agenda and the lens of which we’ve organized is what I’m trying to say for the last few years. In certain other parts of the state we couldn’t just kind of, you know, use that same blueprint right over to Livingston and Tangipahoa, we had to kind of take the lead of the folks in that area, so that was a very unique thing.

All in all, it worked out. We’re still in community, still building with the folks on the lake side, and now that we’re on the Ascension Parish side, also organizing in St. James and St. John. 

And to be clear, St. James and St. John are the parishes that would bear the brunt of the CO2 pipeline construction. Ascension Parish is where the facility is situated, where the official announcement has happened from Air Products, where they have decided to halt construction of the CO2 carbon capture facility in Sorrento-Darrow area.

And so now that we are organizing this side, it’s also very interesting because it’s a mix of Black and Brown, white folks that are also pretty well off that typically enjoy, you know, a very luxurious lifestyle for the most part. Their kids go to really good schools, a great deal of them are already a part of industry but don’t necessarily buy into carbon caption storage and what that is and what that means and a lot of them are very well aware, very educated on the fact that carbon capture and sequestration has not worked anywhere in the world and they’re not bought into it right and Air Products has not sold them on the technology.

And so for them, it is the pushback on; I don’t want CO2 pipelines constructed near my home, what does this do to my property values, what does this technology potentially do, or what does a pipeline rupture or leak look like near the school that my kids attend. Right

So the conversations are a little different, but no matter what, those different narratives have certainly shaped the feedback and the responses and the public comments that we’ve dispersed throughout the different public hearings that we’ve been able to participate in in the last few years, whether in Baton Rouge at the primacy hearings or in Ascension Parish, or in St. John, St. James, or Livingston on the lakeside. And it’s been very interesting and really exciting to see people’s different world views on how they take on this CO2 pipeline facility.

The post Victory! Louisiana Residents Defeat Air Products’ Carbon Capture Project appeared first on Earthworks.

Andreas Sieber is head of political strategy at 350.org. Cat Abreu is director of the International Climate Politics Hub.

From the US abduction of Venezuela’s president at the start of this year to the Iran war which rumbles on, disruption is the new normal for global geopolitics, more often than not linked to conflict over supplies of oil and gas. 

Events so far in 2026 – driven largely by the desire of the Trump administration to grab control of fossil fuels around the world – show that the climate community’s approach to energy diplomacy will have to evolve if we are to operate effectively and push for climate action in such a volatile landscape. 

Today’s climate and energy governance must be able to cope with trade wars, genocide, fascism, spiralling inequality and challenges to multilateralism. The increasingly dominant paradigms of economic competitiveness, energy security and green industrialisation can help drive the transition but they also challenge our collective mission to deliver an equitable green shift. 

US-China rivalry dominates

Longer-term geopolitical trends that are seeing power move from West to East and North to South have fuelled a US–China “superpower rivalry”, which is pulling the global economy apart and reining in trade. 

A key question will be how the fracture “lines” are drawn: by the US and China, or also by other countries or blocs? Many governments will try to remain “in the middle” between the two giants to capture economic gains from both sides. Yet despite the language of “strategic autonomy”, Washington and Beijing may be in a position to force choices via market access, export controls and sanctions.

• Jun 24, 2026 News EU, UK lead push for electrification as “powerful weapon” against fossil fuels A group of dozens of countries seeks to build momentum for a COP31 pledge to electrify 35% of global energy use by 2035 as an alternative to fossil fuels Read more
• Jul 20, 2026 News Top maritime court rejects bid to halt UN deep-sea mining inquiry Two subsidiaries of The Metals Company sought to block the probe into potential contract breaches launched after the firm’s application for US-sponsored permits Read more

At first glance, this may not seem particularly relevant for climate and energy politics. But Huawei’s exclusion from 5G operations across the political West and India following the so-called Clean Network Campaign by the US government serves as a warning of what could happen to climate green tech. 

And the recent debate to cut out Chinese inverters from European markets follows the same pattern – US security forces perceive a risk and start encouraging their allies to drop Chinese technology.

The new drivers: competition and security

Despite this fracturing geopolitical and economic context, energy transition is still happening. To ensure it is effective and equitable, we need to understand what is driving it and how to adapt climate politics so that it better responds to these drivers.

Put simply, China is supplying the world with low-cost renewables (roughly 60% of critical wind and 80% of solar components), batteries, EVs and other key elements. Other countries now also want their piece of the green tech pie and are forming industrial policies to get it.

It is this new competitiveness-driven logic that will shape the quest for decarbonisation, which has shifted from cooperating around the cost of tackling climate change to rivalry for the benefits of climate action. 

Over 90% of new renewables projects are now cheaper than fossil alternatives. Gas-fired power is 3–4 times more expensive than solar and wind. In 2015, most decarbonisation policies were “traditional” emissions-cutting strategies like carbon pricing or net zero dates, whereas green industrial policies now underpin the majority.

Iran war could boost fossil fuel phase-out push, says Colombian minister

Meanwhile, security has become a central driver of energy politics. We are living through the second major fossil fuel crisis in just four years. Elevated oil and gas prices will impose up to $1 trillion in additional costs on the global economy by the end of the year if disruption continues in the Strait of Hormuz. Fossil fuel supply chains have exposed countries to conflict, coercion and brutal price shocks.

Fossil fuel volatility destabilises whole economies – higher fuel costs drive up food prices, increase political instability, and push millions into poverty and hunger. This incentivises governments to shield themselves from global shocks, especially in countries that are net fossil fuel importers and home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s population. 

Yet security fears can cut both ways. The same instability that makes fossil fuel dependence untenable is also sharpening concern over China’s dominance of critical clean technologies and supply chains.

Equity, cooperation and the opportunity for change

Developing countries benefit from the rapid uptake of renewables enabled by low-cost Chinese technologies. But significant fiscal space and public investment is needed for the electricity grids and infrastructure required to fully unleash the energy transition, as well as for green industrialisation to diversify revenue streams.

Despite this, industrial-scale domestic production and ownership often remain out of reach for too many countries that lack the fiscal space to allow green supply chains to flourish and compete with their traditional industrial base. But more just and diversified green tech supply chains could be achieved with concomitant support.

Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?

For the first time in decades, the international order is being substantially reshaped. If within this context, decarbonisation is increasingly driven by green industrial policy, energy security and competitiveness, the climate policy community must better anticipate where these debates are moving. We must speak the same language, and enter the forums where decisions are made,  including security, trade and bilateral or trilateral spaces. 

We should build on an enlightened self interest recognising that cooperation remains essential and beneficial. This includes using the UN climate process differently: less as an ever-expanding negotiation machine, and more as a space for norm-setting, political alignment and deal-making. In an age of fragmentation, effective cooperation must not only be framed as necessary but thought of as a strategically compelling source of resilience and shared advantage. 

The post Energy transition policymaking must evolve to fit an age of rupture appeared first on Climate Home News.

Friends of the Earth map of areas where a form of fracking could be carried out. Link to interactive version of map

On the first full day of the Burnham government, campaigners have warned that people in 79 English constituencies could face a form of fracking unless a legal loophole is closed.

The previous Starmer administration promised to ban fracking for good. But it did not define which operations would be included in legislation.

The current moratorium, introduced in 2019, did not prevent lower volume fracking, also called proppant squeeze, reservoir stimulation or acid fracking.

These operations use a smaller volume of fluid than the statutory limit set out in the moratorium. They can be used on various rock types, not just shale.

It is unclear whether the Energy Independence Bill, which proposes to ban fracking, would outlaw these lower-volume operations.

Lower-volume fracking has already been approved for a site at West Newton in East Yorkshire and was recently rejected at Burniston in North Yorkshire. The Wressle oil site in North Lincolnshire is currently seeking permission for proppant squeeze.

The government also promised to ban new oil and gas licences. But this would not prevent lower-volume fracking in existing licences.

