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Chefs are more than culinary innovators. They connect farmers and consumers, shape food culture, and use their purchasing power to influence how food is grown, produced, and served. 

“Chefs are in a very unique position on planet Earth to be changemakers,” says Andrew Zimmern, Emmy- and James Beard Award-winning chef, television host, author, and food advocate. They operate at the intersection of immigration, gender and pay gaps, hunger and food insecurity, food waste, and a range of other global issues.

At “Chefs Save the World,” held in partnership with the James Beard Foundation and CARE at Climate Week NYC 2026, culinary leaders, farmers, and advocates came together to explore how chefs can use their platforms to build a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable food future. Watch the full event replay here.

Throughout the morning, speakers emphasized the importance of diversity throughout the food system—not only in crops and ingredients but among humans.

“If we demand more diversity in our food system, that is what is going to build resilience,” says Chef Bleu Adams, Executive Chef at Black Lamb Group and Director of IndigeHub. And diversity in kitchens builds human resilience, too, she adds.

“Better food begins with embracing diversity. Whether that’s diversity in our fields, diversity in our ingredients, diversity in the people preparing our food, or diversity in the people we welcome around our tables,” says Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg.

Right now, chefs are “operating in the most difficult environment they’ve ever operated in,” says Erica Helms, Chief Growth Officer at the James Beard Foundation.

Meanwhile, food producers and workers face systemic challenges worldwide: “In many parts of the world, the people who are food insecure are the people who are growing the food,” says Emily Janoch, Associate Vice President for Evidence and Learning at CARE. “This is not a charity problem but a systems problem.”

That imbalance also affects the restaurant industry, which navigates pricing food to appropriately compensate farmers and food workers while caring for their own employees.

“How do we balance the really tricky economics of being able to actually charge the cost of food to be able to pay farmers fairly and pay our employees and offer benefits to allow them to stay in this industry?” asks Liz Murray, Chief Operating Officer at The Marlow Collective.

Panelists also spoke to the importance of respecting local knowledge and ensuring communities have the resources to lead their own solutions. Foreign aid, especially in times of disaster, is critically important—but it must allow the skills and knowledge of local communities to lead the way.

“We prefer you give us what we need and trust we will utilize it in the way that best fits our community,” says Chef Adams. And Chef Fariyal Abdullahi, Executive Chef and Partner at Hav & Mar, agrees: “When you have the right partnership, it’s never to override what’s happening on the ground. They have the knowledge; they just need resources.”

Chef Sean Sherman brought the conversation back to the importance of diversity in food systems, calling for greater recognition of Indigenous foodways and the knowledge embedded in regional ingredients. 

Through NĀTIFS, the North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, Sherman works to revitalize Indigenous food systems and promote greater access to culturally rooted foods. His Ring Diet, or Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide, offers a framework for understanding the nutritional value of foods connected to local ecosystems.

“We’ve been living under this eurocentrism of our food here in North America…Even in a city like New York, we can find food from all over the world, just not right here where we’re standing. There are no Native American restaurants in this city,” says Sherman. 

“We have a lot of evolving to do as humans and as a global community. Food is that connection.”

Sherman says greater curiosity about different plants and ingredients around the world can help drive change. “There are so many more plants and proteins out there that we haven’t touched.” He adds, “Be curious. That’s the biggest part of how change happens.”

Explore the entire Food Tank event schedule during Climate Week NYC 2026, and live-stream every Summit on FoodTank.com and Food Tank’s YouTube channel.

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

Photo by Ryan Rose for Food Tank.

The post Chefs Are Driving a More Diverse, Resilient Food System appeared first on Food Tank.

Greenbelt Alliance says NO to Measure G in San Francisco to save the Sunset Dunes Park and keep the 2-mile stretch of the Upper Great Highway along Ocean Beach closed to cars and open for people every day. Measure G proposes to reopen the road on weekdays. The campaign says the road would remain part of the car-free park on weekends.

In 2024, we endorsed Proposition K to close this segment of the highway to first establish this stretch of Ocean Beach as a park open to the public. Prop K was successful and won on the ballots, and since then has seen a huge turnout of people, as the city’s 3rd most visited park.

According to KQED, “the majority of voters who live closest to the Great Highway opposed its closure in 2024, and its status remains at the center of west side politics, leading to the recall of District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio in 2025 and a now-dismissed lawsuit challenging Proposition K.” Measure G campaign claims that reopening this stretch of the road would lead to better road safety; however, this claim is being denied by pedestrian-safety advocates, including partners like SPUR, who say the campaign’s “new branding misappropriates street-safety imagery and falsely suggests that the proposition would increase neighborhood safety.”

Why It Matters

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, a portion of the Upper Great Highway along Ocean Beach closed to cars and welcomed residents to enjoy the highway as a recreational and social public space. But this arrangement was set to expire in 2025, and Proposition K established a permanent closure and oceanside park 

Climate change is currently causing parts of Ocean Beach to erode and making the highway unreliable and threatening its longevity and safety. Before the permanent closure, the highway was already closed up to 65 days per year due to sand removal, costing the City nearly $2 million annually.

Voters have just recently weighed in on the same question, and they said YES to open spaces for public recreation. We support Sunset Dunes again in 2026 and urge voters to vote No on Measure G in San Francisco.

Photo from Friends of Sunset Dunes website.

The post Vote No on Measure G to Keep Sunset Dunes Park Open in San Francisco appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

President Donald Trump’s second term has been a nightmare for global cooperation on climate change. Trump has yanked the United States from the Paris climate agreement, attacked a global agreement on a carbon tax for cargo ships, and threatened countries with tariffs if they get too vocal about climate. 

This week brought a notable exception. World leaders at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday approved a unanimous resolution on how to handle sea level rise, and the United States did not block it from moving forward. The passage of the accord represents a rare win for multilateralism, made all the more notable by the fact that the agreement includes references to climate change and climate aid for developing countries. 

The declaration could bring new momentum to efforts to help small island states, said Philip Davis, the prime minister of the Bahamas, in an interview with Grist.

“Our landmass is less than 3 meters above sea level, we are already seeing our land being swallowed by water, and the global effort to stem the carbon footprint has stalled,” he said. “I think this declaration will perhaps heighten the flow of action.”

For many low-lying countries, the implications of this agreement could be profound. Some island nations, like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, face almost total inundation over the next century as rising temperatures melt the world’s ice sheets and glaciers. It had never been clear what would happen to those sovereign nations. Under the agreement, those states will continue to exist as political actors even if their landmass disappears. They’ll also retain control over their old maritime borders, the stretch of sea extending from the coastline over which a country has exclusive control for fishing, energy development, and other military and economic activity. 

