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This is a guest blog by Tom Ellison, Deputy Director, Center for Climate and Security (CCS), a research institute tackling systemic climate and ecological security risks, and Phil Newell, Communications co-chair, Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of over 50 leading climate and anti-disinformation organizations dealing with climate misinformation and disinformation.

This past summer’s extreme weather has brought home the intensity of the climate crisis for many of us around the world: from the catastrophic floods in Nepal, to the lethal heatwaves across Europe and India, to the choking wildfires in North America, France, and Spain. 

As if that isn’t enough, we are seeing these extreme weather crises going hand-in-hand with information crises. The danger of heatwaves is being downplayed. Flooding is getting blamed on foreign neighbors. Wildfires are being attributed to a land-clearing conspiracy. As fossil-fueled extreme weather continues, it is also fueling an information crisis, bringing climate denial, AI slop content, political propaganda, extremism, and online rage bait. This has ramifications that endanger lives, divide societies, and undermine climate action. 

We must protect ourselves and those around us not only from the physical impacts of extreme weather but also from the disinformation that comes with it. The good news is, we can keep ourselves safe by anticipating and short-circuiting lies and distortions.  A new toolkit ‘Weathering Extremes,’  by Jennie King  from CCS lays out some practical steps forward:  

A Spanish military unit battles wildfires in August 2026, which displaced more than 300,000 people across Spain and France. (Military Emergencies Unit, Spanish Ministry of Defense)

Wildfires, floods, and other extreme events bring a host of problematic claims and narratives. Experts sometimes talk about false information that is spread knowingly (disinformation), or  false information spread unknowingly (misinformation), or even  cherry-picked facts that are spread to manipulate (malinformation). But the most important thing is the impact this kind of information has, not the mindset of the person clicking “share.” 

In the wild, we might encounter three main categories of deception around extreme weather. These can look different from traditional denialism in climate debates. But they have a variety of harmful impacts.

• The first category is environmental, which attacks science or cherry picks facts to separate a disaster from its climate-related causes. To use wildfires as an example, this could mean saying this wildfire was started by an arsonist, not climate change. That may be true, but it obscures the fact that climate change is making wildfires more likely and intense, regardless of how they start. Over time, this can weaken our understanding of climate change, and slow down climate action. 
• The second category is political, which attacks disaster response efforts, often to grind an unrelated partisan or geopolitical axe. For example, Russia falsely claimed the wildfire wouldn’t have been so bad if the US hadn’t wasted resources supporting Ukraine, or the US President misleadingly argued that the LA wildfires are the fault of his political rival’s water policies. These claims can polarize governance, undermine disaster relief or recovery, or empower authoritarian leaders.
• The third category is hateful and extremist, which blames disasters on minorities or promotes conspiracy theories. These deceptions might look like the wildfires were caused by Jewish weather control or that foreigners are stealing all the disaster aid. Such falsehoods can divide societies or endanger the safety of vulnerable people. 

These claims are mostly about directing blame, whether to “natural” causes, to conspiracies, to minorities, to political rivals or foreign enemies–basically, anything but climate change. So what is really behind the lies? It comes down to money and power that vested interests have on the line during chaotic, viral climate disasters.

Private interests have a great deal of money to protect or gain from high-profile extreme weather events. Most obviously, oil, gas, coal, animal agriculture, and other polluting sectors don’t want disasters to motivate climate action that threatens their profits. The role of corporate lobbying, advertising, and PR in climate disinformation and on climate  obstruction, i.e. creating doubt on the severity of the climate crisis has been documented for decades. But more recently, the interests of Big Oil are increasingly aligned with those of Big Tech. 

Once upon a time, social media promised an open shortcut for connecting with other people, be they friends, family, or strangers. But along the way, social media became a stew of addictive algorithms, with users forever scrolling in circles, where attention is sold to advertisers rather than browsing an open web. Now, online conversation around disasters favors whatever earns clicks and cash– whether it’s rumors, rage bait, AI slop, propaganda, or hate speech. As a result, the social media channel for public engagement has been hijacked by dishonest influencers, polluters, and bots. That leaves policymakers and the public struggling to find reliable information during disasters, right when they need it most.