Friends of the Earth said its new analysis, published today, reveals constituencies in England with at least 1km where oil and gas developments are licenced.

The organisation identified the location of the affected constituencies:

20 in Yorkshire & Humber
17 in the south east
15 in the north west
14 in the east midlands
6 in the south west
5 in the west midlands
2 in the north east

More than half (46) the constituencies currently have a Labour MP, the analysis found. They include four members of Andy Burnham’s new cabinet:

• Chancellor John Healey (Rawmarsh & Conisbrough)
• Foreign secretary Ed Miliband (Doncaster North)
• Health secretary Yvette Cooper (Pontefract, Castleford & Knottingley)
• Culture secretary Lisa Nandy (Wigan)

Friends of the Earth campaigner Tony Bosworth said:

“Fracking blights our countryside, won’t cut energy bills, fuels the climate crisis and remains deeply unpopular.

“If ministers are serious about banning it, they must close the loophole that allows planning applications for lower-volume fracking, such as proppant squeeze, and turn the current moratorium into a comprehensive legal ban.

“Anything less would leave communities in 79 constituencies, over half of which have Labour MPs, still potentially at risk from fracking. Failing to act would reduce the government’s promise to little more than empty words.”

Frack Free Coastal Communities (FFCC) is campaigning against plans by Europa Oil & Gas to carry out lower-volume fracking at Burniston, just north of Scarborough. Earlier this year, a parliamentary petition secured more than 10,000 signatures against the Burniston operation.

Professor Chris Garforth, chair of FFCC’s steering group, said:

“It took almost 1,600 objections, hundreds of people lobbying outside the Town Hall, and a planning committee willing to overrule its own officers to win a planning refusal at Burniston.

“Most communities won’t have those resources, and they shouldn’t have to spend their free time battling companies that put profit above health, climate and the environment. The solution is obvious. We need a comprehensive ban.”

Earlier this year, Friends of the Earth published analysis by Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology at University of Edinburgh, which warned that lower-volume fracking could trigger earthquakes that are as large and as unpredictable as high-volume fracking.

Tejido Global de Alternativas: Declaración Popular de Bandung [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] [ Kurdish] Emitida en la segunda Asamblea presencial celebrada en Bandung, Indonesia, del 11 al 17 de abril de 2026. A los pueblos del mundo y a quienes luchan contra todas y cada una de las formas de opresión e injusticia. A toda la vida, incluidas todas las especies no humanas. A los gobiernos de los Estados-nación del mundo y a las instituciones internacionales.

Global Tapestry of Alternatives: People’s Bandung Declaration [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] [ Kurdish] Issued after the second in-person Assembly of the Global of held in Bandung, Indonesia, 11-17 April 2026 To the peoples of the world and to those struggling against any and all forms of oppression and injustices. To all of life, including all non-human species. To the nation-state governments of the world, and to international institutions.TapestryAlternativesalternativ…

If drivers of gasoline cars refrained from speeding, they would collectively save an average of 57,000 metric tons of carbon emissions every day in the United States—while spending less than a minute more behind the wheel, a new study reveals.

“We are presenting a somewhat obvious, but impactful, way to reduce energy and emissions that doesn’t require a new vehicle or new technology, just backing off the accelerator pedal,” says study team member William Northrop, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota.

The analysis proceeds from a simple and well-known proposition: driving fast is disproportionately energy intensive, as drag force increases exponentially with speed and the engine burns more and more fuel. “That’s physics,” Northrop says.

But no one had ever added up the impact at a national scale before.

In the new study, Northrop and University of Minnesota graduate student Bharat Jayaprakash analyzed a database of more than 120 million actual trips made by light-duty vehicles such as cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks across the United States to gain insight into how often and how fast drivers speed.

They used a computer model to quantify the energy consumption, fuel cost, and carbon emissions from the actual vehicle trips. Then they modeled what would happen if those same trips had all taken place without the drivers ever exceeding posted speed limits.

Driving the speed limit would save an average of 6.7 million gallons of fuel, 57,000 metric tons of carbon emissions, and $22 million in fuel costs daily across the United States, the researchers found.

 

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Why don’t people comply with posted speed limits? Mostly, because they want to save time. But the analysis shows that slowing down would only add about 190 seconds of drive time per 100 miles traveled—which works out to about 54 seconds per day for the average driver.

“The core takeaway is that the individual time savings gained from speeding are statistically negligible, but the collective environmental and economic costs are massive,” Jayaprakash says.

Obeying the speed limit only cuts fuel consumption by about 2.4-3%, depending on the time of year. But across the United States, that all adds up to an annual fuel savings equivalent to taking about 5.5 million passenger cars off the road.

Plus, the savings estimate is likely a conservative one since the researchers only evaluated speeding on roads with posted speed limits of at least 45 miles per hour.

The team also analyzed the effect of speeding on energy use and emissions generated by EVs in California (the only state where there are enough EVs for a statistically significant analysis). This investigation showed that obeying speed limits would yield small but collectively significant savings for EV drivers too: a single day’s savings of 195 megawatt hours of electricity could power 82 EVs for an entire year.

“There is no free lunch here; no matter what vehicle you drive, speeding and aggressive driving cost energy regardless of what energy source powers it,” Northrop says; the stop-speeding strategy remains important even as the vehicle fleet goes electric.

Source: Jayaprakash B. and W. F. Northrop. et al. “Speeding incurs substantial environmental and economic costs nationwide for negligible travel time savings.” Communications Sustainability 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

Sixty years after surveyors first uncovered evidence of a sprawling coral reef off the West African nation of Benin, scientists have at last found the reef.

Read more on E360 →

Miatta Fahnbulleh has been appointed secretary of state for energy security and net zero in the new Andy Burnham government.

She replaces Ed Miliband, who has become foreign secretary.

Miattta Fahnbulleh. Photo: UK Government

Ms Fahnbulleh, the MP for Peckham since 2024, was previously a junior housing minister (September 2025-May 2026) and a junior minister at the department of energy security and net zero (July 2024-September 2025).

In 2024, the Guardian said of her:

“Fahnbulleh has pushed hard for serious action on the climate crisis and has advocated more urgency in the UK’s response. She is likely to be the big brain of the party’s soft left.”

She told LabourList in 2025 the route to long-term savings in energy was “weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and wholesale on the global market, which is why we are moving to deliver clean home-grown energy at such pace”.

She said:

“When we started, people were quite sceptical if we could get to clean energy by 2030. I think everyone has been staggered at the pace that we are driving through the things we need to do; removing the ban on onshore wind, the biggest ever auction that’s been delivered for renewables.

“We are absolutely driving it – and in the end, that is the way in which we will get bills down.”

Before becoming an MP, Ms Fahnbulleh was chief executive of the New Economics Foundation (2017-2023). She also worked as the director of policy and research at the Institute for Public Policy Research and was head of cities in the policy unit at the Cabinet Office (2011-2013).

She studied philosophy, politics and economics at University of Oxford and has a PhD in economic development from the London School of Economics.

She was born in Liberia and was brought to the UK in 1986 as a five-year-old by her parents fleeing the country’s civil war.

Reaction

Friends of the Earth energy lead, Imogen Dow, said:

“As someone who’s been vocal about the need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and did a lot to shape the government’s Warm Homes Plan under Ed Miliband, it’s encouraging that Miatta Fahnbulleh has been appointed as his successor.

“She will, of course, inherit the same challenges. She must hold the line against harmful fossil fuel expansion – including the highly contentious Jackdaw and Rosebank fields – make cheap, clean energy available to all and build on Ed Miliband’s efforts to scale up our renewable power capacity.

“Today’s announcement to cut VAT from energy bills is certainly a step in the right direction, but this should come alongside a new social tariff to help those on the lowest incomes, which will make a meaningful difference in the long-term. Insulating more homes and boosting Britain’s homegrown wind and solar power production are how we can also drive down bills and slash climate-warming emissions for good.”