An aerial view of a strip of land between the Pacific Ocean and a lagoon in Funafuti, Tuvalu. The island nation of around 11,000 people is facing total inundation as sea levels rise. Mario Tama / Getty Images

The declaration is the result of a campaign by the Alliance of Small Island States, an influential bloc of low-lying island nations. Recent rulings from international legal bodies have helped affirm countries’ continued rights in the face of sea level rise, but the world’s leaders had never endorsed those rulings. 

“What was long treated as a legal ‘presumption’ is now an affirmation,” said Kamal Amakrane, the managing director of the Global Center for Climate Mobility and the climate envoy for Trinidad and Tobago, which helped initiate talks toward a global declaration. He noted that the world has agreed to preserve small islands “by consensus, in a year when consensus has been hard to come by.”

The document enshrines strong protections for states at risk of losing land. It holds that countries “can … maintain their maritime zones in the face of physical changes resulting from sea level rise,” a principle that the document calls a “presumption in favor of continued statehood.” That echoes a landmark climate ruling from the International Court of Justice last year, which held that “once a State is established, the disappearance of one of its constituent elements would not necessarily entail the loss of its statehood,” and which affirmed that international law requires countries to respect one another’s established borders.

The declaration will go a long way toward helping secure the future of small island states. For the Bahamas, protecting pristine ocean territory is essential to its tourism-driven economy. Davis said that the legal protections will safeguard his country and others against efforts to claim ocean territory for industries like deep-sea mining.

“This cannot be a free-for-all,” he said. “This cannot be might is right, and might takes what is there.”

The agreement also includes strong language recognizing that developed countries and historic emitters have an “urgent” obligation to provide “expanded access” to adaptation funds for small island states. This money could build seawalls or restore mangrove forests to protect coastlines from rising water, or it could help relocate populations from flood-prone areas. 

Prime Minister Philip Davis of the Bahamas addresses the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025. The Bahamas is seeking to protect its ocean territory from exploitation as its land disappears. Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images

The declaration on its own won’t do anything to increase the money available to states like the Marshall Islands. Wealthy countries are currently giving poor ones about $130 billion a year in grants and low-interest loans for clean energy and adaptation, well below the level that experts believe is necessary to avoid catastrophic impacts. The world agreed in 2024 to reach $300 billion in annual aid by 2035, but it’s too early to gauge progress toward that target. Even then, much of that finance is in the form of loans, which are hard for many island states to afford — the Bahamas has billions of dollars of debt already, much of it stemming from damages after 2019’s Hurricane Dorian.

Even so, the mention of adaptation was welcome for island nations. Language about climate aid has been much contested at recent United Nations climate talks, with wealthy nations rejecting calls for trillions that could build flood walls and elevate sinking islands. Trump has gone further and rejected almost all international aid obligations, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and pulling out of dozens of treaties. Yet neither the State Department nor other finance-averse countries rejected the language in the sea level rise declaration. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment by publication.)

The reason for the cooperation by the United States is that legal protections against sea level rise are in every country’s interest, said Bryce Rudyk, a law professor at New York University who also serves as a legal advisor to the Alliance of Small Island States. The United States and other rich nations could lose land to sea level rise, and in some countries a shifting maritime border might jeopardize sovereign control over natural resources like oil, minerals, or offshore wind. 

“Everyone will lose land, and no one wants to lose ocean territory,” he said. “I think that’s why they were fine with making these relatively strong statements. … It’s in everyone’s interest to say, ‘We don’t want states just disappearing.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UN passes first declaration on sea level rise, protecting island nations’ sovereignty on Sep 24, 2026.

Just before I left for Tasmania, I watched Short-tailed Shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostris) passing Washington's coast, headed the same direction I was about to go. Around 18 million of these...

Anna Vallery, Coastal Program Manager for Audubon Washington, has long been interested in improving methods used for monitoring seabird and waterbird colonies. She is excited to keep pushing this...

President William Ruto of Kenya has called for COP31’s electrification agenda – a flagship initiative to accelerate the electrification of the global economy – to include a push for electric cookers to replace polluting firewood and charcoal.

The Turkish and Australian co-hosts of the November summit want governments to sign up to a pledge to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35% globally by 2035 and 50% by 2050. It is currently around 23%.

“We should arrive at COP31 with clean cooking firmly embedded in that electrification and efficiency agenda,” Ruto said during an event on clean cooking organised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the governments of Kenya, Norway and the US at the ongoing UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.

“The kitchen is where the energy transition enters daily lives for nearly one billion people,” the Kenyan president said. He added that schools, hospitals and prisons – as well as homes – need to switch to clean cooking fuels.

COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment

Ruto said that – as well as the climate, health and gender equality benefits of clean cooking – electric cooking can make investment in electricity generation and networks more profitable and ensure households get more value from electricity connections.

LPG or electricity?

According to the IEA, about 6% of sub-Saharan African households – overwhelmingly in southern Africa – used electricity to cook in 2024 – while just under a fifth used liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).

Despite being a fossil fuel and worse for indoor air quality than electric cookers, LPG is widely regarded as a clean-cooking fuel as the damage it does to the climate and to health is far less than the firewood and charcoal on which most sub-Saharan Africans rely on.

A new IEA report on electrification found that electric cookstoves are 10% cheaper over their lifetimes than LPG stoves. But they are more expensive upfront so restricted access to finance holds back their adoption, as do power cuts, a lack of access to electricity and cultural preferences.

At the event in New York, some speakers promoted electric cookers while others stressed “technology neutrality”, implying that LPG should be used where appropriate.

People gather near a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder distribution agency as they wait for a supply to be delivered on March 19, 2026 in Lucknow, India (Photo: Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images)

UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte was more in the former camp, saying that “clean cooking must be fit for the modern age of energy transitions and the age of electricity” and “genuinely clean and future-facing”, adding that countries can “ride the trends of electrification” to roll out clean cooking.

As disruptions to oil and gas supply chains push up the cost of cooking gas, Kyte asked: “Why should households and governments be locked into solutions that are simply going to be a victim to fossil fuel and price volatility”.

Alexander De Croo, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, said that renewable energy offers the best potential to achieve clean cooking because decentralised clean power can get to everywhere on the African continent. 

Echoing Kyte, he added that “[renewables] detaches you from the volatility of fossil fuel that you see today, very often”, adding that it poses a very low level of risk compared with other energy systems and is one of the easiest ways of reducing emissions throughout the world.

But Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said that country realities are different and so the pathways to achieving clean cooking will require different combinations of LPG, electricity, bioenergy and other solutions.

Technology neutrality

With half of the about two billion people lacking access to clean cooking globally living in Africa, the African Union’s commissioner for infrastructure and energy Lerato Mataboge said the continent prioritises “technology neutrality” and does not have a preference for electricity or LPG if either would help achieve clean cooking. 