Besides money, disinformation about extreme weather is also motivated by ideology and politics. Authoritarian governments see extreme weather as a chance to attach their message to a major news event and to undermine opponents and critics. Political extremists, especially the far right, have started treating climate change not just as an energy debate but as an enemy cultural identity. These actors are not the cause of our toxic information environment, but exploit and shape it to serve their goals.

Often, all these motives are mixed. For example, Russia has covertly sponsored far-right climate ‘disinfluencers’ in the United States, and the state-owned gas company owns Russia’s largest media conglomerate, showing how directly fossil fuel interests, social media, and global politics are intertwined.

During Hurricane Helene in 2024, the far right, online provocateurs, and Russian media spread climate denial, partisan attacks, and xenophobic messages, fueling security threats to public officials and FEMA relief workers (FEMA).

There are ways we can protect ourselves and our communities from these threats:  

1. We as communities and climate concerned citizens should expect disinformation during extreme weather as the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, these information crises can happen anywhere, as local events are co-opted into viral narratives. By reading this and the resources here, you are already ahead of the curve. 
2. Second, we need to sidestep the algorithm and not rely only on social media. It’s tempting to focus all our energy online, but social media tends to reward lies and nonsense over truth. As Jennie King writes in Weathering Extremes, “information resilience is built on networks, not newsfeeds.” That means real-world connections matter – personal relationships, ties with local governments, or simple tools like email lists, phone trees, and group texts – that we can build before a disaster strikes. And it’s worth remembering: as Yale’s Climate Maps show, most people in the U.S, for example, support key climate actions – even if you’d never guess that from social media.
3. Third, we can build defenses ahead of time, rather than scrambling to counter or fact-check every rumor and lie during a crisis. One way is “pre-bunking”– warning people in advance about certain narratives, messengers, or tactics they are likely to run into. In fact, the disinformation examples earlier in this piece are themselves a form of pre-bunking. Another tool is the “truth sandwich” – leading with the truth, then knocking down a false claim or bad source, before reiterating the facts again. We can also work to get accurate information into the data AI chatbots learn and draw from – also called “generative engine optimization”. This is increasingly important as AI use grows, and because cunning governments and companies are already trying to feed their own messages into chatbots.

   A resource on prebunking and generative engine optimization, from Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster (CCS).

4. Finally, as citizens and civil society, we can push for the global, systematic reforms needed to make our online environment more trustworthy. Reforms that call for improved safety, transparency, privacy, and accountability standards for tech platforms endorsed by CAAD are a great starting point, and at will  unwind some of the toxic incentives that give lies and outrage the upper hand. 

Climate change and disinformation are two of the systemic challenges of our time, and they are colliding in harmful ways. Neither will be solved easily. But more people and institutions globally are tackling the challenge, from the UN to researchers to certain governments. Ultimately, reliable information is just as much a part of necessary climate infrastructure as is solar and wind power or flood defences. And everyone has a part to play from newsrooms to social algorithms and even family group chats. 

References and resources: 

• Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster
• Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition

The post Keeping Safe from Fires and Liars appeared first on 350.

For António Guterres, it was his final UNGA as UN Secretary-General. And he used the moment to make the case, repeatedly and forcefully, for international cooperation at precisely the moment when it is under greatest strain. In his final General Assembly address, Guterres called on governments to adopt national plans to transition away from fossil fuels, aligned with 1.5°C, and to protect workers and communities through that transition. And then, in words that will resonate far beyond the UN chamber, he landed on three words: “Polluters must pay.” 

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For us here at 350, that matters. For years, movements around the world have been demanding that those who have profited most from fossil fuels contribute to addressing the damage caused by their pollution. This week, that demand was articulated from the highest level of the UN.

And it wasn’t Guterres alone. The call for greater accountability from major polluters was echoed by political leaders, including the Spanish minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen Muñoz

Perhaps one of the most powerful interventions came from Nepal. Prime Minister Balendra Shah addressed the General Assembly following the devastating Bhotekoshi-Trishuli floods, which killed more than 1,400 people and left thousands unaccounted for, according to Nepalese authorities. He spoke not in abstract terms about climate risk, but about families waiting for loved ones who may never come home; communities searching through mud, rocks and floodwater; and homes, schools, roads and livelihoods swept away. 

His message was simple: Nepal heard the warnings. But global political action did not move at the speed required.

“The Bhotekoshi-Trishuli disaster was not just a local tragedy, it was a warning to the world.”