Other cabinet appointments

Chancellor: John Healey, former defence secretary and treasury minister

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster: Louise Haigh

Foreign secretary: Ed Miliband

Home secretary: Shabana Mahmood

Defence: Wes Streeting

Health and social care: Yvette Cooper

Education: Lucy Powell

Work and pensions: Pat McFadden

Housing: Angela Rayner

Business: Jonathan Reynolds

Equalities (minister): Bridget Phillipson

Culture: Lisa Nandy

Justice and Lord Chancellor: Alex Norris

Transport: Heidi Alexander

Environment: Angela Eagle

Northern Ireland: Chris Bryant

Scotland: Douglas Alexander

Wales: Stephen Kinnock

Chief secretary to the Treasury: Emma Reynolds

Chief whip: Anneliese Midgley

Attorney general: Ellie Reeves

Leader of the Commons: Alan Campbell

Leader of the Lords: Baroness Angela Smith of Basildon

Intergovernmental relations (minister): Hamish Falconer

Artificial intelligence (minister): Kanishka Narayan

Housing (minister): Matthew Pennycook

Updated 12.31 with reaction from Friends of the Earth to appointment of new energy secretary

Last night, I slept beneath the stars in the mountains and wondered. As darkness dissolved the contours of the trees into shadow, the night sky revealed itself in astonishing detail. In that vastness, my thoughts wandered between the known and the unknown.

For as long as humans have existed, we have looked toward the stars and the horizon, asking enduring questions: Where did we come from? Who are we becoming? And how do we shape what comes next?

Across cultures, answers to these questions often emerged through food and our relationships with the living world. In the origin stories of communities across Southwest China, the Himalayan foothills, and Southeast Asia, humans emerged from a gourd. In the Maya creation story, humans are formed from maize. In other traditions, people emerged from rice, yams, coconuts, animals, fertile landscapes, and the earth itself. In Abrahamic traditions, humans are created from the earth and placed within a garden, where nourishment shapes humanity’s earliest story.

Food was origin. Across cultures, humanity understood itself emerging from the living world. These origin stories explained our beginnings and expanded humanity’s sense of what was possible. Wonder has always done this. It expands the boundaries of what we believe is possible, allowing us to imagine futures that do not yet exist.

For more than 95 percent of our existence as a species, we lived within the living world by hunting, gathering, fishing, foraging, and moving with the rhythms of landscapes, seasons, and the migrations of other living beings. Then, over thousands of years, communities in different parts of the world began one of humanity’s most consequential expansions of possibility: saving seeds, domesticating plants and animals, and cultivating the landscapes that would eventually give rise to villages, civilizations, and the food systems we know today.

Agriculture emerged as people responded to changing conditions with necessity, curiosity, and imagination. The first cultivators learned by observing the living world: the relationships between seed and soil, rain and harvest, seasons and scarcity. Perhaps they noticed seeds sprouting in the disturbed soils around campsites and wondered what might happen if those seeds were planted with intention. Through generations of experimentation, gathering gradually gave rise to cultivation, one of humanity’s defining transformations.

Agriculture reshaped humanity’s relationship with food, living systems, and one another. People remained rooted in place as trade routes connected distant landscapes through the exchange of foods, seeds, knowledge, culture, and conquest. Villages and new forms of governance emerged. Communities formed around shared labor and stewardship. Farmers, seed keepers, tool makers, healers, artisans, traders, and storytellers all became part of the living web that allowed communities to flourish. Like every food systems transformation, agriculture expanded possibility while creating new responsibilities and unintended consequences.

These relationships shape food systems around the world. I have witnessed them with remarkable clarity in one of the most biodiverse and resilient food systems I have ever encountered: Akha communities in Yunnan Province in the Upper Mekong River Basin.

For the Akha, a food system is community. The food system does not create the community. Communities co-create the food system with the living world.

Over time, I asked Akha elders what makes a community. They taught me that a community is created through the relationships and elements that sustain life across generations: seeds, fire, the shaman, the knowledge of cultivation, the silversmith who forges the agricultural tools, and the tools themselves. No single element creates a community. It is the relationships among them that allow a community to emerge and flourish.

People plant trees for their grandchildren that they themselves may never harvest. In that simple act lies a profound understanding of what sustains life.

Food systems are often defined by their structures and functions: the people, places, institutions, and activities that produce, process, distribute, consume, and dispose of food. Those structures and functions matter, yet they emerge from something deeper. A food system is the living web of relationships that sustains life across generations.

The relationships we cultivate shape what becomes possible. When those relationships flourish, food systems flourish. We flourish.

Food systems transformation begins by reimagining our relationships and what we believe is possible and who are we becoming.

For millennia, stars guided humanity toward horizons it could not yet fully see, from the way finders of Polynesia to cultures around the world guided by the night sky.

Food systems transformation is much the same. We know the world we are leaving behind. There is gratitude for what has sustained us, relief for what we are ready to release, and loss for what may not come with us. While we cannot fully see what lies beyond the horizon, wonder invites us forward.

Years ago, while preparing a seminar on what I had learned throughout my career, I realized that the familiar arc of scientific discovery never captured the whole story. When I shared this with my husband, he responded, “Talk about the liminal space.” That idea stayed with me.

Derived from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, anthropologists use liminality to describe the space between one way of being and another, where familiar assumptions begin to dissolve before new ones have fully emerged.

Liminality is often mistaken for uncertainty. From the perspective of history, the liminal space is where innovations are born. Innovation is not always invention; sometimes it is the rediscovery of enduring relationships in new contexts.

As the health of people and the planet comes under increasing strain, our capacity to understand and shape the future is expanding in extraordinary ways. Just as we have long looked to the stars, we are discovering new universes closer to home, in our soils, our food, and our gut. Artificial intelligence is synthesizing relationships across ecosystems, molecules, microbes, and human biology at a scale and precision previously beyond our reach, opening new frontiers of discovery. Regenerative agriculture is restoring relationships with soil and biodiversity while drawing upon knowledge cultivated across generations.

Wonder has always expanded what we believe is possible. Now it invites us to decide what possibilities we pursue, what relationships we carry forward, what values guide us, and ultimately, who we are becoming and how we shape what comes next.

In my early years of teaching food systems, I noticed something unexpected that now seems obvious. As students moved deeper into their degree program, many began to lose hope. Complexity does not necessarily expand our sense of possibility; without hope, imagination, and resilience, it can narrow it. It made me question how we teach food systems and the stories we tell about them. In preparing food systems leaders, we need to cultivate knowledge, hope, resilience, and the capacity to imagine and co-create what comes next.

Resilient people create resilient communities, and resilient communities co-create resilient food systems with the living world. Every day, we make decisions that shape the food system that future generations will inherit, from the crops farmers plant and how they steward their land to the meals families prepare, the investments funders support, and the policies that govern our food environments.

We often search for a single innovation or policy that will transform everything. History suggests otherwise. Innovation may expand our capability, but it cannot tell us what future is worth creating. That remains profoundly human.

The most enduring transformations emerge from cultivating the relationships and values that shape what becomes possible.

Systems thinker Fritjof Capra reminds us that the horizon is not a destination but a guide. As we move toward it, it moves with us. We never fully arrive because every horizon reveals another beyond it. The same is true of food systems transformation. Every discovery reshapes our understanding. Every challenge reveals new possibilities. Every possibility reveals another horizon.

As I look back to the stars, I wonder what stories my daughter and the generations that follow will tell about who we chose to become and the relationships we chose to cultivate with the living world.

We are becoming the ancestors of future food systems.

This essay is part of Food Tank’s Flourish Series: Food and Health from Molecules to Systems, authored by Selena Ahmed, exploring how food connects us to the living world while asking what it means to flourish. For more in the series, click here. 

