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With the help of the Beginning Farmer Stipend, Johnson is building a new cold storage room to help store more produce and keep it fresher for longer.

The post Lindsay Johnson appeared first on RAFI.

Lawrence is harnessing this Beginning Farmer Stipend to improve infrastructure and prepare for late summer and fall planting.

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The couple is excited to expand their production to include reishi and lion’s mane mushrooms for culinary, health, and wellness purposes.

The post William Romney and Becky Bacheller appeared first on RAFI.

Snow is harnessing RAFI’s Beginning Farmer Stipend to install a drip irrigation system, purchase planting and harvesting tools, and expand the farmstand stall and parking lot.

The post Cody Snow appeared first on RAFI.

Stachowicz will use the Beginning Farmer Stipend to purchase tools that will help increase efficiency of the market garden operation.

The post Liana Stachowicz appeared first on RAFI.

Wallace began farming to provide fresh, organic food in order to help address health challenges in his community.

The post Chris Wallace appeared first on RAFI.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Barbara Grady

As the Western United States grapples with severe drought, leading cities to scramble for water and farmers to abandon some crops, a new scientific study has found that 122 major oil, gas, coal, and cement companies and state-owned operations are partially responsible.

The study found that climate change from all climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the last 70 years has resulted in a 36% decline in annual average mountain snowpacks, the major source of surface water in Western states – and that about 40% of that decline is linked to the climate pollution caused by just 122 companies.

The annual loss attributable to those 122 companies is equivalent to the amount of water held by Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, at full capacity. 

The authors of the peer-reviewed paper, “Carbon emissions exacerbating the Western US water crisis,” also found that global warming from greenhouse gas emissions has led to a 13% decline in average annual streamflows from mountains to the lower-lying areas that depend on them, and to a 4.3% increase in the need for agricultural irrigation. The study attributed about half the streamflow declines and roughly half the increased need for irrigation to the warming caused by the 122 companies. In other words, those companies’ products resulted in a 6% fall in streamflows in the region, according to the study. 

Nine scientists from the University of California at Merced and the Union of Concerned Scientists contributed to the study, published August 25 in the Nature magazine affiliate Communications Earth & Environment. 

The West relies on snowpack 

Summers are dry in the Western U.S. 

Precipitation occurs in winter, with much of it stored as snowpack in the mountains. The West’s multibillion-dollar agriculture industry and the reservoirs supplying cities and towns in 11 states depend on melted snow carried by rivers, streams, and water conveyance systems in late spring and summer. If the snowpack is scant or if snow melts early, water shortages can occur in summer when water demand is highest. 

The West’s historic megadrought has persisted for two decades. With less surface water available, farmers have had to pump more groundwater for irrigation, depleting aquifers so much that the ground is sinking in many agricultural areas. Some farmers in the Southwest have had to abandon crops or fallow fields for lack of sufficient water. Corpus Christi, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix are just some of the cities facing severe water shortages.

Tying drought to specific companies 

Emily Williams, lead study author and a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of California at Merced, said in an interview that the study allowed scientists to disentangle how much worse water scarcity became over the decade 2014 to 2024 because of climate-change-induced atmospheric warming, as well as how much worse it became specifically because of the warming emissions generated by 122 companies and their products. 

“It lets us get beyond how much more intense climate change is becoming to look at specific impacts like snowpack decline as well as specific sources” of emissions, she said. Her team found impacts on water resources “not just from climate change but because of emissions traceable to specific sources.” 

The 122 companies cited in the study are the world’s biggest producers of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions cumulatively up to 2024; they are all coal, oil, gas, and cement producers. That list, known in climate science as the carbon majors and compiled by other scientists, is based on publicly reported coal, oil, gas, and cement production data along with scientific formulas for calculating emissions per unit of product produced. Since 2024, the list has grown to include 178 entities.

Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell are the fourth-, fifth-, eighth-, and ninth-biggest cumulative emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the most recent version of the list. The world’s three highest emitters are state-owned coal, oil, and gas companies from the former Soviet Union, China, and Saudi Arabia (Saudi Aramco). U.S. coal producers Core Natural Resources and Peabody Energy are also in the top 25 carbon majors. 

The study authors based their calculations on emissions since 1950, rather than earlier, because that was the decade when major oil and gas companies began to suspect that use of their products would cause changes to the Earth’s climate. Engineers at ExxonMobil who studied the issue determined that burning large amounts of fossil fuels would affect planetary climate systems. After its engineers shared their conclusions with management in the 1970s, ExxonMobil at first expanded that research to learn more and then – a decade later – pivoted to hiding the scientific findings and denying the existence of climate change, as reported in the Pulitzer Prize finalist series “The Road Not Taken” by Inside Climate News. Other major oil companies did the same. 

The study authors wrote that “roughly 70% of global industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions since 1854 are traceable to 122 fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers (“Carbon Majors”), and ~97% of these emissions occurred after 1950.” 

U.S. oil companies remain silent

When asked on August 27 for a comment on the water crisis study, Chevron – the largest U.S. emitter since 1950 – sent an automatic thank-you note but did not respond to the question by publication. 

Chevron’s second quarter earnings report, released August 12, highlighted record-breaking oil production. The report said the company “achieved new U.S. upstream production record of nearly 2.1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day and record U.S. refinery throughput of over 1 million barrels per day” as well as “competitive growth” in operations “around the globe.” Chevron also has embarked on developing oil resources in Venezuela, which has large deposits of heavy crude – a variety of oil that’s highly polluting to process. 

A media relations receptionist for ExxonMobil, the second-largest U.S. emitter, politely pledged to convey the reporter’s question to the media relations team, but the company did not respond. 

The methodology that Williams and her eight colleagues used involved overlaying observational data of recorded temperatures, precipitation, relative humidity, and hydrologic conditions annually over the decade 2014 to 2024 in seven water basins across the Western states with global climate models. Then they introduced emissions data in three variable scenarios to disentangle the effect of emissions from the carbon majors. One scenario included all human-caused emissions since 1950, the second included no anthropogenic emissions, and the third scenario excluded emissions traced to the 122 companies. 

“By comparing these scenarios and using pattern scaling, we calculated how much of the observed changes in snowpack, streamflow, and irrigation demand are attributable to climate change and specifically to emissions from the Carbon Majors,” the authors wrote.

Governments seek damages from polluters 

The study is part of a growing body of what’s called attribution science. As scientific consensus has solidified around climate change resulting from atmospheric warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, emissions of methane, and destruction of forests, scientists are looking more deeply at the impacts of that warming, how to minimize future warming, and the specific sources of the emissions. 

Similar studies have attributed the size of areas burned in intense wildfires, specific measures of sea level rise, and the increased likelihood and intensity of extreme heat events to emissions from the carbon majors. 

Read: Scientists agree: Climate change is real and caused by people

“We have a choice of how much worse climate change is going to get, and that is a function of how much emissions we allow,” Williams said. She said some changes to the planet’s climate system are already irreversible, but we do have a choice to avoid others and the worsening of some that are already baked in.

Many states and cities around the world are taking the biggest climate polluters to court in hopes of getting financial resources to help them address damages from extreme hurricanes, wildfires and floods whose intensification can be linked to climate change. 

Two states – New York and Vermont – have passed climate superfund laws requiring that the biggest historical emitters help pay for climate damages incurred in their states. Many other states, including California, are considering such legislation. New York’s law was recently struck down in court, but the state also plans to appeal the decision. Meanwhile, several states are suing major fossil fuel companies over the damage they allege was wrought by their emissions.

“As climate impacts become increasingly severe, communities will be asking for more action” to help recover from damage and adapt to climate changes, said Carly Phillips, another author of the water study and senior research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

Communities, states and small countries are bearing an unfair share of the costs of the impacts of emissions, Phillips contended, compared with the companies that ignored the looming crisis for decades and even lobbied Congress against taking action sooner.