Shah also made the injustice explicit. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet is facing profound consequences from a warming climate. He called for greater climate finance, including grant-based support rather than repeatedly pushing vulnerable countries further into debt.  This is what climate injustice looks like in practice: countries that have contributed least to the crisis are being forced to spend scarce resources responding to its consequences.

Scientists, frontline communities and climate movements have been saying for decades that climate breakdown will amplify existing vulnerabilities, undermine livelihoods, drive displacement and interact with conflict and instability. The intelligence assessment adds another powerful voice to that evidence base. But the fundamental problem isn’t a lack of warnings. It is the gap between what governments know and what they are prepared to do.

This brings us to one of the most concerning contradictions at play now: the leaders who will preside over the next stage of the climate negotiations, Australia and Türkiye, both used UNGA and New York Climate Week to talk about energy, electrification and climate action. But they were awfully silent about the elephant in the room: the urgent need to phase-out fossil fuels. It’s not like we’re living the worst energy crisis ever, emphasizing how crucial it is to break our toxic dependency towards oil, coal and gas.

Coal mine in Hunter Valley, Australia. Photo credit: Max Phillips

On the positive side, Türkiye launched its 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge, calling for electricity to account for 35% of global final energy consumption by 2035, alongside initiatives covering grids, buildings, transport, industry and AI. Electrification is important. But there is a fundamental question that cannot be avoided: electrifying with what, and for who?

As 350 and partners argued this week, electrification needs to go hand in hand with rapidly scaling renewables and phasing out coal, oil and gas – and with making climate finance available for developing countries to achieve this. 92+ organizations published this open letter saying that the electrification target counts only if the power is renewable, if it reaches the people who have no electricity today, if the money follows, and if it comes alongside progress in the negotiations on the Just Transition mechanism, finance, and adaptation, and other existing commitments

Otherwise, we risk increasing electricity demand while leaving the fossil-fuel system at the center of the energy system.

That contradiction was particularly visible in the speeches and policies surrounding COP31. Australia is talking about climate action while its government recently approved an expansion of BHP’s Saraji coal mine. Türkiye is promoting electrification while planning further fossil-fuel power capacity. The issue isn’t whether electrification is necessary. It is. The issue is whether governments are prepared to phase out fossil fuels and support a just transition.

Street view of the wildfires in Türkiye’s Antalya province, which will host the COP31 summit. (Photo credit: 350.org Türkiye)

As COP32 hosts, Ethiopia showed its hand with President Atske’s UN address demonstrating the leadership East Africa has been waiting for. Inviting world leaders to Ethiopia in November 2027 in order to find solutions to the climate crisis, one of the defining imperatives of our era.At a time when other world leaders are backsliding on climate action, Ethiopia carried the torch of climate ambition high. As the next host of the Conference of Parties (COP32), this is exactly the kind of ambitious agenda-setting Africa needs, one that prioritizes a people-centered transition away from fossil fuels. 

However, with the world on the verge of overshooting 1.5C, every fraction of a degree we can avoid heating matters – and so does every political meeting. The World Bank. The IMF. The UN. The climate finance negotiations. The UN Tax Convention. COP31. Each is another opportunity to close the gap between what governments know and what they do. We cannot wait until COP32 to see the fossil fuels phase out in the agenda. We need it now.

UNGA ends. The diplomats leave New York. The speeches disappear from the headlines. But the crises don’t. The world has experienced devastating wildfires, catastrophic floods, extreme heat and a rapidly intensifying El Niño. The impacts are already being felt by people and communities around the world.

Next week, the climate season moves to Fiji for the COP31 pre-COP. All eyes will increasingly turn towards the negotiations in Türkiye and Australia. The question for COP31 should be straightforward:

Will governments finally put a date on the end of fossil fuels,  and put the money behind a just transition?

Because after this week in New York, there is little excuse for pretending we don’t know where the world is heading. We know the risks. We know the solutions. We know who has profited. And, who is paying the price.

Now the question is whether governments are prepared to act. Polluters must pay. And the fossil-fuel era must end.

The post UNGA: A week that laid bare the world’s fault lines, climate crisis all over it appeared first on 350.