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The post Op-Ed | Food Systems at the Threshold: Wonder Between What Is and What Could Be appeared first on Food Tank.

Headline News:

• “Construction Surge Pushes US Wind Outlook Higher” • The US wind industry is on track to connect more than 50 GW of capacity through 2030, Wood Mackenzie said in its US Wind Energy Monitor Q2 2026 report. The research group raised its five-year outlook, noting that construction starts increased 8% from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026. [reNews]

Wind farm (Ørsted image)

• “Deal Sealed To Unlock 3.56 GW Capacity In NSW Renewable Energy Zone” • The New South Wales government’s planned South West Renewable Energy Zone is closer to delivery after EnergyCo signed a Project Development Deed with Transgrid to upgrade a key section of the grid to support 3.56 GW of new renewable energy capacity. [pv magazine Australia]
• “Oil Prices Rise As Fighting Between US And Iran Intensifies” • Oil prices rose as fighting between the US and Iran intensified. Oil prices jumped in early trading as the US announced attacks for a ninth consecutive night. Iran responded to the strikes by targeting US allies across the Middle East. Benchmark Brent crude rose 3.2% to $90.95 per barrel. [Euronews]
• “Court Orders EPA To Implement National Soot Standard” • The US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the US EPA must follow the law and implement the strengthened health-based 2024 National Ambient Air Quality Standard for particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution, commonly called soot. [CleanTechnica]
• “The US Needs 5,000 Miles Of New High-Voltage Lines Every Year. It Only Built 392” • Some transmission experts say the grid needs about 5,000 miles of new lines. The additions reached almost 4,000 miles in 2013. In 2025, the industry added 402 miles. Before we supply AI with electricity, we have to know where it will come from. [OilPrice.com]

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

The NFU believes that the NPF must prioritize five policy pillars: generational renewal; growing local markets and regional trade; food security through food sovereignty; long-term public agriculture research; and climate resilience.

The post Canada: The Next Agricultural Policy Framework Must Centre Food Sovereignty, says NFU appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

When the Strait of Hormuz first closed at the start of the 2026 Iran war, the world braced for the “largest energy crisis in history.” Before the conflict began, almost 20 percent of the world’s traded oil passed through the narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Iran’s blockade of the strait effectively erased 15 million barrels per day from circulation overnight. 

Many experts and commentators predicted that the supply gap would have catastrophic consequences. Australia expected fuel rationing, the European airline industry warned of mass flight cancellations, and Goldman Sachs predicted widespread oil shortages. The International Monetary Fund warned of a potential global recession, and some traders worried that oil prices could hit $200 a barrel.

But a little over four months into the war, little of that has come to pass. 

TimelineHow the oil market has handled the Iran warFebruary 28The United States and Israel launch a joint military operation against Iran.MarchIran retaliates and announces that it has closed the Strait of Hormuz. Benchmark oil prices rise above $100 a barrel.

The International Energy Agency announces a coordinated strategic reserve release of around 400 million barrels from more than 30 countries, including the United States.

Governments across Asia introduce energy-saving measures such as remote work mandates and restrictions on who can drive.AprilThe United States and other countries increase domestic crude production and exports, filling the gap created by the closure of the strait.MayBrent crude rises toward around $120 a barrel, its highest level on the year, as traders fear a prolonged supply disruption.JuneOn June 17, the United States and Iran sign a ceasefire agreement. Commercial shipping resumes through the Strait of Hormuz, and benchmark oil prices fall back to about $70 per barrel.JulyThe ceasefire breaks down. The U.S. announces a new blockade of Iranian oil and Iran announces new transit requirements for the Strait of Hormuz. Prices rise back to about $85 per barrel.

True, oil prices have gone up around the world, and there have been critical shortages of products such as cooking oil in some places, but rationing and recession have largely not arrived. Instead, a series of emergency measures have helped avoid the predicted crises: Oil exporters including the United States stepped in to fill the gap, either by drawing down strategic petroleum reserves or increasing production. Countries that were most reliant on fossil fuel imports from the Middle East took emergency conservation measures to reduce their demand. 

Here’s how the world has averted the worst of the oil shock so far, and what experts say might happen next if the conflict continues to drag on.

Finding alternative sources of oil

In the months since Hormuz cut off access to Iran’s main oil supply, the world has scraped every corner to find substitute barrels of crude oil. Many countries had stockpiles of oil saved up for an emergency, and in March, the International Energy Agency coordinated a historic release of oil from those reserves. That put on the market more than 400 million barrels, enough to fill about 20 days’ worth of the supply from Hormuz. 

A U.S. flag flies over Marathon Petroleum Corp’s Los Angeles Refinery, one of the largest oil refineries in North America in March 2026 in Carson, California.
David McNew / Getty Images

In addition, oil producers around the world ramped up production to take advantage of elevated prices. The United States, Venezuela, and Norway all pumped out more crude in the first half of the year than they had in previous months, with those additional barrels going to countries that had previously relied on shipments from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. South Korea, for instance, doubled its oil imports from the United States between February and April of this year. Iraq and Saudi also routed more than 6 million barrels of oil per day through land pipelines that were operating below capacity, skirting the strait altogether.

China, the world’s largest oil importer, also helped stabilize the world market. It stopped buying oil for its own strategic reserve after the war began, and it also stopped purchasing crude for its own domestic refineries, shutting them down for months. To generate electricity, it pivoted to coal and solar. These measures together freed up another 5 million barrels per day for the world market.

Using less oil

Even as the world scrambled to replace Middle East oil, the Asian countries that rely on it moved aggressively to slash their usage. Many nations idled their factories and industrial facilities that use petroleum-based liquids, which shaved off a few million more barrels a day. Some increased imports of electric vehicles or accelerated plans to adopt solar and wind technology to reduce their dependence on foreign oil and gas. But the vast majority of imported oil is used for transportation and power generation, so in order to weather the crisis, countries also needed to change consumer behavior.

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More than 100 countries enacted some form of conservation measure, ranging from limits on elevator usage to outright restrictions on when people could drive. The Philippines, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka all moved to a four-day work week, and Myanmar restricted gas vehicles to driving every other day based on the number of one’s license plate. Bangladesh limited air conditioning temperatures to 77 degrees Fahrenheit and closed public university buildings. This helped reduce demand on a power grid that runs on imported oil and liquefied natural gas, much of which also comes through Hormuz.

Some wealthier countries in Europe got even more ambitious: The Netherlands, for instance, allowed citizens to trade in gas cars for electric ones, and Sweden halved the cost of public transportation fares.

Consumers wait to fill gas cylinders at the Nepal Oil Corporation depot in Kathmandu, Nepal, in March. Across much of Asia, cooking gas is in sort supply due to the Iran conflict.
Subaas Shrestha / NurPhoto via Getty Images

These conservation measures likely prevented an out-of-control price spiral, giving importers time to procure more oil from other nations. They also likely saved Asian countries from needing to impose extended periods of rationing the way the United States had to do during the oil crisis of the 1970s, the largest previous disruption to the world’s oil supply.

“There have been multiple measures taken by governments both on the supply and demand side, but mainly on the demand side for large oil importers,” said Kevin Morrison, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis who focuses on oil and gas in Australia. “This is a trend that is likely to continue as the uncertainty around future oil supplies remains uncertain.”

How long can these tactics last?

Even though the most dire early predictions haven’t borne out, the closure has not been easy. In the early days of the crisis, before countries procured substitute fuel, price spikes and supply disruptions in Asia altered millions of lives. Taxi drivers in Myanmar lost their livelihoods and funeral homes shut cremation services for lack of fuel. A lack of fertilizer during key rice planting times in Asia will likely hamper harvests later this year, contributing to higher food prices.

Aside from crude oil, the war has caused shortages of other goods like helium and sulfur, shipments of which also pass through the Strait of Hormuz. This has contributed to broader inflation for everything from nickel to semiconductors.