She said national circumstances of African countries must be respected, adding that the continent needs a range of affordable, reliable and safe cooking solutions as well as approaches that allow countries to select technologies that are “appropriate to their resources, infrastructure and household needs”. 

She added that financing decisions should not exclude viable solutions “solely because of the energy source from whence they come”. Whatever clean-cooking technology is used, she said that “affordability must extend beyond the purchase of a stove. We must ask if a household can afford the next cylinder refill or the next electricity payment”, she said.

• Sep 23, 2026 News UN Climate Summit: UN chief says world has tools to end fossil fuel age At the UN Secretary-General’s climate summit in New York, countries shared their energy transition plans while Nepal and island nations advocated for more international support Read more
• Sep 23, 2026 News UN backs push to upgrade grids slowing clean power uptake in Africa and SE Asia The Global Grids Accelerator will help turn national and regional plans to expand electricity infrastructure into viable projects on the ground Read more
• Sep 23, 2026 Justice Despite “real progress”, third of countries still lack early warning systems About 60 nations have yet to put in place a multi-hazard early warning system to protect people from disasters before they happen, the UN says Read more

Dola Oluteye, senior fellow in energy and transport policy at the UCL Energy Institute, agreed, telling Climate Home News that – while electric cooking is viable in parts of Africa where reliable electricity, affordable appliances and suitable infrastructure already exist – those conditions remain out of reach for much of the continent.

She warned that making electric cooking the only measure of a clean cooking transition could slow progress in countries where other technologies offer a more immediate solution. “My concern is a purity trap,” Oluteye said.

She pointed to an IEA scenario forecasting that, with clean cooking rolled out quickly, over 60% of people gaining access to clean cooking in Africa from 2024 to 2040 would do so through LPG, compared with 17% through electricity. Bioethanol and biogas combined would account for 11% while advanced biomass cookstoves make up 10%.

Burn Clean-stoves client Loise Wanjiku cooks inside her house at Kachoroba village in Kiambu County, Kenya, August 16, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi)

“The intermediate solutions cannot be abandoned while the grid catches up,” she said, but added that if handled well, cooking could be “one of the best things that could happen to African electrification”, providing the predictable demand that gives utilities a reason to invest in electricity networks and reliability.

Amina Mohammed, UN deputy secretary-general and former Nigerian environment minister, warned at the New York event against repeating the experience of programmes that supplied cooking technologies without adequately considering whether they actually worked for the women expected to use them.

Speaking after Birol, Ruto, US energy secretary Chris Wright and Norwegian international development minister Åsmund Aukrust, Mohammed joked that she was responding to “four men for whom this is a big women’s problem”.

After Birol said that the IEA had been working on the issue for 25 years, Mohammed said the fact that the problem had not been solved in that time was “probably an indictment of the international community on what is supposed to be a huge problem for women and a billion of them”.

The post Push for cooking to be part of COP31’s electrification agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.

Concern about data centers on public lands is building in the West as the Trump administration weighs at least 12 proposals covering more than 17,600 acres across six states. Earlier this week, members of Arizona’s congressional delegation demanded answers from the Bureau of Land Management about four data center proposals covering roughly 3,000 acres of public land in the state. In a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, congressional members asked for details on each project and for the plans for public input and environmental review.

“There’s been, unfortunately, a lack of transparency by the Trump administration. We found out about the proposed four data centers on BLM land in Arizona from a media source in Washington, D.C.,” said Representative Greg Stanton of Arizona.

In Idaho, there is a proposal for a four-million-square-foot data center and natural gas power plant on up to 3,700 acres of BLM land southeast of Boise, near the Blacks Creek Reservoir bird reserve. “I honestly don’t know how we would be able to keep up with that in terms of energy demand, water demand, in the region, which is already so tight,” said Lisa Young, director of the Sierra Club’s Idaho Chapter.

Meanwhile, in Nevada, BLM has asked the Interior Board of Land Appeals to set aside its approval of a right-of-way amendment that would put a data center near Boulder City on land permitted for a solar plant. Boulder City opposes returning the decision to BLM without commitments to environmental review and public involvement. A recent Pew Research Center survey showed that nationally, 60 percent of Americans say they would be uncomfortable with a new data center in their area, including 54 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats.

Pitkin County approves Maroon Bells permit

Pitkin County commissioners voted on Wednesday to approve a special use permit to take over daily operations of the Maroon Bells Scenic Area from the U.S. Forest Service starting in 2027. The permit still needs final approval from the Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the agency has not said how many acres the county would manage or released a map of the permit area. The Forest Service’s 15-day comment period has not yet been published in the Federal Register. “Pitkin County is stepping in because the federal government failed to fund one of the most iconic landscapes in the country,” said Aaron Weiss, CWP’s executive director. “Congress sets the Forest Service’s budget, and it’s Congress’s job to fund our public lands so the federal government can manage them for everyone.”

Quick hits DOGE memoir skips the part where children died and taxpayers got ripped off

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As bears ‘spin out’ in southern Montana, wildlife managers are at wit’s end

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Quote of the day

Our national inheritance hangs in balance today. It is not an exaggeration to say that this moment is existential. For our field, for the communities we serve, and for generations to come.”

—Brent Leggs, President and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Associated Press

Picture This
@usinteriorChub in the tub,
Chunk in the trunk,
Salmon gets spotted,
Salmon gets dunked.

Big on the belly,
Thick through the thighs,
Winter is coming,
Supersize.

Tune is to the live-cameras for all the fat bear fun. See who can pack on the pounds to be the winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week contest: https://explore.org/

Photo of bear 747 by L. Law

 

Featured photo: Lake Mead and Boulder City, Nevada. Source: Doc Searls/Wikimedia

The post Data center proposals on Western public lands face growing scrutiny appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order making changes to how presidential authority under the Defense Production Act (DPA) is delegated. Previously, the president delegated a variety of authorities under the DPA to the Secretary of Energy. Trump’s executive order amends the delegation of some authorities to include both the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of the Interior, “with respect to all forms of energy under their purview, each of whom may exercise such delegated authority independently of the other.” At a time when our national public lands are already under attack, this hands Interior Secretary Doug Burgum a new way to ignore land protections and avoid following environmental laws under the guise of national security, with few guardrails or opportunities for the public to weigh in.

First passed in 1950, the DPA was originally designed to give the president limited authority to ensure that domestic industry can meet the country’s national defense needs. Over time, the DPA has been reauthorized and modified to expand the definition of “national defense” to include preparedness for national emergencies and other non-military needs. Presidents have also delegated some of these authorities to executive branch agencies. But why delegate authority to the Secretary of the Interior, whose job is to manage national parks and public lands? And why go to the trouble of stating explicitly that the Interior secretary can act independently?