 “Given the outsized contribution of certain entities to the problem – 122 companies is a very small number – there should be some accountability,” she said.

This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

//

Registered nurses will hold a rally and community event on Saturday, Oct. 10 in Washington, D.C. to demand that MedStar Washington Hospital Center reopen its shuttered postpartum unit in the midst of a Black maternal health crisis in the District. Following the rally, the nurses and allies in the community will make their way to the hospital where they will deliver a letter to management calling for the immediate reopening of the unit.

In this special encore episode, Bob talked w/ Fadi Kafeety, a scholar of Arab and Middle Eastern history, about the current crises in the region which have been intensified by…

DENVER—A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that 99.1 percent of the 370,238 public comments posted on the U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule oppose the Trump administration’s plan. The comment period closed October 6.

The 2001 Roadless Rule prohibits most road construction and commercial logging on more than 44 million acres of national forest land outside of Colorado and Idaho, where state-specific roadless rules apply. The proposed rule, published August 20, would rescind those protections nationwide and leave the management of roadless areas up to individual forest plans. USFS argues that removing the rule would help reduce wildfire risk and give local managers more flexibility, claims that are undercut by the agency’s own environmental analysis of repealing the rule.

Key findings:

• 99.1 percent of posted comments opposed rescinding the Roadless Rule
• 0.5 percent supported the rescission
• 0.3 percent were neutral or off-topic

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein:

“For the second year in a row, Americans have flooded the Forest Service with comments telling it to keep the Roadless Rule. If the Trump administration moves forward with this proposal, they will be blatantly ignoring the wishes of the American people.

“The Trump administration keeps claiming that repealing the rule is about wildfire, but the public isn’t buying it—our comment analysis confirms that Americans know this is about giving private industry easier access to our public lands.”

These results track previous CWP analyses that found near-universal opposition to the Trump administration’s public lands rollbacks. In September 2025, more than 99 percent of approximately 183,000 comments opposed repealing the Roadless Rule. In November 2025, 98 percent of comments opposed rescinding the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule. And last month, 99 percent of 134,312 comments opposed the Forest Service’s rewrite of the Travel Management Rule, which would open national forest roads and trails to motorized vehicles by default.

Methodology:

CWP downloaded all 370,238 comments posted to docket FS-2025-0001 on regulations.gov as of October 7, 2026, 7:06 AM MT. CWP also downloaded and read the 17,857 attachment files submitted with 3,924 of those comments, so that letters submitted as PDFs or images were classified by their content. Those attachments represent an estimated 296,000 additional individual comments or signatures. Each comment was classified as supporting, opposing, or neutral/off-topic using a combination of keyword matching and a large language model. CWP staff manually audited the labels on a sample of 300 comments, which oversampled “support” and “neutral/off-topic” comments. The audit found a labeling accuracy rate estimated at 99.9 percent.

The comments posted to regulations.gov reflect a portion of the massive public outcry against rescinding the Roadless Rule. Conservation organizations have tracked more than 1 million letters and signatures asking the Forest Service to keep the Roadless Rule in place. The General Services Administration does not post every comment submitted to each agency; CWP’s analysis covers all of the comments that are available online.

Learn more:

• USFS’s own analysis shows Roadless Rule repeal would harm wildlife, water, and rural communities — Westwise

• Commenters overwhelmingly oppose Travel Management Rule rewrite — Center for Western Priorities

• Comment analysis finds over 99% opposition to repealing 2001 Roadless Rule — Center for Western Priorities

The post STATEMENT: New analysis finds 99.1 percent of public comments oppose repealing the Roadless Rule appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

A Dutch NGO has filed the first climate complaint under the European Union’s trade rules, arguing that New Zealand violated the environmental provisions of its free trade agreement with the bloc by weakening its climate regulations.

The case will test whether binding climate provisions in the EU’s free trade deals can be enforced to hold governments accountable to their climate obligations, experts told Climate Home News.