This is a first-hand account by Margaretha Winda, a journalist based in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan, on Indonesia’s wildfires, which has produced hazardous smoke that chokes its people and wildlife, and has spread to neighbouring countries Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and the Philippines. 

There is something ironic about forest and land fires. A blaze may start on a single plot of land. But the resulting smoke and haze do not recognize boundaries of ownership. They move past fences, roads, villages. They enter homes, schools, and the lungs of people who never lit a match. Those who never started the fire are the ones who end up paying for it — and that is as true a few kilometers from the fire as it is a few hundred.

I remember one morning this season waking up to a sky already overcast, the sun reduced to a faint, sickly yellow smear behind the haze. The smell hits before anything else — burning peat, sharp and distinctive, the kind that settles into your chest until it’s hard to take a full breath. And yet life around me didn’t stop: women were still washing clothes at the riverbank with no protection at all, no masks, no thought given to a health check. Children rode their bicycles to school through thick smoke, unmasked, because no notice had come telling schools to close.

This year is worse than anything I remember from three years ago. Back then, fires happened too, but the smoke never got this thick, and it was brought under control quickly. This year’s fires spread everywhere, and the response never caught up.

Where I live, in Pulang Pisau, 1,503 hotspots and 38 fires have burned 334 hectares this season. Jabiren Raya alone accounts for 1,303 hotspots and 257 hectares — including peat near the Tumbang Nusa bridge up to 40 meters deep, among the deepest burning in the regency. It smolders underground and resists rain rather than burning out quickly.

A Forest and Land Fire Control Brigade worker tries to extinguish a fire in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan province, on Aug 12, 2026. Photo: Reuters/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana

I am not writing this from a distance. I’m a journalist, and this season my job has put me at the fire sites themselves, working right up against the smoke. The one thing that’s changed for me is that I now have to wear a mask more carefully than ever, just to avoid getting sick myself — though for most people around me, that choice doesn’t even exist. Work doesn’t stop for haze. There is no version of survival here that includes staying home.

It has reached my own family, too. I have two children, and both came down with acute respiratory infections during this haze season that simply wouldn’t clear — coughing, flu, and at one point diarrhea. They were not the only ones. Children and elderly people across my community have ended up in hospital, struggling to breathe.

Nationally, Indonesia’s health ministry recorded nearly 51,000 acute respiratory infection cases tied to the haze in July and August alone. Two volunteers fighting fires in Central Kalimantan died this month from breathing difficulties. An orangutan was found on a plantation in West Kalimantan and later died of suspected smoke inhalation; firefighters elsewhere have found snake and pangolin carcasses in burned areas.

I’ve seen versions of this closer to home too. In Pulang Pisau, in the early morning and evening, visibility here drops to about one meter. The wildlife I’ve seen displaced is mostly snakes, turtles, and monkeys — animals whose habitat simply burned out from under them. A duck farm near one of the fire sites was directly hit as well, its surroundings caught up in the same blaze. On schooling: some areas of Pulang Pisau have shifted to distance learning, but others are still holding regular in-person classes in the middle of all this smoke — there’s no consistent rule, just whatever each school decides on its own.

And the government’s presence has been strangely uneven. Even as fires grew large across the district, official attention stayed narrowly fixed on Desa Tumbang Nusa, while other areas burned with far less response. 

I’ve lived through enough dry seasons here to recognize the warning signs: the sky dimming to a dull yellow-grey before the smoke rolls in for good. The wind carries the smoke north toward Palangka Raya. This year, it even crossed the Java Sea and kept going — and by the first week of September, four other countries were living inside it too.

• Singapore. On September 4, residents woke up to a smoggy sky as the air quality index crossed into unhealthy territory. By late afternoon, IQAir’s global rankings placed the city with the third-worst air on the planet.
• Malaysia. In Sarawak state, the capital Kuching had already been ranked the world’s most polluted city for over a week straight, with a hazardous reading of 311. On September 4, its Air Pollutant Index in the town of Serian surged past 500 — a level that can halt nonessential work and outdoor activity — prompting Malaysia’s king to consent to a state of emergency there. A Serian resident told reporters, “Even when I turn on the air conditioner, I can still smell the smoke in my house.” Days earlier, the health ministry reported asthma cases up 259% and upper respiratory infections up 124% in a single week.
• The Philippines. Officials declared air quality “acutely unhealthy” across Manila’s metro area, the Visayas, and Mindanao — three separate island groups, hundreds of kilometers apart, choking on the same haze. The health department was telling people to mask up..
• Brunei. Hazy conditions have blanketed the sultanate since mid-August, with no clear end in sight as the fires behind it keep burning.