One likely answer is that this is part of the larger Trump-Burgum agenda to dismantle national parks and other public lands that for-profit companies see as a nuisance standing in the way of expanded exploitation and the pursuit of greater private profits. While there are a number of legal and valid ways for companies to extract natural resources from national public lands, there are processes and guardrails in place to give the public an opportunity to review proposals and weigh in, and to ensure that other resources on those lands are being appropriately considered and protected. The Trump administration, however, has been working hard to eliminate as many of these as possible, to make it easier for companies to extract resources without having to engage with the public or conduct environmental reviews.

Oak Flat in Arizona, near the site of a proposed copper mine; Elias Butler/CC BY-SA 4.0

Another possible answer is that Doug Burgum just isn’t that interested in being Interior secretary and is looking around for assignments that bring him closer to Trump, such as personally overseeing Trump’s vanity projects in Washington D.C., or that would give him a more prominent role in global conversations about topics he finds more interesting, such as energy extraction to serve the AI industry. Early on in his time as Interior secretary, Burgum delegated most of his responsibilities to DOGE operatives, who immediately attempted to dismantle the agency through a variety of funding and staffing cuts.

Burgum also took on the job of chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, a new entity created by a February 2025 Trump executive order. The NEDC exists primarily to hold meetings on energy issues and hasn’t had much of an impact, but it gives Burgum some fancier hats to wear. Being Interior secretary makes him chair of the NEDC, and being chair of the NEDC gives him a seat on the National Security Council, a long-standing and legitimate entity with influence on U.S. foreign policy.

Burgum’s resume-building aside, expanded delegation of DPA authority is concerning for national public lands for a few reasons. Many DPA authorities become available during a “national emergency,” and during what most Americans would consider a true emergency, this makes sense. However, the Trump administration has abused the concept of an “emergency” to create open-ended blanket justifications for not following laws it finds inconvenient. The “national energy emergency,” put in place by the Trump administration in January 2025, has been used to justify policy actions to boost oil and gas drilling, prop up coal, and increase domestic mining and mineral processing, among other things. Similarly, the “border emergency” has been used to justify the militarization of public lands across the southern U.S., including the construction of a border wall through Big Bend National Park and the bulldozing of a sacred Tribal site in Arizona for border wall expansion.

With these “emergencies” in place, it’s already easy to use DPA authorities to advance the Trump administration’s policy priorities. The latest executive order gives an additional agency head the power to lean on national security to justify policy changes that will impact over 500 million acres of national public lands. Burgum would have at his disposal a new set of tools that could enable him to use national security as an excuse to prioritize oil and gas production, expand mining, or approve data centers on national public lands.

Clark Mountain in the Mojave National Preserve, near the site of a proposed gold and rare earths mine; Matthew Dillon via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

This is concerning enough under the existing DPA. What if the DPA were updated to give agency heads even greater authority to waive laws in the name of national security? A proposal considered earlier this year would have done exactly that. The DPA Modernization Act would have expanded the authority agency heads have to waive regulations that implement environmental laws and the authorities available during a national emergency. While this particular proposal was shelved in favor of a “clean” reauthorization of the DPA without these changes, this proposal or one like it could come back in the future, including later this year when Congress considers the National Defense Authorization Act.

Between the “national energy emergency” and the “AI arms race,” it’s clear that Trump and Burgum are looking for any way they can tie national public lands to national security so that they can get environmental protections out of the way of extracting resources and building data centers, all while avoiding taking public comment on proposals they know are overwhelmingly unpopular with the public. They’re also failing: despite policies put in place to address the “energy emergency” and escalate the development of AI, energy prices are persistently high, and opposition to the data centers that support AI is intensifying. Perhaps the Trump administration should focus on something Westerners actually want: policies to ensure that outdoor recreation, clean water, and wildlife habitats on national public lands are protected for future generations.

 

Featured image: Bears Ears National Monument, an area that has drawn interest from uranium and coal mining companies; BLM Utah

The post Trump hands Burgum a new way to bypass public lands protections appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Dear friends,

The 2026 legislative session concluded on August 31, and the next important deadline is quickly approaching. Governor Newsom now has until Wednesday, September 30, to sign or veto bills passed by the Legislature.

With AB 2218 and SB 872 now on the Governor’s desk, we need your help urging the Governor to sign both bills into law.

Read more about each bill below and learn how you can call or write the Governor’s office today to voice your support forAB 2218 and SB 872!

Help Support SB 872: The Delta Levees and Canal Subsidence Fund

SB 872, a bill designed to safeguard California’s water supply for decades to come, has been unanimously approved by the Legislature. 

The bill brings together Northern and Southern California legislators, environmental groups including Restore the Delta, and water interests to protect the state’s primary water source.

If signed into law by Governor Newsom, SB 872 would address two major threats to California’s water supply: aging levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and sinking canals in the State Water Project (SWP). Many Delta levees are at risk of failure, raising the threat of catastrophic flooding and ecosystem damage, while sinking land is jeopardizing SWP canals and reliable water deliveries.

Now that SB 872 has moved to the Governor’s desk for signature, we need your help to sign this bill into law!

Two Easy Ways You Can Take Action:

1. Call the Governor at (916) 445-2841, urging his signature on SB 872.

When calling the Governor’s Office, please tell them: 

• As a constituent, I urge you to sign SB 872 into law.
• You support advancing legislation that prioritizes safeguarding California’s water supplies, protecting critical infrastructure, and preparing the state’s water system for future challenges.

2. Alternatively, you can also write to the Governor’s Office, asking for their support on SB 872. 

• Click this link to send a comment urging the Governor’s Signature on SB 872.

Support AB 2218: Water policy: California Native American tribes

On February 19, 2026, Assemblymember Kalra introduced AB 2218, the Indigenous Water Rights Bill sponsored by the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians and the Karuk Tribe. 

AB 2218 would establish a clear statewide policy directive acknowledging and seeking to remedy the inequities inflicted upon Tribes in California through historical state-sanctioned acts of termination, removal, and forced assimilation.

The bill directs relevant state agencies, including the Department of Water Resources and the State Water Board, to incorporate this policy into water rights decisions, regulatory actions, permitting, and grantmaking to address identified inequities. Recognizing historic harms and directing state agencies to center Tribal equity in water policy is not simply a symbolic act; it is a pathway toward stronger relationships, more inclusive decision-making, and better outcomes for the ecosystems we all depend on.

Now that AB 2218 has moved to the Governor’s desk for signature, we need your help to sign this bill into law!