The EU-New Zealand free trade agreement, which came into force in 2024, was the first in the world to include legally-binding climate provisions and possible sanctions for violating them, as the EU seeks to use its trade partnerships to advance greater environmental protection.

Under the deal, both parties committed not to weaken their environmental law to promote trade or investment and to “refrain from any action or omission that materially defeats the object and purpose of the Paris Agreement”.

• Aug 24, 2026 Business New Zealand moves to protect business with law curtailing climate litigation A new bill prevents corporations being sued for the climate damage their emissions cause, as the government says climate action should be handled at the national level not in court Read more
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At the time the agreement was signed, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the agreement included “unprecedented social and climate commitments”. But experts warned it was unclear how the Paris Agreement provisions would be enforced.

The EU included a similar “trade and sustainable development” clause in 14 other bilateral trade deals in recent years, with several others, including with China, awaiting ratification or being negotiated.

Climate activists at the Dutch NGO Both ENDS argue that the New Zealand government breached these terms by reopening its waters to offshore oil and gas exploration, releasing a climate plan that barely requires any emissions reductions, and passing a law that prevents corporations from getting sued over climate damages.

“Here, we have a so-called gold standard for free trade agreements with sustainability provisions but we have a trading partner that is doing exactly the opposite: regressing, as all the evidence points to, away from the Paris Agreement,” said Marius Troost, a senior policy advisor at Both ENDS.

Can the EU enforce its climate trading rules?

The Dutch environmental group filed the complaint under the EU Commission’s Single Entry Point, a mechanism that allows civil society to request enforcement of the bloc’s trade commitments.

The EU-New Zealand trade deal includes the possibility of suspending beneficial trading arrangements between the two parties in response to serious violations of its climate provisions. This, Troost said, is a “unique” tool to enforce both parties’ obligations under the deal.

“This is an opportunity for the EU and New Zealand to show that they are actually serious about these commitments,” he told Climate Home News.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon visits a school in Tonga, August 30, 2024. (AAP Image/Ben McKay)

A spokesperson for New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade denied any violations of the agreement and said the government hadn’t received formal notice of the complaint. The country, they said, “takes its commitments under the NZ-EU Free Trade Agreement seriously, including the agreement’s environment and climate-related provisions”.

An EU Commission spokesperson said it will start a preliminary assessment of the complaint and engage with NGO Both ENDS. “Sustainability is a central pillar of the EU-New Zealand relationship,” they added.

The EU is New Zealand’s second-largest trading partner after China, with about 14% of the country’s exports going to the European market. Agricultural products like meat, diary, fruit and vegetables are the country’s biggest exports to Europe.

New Zealand is ‘having its cake and eating it’

Eliza Prestidge-Oldfield, a senior legal researcher at the New Zealand-based Environmental Law Initiative, which is supporting Both ENDS’s claim, told Climate Home News that if the EU upholds the complaint, both parties would begin a negotiation process.

“The idea is to try and resolve this positively with the New Zealand government acknowledging areas where it needs to change its actions in order to comply with the agreement, and get that change in place as soon as possible,” she said.

But New Zealand’s right-wing coalition government said it won’t take any directives from foreign actors regarding its policies. Trade minister Todd McClay told local media that it was “not for overseas countries, organisations or lobby groups to tell New Zealand how to meet its obligations”.

• Oct 6, 2026 Comment Coal mines and hypocrisy must not be Australia’s COP31 legacy Still without a coal phase-out plan, Australia must course-correct to earn the mantle it has been given and do right by the Pacific nations that backed its bid for COP’s co-presidency Read more
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• Oct 2, 2026 Comment As COP31 co-host, Australia should make its polluters pay for climate damage With UN climate funds running short on cash, now is the time to start taxing the companies whose emissions are driving harm in the Pacific and other vulnerable parts of the world Read more

Prestidge-Oldfield argued the complaint isn’t about “Europe telling anyone what to do at all”, but rather stressing the conditions under which they are willing to import goods from New Zealand. “The New Zealand government is trying to have its cake and eat it too,” she said.