A natural gas delivery worker waits at a red light with tanks of gas strapped to their motorcycle in Bangkok, Thailand, in April The cost of living in Thailand is increasing as petroleum prices skyrocket amid the U.S.-Israel war on Iran.
Matt Hunt / Anadolu via Getty Images

The market shifts of the last few months have had consequences even in places like the United States that could afford a consistent supply of oil. Refiners around the world have produced more jet fuel to keep airlines supplied, but that means they have also produced less gasoline for cars. As the U.S. heads into the peak summer driving season, its gasoline inventories are as low as they have been in a decade. Supplies could drop even lower this fall as companies perform delayed maintenance on their hard-working refineries, said Bob McNally, the founder of the analysis group Rapidan Energy Group, who also advised the administration of President George W. Bush on oil policy.

It may soon get a lot worse. Even though global oil prices have fallen from their peak, there’s still a fundamental mismatch between oil demand and oil supply. As a result, experts say the world could still experience severe economic disruption later this year if the strait remains closed. Some vessel traffic resumed through the Strait of Hormuz last month following a tentative agreement between the United States and Iran, but the ceasefire has collapsed and Iran now says the strait is closed again. 

Read Next The war in Iran could plunge the world into hunger Ayurella Horn-Muller

“The market decided at the end of Round 1 to price for perfection” in an Iran deal, McNally said. “Instead, we’re getting Round 2. We played some tricks and some cards, but all these things … are either wearing off or already known.”

Those “tricks” have run their course. Most countries’ emergency stockpiles are close to depleted, and the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve has fallen so low that its structural integrity is starting to strain. At the same time, China has ended what McNally called its “crash diet” and has started to buy oil for its refineries again. 

This leaves the world without the buffer that it had during the first round of the crisis. 

“Hormuz 1.0 was about supply and inventory,” said McNally. “In Hormuz 2.0, prices will have to do more of the work. And they have to go really high, because the problem is demand is inelastic — you’ve got to eat.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the Iran war hasn’t caused a global oil crisis — yet on Jul 21, 2026.

Low-income Indian workers, many of them migrants from rural areas hit by climate change, are paying for worsening extreme heat through lost working days and health complications, with the cost equivalent to 2% of national GDP per year, new research shows.

The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a London-based think-tank, worked with local organisations to survey around 540 households of informal workers in three Indian cities: Ajmer, Delhi and Agra. Most had migrated from rural areas to find work in industries such as construction, brick-making, garment manufacturing and food packaging.

The survey found them struggling through long working days with little access to shade, cooling, rest or water, as well as few toilets for women. And even when they go home, many live in makeshift shelters or airless cramped rooms with barely a single fan, bringing almost no respite.

Outdoor workers are losing about 24 days of work a year due to heat, costing them nearly a tenth of their annual earnings, while indoor workers sacrifice roughly 15 days. On top of losing income, they are also bearing the cost of health problems like heat exhaustion, psychological stress and kidney damage brought on by repeated dehydration.

If the survey’s findings are extrapolated to a national level, the IIED researchers estimate that the decline in productivity and effects of kidney disease combined add up to lost wages of $78 billion each year.

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Vishram Meena, 45, from Alwar in Rajasthan, has worked on construction sites in Ajmer for more than a decade, toiling for 10 to 12 hours a day carrying materials and mixing cement in the full sun.

In May 2024, on one of the hottest days, he collapsed after feeling dizzy and suffering a nosebleed. His wife and colleagues managed to get him to hospital where he was diagnosed with heat stroke. He has since returned to the same building work because the family needs the money.

“I went back because what else could I do? We are not machines. We are human beings. The heat is killing us slowly,” he was quoted as saying in a report on the survey’s findings.

“Victorian-era” conditions

Ritu Bharadwaj, IIED’s director of climate resilience, finance and loss and damage, described some of the stories from workers about their experiences of extreme heat as “genuinely horrifying”.

Kusum, a tailor at a garment manufacturing and export unit in Kapashera, Delhi, recounted how the machines for ironing finished garments are in the same tiny room where workers are making the clothes, with steam and hot air building up through her shift.

Fans are too far apart to move the air and nothing has changed in over a decade, she said, adding that “in summer, the unit feels like a furnace”.

“These are Victorian-era working conditions and they’re completely unacceptable in the 21st century,” said Bharadwaj. She called for stepped-up social protection from the government to pay people for days they are unable work due to heat, as well as micro-insurance schemes with payouts triggered by temperature measurements.   

This money would help families buy food and pay medical bills when their income dips if they fall ill or cannot work their usual hours due to soaring temperatures.

Climate change-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders

The aim of the IIED study, Bharadwaj added, is to get policy-makers’ attention by showing the scale of damage extreme heat is doing to India’s GDP in an economy whose growth relies on service-led industries. “If the workers within them start falling sick, you know it’s the economic growth which is going to get impacted,” she told a webinar to present the research.

“Whether [policymakers] care about the workers or not, at least they would care about the GDP, and therefore then invest in the care that is needed for them,” she explained.

Labour code leaves out heat

However, Bharadwaj noted that a 2026 reform to India’s labour law bringing a range of regulations together in one code does not include heat-related protections for workers and only applies to businesses above a certain size. She urged the government to introduce a temperature threshold above which all workers would be able to stop their activities.

IIED and its partners have also carried out a similar study in Bangladesh which will be published later this month, showing that extreme heat is costing its workforce the equivalent of nearly 1.4% of GDP.

Shakirul Islam, chairperson of the Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP) in Bangladesh, said the government had introduced stricter safety policies for garment-making companies after the Rana Plaza complex collapsed in 2013. But, he said, these rules are rarely followed by manufacturers, especially at the level of smaller subcontractors.

The workers’ welfare centres that do exist are open mainly during work hours so they are difficult to visit. Some companies also make saline water available for heat stress, which is no good for those with high blood pressure, he noted.

For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity

Archana Shukla Mukherjee, CEO of India’s Change Alliance, which also partnered with IIED on the survey, said it was time to hold both the government and businesses accountable for finding solutions to the intensifying problem of extreme heat’s effects on workers.

She said that employee state insurance schemes should identify heat stroke as an occupational disease while companies along the whole supply chain should start putting in place heat protection measures, including for informal workers and migrants.

If the tools and mechanisms available to help workers do not reach the most vulnerable and marginalised people, “then I think we are not doing something right,” she said.

The post Extreme heat costing India’s poorest workers 2% of GDP, survey finds appeared first on Climate Home News.

The government of French Polynesia plans to challenge an American startup’s proposal to explore the waters just beyond its maritime borders for seabed mining. 

“We were approached, but we were not consulted,” Moetai Brotherson, the territory’s president, told Grist. “We are not remaining passive while industrial activities are proposed immediately next to ecosystems that French Polynesia has chosen to protect.”

As Grist reported last week, a Bay Area investor wants the Trump administration’s approval to explore seabed mining in international waters entirely surrounded by the maritime borders of the Cook Islands, Kiribati, and French Polynesia. The company, American Deep Sea Minerals, has a permit application pending before U.S. regulators and hopes to extract minerals essential to the production of batteries and military technologies. It is one of at least a dozen applications under consideration as President Trump races to make the United States a leader in critical mineral mining. 

Negotiators from dozens of countries are meeting this month in Jamaica at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority, where they are debating the minutiae of a regulatory framework that’s been in progress for more than a decade. Last year, the Trump administration invited companies to apply for permits to mine the high seas directly through the U.S. rather than wait for the adoption of those rules. That has prompted global outrage from countries who say it flouts international law. 

“The deep seabed belongs to no single country and no corporation; it belongs to all of us,” Letitia Carvalho, the secretary-general of the regulatory body, said in Jamaica last week. “If we lose sight of this, we risk repeating on the ocean floor the same injustices and destruction we still strive to remedy on land.” 

French Polynesia doesn’t have a seat at the authority because it remains a French territory whose Indigenous people haven’t been granted political self-determination. And until recently, when environmental nonprofit organizations extended their observer status to Indigenous advocates, the voices of French Polynesians were largely left out of the discussion. Still, Brotherson said he prefers the international regulatory process to recent U.S. actions. 

“This case therefore goes beyond one company or one licence application,” Brotherson said. It raises a fundamental question, he said, about whether an individual country can unilaterally authorize a new industry in international waters, particularly those adjacent to Pacific island nations and protected marine areas. 

According to Brotherson, American Deep Sea Minerals sent a brief introductory email to a government representative; the government replied asking for more information. “No response was received,” he said. “Thus, no consultation has taken place regarding this proposal, and the government has not been provided with sufficient information to assess the project or its potential environmental implications.” Under international law, Indigenous peoples have the right to free, prior and informed consent — and to withhold such consent — regarding development and extractive projects on their ancestral territories. 

Graham Goulet, the CEO of American Metals, told Grist the company intended to consult the governments of the Cook Islands, Kiribati, and French Polynesia “as the exploration program develops.” Those discussions will, he said, occur under U.S. oversight and in accordance with the intentions outlined in its application. The filing notes that it intends to create a benefit sharing agreement with Pacific nations and plans to avoid interfering with fishing.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. government agency overseeing seabed licenses in international waters, is still considering Goulet’s application. It is available for public comment online until August 3. 

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The environmental implications of seabed mining have long concerned French Polynesia, which banned the practice in 2022, followed quickly by France in 2023. Indigenous peoples with longstanding connections to the ocean, such as for traditional navigation, account for 80 percent of the territory’s population. Studies show extraction could harm fisheries, and Indigenous Pasifika leaders from across the region have raised cultural concerns about the significance of disturbing the sea floor. 

“As if climate change wasn’t enough, the spectre of deep-sea mining threatens to strip-mine the ocean floor, our sacred place of creation,” said Hinano Murphy, an Indigenous cultural expert from Moorea and Tahiti in a TEDxTalk last year.  

Last September, Brotherson added further prohibitions on seabed mining within Tainui Atea, a marine protected area that encompasses nearly all of the islands’ exclusive waters. The preserve sustains 21 species of sharks, 176 species of coral, and more than 1,000 species of fish, according to the United Nations. One survey found more than 92 percent of French Polynesians support Tainui Atea because it honors their traditional cultural practices. 

“French Polynesia’s position is therefore not only a political statement. The protection of deep-sea ecosystems is now embedded in our domestic regulatory framework,” Brotherson said. 

The waters that American Deep Sea Minerals is eyeing, known as Eastern High Seas Pocket 3, are also a popular tuna fishing spot, as well as a potential conservation area. 

In January, the United Nations High Seas Treaty, an international law intended to protect marine ecosystems, took effect, allowing nations to create conservation areas in international waters for the first time. French Polynesia wants to use the law to protect the Eastern High Seas Pocket 3. Doing so could set an important precedent for how effective the treaty is, and how protected the world’s oceans will be in the future, Brotherson said. 

If American Deep Sea Minerals’ application proceeds, French Polynesia wants a say in what happens and a thorough environmental review. Recently, U.S. regulators fast tracked the approval process for deep-sea mining applications by halving the number of environmental reviews required for commercial permits. “We expect the interests of neighboring Pacific countries and territories to be fully taken into account through prior notification, meaningful consultation, and a comprehensive, independent and participatory environmental impact assessment,” Brotherson said.

As part of a U.S. application, American Deep Sea Minerals will need to conduct scientific studies of the area and create an environmental impact assessment. Brotherson said that his government supports independent scientific research conducted on deep-sea ecosystems.

“However, we do not regard this particular application as neutral scientific research,” he said. Although the company says it does not yet intend to apply for a commercial license, its application shows that it intends to conduct the research necessary to apply for one, as well as a mining test. “It is therefore part of a pathway towards potential commercial mining,” Brotherson said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline French Polynesia objects to an American seabed mining plan made without its input on Jul 21, 2026.

This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance.

The Arctic is warming four times faster than other regions, a trend that disproportionately harms the Indigenous Sámi people — particularly their access to vital traditional resources like reindeer and salmon, which are used for food, clothing, weapons, and more.

As northern temperatures rise, snow is melting and refreezing at an accelerating rate. That forms ice, preventing reindeer from reaching the lichen below and dramatically increasing starvation rates. “Those impacts in nature are severe for our culture and livelihoods,” said Tuomas Aslak Juuso, vice president of the Sámediggi, or Sámi Parliament, of Finland. “So survival of reindeer and then survival of our livelihoods [and] cultures is then questioned.” 

Last week, the impacts of climate change and colonialism were among the key issues raised by the hundreds of Indigenous people gathered in Geneva. They’d come from around the world to discuss these mounting threats at the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or EMRIP. They agreed that a multitude of crises will only grow worse unless they are given greater say in international negotiations and decision-making. That’s why in addition to pushing specific policy recommendations on conflict, AI, and other key issues, Indigenous delegates continued their decades-long demand for better representation at the U.N.

“What we are trying to do is to get some implementation resources for us to adapt to the climate change. With Finland, for example, we don’t have any adaptation resources on how to adapt to these situations,” Juuso said. “To be able to bring these issues forward to the global discussion, we would have to have the opportunity to participate.”

Member states are granted access to U.N. gatherings, where they can easily express views, determine policies, and outline their progress implementing international commitments required by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other agreements. But Indigenous advocates say the voices of the peoples directly impacted by such actions aren’t always heard at international forums. 

The U.N. structure requires participation through either a member state or a registered civil society agency — for instance, a non-governmental organization, academic institution, or accredited Indigenous organization. But Indigenous nations don’t fit neatly into one of those categories and are reduced to participating as NGOs. Beyond those structural barriers, Indigenous peoples also face financial and other resource challenges that compound the difficulty of making themselves heard at the international level. That’s why those attending EMRIP continued the long fight for what is called enhanced participation, which could finally give Indigenous nations and organizations the same access and power the United States and other countries enjoy.

That increased influence is especially important when many countries ignore Indigenous priorities. Throughout the week, many delegates identified climate and environmental issues as one area where national governments often have different priorities than Indigenous peoples, who consider land and ecosystems more important than economic growth — a value system they believe is at odds with the world’s best interests. 

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“We’ve got to try and balance immediate economic interests with longer-term environmental protections,” said Kym Hamilton, who is from the tribes of Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Raukawa in Aotearoa New Zealand. “I think we’ve got a responsibility to protect our descendants.”

In U.N. lexicon, enhanced participation is the catchphrase often used for efforts to elevate Indigenous peoples’ voices. Those gathered in Geneva asserted the right to represent their communities in crucial global discussions that impact them. They are also demanding more respect from member-state governments and other policymakers, something they argue will better help them to survive conflict and other crises.

“The question before us is no longer whether Indigenous peoples should participate more fully in the Human Rights Council,” Hamilton, who spoke on behalf of the National Iwi Chairs Forum that represents 87 tribes, said. “The question now is how quickly we will implement these commitments.” 

She offered recommendations for EMRIP’s seven expert Indigenous members, including a clear timeline for creating participatory status for Indigenous peoples’ institutions and appointing Indigenous and state representatives with equal standing to lead the process. She also called for the establishment of an independent and transparent accreditation mechanism to prevent states from vetoing Indigenous representatives, and initiatives to provide predictable and sustainable funding to take part.

Hamilton said Indigenous peoples’ full participation in international deliberations includes the right to decide who represents their communities. “Governments don’t always tell the truth,” she said, citing the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review — which all 193 member states must undergo every 4.5 years — which she said revealed gaps between the reports governments submitted and the actual human rights situations within their jurisdictions.

Kenneth Deer, member of the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawà:ke and longtime international Indigenous advocate, echoed that point. “The government never speaks ill about itself,” he said. “You can’t let government speak for us.”

But the U.N.’s accreditation and recognition process can hinder progress toward collectively tackling the challenges impacting Indigenous peoples, he noted. “For us, as a representative institution, there isn’t actually any clear path to accreditate ourselves — and that leads to them trying to improvise, and try to find ways how we can accreditate ourselves.”

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The National Congress of American Indians also called for increased Indigenous participation at the international level. “Recognition and participation of Indigenous peoples must accommodate the numerous ways we identify, organize, and represent ourselves,” President Mark Macarro said. “It is essential that we participate directly in matters of global concern that affect our environment, health, human rights, and unique rights as Indigenous peoples.”

Deer said he’s seen many caucuses of Indigenous delegates at the U.N. engage in important collaborations. But he wishes they could have a higher profile. “Indigenous peoples want to have a voice,” he said. “They want to be heard.”

A diversity of voices at the U.N.’s highest levels, he believes, would improve the U.N. processes and system to the benefit of all countries. “What we need is the states, now, to agree to a process that was run by Indigenous people,” he said.

Throughout the week, EMRIP delegates identified a host of other barriers to participation. For example, communications technology within remote communities presents challenges to joining global deliberations. Additionally, there are significant financial barriers for under-resourced communities when U.N. forums are held far from their homelands.

The U.N. Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples, which helps finance travel to U.N. forums, is also experiencing budget shortfalls, inhibiting many delegates’ ability to attend. It is seen as an important way to increase participation among delegates from areas where governments do not recognize the Indigenous peoples within their borders. Sheryl Lightfoot, EMRIP’s North America region member, is an Anishinaabe expert in Indigenous rights, global politics, and public policy.

She said states are not involved in how EMRIP officially recognizes Indigenous peoples. “Worldwide, there’s a need — and this is especially true across Africa and Asia — of Indigenous peoples seeking just mere recognition of their existence from their governments,” she said. “States seem to be more resistant now than they were 10 years ago to recognize that peoples are Indigenous peoples and have those rights attached to them.”

Despite Hamilton’s doubts about how much change has been achieved internationally, hearing her peers from other Indigenous nations testify about how they’ve persevered inspired her and restored her hope. “I feel like there’s a real sense of … urgency and concern,” she said. “We don’t want our grandchildren’s grandchildren to have to keep coming here and doing this stuff.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate change threatens their lands, Indigenous nations demand more power at the UN on Jul 21, 2026.

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Environmental fallout is becoming a tangible reality for a growing number of Europeans amidst unabated climate change. While much of this harm is hard to attribute to a single cause or set of policies, there are cases where a few actors bear clear responsibility for the damage. This dynamic is visible in the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, where voters have expressed their frustration through the ballot box.

The ground in the Dutch province of Groningen shakes more often than one might expect. More than 1,600 kilometres from the nearest active volcano, and far from any major natural fault lines, the earthquakes that trouble this region are entirely man-made.

For decades, the Netherlands extracted vast quantities of natural gas from beneath Groningen’s soil, powering homes, fuelling industry, and filling state coffers, all while quietly destabilising the earth below. What began as an economic triumph has since left a complicated legacy: thousands of small earthquakes have damaged homes, unsettled communities, and eroded public trust. Today, residents live not only with cracks in their walls, but with fractures in their confidence in the institutions that once championed the project. From compensation claims and legal battles to the ballot box, this distrust is increasingly visible today.

Gas in Groningen

Up until 1959, the North Sea area was assumed to be mostly devoid of oil and natural gas. This changed when exploratory drilling by the Dutch Petroleum Company (NAM), jointly owned by Shell and Esso, discovered a gas field in the municipality of Slochteren, in the province of Groningen. While little was known about its size at first, further drilling revealed a site large enough to be of commercial interest. After the Dutch government granted a concession in 1963, extraction began under a consortium of the state-owned mining company, NAM, Esso, and Shell.

The ensuing gas rush was further amplified by expectations that gas would lose its relevance over the following decades with the anticipated rise of nuclear energy. Consequently, there was a strong push to scale up production and sell Groningen’s gas quickly, and early concerns – particularly about possible ground subsidence – were brushed aside. Extraction ultimately peaked in 1976, at 88 billion cubic metres, roughly equivalent to Germany’s entire current annual gas consumption. Only after the oil crisis of the 1970s and growing social resistance to nuclear energy had shown that gas was here to stay did the government begin treating the Groningen field as more of a long-term reserve, slightly reducing extraction and diversifying towards smaller fields, particularly in the North Sea.

A Turning Point

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the Groningen field seemed nothing short of a miracle. Gas profits flowed generously into shareholders’ pockets as well as into the treasury. The Dutch government received up to 85 per cent of gas revenues, which at times accounted for as much as a fifth of total government spending. For a small country still rebuilding after World War II, this was transformative. Roads, schools, hospitals, and social programmes were funded in no small part by the resource extracted from beneath Groningen.

Yet the benefits to the province itself proved limited. The gas sector created around 9,200 jobs – meaningful but modest for a region with a labour force of approximately 286,000. As a Dutch parliamentary inquiry concluded in 2023, only about 1 per cent of the total revenues from the gas field flowed back to Groningen. Most of the economic value flowed upwards to The Hague, to be redistributed at the national level, far from the villages that hosted the extraction sites.

National policy choices only deepened this imbalance. Unlike Norway, which established a sovereign wealth fund on its oil revenues, the Netherlands folded gas income directly into the state budget. This allowed for the rapid expansion of the Dutch welfare state, but at the cost of longer-term planning. The gas windfall also brought what The Economist would coin the “Dutch Disease” in 1977: as revenues strengthened the guilder, Dutch manufacturing lost its international competitiveness, and unemployment more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1977, rising from 1.1 per cent to 5.1 per cent. In short, the gas boom filled the treasury while hollowing out industry.

Things get shaky

For the first two decades of gas extraction, the ground beneath Groningen remained deceptively calm. Despite early concerns about subsidence, no seismic activity was officially recorded, reinforcing the belief that the risks were manageable. This confidence began to erode on Christmas Day in 1986, when a magnitude-2.8 earthquake struck near Assen. In 1991, the Dutch meteorological institute recorded the first officially recognised induced earthquake directly linked to the Groningen field, with a magnitude of 2.4. From there, seismic activity accelerated: four earthquakes in 1991, six in 1992, and 16 in 1993.

Induced earthquakes occur when human activity, most commonly hydrocarbon extraction, alters pressure levels in underground rock formations. As gas is removed, pressure drops, the surrounding rock compacts, and stress builds along geological faults until it finds sudden release. In Groningen, this process unfolded gradually but relentlessly.

By the early 2010s, the situation had escalated sharply. In 2013 alone, 133 earthquakes were confirmed across the Netherlands, 121 of them in Groningen, averaging roughly one every three days. The turning point came on 16 August 2012, with the Huizinge earthquake, measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale, the strongest ever recorded above the Groningen field.

Though most of these tremors were classified as light by seismological standards, their impact on buildings and residents was anything but negligible. Homes cracked, foundations shifted, and entire neighbourhoods began to deteriorate.

Still, the political response lagged despite the mounting evidence. In January 2013, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Henk Kamp, decided against an immediate reduction in gas extraction, against the urgent recommendation by the State Supervision of Mines, instead commissioning 14 separate investigations into the maximum credible earthquake magnitude, seismic hazard, effects on housing and infrastructure, security of supply, and the fiscal cost of a production cut. This decision came at a time when the Netherlands was in a period of fiscal austerity, and gas revenues were not easy to forgo.

The prevailing assumption was that the risks could be managed financially. A compensation scheme for earthquake damage was expanded, based on the belief that revenues could offset material losses and political fallout. Extraction would continue; damages would be paid.

It was not until 2014 that production was capped – at 42.5 billion cubic metres – for the first time explicitly due to the earthquakes. Further reductions followed, though always cautiously. Plans to phase out extraction entirely were announced, revised, and at one point delayed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which briefly revived Groningen’s strategic importance. Gas extraction from the field ultimately ceased in October 2023. By then, roughly 2.3 trillion cubic metres of gas had been extracted from one of the largest gas fields ever exploited.

But even with extraction halted, the harm persists. Over 3,300 buildings were demolished in Groningen due to earthquake damage between 2012 and 2023. Furthermore, following the Huizinge quake, hundreds of thousands of damage reports have been filed. The Dutch state has paid over 1.2 billion euros in compensation, yet many residents describe the process as slow, opaque, and adversarial. Studies by researchers at the University of Groningen also link sustained exposure to the risk of earthquakes to deteriorating mental and physical health outcomes, and even to increased mortality. Entire communities lived for years in a state of permanent vigilance, unsure whether their homes were safe or whether promised repairs would ever materialise.

Shaking Up the Vote

What makes Groningen particularly distinctive is not just the scale of the damage, but its origin. The harm that people there have faced for decades is immediate, local, and unmistakably man-made. And that has had significant political consequences.

Jordan McAllister and Afiq bin Oslan tackle this topic in a recent paper titled “Shaking up the Vote: The Electoral Impact of Induced Earthquakes”. Placing the Groningen earthquakes at the centre of a broader inquiry, the authors examine how first-hand experience of the direct consequences of environmental harm has translated into changed voting behaviour.

Groningen is an unusually well-suited setting for this kind of study. Unlike pollution or an oil spill, where the distribution of harm is ultimately shaped by human decisions, induced earthquakes strike in nearby areas depending on geological factors that no one controls. They are caused by human activity (unambiguously so in Groningen, where earthquakes were virtually non-existent before drilling began), but where exactly they strike is essentially random. As a result, the researchers can reasonably associate differences in voting behaviour across polling stations with earthquake exposure rather than some pre-existing political difference between areas.

Using data on 891 earthquakes linked to the Groningen field alongside highly granular polling-station-level data across Groningen and its two neighbouring provinces, Friesland and Drenthe, McAllister and bin Oslan ask whether voter exposure to induced earthquakes increases electoral support for GroenLinks, the Dutch green party. The answer, in short, is yes. Across three elections and multiple model specifications, areas with greater earthquake exposure consistently show higher GroenLinks vote shares in subsequent elections.

The paper also finds that earthquakes are associated with a significant fall in support for the PvdA, the Dutch Labour party, consistent with the idea that earthquake exposure is prompting vote-switching towards the Greens from other parties on the left, rather than simply raising overall turnout.

Crucially, the relationship between earthquake exposure and green voting is not linear. It peaks at moderate levels of exposure and weakens at the very highest levels of impact. The authors suggest that those most severely affected may come to prioritise immediate material concerns such as compensation, repairs, and economic security over electoral environmental preferences. At the same time, those experiencing meaningful but less overwhelming exposure are most likely to translate that experience into a green vote. Environmental shocks then do not automatically and uniformly push electorates in a greener direction. How exposed they are, and what else that exposure demands of them, matter as well.

Beyond Groningen

The Groningen case is, in several respects, unusual. Induced seismicity directly linked to gas extraction in a densely populated region, with clear institutional responsibility and a single identifiable operator, is not a combination that recurs frequently elsewhere. But the broader mechanism it illustrates – locally experienced and clearly attributable environmental harm feeding back into political behaviour – is hardly confined to the Netherlands.

In the Val d’Agri valley in the southern Italian region of Basilicata, the energy giant ENI’s oil extraction operations present a comparable picture. The region hosts the largest onshore oil field in Western Europe, yet its population has seen negligible economic benefit from decades of extraction while bearing environmental costs, including contaminated water sources and elevated rates of cancer and respiratory illness.

The political response has been real: ENI executives have faced joint legal action from the regional government, municipalities, and environmental agencies. Moreover, grassroots organisations such as COVA Contro have built sustained platforms for accountability. Anti-extraction sentiment has surfaced electorally too: in the 2019 regional election, a left-wing candidate running explicitly on an anti-oil platform received 4.3 per cent of the vote, though this has remained a niche position rather than a decisive force.

Two factors may help explain the gap between Italy and the Netherlands. Firstly, economic anxiety in the Val d’Agri valley, one of Italy’s poorest regions, tends to compete with environmental grievance as a political driver. Secondly, unlike the Netherlands, Italy has no well-established Green party capable of channelling anti-extraction sentiment into parliamentary weight. While the Groningen parallel seems to hold in terms of the underlying injury and political mobilisation, the similarities are less clear when it comes to votes.

The German lignite regions offer another striking parallel. In the Rhineland and Lausitz, local communities have borne the costs of extraction in ways that are, if anything, more visible than in Groningen: more than 50 villages or parts of villages have been demolished in North Rhine-Westphalia alone to make way for expanding open-cast mines, with entire communities uprooted and resettled. The public has opposed these projects fiercely: the planned demolition of the village of Lützerath to expand RWE’s Garzweiler II mine drew thousands of protesters over years of sustained resistance; in 2023 the eventual five-day police clearance of an activist occupation of the village became a national flashpoint. But was there also a wider political response?

The vote share data from North Rhine-Westphalia is at least suggestive: the Greens rose from 6.4 per cent to 18.2 per cent in state elections between 2017 and 2022, in contrast to their more modest gains at the federal level, from 8.9 per cent in 2017 to 14.8 per cent in the 2021 Bundestag election. That rise, though, predates the party’s own turn: In October 2022, when they were in government federally and in the state, the Greens agreed to the deal with RWE that cleared Lützerath for demolition. This turn was viewed by many as a change in sides. Whether this will cost them electorally is difficult to determine.

The confounders here are too numerous to read much into either shift directly, but the broader point stands: these cases offer at least plausible instances of locally experienced environmental harm feeding back into political behaviour, in different institutional and partisan contexts. What they also reveal, by contrast, is why Groningen is such a rare analytical opportunity. Elsewhere, the harm is real enough, but the causal pathway remains tangled, and the harm harder to isolate.

The Limits of Attribution

The cases considered so far share a key feature: the source of harm is local, visible, and traceable to a specific operator or set of decisions. Where the previous section showed variation – Groningen producing a measurable electoral response, Basilicata and the lignite regions less so – the explanation lay not in attribution, but in what came after it: whether a credible electoral channel existed to convert grievance into votes. The mobilisation, in all three cases, seems real enough. But not all environmental harms afford even that starting point.

When flooding devastates a region or drought destroys harvests, the causal chain is longer and more contested. Climate change may have made the event more severe, but the link between many natural disasters and specific policy choices is harder to draw, and therefore harder to convert into electoral accountability. The devastating floods that struck Valencia in October 2024, killing over 230 people in one of the deadliest natural disasters in Spain’s recent history, illustrate this well. Scientists broadly agreed that climate change had intensified the rainfall, but the political response was far from unified. Multiple levels of government faced – and traded – blame simultaneously: regional president Carlos Mazón faced mass protests over the dismantling of an emergency unit his administration had shut down just the year before, while the national government faced accusations of insufficient coordination. Rather than producing more support for environmental protection, the debate became highly polarised, with disinformation campaigns seeking to redirect blame onto environmentalists themselves for having allegedly restricted flood-control infrastructure.

Groningen and the cases it can usefully be set alongside illustrate that the political salience of environmental harm is shaped not only by its severity, but by its legibility, by how clearly it can be traced to identifiable decisions, and how directly it is felt. As the consequences of both energy policy and climate change continue to accumulate across Europe, that kind of clarity is likely to become rarer.