Two Easy Ways You Can Take Action:

1. Call the Governor at (916) 445-2841 urging his signature on AB 2218.

When calling the Governor’s Office, please tell them: 

• As a constituent, I urge you to sign AB 2218 into law.
• AB 2218 supports the State’s progress towards equitable water management.
• AB 2218 is an important step toward addressing inequities affecting California Native American Tribes in state water policy and ensuring Tribal interests are meaningfully considered in decisions affecting water.

2. Alternatively, you can also write to the Governor’s Office, asking for their support on AB 2218. 

• Click this link to send a comment urging the Governor’s Signature on AB 2218.

Support SB 872: The Delta Levees and Canal Subsidence Fund

SB 872, a bill designed to safeguard California’s water supply for decades to come, has been unanimously approved by the Legislature. 

The bill brings together Northern and Southern California legislators, environmental groups including Restore the Delta, and water interests to protect the state’s primary water source.

If signed into law by Governor Newsom, SB 872 would address two major threats to California’s water supply: aging levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and sinking canals in the State Water Project (SWP). Many Delta levees are at risk of failure, raising the threat of catastrophic flooding and ecosystem damage, while sinking land is jeopardizing SWP canals and reliable water deliveries.

Now that SB 872 has moved to the Governor’s desk for signature, we need your help to sign this bill into law!

Two Easy Ways You Can Take Action:

1. Call the Governor at (916) 445-2841, urging his signature on SB 872.

When calling the Governor’s Office, please tell them: 

• As a constituent, I urge you to sign SB 872 into law.
• You support advancing legislation that prioritizes safeguarding California’s water supplies, protecting critical infrastructure, and preparing the state’s water system for future challenges.

2. Alternatively, you can also write to the Governor’s Office, asking for their support on SB 872. 

• Click this link to send a comment urging the Governor’s Signature on SB 872.

English subtitles available

When the Officine Municipali in Bracciano opened as a free coworking space, the idea was simple: somewhere to study and work. A few months on, the space is becoming something more. Students and young people come every day, stay for hours, return, and increasingly take part in the life of Terrae Vivae around them. With Navdanya International as managing partner and the Municipality of Bracciano as a committed ally, the Officine are becoming the Terrae Vivae Hub, a civic home where ecological learning, everyday life and democratic participation meet.

Why a hub

Around Lake Bracciano, as in so many territories, the difficulty has rarely been a lack of solutions. There are farmers practising agroecology, teachers opening their classrooms to the land, young people ready to act, and institutions willing to listen. What is often missing is a place where these relationships can meet and keep meeting. Industrial food systems thrive on fragmentation: they separate people from nature, farmers from citizens, schools from the land, youth from the decisions that shape their territory. A shared civic space is one of the most concrete ways to mend those separations. The Hub is not an addition to Terrae Vivae. It is the connective tissue that allows everything else to hold together and endure.

From a school year to a public voice

A turning point came on 23 May with Youth & Territory: Pathways in Agroecology and Citizenship. Students, teachers, local farmers, residents and representatives of local institutions gathered at the Officine to talk about the future of Lake Bracciano through agroecology and active citizenship. The students brought a whole year of ecological exploration with them, and they did not present it as schoolwork. They carried their knowledge, questions and proposals into a public space and shared them as members of their community. This is the passage Terrae Vivae works for: from learning to read the relationships that sustain life, to taking part in caring for them. Youth & Territory closed a school year, and it opened a lasting relationship between young people and the Officine.

A space that is lived in

A community space comes alive when people stop visiting it and start inhabiting it. The first monitoring data suggest this is already happening. Between 4 June and 31 July 2026, over 35 opening days, the coworking space recorded 209 visits by 99 different people, around six people a day and roughly 880 hours spent together in the space. The average visit lasted 4 hours and 13 minutes, and almost 40% of visits lasted five hours or more. People are not passing through; they are choosing to spend their days here. A core community is also taking shape: 38 people returned at least once, 23 came three times or more, and nine came at least five times. What these numbers describe is not attendance but rootedness.

Young people as protagonists

The most striking finding is how naturally young people have made the space their own, a place to be together outdoors while staying connected to their work and to one another. They already know what they need from a shared space. The next step is to give that knowledge room to shape the Hub itself. One day each week will be opened to activities that young people propose, organise and run: workshops, meetings, music, art, training, or new ways of spending time together that grow from their own interests. This is not a programme designed for young people. It is a programme they co-create, and with it comes a share in the responsibility for the space.

Seasons of gathering

Alongside daily life at the Officine, public events are drawing a widening circle. The latest evening of Le stagioni di Officine (The Seasons of Officine) brought together more than 70 people: young people, residents, local producers, restaurant owners and local organisations. Producers shared what short supply chains and a circular local economy can mean in practice, and a screening of The Seeds of Vandana Shiva connected concerns close to home with struggles for seed and food sovereignty worldwide. Events like these are not a calendar of activities. They are how relationships are woven, how knowledge circulates, and how a building becomes a known place to meet and act.

One model, two soils

Terrae Vivae is not a local project. It grows from Navdanya’s decades of work in India, where community seed banks, women’s collectives and Earth University have shown how living knowledge can regenerate land and community, and it translates that method into the soil of Lake Bracciano. Learning travels in both directions. What young people, farmers and institutions are discovering here returns to a wider international community of practice, just as experience from India enriches the work in Italy. It is an international process, grounded in one territory.

From Bracciano to the world, and back

October brings this connection into sharp focus. The 54th plenary session of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) meets at FAO headquarters in Rome from 19 to 23 October 2026. The following day, 24 October, Bracciano will host Agroecology and Regenerative Communities, welcoming delegates from the CFS, the Sustainable Development Forum, the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE), the Italian Buddhist Union and other environmental organisations. The aim is to bring the international debate into a real territory, and to carry the experience of that territory back into the global conversation. A territory brings to such a conversation something no position paper can: named farmers, working relationships, and young people speaking from their own experience.

Where this is going

Terrae Vivae begins from the understanding that communities are living ecosystems, shaped by local and global forces alike, and able to regenerate through participation, knowledge, relationships and shared responsibility. The Officine Municipali give that understanding a physical home, where daily work, ecological education, civic life and international dialogue come together. Transition is not delivered to a community; it is grown by one. It is still early, but the direction is clear: from coworking space to meeting place, from meeting place to community, and from community to a space that plans and acts for its territory while remaining in conversation with the world.