If New Zealand refuses to adjust its policies in line with the agreement, the complaint will be assessed by an independent panel, which can require the country to make changes. If those changes are not implemented, the panel could decide that New Zealand should lose its preferential EU market access.

A negotiated resolution is more likely, however, with no prior labour-related complaints to the EU having ever reached the panel stage.

Alexander Gillespie, a law professor at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, said sanctions would be a “last resort”. “This is a test case, which will generate considerable attention – as it is not just about climate change, but how free trade and environmental sustainability have been woven together,” he said in a statement.

Trade deals as tool for climate accountability

Experts said the case could set a precedent for how trade deals can be used to hold governments accountable on climate action. The EU has enacted similar “trade and sustainable development” clauses in its trade agreements with Canada, Japan and South Korea.

While still pending ratification, the EU’s 2024 trade agreement with Mercosur – which encompasses Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay – also includes climate provisions, including a commitment to “effectively implement” the Paris Agreement and promote low-carbon trade.

In addition, legal researcher Prestidge-Oldfield noted that last year’s landmark advisory opinion on climate change by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) laid out stronger climate obligations for developed countries like New Zealand and could strengthen allegations of violations of the terms of the trade deal.

“It will be an interesting area to watch how the EU free trade agreement is interpreted in the light of this advisory opinion,” she said.

The post New Zealand accused of breaching EU trade deal over climate rollbacks appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Virginia State Corporation Commission approved fuel cost securitization for the second time since 2023, adding additional interest costs for customers.

Australia and Türkiye have agreed to take forward a “presidency-led decision for COP31” after consulting with different countries and groups, Australia’s climate change and energy minister said on Wednesday at the pre-COP meeting in Fiji.

The announcement that November’s climate conference will produce what is known among negotiators as a “cover decision” lays to rest the annual speculation over how the main outcomes of the UN climate conference will be presented this year.

Unlike other formal decision texts at COP, cover decisions are not negotiated word by word between governments. They are often summaries crafted during the proceedings by the presidency, although they still need to be adopted by consensus. Cover texts bring together key elements and initiatives emerging from the discussions at the two-week UN climate talks and give a sense of the political direction of travel for the coming year.

Australian minister Chris Bowen, who will preside over the negotiations at COP31 in the Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, said the presidency did not want to negotiate “a lengthy political statement”. The two countries are sharing the presidency in an unusual arrangement, although Türkiye has the formal title of COP31 President.

The decision, he explained, will be one that “captures the global moment and calls for action”, adding that it would offer “a focused and concrete response to the challenges and opportunities of our time”.

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Bowen said the text could recognise the recent UN report acknowledging that an overshoot of the 1.5C warming limit is now inevitable, but temperatures could be brought back down to that level. The decision could also stress “the urgent need for climate action, support and international cooperation to go further and faster”, he added.

With COP31 President Murat Kurum sitting next to him, smiling and nodding, Bowen said the joint presidency aimed to be open and transparent, giving governments an early idea of what to expect from the COP31 process.

Earlier in the week, they published a second joint letter laying out key areas for progress at the negotiations, from setting up a just transition mechanism to putting science at the centre of the next global stocktake of climate plans and focusing governments on the need to increase adaptation finance.

Cosima Cassel, climate diplomacy lead at think-tank E3G, said a COP31 cover decision should send a clear political signal that accelerating climate action is central to global security, prosperity and resilience, show that faster implementation can help address 1.5C overshoot, and support developing countries to put their climate plans into practice.

EU keen to know “what success looks like”

Earlier on Wednesday, Europe’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told journalists in Fiji that the European Commission had asked the UN and COP31 organisers to provide clarity on the summit’s agenda and “what success would look like” in Antalya.

That is why, he added, “I… like it a lot that the organisers are pushing for electrification and are already clear about it upfront”.

A voluntary goal for electricity to provide 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035, up from 23% today, was announced by Türkiye at the Bonn mid-year climate talks. It has since been garnering support for the target, which was developed with the backing of international energy agencies. Australia said on Wednesday it would sign up for the goal.  

However, it remains unclear if or how this goal will be reflected in the COP31 cover decision, as including it in a document that has to be endorsed by all countries could influence its form.

COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment

In recent years, blocking tactics by powerful fossil-fuel producing countries like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia have made it difficult for COPs to make headway on a 2023 decision to transition away from fossil fuels (TAFF).

At COP30 in Belém, Brazil had to offer to develop a voluntary TAFF roadmap at the last minute after failing to secure support to launch the process as part of the formal UN talks. There was also confusion over whether COP30 would produce a cover decision, with Brazil holding its cards close to its chest until the second week, when it decided to put together the “Mutirão Decision”.

Electrification goal in cover decision?

This time around, it is now practically certain that COP31 will produce a cover decision, but a key question is whether the co-presidency will somehow try to anchor the voluntary electrification pledge in that text.

Doing so could make it hard to specify that the electricity to meet the target should come from clean, renewable sources, due to potential objections from some countries. The proposed text for the electrification pledge, unveiled on the sidelines of the General Assembly last month, did not make that commitment.

E3G’s Cassel said the COP31 cover decision needs to specify that electrification will be clean “otherwise there is a strong risk that fossil fuel projects are supported by the pledge”. It also must outline the support needed to enable the 35×35 goal to be met, rather than just the top-line target, she added.

On Wednesday, the EU’s Hoekstra said “the whole main effort” towards the electrification goal “should be focusing on renewables”, while nuclear could also be part of the solution.

The energy transition, he added, “is about making sure we transition away from fossil fuels, as the world has already agreed on – so then doubling down on solar, on wind, on battery capacity, on all these elements should be at the very heart of it”.

The post Australia says COP31 co-presidency will work on a cover decision appeared first on Climate Home News.

“We are disappointed by the lieutenant governor’s decision and respectfully disagree with it,” Neil Nissan, a spokesperson for NextEra Energy, told Utility Dive. State regulators are set to hold their first local hearing on the case Wednesday.

Renew Home is now Everyday Electric. CEO Ben Brown told Utility Dive its flagship Everyday VPP can reduce the need for new centralized generation and mitigate costs for all ratepayers.

An investigation by ABC News has shed new light on the problem of abandoned mines in the Western U.S. and across the country. The investigation compiled records from the Office of Surface Mine Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), part of the Department of the Interior, to create an interactive map of more than 230,000 documented abandoned mine sites.

Many of the documented abandoned mines are in coal-producing regions in the eastern U.S. The investigation points out that since the 1970s, coal mining companies have been required to develop and execute remediation plans to restore the land after coal mining operations have ended, and OSMRE’s Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program, established in 1977, addresses legacy coal mines using fees on current coal production. However, there is not a similar funding source for reclaiming hardrock mines, which are much more common in the West. The ABC News map shows just how many documented abandoned mines are concentrated across Western states.

OSMRE officials also acknowledge that there may be many more abandoned mine sites that are not documented or identified. “Mining back in 1865 or 1880 or 1890, there are no records of that. No one kept records,” Lanny Erdos, an OSMRE official, told ABC News. “There potentially can be mines out there that we would have no idea that they are there until they express themselves in some adverse way.”

Quick hits As Pitkin County looks toward management of the Maroon Bells, what does it mean for the iconic place?

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Quote of the day

What’s it going to be? ‘The Maroon Bells brought to you by Budweiser’?”

—Victor Valinskas, visitor to the Maroon Bells Scenic Area, CPR News

Picture This @greatbasinnp

On a cool September evening, sundown reveals the Great Basin one layer at a time: rock and rabbitbrush, sagebrush and pinyon-juniper, the broad basin below, and distant mountain ranges rising beyond it.

These isolated ranges are sometimes described as “sky islands”—higher, cooler habitats surrounded by lower, drier country. Each change in elevation brings changes in temperature, moisture, plants, and wildlife.

But this landscape offers something that cannot be measured by elevation alone.

Quiet. Distance. Room to breathe.

Great Basin National Park preserves not only mountains, caves, ancient trees, and dark night skies, but also opportunities to experience solitude. Sometimes the landscape’s quietest moments tell its story best.

What do you notice first when you look across the Great Basin?

Photo Credit: NPS/G. Zierdt

 

Featured image: An abandoned mine in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, D&RG Railfan via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0

The post Abandoned mines ‘a constant problem’ across the West appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.

Food labels provide information about food products and their contents. Most identify the product and list its ingredients and net quantity. Labeling requirements generally apply to packaged and prepared foods, although the information required—and how manufacturers must present it—varies across countries and food categories.

Food labeling has expanded beyond identifying a package’s contents. Today, labels communicate information about nutrition, allergens, food safety, preparation and storage, production practices, and other product characteristics.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) identifies nutritional information as a central feature of food labels. Nutrition labels typically provide a product’s energy content and levels of nutrients including carbohydrates, protein, fat, sugars, sodium, vitamins, and minerals, typically reported per serving or specified quantity.

Labels also communicate food safety information. Allergen disclosures identify ingredients that may trigger reactions, while storage, preparation, and handling instructions help consumers use foods safely. Date markings such as ‘sell by’ and ‘best before’ can provide information about a product’s safety or quality over time. But date labeling can also be confusing to consumers, leading to safe food going to waste.

According to the European Commission and the FDA, food labels are intended to help consumers make informed choices by explaining what a product contains and allowing them to assess dietary needs and compare products.

They aim to provide clear comprehensible information to enable efficient decision-making at the point of sale, describes the World Health Organization (WHO). Data from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that the majority of in-store shoppers spend an average of 13 seconds evaluating a brand before purchasing, with most decisions taking less than 10 seconds.

Food-labeling requirements vary globally. Research published in Frontiers in Public Health has identified mandatory nutrient-declaration policies for processed foods in at least 95 countries, with differing requirements for front-of-package labels and health and nutrition claims.

The FAO and WHO develop international standards through the Codex Alimentarius Commission, including baseline principles for labeling prepackaged foods that can inform national regulations.

In the United States, the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) share primary responsibility for food labeling. Federal regulation dates to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which targeted adulterated and misbranded foods. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 expanded labeling requirements, while the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 established mandatory nutrition labeling for most FDA-regulated foods.

The European Union takes a more centralized approach, establishing common labeling requirements across its member states. The United Kingdom’s voluntary ‘traffic light’ system uses green, amber, and red to identify nutrient levels, while Chile requires black, octagonal ‘high in’ warnings on products exceeding thresholds for calories, sugar, sodium, or saturated fat.

As food labels communicate more information, they can also become more difficult to interpret. Consumers must navigate nutrition and ingredient information alongside claims, certifications, warnings, and other disclosures, making relevant information harder to identify and understand.

Government labeling resources often target producers and use technical language that consumers may struggle to interpret, Laurie Beyranevand, Director of Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and Professor of Law, tells Food Tank.

And because the pages contain technical jargon, consumers may not always understand what they read.

A study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior finds that 89 percent of respondents believed they understood date labels, but just 24 percent correctly identified their meaning.

“I think there are real trust issues with our food supply. Having access to information and having clarification of what those things mean is really important,” Dr. Roni Neff, Professor at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for a Livable Future, tells Food Tank.

Confusion around date labels can also contribute to food waste. A European Commission study estimated that confusion and other practices surrounding date marking contribute to approximately 10 percent of food waste in the EU. Consumers may discard food that remains safe to eat after misinterpreting ‘best by,’ ‘sell by,’ or ‘use by’ dates.”

Public health organizations increasingly identify food labels as a potential policy tool. The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies nutrition labeling as one approach to helping consumers make healthier food choices, while UNICEF reports growing evidence that nutrition labels can improve consumers’ understanding of nutritional quality.