The city center blanketed in thick haze in Kuching, Sarawak state, Malaysia, on Sept. 4, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Xpin Voon.

We may live in very different places, but our fears are starting to sound the same. Families in Sarawak are now doing what mine has done all season — watching their children for coughs, keeping them inside, waiting for the air to clear. Those who contributed least to causing this crisis are so often the first, and the hardest, hit by it. 

An estimated 10.67 million people are affected by this haze here in Indonesia alone.  Citizens have taken this to court before. In 2017, a group of Palangka Raya residents won a citizen lawsuit against the Indonesian government over its failure in handling forest and land fires and in preventing a haze disaster — a court found the state guilty of unlawful negligence, a ruling upheld on appeal and again by the Supreme Court in 2019, only to be dismissed again in a judicial review on 2022. But winning in court hasn’t meant winning in practice: judgments like this one have gone largely unenforced. 

So when people elsewhere start watching their children for coughs and keeping them indoors, waiting for the air to clear — I recognize that fear completely. It’s the one my family has lived inside all season, without the world watching.

Landowners are responsible for safeguarding their land. Companies are responsible for ensuring their operations don’t create risk. Government is responsible for making sure all of this is actually enforced — not just showing up once a fire is already large.

And I want to be precise about who is actually burning, because this gets misunderstood constantly, both inside and outside Indonesia. Dayak communities here largely stopped clearing land by fire a long time ago. The fires happening now are not, in my experience, a story about traditional farming practices gone wrong. 

Part of why these fires catch and spread so easily  goes back decades, to how this land was managed. Much of Kalimantan’s peat has been drained for industrial agriculture, including oil palm, leaving it dry enough to burn like fuel instead of holding the water that once kept it from catching. Indonesian law requires companies operating on peatland to keep it wet, but those rules are widely ignored, and to make it worse the President dismantled the ad hoc government agency that tasked specifically for peat restoration last year, leaving accountability gap that no other institutions seem to prepared to fill.

Burnt peatland in Central Kalimantan province, Indonesia, in August 2026. Photo: Krismes Santo Haloho/Mongabay Indonesia.

What’s also changed is the climate in which we now live. Longer, hotter dry seasons — the kind scientists tie to the broader climate crisis – are setting the stage for fires to start faster and burn longer. Layered on top of this year’s own strong El Niño, fires can now burn underground indried-out peat for months.

Communities here already practice gotong royong — mutual cooperation, neighbors carrying each other through hardship. I opened a volunteer relief post in the Kahayan Hilir subdistrict this season to supply logistics to Masyarakat Peduli Api — the volunteer firefighters actually on the ground putting these fires out. A lot of people have stepped up to donate food and drink for them. But those volunteers are still going out without basic equipment — hoses to fight the fire, fuel for the pumps that draw water. That gap shouldn’t be theirs to fill alone, and it shouldn’t have to substitute for a government or companies acting before the smoke crosses a border, rather than after.

This haze disaster isn’t new, and it isn’t only this year’s story — it comes back every long dry season, and every year the response arrives just as unprepared as the last. My ask, to the government and to anyone reading this far: don’t let this become an opportunity for a handful of elites remain unaccountable while residents’ rice fields burn, while elderly people, children, and pregnant women are hospitalized, while the actual cost gets absorbed by people who had no hand in causing it.  In the end, polluters are darkening our collective skies and must pay for the damage they’ve caused. From burning fossil fuels that heat up the planet to clearing forests for plantations, it’s the actions of big corporations, not small farmers, that are setting our forests on fire. 

These are the very forests and lands that have given life to our communities for generations that deserve better than to be reduced to smoke. Governments must step up and hold the polluters accountable, so that our forests, our country, and all of us who live here can finally breathe freely again.   

The post The Haze We All Breathe: A Letter from Kalimantan, Indonesia appeared first on 350.

This is a guest blog by Rodrigo Leitão, environmental lawyer and member of Coletivo Pororoka, and Alexandre Anderson, of Rede Ahomar — a nationwide organization representing fishermen and fishing communities in the Guanabara Bay region, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, and throughout the country. On October 7 2026, Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency (ANP) is set to hold its next oil block auction — including further expansion of exploration areas in the Foz do Amazonas basin.

The confirmed discovery of oil off the coast of Oiapoque, at the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil — an area known as the Foz do Amazonas basin, puts the region on a slippery path that fishers in Guanabara Bay already know well. A path that, once travelled, leaves marks impossible to erase.

Rodrigo Leitão is an environmental Lawyer; member the Amazonian organization Pororoka and Representative of the Brazilian Institute of Environmental Law (IBDA). Photo: AHOMAR

Guanabara Bay, in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, knows what it looks like when the oil industry arrives. The story began in 1954, when the Manguinhos Refinery started operating. In 1961 came the Duque de Caxias Refinery, known as REDUC. After that came the pipelines, the terminals, the petrochemical plants, the support structures for the offshore industry, the vessels and the new facilities. Decade after decade, the industry took up more of the Bay, competing for space with the people who already lived there. 

In Guanabara Bay, the destruction caused by oil didn’t happen all at once — it built up slowly, one project at a time. Each new project was licensed on its own, so no one ever assessed the full, combined impact. By the time the damage became visible, a great deal had already been lost. 

In January 2000, a ruptured of a pipeline spilled around 1.3 million litres of oil, roughly 340,000 gallons, into Guanabara Bay. Mangroves, beaches, fish, birds and thousands of fishers were hit. But the violence against small-scale fishing did not begin at that moment. It had  already been under way for years: in the shrinking fishing grounds, the exclusion zones, the traffic of large vessels, the dredging, the pollution and the steady transformation of the territory.

A participatory mapping carried out with small-scale fishers in Guanabara Bay showed the scale of that loss. The study by Carla Ramôa Chaves, developed at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), found that only 12% to 25% of the bay remained free of restrictions on fishing. The oil industry stood out as the largest single user of the water surface.

Losing a fishing territory is not simply losing an area on a map. Territory means income, food, knowledge and spirituality. Even the definition used by Brazil’s Federal Government recognizes that life in these communities is organized around the waters and their cycles. It took many generations to learn the right time to take from nature what nature offers. And for that, fishers depend on mangroves, rivers, estuaries and seas that are still alive.

So when a fishing territory disappears, what disappears is far more than an economic activity that could easily be swapped for another source of income, as many people assume. It is a form of violence, because it wipes out a way of life handed down from parent to child, built in community and in respect for nature. It is violence because it destroys what people learned to love and to value, in the name of a development that never arrived and never will.

It is impossible to look at this history and not think about the mouth of the Amazon.

Fishing industry leaders from Rio de Janeiro join forces with leaders from the Amazon against well drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River. Photo: AHOMAR

On August 14 2026, Petrobras confirmed that it had found oil in the main well of Block FZA-M-59 – the first confirmed discovery of oil in the mouth of the Amazon River. As soon as the news broke, several foreign oil companies applied for permission to drill in the area. The block, with four wells planned, can be presented as an isolated business venture 175 kilometres (about 109 miles) off the coast of Amapá. But we are not talking about a single project.

In 2025, contracts were signed for 19 new blocks in the Foz do Amazonas basin, at the mouth of the Amazon River. In June 2026, Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency (ANP) listed another 36 blocks in the same basin for study, with a view to including them in future auctions. What these facts show is the opening of Foz do Amazonas basin as a new frontier for oil exploration.

Once production begins, what comes with it are support vessels, shuttle tankers, helicopters, subsea structures, safety zones, logistics bases, port facilities, fuel, waste, workers, storage, pipelines and terminals.

That is how the occupation of Guanabara grew, little by little, until it stopped being a set of separate projects and became a permanent dispute over territory.

Fishers in the Foz do Amazonas basin do not need to wait twenty or thirty years to find out what fishers in Guanabara learned over the course of their own lives: oil does not only occupy the seabed. It moves into living territories and destroys them.

Unlike the generations before us, our greatest challenge is no longer to control nature. It is to join it, if we want any chance of surviving climate change. In the delicate balance of the world, mangroves play a key role. They are important sinks for carbon dioxide, one of the gases responsible for global warming. At the mouth of the Amazon lies the largest mangrove belt on the planet and most of Brazil’s mangroves, stretching across the states of Amapá, Pará and Maranhão – a huge carbon sink.

Mangroves are also fundamental to local life. They are nurseries for countless marine species that provide food and income for traditional communities, something already recognized by Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment. IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, has classified the region as extremely sensitive in social and environmental terms, pointing to Indigenous Lands and protected areas that shelter Indigenous villages, threatened species and one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity known.

IBAMA has also warned that assessing a project in isolation, as in the case of Block 59, does not answer the question of whether the region is suited to receiving the entire oil production chain.

That is the motto of the Association of Men and Women of the Sea of Guanabara Bay (AHOMAR), a kind of omen that comes before a great victory. AHOMAR, founded in 2007, today brings together 11 associations and around four thousand fisherpeople who are fighting for formal recognition of their community territories and against the steady loss of fishing grounds in Guanabara Bay. The group stands up to chronic pollution, to the pressures created by REDUC’s operations and by the logistics expansion linked to COMPERJ, the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex project, in a context of serious socio-environmental conflict and threats against fishers.

The experience of Guanabara can help strengthen a wide alliance of small-scale fishing in the Foz do Amazonas basin: to map fishing territories, to record traditional fishing spots and routes, to track changes in the quantity and quality of the catch, to monitor impacts, to produce information through the communities themselves, and to fight so that these peoples have a voice before decisions are taken and not only after the damage is done. To fight so that an economy that may last a few decades does not destroy a socio-bioeconomy that has sustained generations and could sustain many more.

Alexandre Anderson de Souza is a fisherman and president of the Association of Men and Women of the Sea (AHOMAR). Photo: AHOMAR

May the wind blow strong in Guanabara Bay, and may it reach the peoples of the mouth of the Amazon.

The post Oil Exploration at the Mouth of the Amazon: a Warning from the Guanabara Bay appeared first on 350.

Adam Currie is Campaign and Movement Support Manager at 350 Aotearoa. In this piece, prompted by a photograph of the glacier collapse on the Tibet/Nepal border, Adam reflects on grief, scale, and the difference between despair and honest reckoning — and issues a gentle challenge: one climate commitment, made and kept, this September.

Credit: Chinese mountaineer Zhia Yitie

Take a look at this photo. It isn’t remarkable until you look closer. It shows the aftermath of the tragic glacier collapse on the Tibet/Nepal border. The pale stream running down the center is where the ice came away.

What made me double-take wasn’t what had fallen, but what remains.

Look closely at the glacier. Almost all of it is still there. Then think of the tens of thousands of other glaciers across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Picture yourself running away from a surging torrent caused by a collapsed glacier – as thousands in Nepal actually did. Imagine a circle widening across the globe from this one place: rivers, coastlines, towns, ecosystems and lives, all shaped by how much more warming we allow. And it’s so easy in our detached lives to not think about any of this – although perhaps less so for the increasing numbers of us struck by climate-fuelled disasters across the world.

It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of the damage still ahead of us, and there is plenty to grieve; not least the 1300+ folks killed by the flash floods. Our hearts and prayers go out to everyone affected — those who lost loved ones, homes, and communities in this disaster.

But let’s resist the urge to give up before we’ve truly lost. Because the same image also tells us something hopeful: there is still so much damage we can prevent.

The climate crisis isn’t a cliff we either fall off or don’t. There’s no single line that, once crossed, seals our fate — and no single line that, if held, saves us. It’s more like a boulder rolling down a long slope: it’s already moving, and we can’t stop it outright, but we can still shape how fast it goes and how much damage it does on the way down.

A recent UN report confirmed that the world is now set to breach the 1.5°C warming threshold within the next few years. That’s real, and it’s serious. But the same report makes a crucial point: breaching 1.5°C is not the same as losing. How far the boulder rolls, and how much it flattens on the way, is still being decided — by the emissions we cut or don’t cut, starting now.

That’s why every fraction of a degree matters: each one changes what happens on the way down, a slightly worse drought, a stronger storm, another flooded town. And that’s why every tonne of carbon we keep out of the atmosphere matters too — not because any one tonne will stop the boulder, but because collectively, our tonnes decide how hard it lands.

I am writing from New Zealand, where there is a whakataukī – or saying – “Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua” or “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past,” has always resonated with me, and never been more relevant toda

I remember the solidarity after the climate-fuelled destruction of Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. People flooded into the area with shovels, food, generators, boats and above all, kindness. Roads were cut off and homes were destroyed, but communities still found ways to reach one another. Hope in moments like that one was never about pretending the damage is small; but is refusing to let the damage be the only thing that defines what happens next.

As I wrote in 2020, there’s no point in a ‘climate sprint’ into the future without learning from and honouring the climate-fuelled disasters that have already happened, or forgetting the mātauranga and ways of living that communities have carried for generations. Sure, a few technological ‘advancements’ may or may not give us a bump. But the key solutions are in the past – living within our means, leaning into hard work/discomfort, sharing, living in the right relationship with others and the land.

None of us controls the whole picture. But everyone reading this has some small piece of it within reach.

So, as September and spring begin, I encourage us all to make one new climate commitment for this month. Just one thing you will actually do differently. The commitment could be anything. Write to someone dealing with a climate disaster here or overseas. Turn up to a planting day. Donate to 350.org. Ground yourself in your community. Volunteer for a climate org. Reach out to someone you’ve lost touch with and pull them a little closer into your community.

The glacier in this photograph is partly gone, but most of it is still there. It’s the same with our humanity. This government and the philosophy behind it are doing their best to undermine the bonds that tie us to each other, and make us retreat into our shells. We’ve lost a lot. But most of us are still here. Monty Python might say, “Always look on the bright side of life.” To that I would add: if we truly believe in the bright side, we have to walk towards it.

Credit to Chinese mountaineer Zhia Yitie for the photo, and 350.org pioneer Bill McKibben for bringing our attention to it.

The post Finding Steady Ground on a Glacier still Standing: A Letter from Aotearoa appeared first on 350.

What does the Pacific Ocean have to do with the electricity you need to charge your phone?

Quite a lot, actually.

Scientists are monitoring the development of El Niño, a natural climate pattern that begins with unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific. It might seem a long way from South Africa, and it is, but changes in the Pacific can influence weather patterns thousands of kilometres away.

For Southern Africa, that can mean hotter and drier conditions, putting more pressure on water supplies and agriculture while increasing the risk of fires.

In the Western Cape, officials are already warning that the months ahead could bring higher temperatures, increased fire risk and greater pressure on water resources.

We don’t often connect what is happening with the climate to what is happening in our energy system. But we should. Our electricity system doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It operates in a world that is getting hotter, drier and more extreme. That changes things.

More extreme heat can drive up electricity demand as households and businesses try to keep cool. Fires, floods and severe storms can damage power lines, substations and other infrastructure used to distribute electricity. Water shortages can create additional challenges for parts of the electricity system that depend on reliable water supplies.

These impacts can have very real consequences. Damaged infrastructure can leave people without power. Rising demand can put an already stretched system under even more pressure. Repairs and replacements can increase costs. When the grid is under pressure, electricity becomes scarcer and more expensive.

When we connect the weather and electricity, one thing becomes clear: climate change is changing the conditions in which our electricity system has to operate.

South Africa’s electricity system isn’t exactly starting from a position of strength. We’ve spent years dealing with loadshedding, load reduction, breakdowns and expensive diesel backup, all of which have made the system unreliable, unaffordable and inaccessible.

Unpredictable weather caused by climate change adds another layer to these challenges.

At the same time, South Africa is in the middle of a major reform of its electricity system. We’re talking about electricity market reform, new generation, transmission infrastructure, electricity pricing, the future of Eskom, the role of renewable energy, and how to make electricity more affordable and accessible.

These decisions will shape our energy future. That means we can’t just ask, “Will the lights stay on?” We also need to ask, “Will the energy system we’re building be resilient to climate change?”

We may not have all the answers yet. But the current reforms give us an opportunity to think beyond simply producing more electricity and start thinking about the kind of energy future we want and need.

One that is reliable.

One that people can afford.

One that everyone can access.

One that can withstand a changing climate.

Written by: Boitumelo Masipa for 350.org

Sources:

Western Cape warns of El Niño risks as summer heat, fires and water pressure loom 

Transforming our energy system to ensure reliable and affordable electricity for all | South African Government 

The post Can South Africa’s Electricity System Weather What’s Coming? appeared first on 350.