Photo credits: Maela Bonafede

Project “Coworking Space Bracciano” – CUP F11I24000190009 – co-funded by the European Union under the Lazio ESF Regional Programme 2021–2027, Priority 1 Employment, Specific Objective ESO4.2, Key Action (AC) 19, “Officine Municipali” Call for Proposals, DD G05680/2023. Beneficiary: Municipality of Bracciano. Managing partner: Navdanya International ETS.
CUP: F11I24000190009 – Sigem Code: 23019DC000000106

After the USDA deregulated the GE American chestnut for release, we asked the question regulators keep sidestepping: what does “safety” even mean when a tree can live for centuries, spread pollen for miles, and reproduce in ecosystems we cannot control?

Hours after Judge Timothy Kelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., delivered a resounding defeat to President Trump early this morning, restraining his administration from barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House and holding that the ban is likely unconstitutional, the administration defied the order by continuing to deny access to the networks.

Kelly held that the press met the “high bar” to show that the ban likely violated the Fifth Amendment’s protections for due process. He also rejected the administration’s argument that “national security” concerns justified the ban, noting that the news stories the administration pointed to are “routine” and that there is no precedent for applying laws prohibiting disclosure of classified information to reporters.

But after Kelly’s ruling and in spite of the temporary restraining order entered by the court, Politico, CNN, and MSNOW reported today that some of their reporters were denied access to the White House and some also had their press credentials confiscated.
The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern:

“The administration was rightly given the back of the hand by Judge Kelly for claiming routine reports harm ‘national security,’ but court orders are just paper unless they’re enforced. Enough is enough. Government officials who continue to deny journalists’ access to the White House in defiance of Kelly’s order should be held in contempt.

“And it’s long past time for judges to start aggressively sanctioning DOJ lawyers when they make frivolous national security arguments to turn Trump’s petty grievances against the press into government policy. That way, we won’t get to the point where Secret Service agents are defying court orders to carry out the president’s authoritarian whims.

“The Pentagon Papers case famously rejected a prior restraint aimed at specific documents the government claimed posed national security risks, and Trump himself lost two cases in which he tried to similarly ban reporters in his first term. Anyone who argues ‘national security’ are magic words justifying banning three entire news outlets from the White House should be not just laughed out of court but sanctioned.

“Trump’s own announcement of the ban admitted it was about coverage he didn’t like. The reports the government cited are years old and one was even based on a briefing from the vice president. Trump beats up on the free press not because of national security but because he’s terrified for the public to see what he and his administration are up to in the people’s house behind closed doors, whether it’s letting classified tech go missing or almost starting a war based on an AI hallucination.

“Those are the stories you won’t see on Trump TV. They bolster national security by exposing real threats to the homeland — government malfeasance and incompetence. Everyone involved in this multipronged and apparently ongoing attack on the Constitution must be held accountable.”
Read Judge Kelly’s full order here

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The University of Toronto could generate a quarter of its electricity from on-site solar power, according to our new report. Despite U of T’s ambitious climate and sustainability goals, existing solar installations currently supply less than 1% of the university’s total electricity needs. Our new report, Scaling Solar Power at the University of Toronto, finds

The post University of Toronto could generate 25% of its electricity with solar power appeared first on Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

The Place:

Morrell Nature Sanctuary is a 110-hectare (270-acre) preserve of coastal Douglas-fir forest in British Columbia that volunteers battle to keep safe from invasive species. The sanctuary is a shelter for a biodiverse ecosystem where fir coexist with massive red cedars, Garry oaks, and twisting, hard-as-stone arbutus trees with their shocking, ever-peeling red and pistachio-green trunks. The forest’s undergrowth is dominated by salal, Oregon grape, and ferns. But those are just a few of the more than 100 species of plants that provide a home for animals, including deer and bears. Ravens and barred owls regularly oversee our work.

Why it matters:

According to the Coastal Douglas-fir Conservation Partnership, this type of forest is the most at-risk zone in British Columbia, yet it contains the highest diversity of plant species in the province. Morrell Nature Sanctuary is a volunteer-led organization trying to maintain a small piece of this forest for all.

A barred owl looks down on Morrell. Photo: Tanya Berry (used with permission) The threat:

The forest is in peril. Always creeping in from the edges or growing from bits dropped by birds are invasive Christmas-card perfect holly trees and very pretty, but toxic, daphne laurel. The open, rocky bluffs that the arbutus and Garry oaks favor are at risk of being taken over by Scotch broom. Local lore attributes the broom plague to a sentimental Scot who planted a few seeds to remind him of home. Now the broom has taken over any disturbed (literally and metaphorically) location across large swathes of southwestern British Columbia. It runs rampant up hydro lines, along trails and ditches, and in lots clearcut and then abandoned by developers. We curse the homesick Scot even as we grudgingly admire the bright yellow blooms in late spring.

It’s not just the sanctuary volunteers who engage in the Sisyphean labor of cutting blooming broom as close to the ground as possible. Many groups work to eradicate it, worrying the highly flammable, toxic bush will kill the native species and fuel a forest fire. It is dangerously everywhere.

The invasive-fighting volunteers have heard the arguments. Isn’t it natural evolution to let plants grow as they wish? That’s hard to believe if you witness the monoculture left under the canopy if you let daphne laurel grow at will. Isn’t it a waste of time? I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to liberate an arbutus from a surround of broom and know that even if you need to come back to cut baby broom next year, the arbutus is free for now. Parts of the sanctuary are close to pristine, where breathing is easier for everyone — and that can’t possibly be a waste of time or labor.

So we persist against the holly, daphne laurel, and broom while occasionally tackling other problematic plants in our neck of the woods: Periwinkle, English ivy (homesick settlers take note!) and Himalayan blackberry have also taken root.

My place in this place:

Of all the invasive plants, it’s the blackberry I find most difficult — and not just because of its vicious, rope-thick cane and brambles. There’s actually very little of it in the sanctuary, but when I occasionally come across it, I morph into a blackberry terminator, lasering in on the plant as I approach for the kill.

The author at Morrell.

My technique involves clipping back as much of the vine and cane that I can until the roots are exposed, which I pull out of the ground with specially designed “puller-bears.” These heavy contraptions are very useful for pinching around the base of a plant and then slowly levering the roots out of the ground. They’re indispensable for clearing daphne laurel and smaller holly trees, which will regrow if cut. But never use a puller-bear on broom: You’ll just disturb the soil and create the perfect nursery for thousands of dormant broom seeds to sprout. It’s better to cut blooming broom off at the base, which will likely kill it.

But back to the blackberries. In the sanctuary I gleefully eradicate them. It’s when I leave that problems arise, as I wrestle with my hypocritical lust for a perfectly ripe blackberry. As soon as I touch a plump fruit, I know whether I should immediately pull it to my mouth or drop it in a bucket to freeze for delayed gratification over the winter. The ripe ones come to you willingly, almost falling into your hand as you caress them and then offer explosions of sweetness leaving a lingering, subtle, delicious tartness on your palate. There’s a reason “hints of blackberry” is often used to describe rich red wines.