But labels can only serve that purpose if consumers can understand and use the information they provide. WHO recommends that front-of-package labels present nutrition information in a convenient and readily understood format, while the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) emphasizes the need for clear, reliable labeling as global food supply chains increase the distance between consumers and producers. For policymakers, Beyranevand says, that means prioritizing accessibility and comprehensibility when developing labeling requirements.

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Coyotes, it seems, prefer the roar of the garbage truck to the call of the wild.

While pigeons, rats and cockroaches might be more emblematic city-dwelling wildlife, coyotes have shown an aptitude for urban living. In just the last year they’ve made the news for taking up residence in such places as West Hollywood, Chicago and suburban Miami. Their presence near cities is so routine that it takes something unusual to generate headlines.

Much as humans pack together in cities, it turns out coyotes inhabit at least one urban area at roughly 9 times the density they do in the wild, according to research in Washington state published recently in the journal Environmental Research: Ecology.

“That might surprise people who think of coyotes as afraid of humans, but I think it just shows how ideal the urban setting is for coyotes,” said Laura Prugh, a University of Washington wildlife ecologist who led the new research.

This isn’t the first time scientists have noted that cities boast higher concentrations of coyotes, nor is the phenomenon confined just to these canines. Other research has found that raccoons, red foxes and (improbably) leopards live in cities at densities five times that of their counterparts in the countryside.

But in the case of coyotes, much of the evidence is incomplete, without the scientific rigor that could get at just how coyote life varies between paved streets and remote forest.

To get a more accurate comparison, Prugh and her collaborators tracked coyotes through their scat. In 2021, they repeatedly scoured 34 green spaces in Seattle, such as parks and cemeteries, for feces left behind by coyotes. They did the same in forests and open country in a mountainous north central part of the state, some 120 miles away from Seattle.

 

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All told, they gathered more than 800 samples. Genetic analysis told them the scat came from 48 different Seattle coyotes and 213 wildland coyotes.

While that might make it seem like there were more coyotes in the wild, that’s not adjusting for the size of the locations where they looked for scat. Relying on statistical techniques commonly used to estimate wildlife population demographics, the scientists found that urban coyotes were, in fact, much more closely packed together.

There are a host of reasons why coyotes might thrive more in a city. They are much less likely to encounter animals that prey on them, such as wolves, bears and mountain lions. Among radio-collared wolves in the wildland  study area, 3 were killed by cougars and one by a black bear. Coyote pups were also killed by wolves.

While cars present a danger on city streets, armed humans bent on killing coyotes in rural areas might well be more lethal than any vehicles. Of the 47 collared wildland coyotes whose deaths could be confirmed, slightly more than half were killed by hunters or trappers. A single coyote was killed by a vehicle.

Then, there’s the urban smorgasbord of food. Between overflowing trash cans, fast-food burgers dropped in the gutter and ubiquitous urban bunny rabbits, Seattle coyotes have a far more diverse, and potentially much more abundant, food supply. The same research group found that coyote scat in Seattle contained genetic matches for more than twice as many species or groups of species than their wild counterparts±64 to 27.

Despite these results, coyotes appear conflicted about urban life. While there are more of them per square mile, the scientists found that when you compared different parts of Seattle, the places with the highest coyote density were the ones with the fewest people. They’re drawn to much of what the city offers, just not the humans that built it.

So how should we react to the idea that coyotes appear to thrive more in cities than in the wild? Perhaps acceptance or resignation are best. It’s repeatedly been shown that the animals defy efforts to control their numbers, said Prugh. We might just need to add them to the pantheon of urban animals.

“Whether there are too many or too few coyotes is sort of a societal question, but ultimately our answer might not matter,” said Prugh. “Coyotes are here to stay in cities, and it is up to us to learn how to live with them.”

Prugh, et. al. “Urbanization increases coyote density 9-fold in Washington state despite negative effects of human density within Seattle, USA.” Environmental Research: Ecology. Sept. 10, 2026.

Image: ©Robert McGouey/Alamy

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