As I walk to the sanctuary on summer mornings I assess the readiness of the crop, justifying my greediness with every step. They’ll still be there, taking over fields and ditches if I don’t eat them. And it’s free food! (Monetarily, at least.)

The coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem also has native trailing blackberries. Their fruits are smaller and sweeter, and many claim more delicious, than Himalayan blackberries. The trailing blackberry vine is also more delicate, and there’s no cane. While Himalayan blackberries would make an extremely effective defense against invaders, trailing blackberries allow animals to move through and coexist with salal and Oregon grape. Nonnative blackberries grow prolifically, not allowing anything else to grow and even competing with broom in disturbed sites. I believe it’s the alpha blackberry that will win out.

Have I mentioned the thorns the size of tacks that tear at your clothes, sometimes piercing the armor you donned before heading out on the hunt? For a month or so every summer the invasive blackberries dare you to come and get ’em if you’re brave enough to try. It’s not a chore for the unprepared. No matter the weather, you have to wear thick clothing and closed-toe shoes, if not boots. Mesh-topped running shoes won’t last a minute. The wise bring hand clippers to carve out a relatively safe space to pick. My husband carries an old broomstick with a bent nail banged into one end, which he uses to snag berry-laden branches and pull them within reach. He favors cutting his way in where others dare not go and picking in one spot. I wear a thick work glove on my non-picking hand to maneuver fruit nearer as I skim along the surface of the brambles. We’ve enviously watched seasoned warriors lean ladders against three-meter-high blackberry hedges to get at the ones the rest of us can’t reach.

My love of blackberries illustrates the issue at hand. Many invasive plants were originally planted in gardens because they’re pretty or taste good. I, along with everyone else, need to tamp down our selfish need for plants that don’t belong here. Inevitably as I enter the sanctuary, my mouth stained a deep purple, I relax because it’s always cooler there when it’s hot out. On rainy days the towering canopy gives protection. I stop and breathe and know that given the choice of this or blackberries, I will choose the forest every time. That’s what we are fighting to protect.

Who’s protecting it now:

Volunteers. In addition to the Morrell nature sanctuary, volunteers with organizations such as BroomBusters are working in the region to eradicate invasive species, Scotch broom in particular.

Photo: Tanya Berry (used with permission) What this place needs:

The smallest actions, such as ripping out an invasive plant as one walks by, can quickly add up, clearing areas remarkably effectively. But local government leaders also need to step in and recognize the threat posed by invasive plants. The wildfires should terrify us all and spur action to legislate the removal of plants such as Scotch broom or fine those who don’t take action. Another step is to make the disposal of invasive plants easier. Right now, it costs us to take bags of pulled or cut plants for disposal; we need support, not barriers.

Lessons from the fight:

A small group of mostly retired people working a few hours a week can make a surprisingly big difference. But we Morrell volunteers are only working on a tiny piece of the landscape. If more people started working a bit more broadly, I believe much more of the forest could be protected. For example, I regularly walk through a Nanaimo park that’s choking on invasive plants. Holly and daphne are everywhere, and the cedars and firs are covered in ivy. Yet it’s obvious where people have stepped in to eradicate the interlopers, leaving pockets of forest in a clean state. It can be done.

Learn more:

To find out more about the Morrell Nature Sanctuary, visit their website or follow them on Facebook.

To see the work of another invasive fighting volunteer organization, with inspiring examples of small groups who made big impacts, visit the BroomBuster’s website.

To learn more about the coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem visit: https://www.cdfcp.ca/about-the-cdfcp/.

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

Protect This Place: The Florida Panhandle vs. Petrochemicals

The post Protect This Place: Coastal Douglas-Fir Forest of Southwestern British Columbia appeared first on The Revelator.

Registered nurses at Olympia Fields Hospital in Olympia Fields, Ill., voted 82 percent in favor of joining National Nurses Organizing Committee, an affiliate of National Nurses United, the largest and fastest-growing registered nurse (RN) union in the nation.

Almost three-quarters of the 72 five-year plans published by China this year include policies or targets related to climate change and energy, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

Five-year plans are an important part of China’s policymaking process, signalling key priorities and setting targets for the coming years.

The post Interactive: What China’s dozens of ‘five-year plans’ say about climate and energy appeared first on Carbon Brief.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Dr. Wendy Zhou to discuss her recent USC dissertation on dynamic accessibility — you know, how static maps without a time-based dimension don’t tell the whole story on access and how it’s time for a “people-based” accessibility.

And you know that there’s three ways to play the weekly Talking Headways game:

• Put on some headphones and click “play” in the player below:
• Read an excerpt of our exhilarating conversation below the player.
• Read the entire text (with some transcription typos) here.

Here’s the excerpt:

Jeff Wood: How did you get interested in transportation policy?

Wendy Zhou: I grew into later in life. My interest started in urban planning, not specifically transportation, when I did my college in China, and then I did my Masters in Berkeley.

I was not a specific transportation person. I was more environmental. For example, when I did my research in undergrad, I visited different communities to see how people actually interact with neighborhood green space. So I know people use the infrastructure differently, and the urban planning benefit different people, so that’s kind of how I get interested in urban planning in the first place.

And it’s about how people live in a city that’s got me interested in the first place. And then, I got more exposed to transportation when I was in USC, where I work with my adviser, Geoff Boeing.

Jeff Wood: Geoff’s been on the show before.

Wendy Zhou: Oh cool. That’s when I got more exposed to transportation planning and transportation policy. One thing that kind of bugs me is the accessibility map that I see in, for example, the USDA’s food desert. It’s based on the home census tract and it draws a one-mile buffer around the centroid of census tract to see whether, for example, there are supermarkets within that buffer.

It bothers me because it’s not the case from my experience of how I live. I live in San Gabriel, and where I live is actually marked as a food desert on that map, and I was shocked because I never feel that way. And then I realized because I go to school that has a Trader Joe’s. And sometimes I drop off my husband in Pasadena, where his shuttle is, and there are Whole Foods, like every grocery store there.

It occurs to me I never buy grocery close to my home, and I think maybe perhaps how we measure it can be different from how people living there and experienced accessibility, and that’s the idea that interests me and the dissertation idea came from.

Jeff Wood: Obviously that’s an issue, but I’m curious what led you to think that this was something that needed extra research, that the static maps weren’t quite working for planners and others who are thinking about these issues like food deserts?

Wendy Zhou: That’s a great question. … Take smartphone data, which was not a thing that we used to have as planners. With that data, we can know where people are across different times of day, which should be a better information to just proxy people from where they live. So that’s the new opportunity of this research.

And I think the problem is more based on my own experience because I know how you proxy from people’s home is not what people experience. We know there are data there and know how people experience it differently and want to see how they come together.

Jeff Wood: So what do access metrics look like now? You did basically a review of about 160 different papers. I’m curious what it looks like currently in the world.

Wendy Zhou: So it’s still based on places. That’s most likely still using census tracts, census blocks, and then use that place to proxy people’s home location.

So for example, “more Asians live in that place,” or “more White people” or “more Black people,” and use that to proxy different people’s accessibility. So basically it’s based on their home. But I see the development is more like the time fact, like people are more incorporating the time sensitive, like transit data.

Unlike decades ago, maybe more people are using just straight line distances or like network distances. But now they more incorporated the time difference, the travel time difference by bike, for example, by transit, by drive. So that’s kind of seeing like the temporal dimension they’re incorporating. But most likely they’re based on places like the home census tract.

From 19 to 23 October, FAO headquarters in Rome will host the 54th session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), one of the leading multilateral forums on food security and nutrition. The CFS brings together governments, UN agencies, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, researchers and the private sector to tackle the root causes of hunger and malnutrition, advance the right to food, and build sustainable, resilient food systems. High on this year’s agenda are food system resilience and critical and emerging issues for food security.

The meeting opens just over two months after the release of a FAO–UNOSAT report that shows starkly what it means, in wartime, to lose not only access to food but the very ability to produce it. In the Gaza Strip, just 3% of cropland is both accessible and undamaged.

As of 24 June 2026, 4,091 hectares were accessible, 27% of the total agricultural area. Yet only 448 hectares were intact and could be farmed without first being restored, while the remaining 3,643 accessible hectares had been damaged. Since October 2025, the area of accessible, undamaged farmland has shrunk by a further 25.5%. In Rafah, 97.2% of agricultural land and 98.4% of greenhouses are out of reach. Across Gaza, just 224 hectares of greenhouses, 16.6% of the total, remain both accessible and intact.

According to FAO, the main reason less land has been available in recent months is not further physical damage but loss of access to the fields. Land can still be fit for farming and yet produce nothing, because farmers simply cannot reach it. Even where access is still possible, production is held back by shortages of seeds, fertilisers, irrigation equipment, fuel and other essential inputs. Livestock farmers are struggling to find animal feed and veterinary medicines.

Before October 2023, agriculture accounted for around 10% of Gaza’s economy and supported the livelihoods of more than 560,000 people through farming, livestock and fishing. The hostilities have struck not only crops and infrastructure but an entire food ecosystem: soil, water, seeds, farming knowledge, labour, local trade and the ability of people to keep producing their own food over time. This is where the question of seeds becomes crucial. A seed is not just another input to be imported. It is the first link in a community’s food autonomy, because it holds the possibility of saving, reproducing and adapting crops. The freedom to save and exchange seeds and the protection of biodiversity are fundamental to food sovereignty. When land, water, seeds and local productive capacity are lost, dependence on outside sources grows instead. FAO itself lists among its priorities safe access to land, the entry of agricultural inputs, and investment to rehabilitate fields and rebuild local agriculture.

As the CFS meets in Rome, Gaza raises a question that reaches far beyond the Strip: can we talk about food security in terms of food availability alone, without also considering whether communities are able to produce it? For Navdanya, this is exactly where food sovereignty begins: with the freedom to safeguard seeds, regenerate the land and keep the power to feed themselves in the hands of communities.

Ruchi Shroff 

Navdanya International

Thumbnail: “Palestinians commemorate Land Day in the ‘buffer zone’ of the eastern Gaza Strip” by Joe Catron, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr. No changes made.

Increasing use of AI systems to manage public utilities creates new risks for critical infrastructure, regulators said.

Flying is one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the European Commission. And while road transport emits more carbon over, flying is energy-intensive per person. Flying from Lisbon to New York and back produces roughly the same emissions as an average European Union citizen heating their home for a year.

The aviation industry has adopted several measures to cut its emissions. But data on the impact of these measures has been limited.

Researchers from the German Aerospace Center provide some new insights in a study in the journal Science Advances. The researchers estimated the effects of sustainable aviation fuels and modern efficient engines on aircraft pollution.

“Our findings demonstrate that a substantial reduction of particle emissions requires a synergistic approach, combining the use of alternative fuels with modern engine technologies,” the team writes. “The results may support the optimization of future engine technologies for lower particle emissions…and thereby help to reduce the impact of aviation on climate and public health.”

In addition to carbon dioxide, jet engines emit ultrafine particle pollution, composed mainly of tiny soot and sulfate particles. These emissions impact human health on the ground. Under the right atmospheric conditions, the particles also lead to contrails. That’s because hot water vapor in engine exhaust condenses on the tiny solid particles and freezes. Contrails can persist for hours and trap heat in the atmosphere.

Reducing aviation’s non-carbon dioxide emissions will be key to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, past studies have shown. Sustainable aviation fuels and modern lean-burn engines, which use a higher air-to-fuel ratio, should both reduce particulate emissions.

 

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But “the influence of the fuel composition…on particle emissions in rich-burn and lean-burn combustor conditions has hardly been explored in flight experiments,” Rebecca Dischl and colleagues write in the paper.

So the team analyzed measurements of in-flight particulate emissions from two Airbus airplanes. Both planes flew on lean-burn engines, but one used conventional fuel while the other used sustainable aviation fuel.

As the airplanes cruised, a smaller test aircraft equipped with inlets on the fuselage followed. The test craft had various instruments for measuring aerosol particles and trace gases. Two instruments mounted under the wings detected ice particle number and size. The test flights were conducted in November 2021 and March 2023.

Earlier this year, the research team reported that aircraft made contrails even when they produced less soot. Liquid particles such as engine oil droplets, it turns out, led to contrail formation.

Their new analysis shows that the advanced engines reduce soot particle emissions by three orders of magnitude compared with conventional engines. Further, under the rich-burn conditions, soot particle emissions depended exponentially on the hydrogen content of the fuel burned.

Meanwhile, volatile particle emissions from sustainable fuels increased with the sulfur content of the fuel. And the emissions varied considerably even between engines of the same type, the authors found.

By comparing particle emissions from different aviation fuels and aircraft engines, the findings enhance the understanding of aircraft emissions in the low-soot regime. This data should serve as valuable input for advancing jet engine model development, the researchers write. Optimizing fuel composition and engine technology would reduce particle emissions, improve airport air quality, and mitigate contrails.

Source: Rebecca Dischl et al. Mitigating aviation’s environmental impact through alternative fuels and cleaner engines. Science Advances, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine