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Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. 
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week Heat and firewaves

‘FIREWAVE’: Wildfires ravaged Europe and North America this week. France utilised water-dumping planes collecting from the Seine to contain a fire in the Fontainebleau forest near Paris, according to the Associated Press. The Financial Times reported that the UK has had “25 non-consecutive days with temperatures of 30C or more, including nine days above 34C”, creating a “firewave” and putting pressure on emergency services. Meanwhile, an “orange haze from Canada wildfires” could be “seen in Ontario and northern US”, said BBC News. 

‘NEW NORMAL’: Climate events previously seen as extreme are becoming the “new ‘normal’”, said the Met Office, in a report on the UK’s climate. While last year was the UK’s hottest on record, rising temperatures mean it is expected to be surpassed in the next few years, reported Reuters. Liz Bentley, head of the Royal Meteorological Society, told the Guardian that “climate change has been described by scientists for many years but is now increasingly being felt by the UK population in their own homes and communities”. 

Around the world

• ELECTRIFYING PUSH: The European Commission has announced a target for electricity to account for 46% of energy consumption across the bloc by 2040, reported Carbon Pulse. The commission has also made plans to adapt its emissions trading system to “bring relief to industry”, it said.
• FALLING OIL: The International Energy Agency said that global oil demand is expected to decline this year for the first time since 2020, reported the Associated Press.
• US ROLLBACKS: Trump cuts to clean energy support “led to the cancellation ​or delay of $83bn in investment across hundreds of projects”, reported Reuters. The Trump administration has also changed environmental law to allow development in the habitats of endangered species, according to CNN. 
• BURNHAM BEGINS: Incoming UK prime minister Andy Burnham is preparing to announce new North Sea drilling “within days of taking office”, said Bloomberg. Carbon Brief looked at 28 statements that Burnham has made about climate change and fossil fuels.
• DRY JULY: Drought in Uganda led to significant crop losses and at least 16 deaths from starvation, said BBC News. 
• ON AI: Australia planned to implement restrictions on energy and water usage for datacentres “amid [an] AI boom”, said the New York Times. 

38%

The drop in Brazilian Amazon deforestation in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, reported Al Jazeera.

Latest climate research

• The area of land burned by wildfires in Africa each year has reduced due to a shrinking dry season | Geophysical Research Letters
• Most people do not distinguish between climate adaptation and mitigation when thinking about tackling climate change | Climate Outreach
• An “effort-sharing framework” has been developed to support progress towards the Paris Agreement | npj Climate Action

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Carbon Brief explained how more than 1,000 heat-related deaths in England and Wales during May and June were attributed to climate change, accounting for almost half of all heat-related deaths experienced during those months. The article also unpacked the different methods for estimating heat deaths around the world.

Spotlight Natural History Museum exhibits climate change

This week, Carbon Brief interviews Meaghan Macdonald, senior project and programme manager for London’s Natural History Museum, about their first permanent climate-themed exhibition, Fixing Our Broken Planet.

Carbon Brief: Why are programmes such as Fixing Our Broken Planet so important?

Meaghan Macdonald: One of the main things we’re trying to achieve with Fixing Our Broken Planet is to place the museum as a convener of conversations around the planetary emergency…trying to bring together the different groups of people who need to be involved in this conversation in order to work together to find a solution. 

And we find that a lot of the people who come into the gallery weren’t necessarily coming here to see it; they come across it, which is a really great way to engage people who may not have been engaged in that discussion previously.

CB: How does the exhibition engage and inspire visitors?

MM: A driving force for this exhibition is that you are dealing with a subject matter that can be quite disheartening, and one of the things that we were very careful about is to try to make sure that woven throughout the scientific data… is a sense of hope… to enable people to feel empowered to make a difference. 

We were able to do things like our “what you can do” labels, which give an example that people can take away with them. We also have “conversation starters”, which is a digital screen that asks people a series of questions related to the planetary emergency. Things like: “Should we mine the deep sea to power the green economy?”…And there’s no right or wrong answer. 

We [also] set out very specifically to…forefront the science that’s happening here. We know from multiple studies from thinktanks and organisations that people actually trust our scientists the most. 

Natural History Museum’s Fixing Our Broken Planet exhibition. Credit: Micheal Melia / Alamy Stock Photo

CB: The museum has set out a goal to “create advocates for the planet”. What does this mean? How does it relate to the exhibition and the museum’s wider climate action?

MM: The aim of the museum is to get to a place where both people and the planet thrive. Being a library of the natural world, it is our duty to be standing up for it and to help people find their way, fighting for nature’s side. 

In order to create those advocates, the aim of the [exhibition] and the wider advocacy programmes at the museum is to try to find ways to bring all these people [individuals, policymakers, industry, scientists] together. 

We have the wider programme with Fixing Our Broken Planet. We have Generation Hope…a free graphic panel version of our display in the gallery that we have been able to get into a number of venues in Bangalore…the very long-standing and beloved wildlife photographer of the year [exhibition]…our urban nature movement…[and] an initiative that we are doing with the Department for Education called the National Education Nature Park.

Watch, read, listen

STUBBORN HOPE: For the Conversation, climate scientist Prof Peter Stott argued that researchers need to “talk more about the very worst-case scenarios” and the possibility for action. 

EXTREME: Vox’s the Gray Area podcast spoke to New York Times journalist David Wallace-Wells about the possibility of a “Godzilla” El Niño.

RESPONSIBILITY: For Climate Home News, two researchers from the Center for International Environmental Law explored how “major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed”.

Coming up

• 13-31 July: Meeting of the International Seabed Authority assembly and council, Kingston, Jamaica
• 17-19 July: 3rd International Conference on Environment and Sustainable Development, London
• 19 July: Presidential election, São Tomé and Príncipe

Pick of the jobs

• Zero Carbon Analytics, research lead | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote
• Met Office, ocean climate scientific manager | Salary: £54,515-£58,582. Location: Exeter
• National Trust, land use and nature delivery partner | Salary: £44,499. Location: Newcastle or York

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

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

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The post Debriefed 17 July 2026: UK ‘firewave’ | Fossil-fuelled heat deaths | London’s Natural History Museum spotlights climate appeared first on Carbon Brief.

We occasionally use flowers to decorate food, but few people would think of flowers themselves as food. Now a new study challenges that, finding that the common marigold contains protein levels similar to other plant-based sources.

This potentially opens up a new sustainable protein alternative to meat, especially as the new research finds that these flowers could have diverse uses in food.

For their experiments the researchers sourced an abundant supply of dried marigold flowers, and then set about extracting protein from their petals. First they blitzed these into a powder, creating a mixture that was distilled, centrifuged, and filtered. Next, they applied different chemical compounds including alcohol and sodium chloride to separate and extract ingredients from the mix. Among these were four types of protein: albumin, globulin, glutelin and prolamin. In each case the researchers measured how much protein they had extracted, and examined its structural composition. 

From this, they found they could extract almost 9 grams of protein per every 100 grams. These levels make marigolds nutritionally similar, in protein terms, to other edible flowers like the banana flower, which is commonly used in South Asian cuisine. Perhaps more familiar to many people is quinoa, a grain valued for its relatively high protein content: marigolds had similar protein levels to this popular foodstuff, too.  

This means marigolds could add to the increasing array of plant-based proteins, perhaps diversifying the options to attract people away from meat. But it wasn’t just the nutritional content that struck the researchers: they found that marigolds contained other properties which could make them a valuable additive for the food industry. 

 

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For example, the experiments showed that some proteins in marigolds have a low pH which make them a good emulsifying agent. This would be useful for making foods like mayonnaise and salad dressings where oil needs to be mixed into water. Other marigold proteins were found to remain stable at high temperatures of up to 105 °C—making them more reliable under heat pressure than other plant proteins like chickpeas—suggesting that it could be useful in baking applications. The researchers also highlight that the high globulin content in marigolds gives them a good foaming capacity, which is valuable for making aerated ingredients like whipped toppings for baked goods. 

Finding markets for this food stuff could be a challenge, as with any relatively new and unfamiliar food. But something that drove the researchers’ original interest in marigolds is the ready and abundant supply: huge quantities of these flowers end up as waste each year, especially in India and Mexico where millions of decorative marigolds are used in events and festivals. The researchers estimate that roughly 40% of used marigolds end up being thrown away. 

This is potentially a huge untapped supply of sustainable protein. “People are increasingly aware of food waste and are seeking innovative solutions,” says study lead author Anand Mohan, associate professor of food science and technology at the University of Georgia.

“Demonstrating that something as common and overlooked as a flower can be transformed into a valuable food ingredient makes science both relatable and impactful.”

Mohan et. al. “Assessing Structural, Thermal, and Functional Characteristics of Marigold Flower Protein as a Sustainable Food Ingredient.” ACS Food Science & Technology. 2026. 

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Recent weeks have seen a flurry of reports from public health authorities and scientists that estimate the deaths caused by Europe’s record-breaking summer heatwaves. 

In France, the national public health agency reported 2,025 excess deaths over the week where the heatwave peaked in June. 

Authorities in Germany and Netherlands put the excess death toll during the same seven-day period at 5,753 and 533, respectively.

An analysis from climate scientists in Carbon Brief found that France saw more than 2,700 heat-related deaths over 17 days in June.

Separate research estimated there had been 2,700 heat-related deaths in the UK’s May and June heatwaves – 42% of which had been caused by human-caused climate change.

There are a number of methods for how academics and governments tally deaths caused by extreme heat, each with their own advantages and drawbacks.

Here, Carbon Brief looks at the different ways scientists and public health authorities have calculated the death toll of Europe’s record-breaking summer heat. 

• How established is the science of calculating heat deaths?
• What are the different approaches to counting heat deaths?
• What do the latest figures show for Europe’s May and June heatwaves?
• What are the pros and cons of the ‘excess deaths’ method?
• What are the pros and cons of the ‘statistical modelling’ method?

How established is the science of calculating heat deaths?

Economists and epidemiologists have been studying the relationship between heat and mortality for nearly a century. 

A pioneering study published in 1923 by geographer Ellsworth Huntington and economist Margaret Justin that looked at mortality data for New York City over 1882-88 found that deaths increased rapidly as temperatures rose above 17C. 

As global temperatures have risen in response to human-caused carbon emissions, scientists have increasingly sought to understand how warming could impact mortality. 

The study of mortality caused by specific heatwave events dates back a few decades, with a 1995 heatwave in Chicago among the earliest events to be studied in detail.

Over the past decade, a growing number of studies have gone a step further, by estimating the number of deaths caused by a specific heatwave event and then attributing a percentage or number of those deaths to human-caused climate change. 

Carbon Brief covered the first study of this type, which was published in Environmental Research Letters in 2016 and focused on a 2003 summer heatwave that caused tens of thousands of deaths across Europe.

The study estimated that 506 of the 735 summer fatalities in Paris and 64 of the 315 in London were a result of human influence on the climate.

More recently, a study in Climatic Change found that 27% of deaths in a 2018 heatwave in Zurich, Switzerland were linked to human-caused climate change and a paper in Science Advances estimated that 11-15% of deaths in a 2021 heatwave in British Columbia were attributable to global warming. 

Dr Christopher Callahan, assistant professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, tells Carbon Brief this type of “two-step” study has “really exploded” in recent years:

“It is really only in the last five to 10 years that we have seen this, partly because it does require interdisciplinary expertise. You need people who know how to run the epidemiological models and you need a climate analysis of the counterfactual [world] without climate change, which is its own effort.” 

What are the different approaches to counting heat deaths?

A central challenge in estimating deaths from a heatwave is that heat is rarely recorded as the primary cause of death on death certificates.

However, exposure to high temperatures has wide-ranging effects on the human body, including the strain of keeping cool. This effort places pressure on the heart and kidneys.

As a result, heat extremes can worsen health risks from chronic conditions and cause acute kidney injury. Researchers have linked heat to increased mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as dementia and Alzheimer’s. 

As a result, public health authorities and scientists cannot depend on death certificates for a full count of heat-related deaths. They instead estimate heat deaths using a number of different approaches, each with assumptions baked into their calculations. 

Dr Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, who researches methods for calculating excess mortality due to extreme events at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College, tells Carbon Brief there is “no ground truth” when it comes to tallying heat-related deaths: 

“We don’t know what the heat-related deaths are, so we rely on different models to describe the picture.”

This makes the study of deaths from heatwaves similar to those from air pollution, he says:

“This sort of health-impact assessment has been done for years on studies related to deaths from air pollution, which have the same problem. Air pollution, until very recently, was not recorded on death certificates. 

“[However], for air pollution, the [scientific] literature is much larger, so no one questions that air pollution is toxic and kills. This sort of messaging for heat is more recent.”

There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to calculating deaths during a heatwave. 

The first involves counting the number of excess deaths relative to a period in the past. 

This method – often referred to as an “excess deaths” approach – looks at how many people died during a particular time period compared to a baseline period where there was no heatwave. 

To do this, public health authorities and researchers rely on official death figures reported by country authorities. 

The heat death tolls published in recent weeks by public health agencies in Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands relied on this approach. 

(For more, see: What are the pros and cons of the ‘excess deaths’ method?)

The second method uses long-term mortality data to understand the statistical relationship between temperature and mortality in a given place. The model that emerges can be used to infer the number of deaths from a heatwave in that place. 

In a rapid analysis published this week, researchers at Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the Met Office used this approach to estimate that the May and June heatwaves in the UK caused the deaths of 2,700 people.

Dr Callahan – working with Prof Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University – used this method to estimate that more than 2,700 people had died in France over a 17-day period in June in an analysis for Carbon Brief. 

(For more: see: What are the pros and cons of the ‘statistical modelling’ method?)

The majority of the figures released in the wake of Europe’s June heatwave have relied on these two methods.

There is a third way to calculate heat deaths, which is to look at official counts of deaths attributed on death certificates to heatstroke.

Callahan tells Carbon Brief that the “death-certificate coding” appears to have fallen out of favour in Europe – which he says is a “smart move” given that it does not provide a “full accounting”. 

Nevertheless, some public health authorities are still using this method. For example, in the wake of the heatwave in the US earlier this month, public health data showed 29 people in New Jersey and three people in New York had died from “heat-related illnesses”.

Scientists tell Carbon Brief the excess deaths and statistical modelling approaches both have advantages and drawbacks. These are explored below.

What do the latest figures show for Europe’s May and June heatwaves?

The table below shows the death numbers that have been reported by governments and researchers for Europe’s May and June heatwaves, including the approach used to reach the figures.

It suggests that multiple countries in Europe experienced more than 1,000 heat-related deaths during the late June heatwave, with authorities in Germany counting more than 5,000.

Meanwhile, the EuroMoMo mortality monitoring system estimated there were more than 10,500 excess deaths across 27 countries during the June heatwave. 

ReportedSourceCountry / regionDatesDaysDeathsLinkApproach 28/06/2026Public Health France ​France22-27 June61,000santepubliquefrance.fr Excess deaths 29/06/2026World Health OrganizationEurope21-28 June81,300x.com/DrTedros/status Excess deaths 01/07/2026Carlos III Health Institute (MoMo)Spain1-30 June301,033dw.com Excess deaths (all-cause and temperature-attributable) 02/07/2026National Institute for Public Health and the EnvironmentNetherlands22-28 June7480rivm.nl
Excess deaths 03/07/2026Public Health France ​France22-28 June72,025santepubliquefrance.fr Excess deaths 07/07/2026Chris Callahan/Andrew DesslerFrance12-29 June182,766carbonbrief.org Statistical modelling 08/07/2026Chris CallahanEurope15-28 June1413,975zenodo.org Statistical modelling 08/07/2026SciensanoBelgium18 June - 1 July141,747brusselstimes.com

Excess deaths 09/07/2026Robert Koch InstituteGermany22-28 June75,120rki.de Statistical modelling 13/07/2026Met Office/LSHTM/ImperialEngland and Wales22-27 June62,183drive.google.com Statistical modelling 13/07/2026Met Office/LSHTM/ImperialEngland and Wales24-26 May3553drive.google.com

Statistical modelling 13/07/2026EURO Mo/Mo27 European countries22-28 June710,650reuters.com Excess deaths 07/07/2025National Institute for Public Health and the EnvironmentNetherlands22-28 June7577archive.ph

Excess deaths 14/07/2026Germany Federal Statistical Office (Destatis)Germany22-28 June75,753destatis.de
Excess deaths

In most instances, Carbon Brief has linked to the figures published by public health authorities, where numbers were first reported. In some instances, figures were released on dashboards or webpages that are updated weekly. In these cases, Carbon Brief has linked to media reports or archived web content. 

What are the pros and cons of the ‘excess deaths’ method?

The excess deaths approach looks at how many more people died during a particular time period compared to a baseline period of the same length. 

For instance, on 14 July, Germany’s federal statistics agency, Destatis, published figures showing Germany saw 32% more deaths than the average in the week of 22-28 June, which was dominated by the heatwave.

Specifically, the agency said that 23,932 deaths had been recorded that week, compared to an average of 18,179 in that calendar week across the years 2022-25.

This suggests there were 5,753 excess deaths during the heatwave week. (This was a slight increase from preliminary Destatis figures released a week earlier, covered by Bloomberg.)

The Netherlands similarly calculates excess deaths by comparing death figures against an average of deaths in a similar period during unspecified “previous years”.

Data published by the country’s National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) shows that, during the week of 22-28 June, an estimated 3,626 people died in total in the northern European country. 

This is 577 more deaths than the 3,049 expected at that time of year, it said. (This is a slight revision upwards from the 480 excess deaths reported on 4 July by NL Times based on preliminary figures from NVIM.)

Callahan says that the excess deaths approach has the benefit of being rapid and relatively uncomplicated:

“It is something that public health authorities can put out fairly quickly without having to run a fancy model and do coding like the academic scientists do. It is a short-term, high-impact, rapid estimate of mortality.” 

The drawback to the approach is that it is impossible to decipher what percentage of these “all-mortality” excess deaths are, in fact, heat-related. 

Imperial College’s Konstantinoudis notes that the public often “feels more comfortable” with the excess deaths approach over the statistical modelling approach because the data it is using – the official death numbers – is based on real-world data. 

However, he stresses that excess deaths figures are based on a series of assumptions, including the reference period picked by researchers and how the numbers are interpreted.

Statisticians and researchers have to make a series of decisions, including what period to use as a comparative baseline. For example, the baseline period could be the week before a heatwave, the same week a year before – or an average of the same week across multiple years in the past. If averaging mortality of a similar period across a number of previous years, they must decide how much “weight”, or influence, each year should have.

They must also decide how to account for spikes in deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic years, as well as the gradual rise in average temperatures due to global warming.

During the pandemic, many governments and the World Health Organization (WHO) used the excess deaths approach to count deaths. The WHO said this metric was more “comparable” and “objective” than relying on national reports of Covid-19 deaths, given that different countries used different criteria for this classification.

A notable example of how assumptions can skew excess death figures came during this period, when the WHO estimated in 2022 that Germany had seen 195,000 excess deaths over two years of pandemic. 

However, after statisticians and epidemiologists pointed out the assumptions in the model were not suited to Germany’s demographics, the WHO retracted the figure and eventually reduced it to 122,000 and then later to 102,000.

Konstantinoudis explains:

“Covid taught us that it is complicated. Depending on the different assumptions used in the excess-mortality approach, you get different results…There is a scientific basis, but we should acknowledge the assumptions.” 

What are the pros and cons of the ‘statistical modelling’ method?

In the statistical modelling approach, researchers use models to determine the specific relationship between mortality and temperature for a particular location and then apply it to temperatures observed during a heatwave. 

This allows them to estimate the overall number of deaths that were caused by a heatwave. 

Previous research has revealed that, in most places of the world, there is a U-shaped response of mortality to temperature – where deaths increase rapidly in cold or hot conditions as daily maximum temperatures depart further from an “optimum temperature”.

For example, research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025 found that mortality rates in France rise as daily maximum temperatures move away from approximately 20C. This is shown in the chart below.

Relationship between daily high temperature and all-cause mortality rates in France, estimated using data over 2004-19. Credit: Dr Christopher Callahan, based on data and methods in Callahan et al. (2025)

Indiana University’s Callahan say this approach allows scientists to “formally establish a relationship between the temperature and the mortality”, adding:

“If you do these calculations right, you can credibly say your entire estimate of mortality is heat-related.”

Prof Antonio Gasparrini, biostatistician and epidemiologist at LSHTM, explains the method relies on “timeseries models that apply relatively sophisticated statistical methods in which you ‘smooth’ trends occurring in time, so you control for long-term trends and seasonality”. 

He says that these models also allow researchers to “remove” trends affecting mortality that are unrelated to heat – for instance, the impacts of the pandemic. They can also “add” other information, such as around how air pollution combines with heat to threaten vulnerable populations.  

Gasparrini adds:

“What statistical modelling can bring is that it is more refined. It can link specific temperatures to specific impacts rather than just looking at the event [in the whole]. And also, it can be localised – [data] can be stratified at a fine scale and we can look at impacts at different scales.

“So, it is more informative. But, at the same time, of course, it’s based on more assumptions than the [excess deaths approach] and, of course, needs to be checked and compared.” 

The approach depends on a number of judgment calls from scientists and statisticians, including the years picked to underpin the model and how to capture the lag in deaths in the days and weeks after a heatwave event. 

They must also decide at what threshold to start counting deaths – in other words, whether to count all deaths above the “optimum temperature” or set a higher, more extreme value – and whether and how to account for any adaptation to heat extremes that may have been put in place in the study area.

A benefit of the statistical modelling approach is that it opens the door for being able to attribute a specific number of deaths to human-caused climate change. 

By applying the temperature-mortality curve to both the temperatures of the recent heatwave and a counterfactual world without climate change, scientists can estimate what proportion of estimated deaths only occurred because the world is warming.

For instance, Imperial College, LSHTM and Met Office researchers found that 59% and 38% of heat-related deaths in the UK’s May and June heatwaves, respectively, could be attributed to climate change. Their findings are shown in the chart below.

Number of heat deaths in England and Wales over 21-29 May and 18-28 June attributable to climate change. Source: Barnes et al (2026).

Some climate-sceptic commentators have argued that modelled estimates are hypotheses and should therefore be treated with caution.

On 13 July, climate-sceptic news website GB News covered a blog post by Oxford academics that argued the figure that 2,700 people had died in the UK’s May and June heatwaves was not reflected in the provisional “all-mortality” data put out by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). Quoting the blog, GB News said:

“Modelling tells us nothing. Models explore possibilities; surveillance tells us what happened. When the two disagree, our instinct should be to investigate the data rather than simply trust the model.”

However, Imperial’s Konstantinoudis – who worked on the models behind the 2,700 figure – says it is important to await the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA)’s annual heat mortality report before arriving at any conclusions. He explains:

“While we are entirely clear that our current findings are modelled estimates, this methodology has consistently delivered comparable results to the UKHSA’s own official analyses of observed deaths for past heat events.”

(The UKHSA report will include updated figures and estimate excess deaths from heat based on specific periods of heat in different regions, whereas the provisional ONS figures cover all national deaths during a full-week period.)

Konstantinoudis says both the excess deaths and statistical modelling approaches have been the subject of extensive peer-reviewed scientific study and can provide a “holistic view of what is happening” when used together. 

Studies that have compared statistical modelling approaches for estimating heatwave deaths with excess death figures in the UK have found they yield broadly similar results. 

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The post Q&A: Europe’s May and June heatwave deaths – and how they were counted appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Headline News:

• “Six Records Solar And Storage Have Crushed In The First Half Of 2026” • Electricity demand is rising, and America needs more power, fast. But solar and storage are delivering. Across the US, the industry is breaking records at a pace that might have been unimaginable just a few years ago. For starters, 91% of new grid capacity in Q1 was solar and storage. [CleanTechnica]

Solar array (Dad Hotel, Unsplash, cropped)

• “Europe’s Booming Solar Fleet Has Saved €20 Billion In Gas Imports Since Iran War, Analysis Shows” • SolarPower Europe analysis shows that solar power saved Europe €20 billion over the time between 1 March and 15 July by lowering demand for gas imports. Over the 137-day period, solar delivered average daily savings of €146 million. [Euronews]
• “What It’s Like Living In One Of The World’s Hottest Towns” • In May, temperatures in the North Indian town of Banda hit a blistering 48.2°C (118.8°F). It was one of several times this year that the town recorded India’s highest temperature. It is called the hottest town on Earth. People work there. And they care for the animals that live there. [Euronews]
• “Cadeler Strengthens Its Hand With Delivery Of Wind Ace” • Cadeler has taken delivery of its eleventh wind installation vessel, Wind Ace. The vessel was built at the COSCO Shipping Offshore shipyard in Qidong, China, and was delivered on schedule and within budget after more than 3.5 million working hours. It will be deployed initially in the UK. [reNews]
• “Science Panel Backs Climate Research, Diverging From The Administration’s View” • A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine backs research finding how much climate change may contribute to extreme weather events. The report could play a role in lawsuits seeking billions of dollars from fossil fuel companies. [MSN]

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

In the face of the intersecting crises of demography, technology and economic insecurity, finding solidarity in the care we give each other offers a path to a more optimistic future. But working towards this requires us to challenge the foundational assumptions of the economy that surrounds us, one that devalues rather than celebrates the care we give each other.

The language of crisis defines our collective experience of the 21st century. As our attention is pulled from one emergency to another, we risk overlooking the mindsets that enable these shocks – not only the pursuit of extraction, growth, and profit, but also our collective relationship with care.  

Care shows up in all our lives – in parenting, foster care and paid care work; in receiving care, or being part of communities. At some point, we all need to care for others and be cared for ourselves. Yet care has been systematically undervalued and under-resourced as a result of those dominant mindsets.  

This isn’t a new issue. Unpaid care labour – particularly the assumption that it is labour carried out by women – is a foundational premise of our modern economy. While more women than ever taking up paid labour is a positive outcome of changing social norms, little has been done to reckon with the implications this has for unpaid care. Particularly as people live longer and Europe’s population shifts, the need for change becomes ever more pressing.  

That care has traditionally been women’s work only compounds the perception that it lacks value and due attention.

But doing so is at odds with an economy that only rewards profit and productivity as, statistically speaking, so much of the care we give to each other counts as neither. Social security systems and wider public services that sustain care have seen weakened investment and wealth extraction through privatisation.  

In England and Wales, research shows that those with a closer relationship to care – whether they receive or give, caring services more than the average person – are more at risk of experiencing poverty: children (31 per cent versus 21 per cent for the rest of the population), larger families (44 per cent of children in large families) disabled people (28 per cent, compared to 20 per cent for able-bodied people) and unpaid carers (23 per cent).  

Where the language of crisis sets off panic, solutions are presented in the form of quick fixes like further investment in AI and technology. From managing workflow to increasing accessibility and translations, predicting future need and remotely monitoring vital signs, there are clear uses for technological innovations across social care settings. But additional research shows that both the public and workers are wary of the impact of less human connection in care and healthcare settings. Whilst inserting new technology for the sake of productivity may in fact achieve the opposite – open up more time for human-led care – there is also a risk that this motivation reinforces existing attempts to minimise investment in human care and ignores the role of unpaid care in our lives. 

Rather than seeing care as another crisis to tackle at surface level, it should be seen as the driver of a shift for our economic model. Facing up to this reality will require us to reckon with the importance of care in our lives and to acknowledge  different experiences of care as separate as having more in common than divides them.  

How did we get here? 

Although European countries invest in care to differing degrees, the Europe-wide approach  is rooted in a shared ideology that sees care as either a burden or a deficit. Feminist economics shows that this ideology is inseparable from the logics of neoliberalism. As writer and academic Emma Dowling articulates, “care… is a cost to capital”, and it follows that this cost must be minimised. When economic success is measured according to GDP growth, any such cost is at odds with ideas of economic progress. Feminist economist Emma Holten lays bare the extent to which measures of economic progress and care are in conflict with one another: “[In] the eyes of GDP, taking care of a flock of kids and taking a nap are equivalent. Either way you are unproductive.” 

Whilst some argue we should factor care into GDP calculations in order to appreciate its value, this would merely align care with capitalism rather than engage with the bigger question of whether capitalism will enhance or degrade the quality of care. With a growing number of economists identifying GDP’s dominance over the economy as detrimental to wellbeing, greater ambition over the scale of change needed is essential. 

That care has traditionally been women’s work only compounds the perception that it lacks value and due attention. This gendered divide endures: women, for example, take on at least two and a half times more housework and care work than men globally – despite this being a socially created and maintained inequality. 

Overcoming these gendered and capitalist mindsets will require action across multiple fronts. Our research with grassroots activists whose work spans different relationships with care identified a range of opportunities to act in solidarity towards a more caring economy: in our communities, in the ways we work, and through the welfare state. 

Communities: Care by design 

In our communities, resisting capitalist framings requires us to work together to create a culture that celebrates care and enables it by design. How we design the places we live is one element of this. Conventionally, care is compartmentalised into specific policy spaces; often this means it is squeezed into the remit of health and social care systems. But for many people, care intersects with their lives in a much more comprehensive way.  

In Barcelona, care blocks offer an alternative way of thinking about how the places in which  we live influence our care for one another. The city has applied to care the principles of the commons (the idea that resources are shared and co-governed by their user community), and emboldened them with material resources and participatory local democratic processes in a municipalist approach. 

These care blocks sprang from Barcelona en Comu (BComu), a political platform that centred feminist economic thinking, reframing care as a public responsibility as opposed to a private issue. They started from a place whereby care is foundational and where those who are the providers of care are centred in policy decisions. Bringing together the many policy threads that impact those who undertake care labour at a local level moved the approach to care – crucially, by foregrounding its place in the city’s economy. 

BComu approached care holistically rather than in a compartmentalised way. Despite bureaucratic barriers, they supported care workers to set up cooperatives and worked to create the abovementioned care blocks whose goal was to enable small teams of workers to support a defined number of people in a fixed geographic location. Workers use a self-managing team model; they also have full-time contracts (as opposed to the more common zero-hours contracts, thereby mitigating economic insecurity), and a space to meet and plan their work. The intention is to improve labour conditions (including travel time between clients), improve the experience of beneficiaries of care, and create a more integrated service with wider health and social services. 

In addition, BComu is creating Centres of Care in these neighbourhoods bringing together a range of services for care workers and those undertaking unpaid care in a range of forms. It expanded its municipal children’s services to enable more women from low income families to undertake paid work. 

Whilst many of Barcelona’s individual initiatives may be familiar to other countries, their political philosophy of bringing different groups together, placing resources in one place, and using a local approach sets BComu’s work apart. By centring inequality and the recognition that “care work is everyone’s responsibility”, they have taken steps to address the devaluing of care in all its forms. 

Work: Rebalancing time 

How we spend our time also significantly impacts our ability to take on different caring relationships. The norms governing paid labour contain fertile ground for change. Across Europe, paid work is failing people with a relationship to care, from disabled people to unpaid carers and parents. The EU’s disability employment gap sat at 24 per cent in 2024, whilst in the UK it’s at around 30 per cent. Meanwhile, some 600 unpaid carers leave paid work every day in the UK alone. Our recent research into unpaid carers’ experiences of poverty exemplifies this, with one unpaid carer telling us, “I was a teacher, but [care] was taking all my evenings… so I’ve got a new job but it’s paying a lot less.” 

Discussions around paid work tend to converge on a vague commitment to flexible working or access to unpaid or low-paid leave for specific groups. Yet such targeted reforms do little to engage with the systems that have led to the norms we have today. Here, solidarity across caring experiences has the potential to embolden campaigns to drive care’s recognition as a collective experience that are currently compartmentalised. Take paid leave. In the UK, different campaigners are working to increase paid sick leave, statutory paternity leave, and paid carers leave. Each of these is an act of rebalancing our paid labour with our wider lives, and any such campaign must speak to the underlying mindsets that devalue care for ourselves and each other.  

Moving from compartmentalised action to transformative change speaks to the increasing recognition in new economic thinking, rooted in feminist economics, that we must recognise the role unpaid care plays in our economy and the need to shift our paid labour model to value and enable care. A more systemic rebalancing of time is needed. 

This year will mark a century since the five-day work week was adopted by the Ford Motor Company, a significant win after a long campaign by unions. A decade prior to this, the average work week was between 50 and 60 hours. Since 1926, average working hours have plateaued, currently standing at 37.5 for women and 39 for men. 

There is growing interest and evidence for a move to a four-day work week, with pilots undertaken globally. Rebalancing the amount of time we spend in paid labour, without loss of pay, is a crucial way to centre care in our lives. In Poland, the government announced a pilot for a shorter working week in 2025 to address some of the longest working hours in Europe. Employers can voluntarily test a flexible approach to shorter working hours, either by reducing daily working hours, increasing the weekend by one day, or providing more annual leave, all whilst maintaining salaries. The pilot received four times the anticipated sign-ups from employers, with over 2000 companies currently undertaking a trial. 

In Germany, 45 organisations were recruited for a two-year pilot to trial a four-day work week, whilst in the UK, a further 61 trialled the same over six months. Across different contexts, results show that productivity improves (an obvious priority for employers), opening space for a better relationship with care. Improvements in wellbeing are also significant, with sick days declining and employees reporting a reduction in stress. 

Social security: Towards universalism 

The social security system is another essential pillar for a more flexible approach to paid work. For those whose caring role means that paid work is not possible, or is limited, the system should provide enough support to live well without having to minimise that care. 

In Europe, improvements in living conditions, shifting attitudes to illness and disability, and innovations in healthcare have meant more of us live longer. Countries have responded to this in different ways, with different degrees of investment in social security and social care. However, the vast majority of care is still provided by family and friends, much of it unpaid. 

In the 1970s, the UK introduced the Invalid Care Allowance (now Carer’s Allowance) for single people caring for a disabled family member. The allowance is now available to all people over 18 who are not in full-time education and are providing care for 35 hours or more a week. There are challenges with the UK model, not least its low payment level, but we can look to it as a starting point for considering how we value and enable those providing unpaid care.  

The idea that our social security systems are there to support our different relationships with care opens up the possibility of more universal provision too. Whilst payments for unpaid carers – and for disabled people who face extra costs – are essential to ensure everyone is able to live well, there is also a case to be made for a universal basic income (UBI) that overcomes the need for boundaries and thresholds around what counts as care. Any model would need to account for the additional costs faced by disabled people in an ableist society, but a foundation of UBI could go some way to enabling care in all our lives. 

Moving from compartmentalised action to transformative change speaks to the increasing recognition in new economic thinking, rooted in feminist economics…

A long road ahead 

Whilst UBI is a longer road, we are seeing early shifts across Europe towards a rebalancing of paid and unpaid labour, towards places designed around care that could enable us all to live well. As a care-experienced collaborator told us of a caring future, it “is imbued with the principles of love, care and freedom for all…we have an obligation to keep that alive and flourishing, to demand a multitude of futures that aren’t eschatological and annihilistic.” Embracing that care is a collective experience, and using that knowledge to act together, in solidarity, to change the mindsets that shape our economy is a source of hope. 

'Cosy games' have grown in popularity in recent years but can they be more than mere escapism? Dr Stephanie Farnsworth investigates

The post Pokopia, cosy games and the problem of escapism appeared first on Red Pepper.

• Not only is speeding wasteful and dangerous, it only saves the average driver less than a minute off their commute. (Yahoo!)
• The U.S. DOT has removed bike lanes and speed cameras from its list of best practices that have been shown to reduce crashes and save lives. (NPR)
• A long article in tech magazine Noema argues that driverless cars save lives even if most people don’t perceive them as safe.
• People who work from home one day a week drive more than full-time commuters, while those who work from home at least three days a week drive less. (Science Direct)
• A Democratic bill would provide $205 billion over five years for high-speed rail projects. (Streetsblog USA)
• Distracted driving declined 14 percent after Iowa passed a law banning the use of mobile devices while driving. (Government Technology)
• A new depot is essential to the success of Austin’s light rail line. (Metro Magazine)
• Video of police stopping a Black Pennsylvania teen for jaywalking went viral. (Patriot-News)
• The last streetcar bridge in Washington, D.C. will be torn down, allowing the National Park Service to reopen a trail that’s been closed due to falling debris. (WTOP)
• Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wants to slash bus service and future transit projects to close a budget cap. (Herald; paywall)
• The Milwaukee County Transit System is facing 25 percent bus service cuts. (Urban Milwaukee)
• Bike traffic in Paris increased by 240 percent between 2018 and 2023. (Momentum Mag)
• Some Southeast Asian cities are organized around rivers rather than roads. (Arch Daily)
• Toronto is integrating bikeshare and public transit. (Cities Today)

Nearly half a century after the Iranian Revolution, its outcome is still widely treated as inevitable. The Shah fell, the story goes, and a deeply religious society naturally produced an Islamic state. Clerical rule appears, in hindsight, as history fulfilling cultural destiny. This interpretation is politically convenient and historically wrong.

The Islamic Republic did not emerge because Iranian society was inherently predisposed toward theocracy. Nor was the victory of the clerical leadership preordained. The Revolution was a profoundly social upheaval shaped by competing class forces, organisational strengths, political miscalculations, and strategic struggles within the revolutionary camp itself.

The Revolution did not have to end with clerical rule. Its outcome was fought over and decided.

The Revolution contained democratic and egalitarian possibilities that were defeated through political struggle rather than cultural destiny.

Understanding why matters urgently today, not only for interpreting Iran’s past, but also for understanding why opposition to imperial aggression against Iran cannot be confused with political support for the regime that ultimately consolidated power.

A social revolution, not a religious eruption

The overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah was the culmination of decades of uneven capitalist transformation imposed from above. Oil revenues financed industrialisation, urban expansion and state-led modernisation, yet political participation remained tightly controlled. Rural displacement accelerated, inequality widened, and millions were pushed into precarious urban existence.

By 1978, dissent had escaped elite circles and become mass rebellion. Demonstrations paralysed major cities, but it was the strike movement,

particularly among oil workers, that fatally undermined the monarchy. Production halted, state income collapsed, and the regime’s coercive apparatus began to fracture.

Across factories and workplaces, workers established councils known as shoras. These bodies supervised hiring, challenged management authority and, in some cases, exercised direct control over production. They emerged organically from struggle rather than religious mobilisation. For a brief historical moment, power was fragmented between a collapsing state and newly created popular institutions.

The Revolution opened a vacuum. What followed was not the automatic triumph of Islamism but a struggle over who would fill that space.

Genuine emancipation, in Iran as elsewhere, can only be the work of those struggling within society itself.

Islamist networks entered this struggle with decisive advantages. Decades of repression had shattered secular parties, socialist organisations, and independent unions. Mosques, religious charities, and clerical networks, however, survived as nationwide infrastructures embedded in everyday social life.

Religious discourse also translated diverse grievances into a shared moral language. Economic injustice, political repression and national humiliation could all be framed as symptoms of moral corruption. This allowed bazaar merchants, students, professionals and the recently urbanised poor to imagine themselves united within a single revolutionary community. Yet this unity concealed deep contradictions.

Islamist leadership mobilised popular anger against dictatorship and foreign domination while defending private property and social hierarchy. It invoked justice for the oppressed while opposing independent working-class organisations and women’s emancipation. Its strength lay precisely in bridging incompatible social interests under a common ideological umbrella.

The decisive question was not whether alliances with such forces should exist. Revolutions make alliances unavoidable. The question was how those alliances were conducted.

The alliance dilemma

Opposition to the Shah necessarily brought together secular radicals, nationalists, liberals, and religious activists. Cooperation during the struggle against dictatorship was both inevitable and legitimate. No single force could defeat the regime alone. The catastrophe emerged after victory.

For a brief historical moment, power was fragmented between a collapsing state and newly created popular institutions.

Large sections of the Iranian Left interpreted the clerical leadership primarily through its anti-imperialist rhetoric. Because it opposed U.S. influence and denounced the monarchy’s Western alignment, it was treated as a progressive partner whose authority should not be challenged during a supposedly transitional stage. Alliance gradually became political subordination.

Instead of maintaining organisational independence while cooperating in struggle, major left currents endorsed referendums legitimising clerical authority, muted criticism of repression and accepted restrictions imposed in the name of revolutionary unity. Independent criticism was postponed precisely when power was being consolidated.

The problem was not cooperation itself. Refusing a united struggle would have isolated the Left from the revolutionary masses. The disaster lay in abandoning political autonomy.

Revolutionary alliances require clarity about divergent social projects. In Iran, shared opposition to the Shah was mistaken for shared visions of the future.

The weakness of the workers’ movement deepened this imbalance. Although factory councils proliferated rapidly, they remained locally rooted and politically fragmented. No national structure emerged capable of transforming workplace militancy into an alternative centre of authority.

As analysed in studies of Iranian labour movements, workers possessed immense disruptive power but lacked durable institutions linking factories across sectors and regions. Without coordination, economic control could not become political power.

Clerical leaders moved swiftly to contain this threat. Strikes were denounced as harmful to national recovery. Appeals to Islamic unity reframed labour demands as selfish disruptions of the Revolution. Workers who had paralysed the monarchy were encouraged, and increasingly pressured, to restore production. Gradually, leverage evaporated.

Counterrevolution from within

The consolidation of clerical rule unfolded not simply through repression but through political struggle inside revolutionary institutions themselves.

Professional and managerial layers anxious about workplace democracy aligned with efforts to restore discipline. Islamic activists reshaped councils into structures loyal to the emerging state. Revolutionary committees increasingly functioned as mechanisms of central authority rather than grassroots power.

Counterrevolution did not restore the Shah’s order. It emerged from within the victorious coalition itself.

By the early 1980s, independent organisations were marginalised or destroyed. Repression followed political isolation rather than preceding it. The revolutionary opening narrowed step by step until clerical monopoly became reality.

Subsequent interpretations often fall into opposing simplifications. One portrays Islamist movements as inherently fascistic enemies, justifying alliances with authoritarian states or liberal elites. The other romanticises them as authentic anti-imperialist forces. Iran demonstrates the inadequacy of both views.

Movements rooted in social dislocation can simultaneously challenge domination and impose new forms of hierarchy. Cooperation in struggle may be necessary, but political independence is indispensable. Without it, the most organised force captures revolutionary energy and reshapes it to its own ends. The Iranian Left’s tragedy was an uncritical alliance.

Iran under attack

These historical lessons acquire renewed urgency amid ongoing military threats and attacks against Iran today.

The Islamic Republic is an authoritarian state that has repressed workers, jailed dissidents and crushed democratic movements. None of this should be minimised. Yet opposition to that regime cannot translate into support for external aggression.

Imperial intervention has never delivered emancipation in the Middle East. From Iraq to Libya, military assaults carried out in the language of liberation have destroyed societies while strengthening reactionary forces. Foreign bombardment does not empower democratic movements. It devastates the very social actors capable of producing internal change. Deliverance cannot come from imperialism.

External attack strengthens authoritarian rule by allowing regimes to present themselves as defenders of national sovereignty. It sidelines internal dissent, militarises politics and fractures civil society. Those who suffer first are workers, students and ordinary civilians, not ruling elites.

Defending Iran against imperial aggression, therefore, does not mean endorsing its rulers. It means recognising that social transformation can only emerge from struggles within society itself.

The same principle applies today as in 1979. Liberation cannot be imposed from above, whether by clerics or by foreign powers.

The endurance of the Islamic Republic should not obscure the contingency of its origins. The Revolution contained democratic and egalitarian possibilities that were defeated through political struggle rather than cultural destiny.

Recurring protest waves in Iran, labour strikes, women-led uprisings and youth mobilisation reveal tensions rooted in that unfinished revolutionary moment. The demands remain familiar: dignity, economic justice and political freedom.

Remembering that the Revolution did not have to end in clerical rule restores historical agency. Outcomes are shaped by organisation, leadership and strategy.

Iran’s experience shows that alliances are unavoidable in revolutionary moments. But whether they liberate or suffocate depends on maintaining independence, clarity, and the capacity to challenge allies once victory reshapes the terrain.

And it reminds us of something equally essential today. Authoritarian rule cannot be overthrown by bombs, sanctions or foreign intervention. Genuine emancipation, in Iran as elsewhere, can only be the work of those struggling within society itself.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Amir Hesaminejad; modified by Tempest.

The post Iran’s Revolution was not destined to end in clerical rule appeared first on Tempest.

Today, multiple news outlets reported that President Trump’s teleprompter operator has been placing profitable bets on Kalshi regarding the content of Trump’s forthcoming speeches. Public Citizen has repeatedly appealed to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the prediction markets, to investigate and enforce the laws against insider trading. On March 5, 2026, Public Citizen filed an insider trading complaint with the CFTC following highly suspicious trades on the timing and developments of the American invasion of Iran. On April 30, 2026, Public Citizen and Better Markets urged the CFTC to conduct rulemaking on prediction markets trading activity.

Craig Holman, Ph.D., government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen issued the following statement:

“Betting on political events on the prediction markets has become highly profitable for a small handful of anonymous bettors. Ever since the American invasion of Venezuela and Iran, a few people have been placing very large bets moments before the events take place, and scoring millions in profits. The timing and accuracy of these bets strongly suggest insider trading, probably by a few individuals in the know within the Trump administration.

“News just broke that Trump’s teleprompter operator has been placing such bets on the content of Trump’s upcoming speeches. This is further evidence of illegal insider trading on the prediction markets – an industry that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has let operate like the Wild West.

“Public Citizen again calls on the CFTC to wake up and do its job of overseeing the prediction market industry and enforcing the insider trading laws.”

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) today published an authoritative report, Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts, that validates the science connecting individual weather disasters and their lethal societal impacts directly to human-caused fossil fuel pollution. In response, Stephanie Brancaforte, climate accountability campaign director with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, issued the following statement:

“For decades, Big Oil knowingly poisoned our atmosphere and deceived the public about the impacts of burning fossil fuels —all the while lining executives’ pockets as communities continue to suffer from extreme heat, floods and fires.

“The science is clear: the extreme heat killing thousands of people in the northern hemisphere this summer is neither an unpredictable event nor an accident—it is the result of corporate crime. With the backing of the National Academies, survivors of climate catastrophes now have strong evidence to pursue justice against fossil fuel polluters to pay for the devastation they have unleashed.”

Utility-scale solar’s levelized cost of electricity ranges between $40/MWh and $98/MWh, while combined cycle gas ranges between $51/MWh and $129/MWh, said a report from Lazard.

The National Academies of Sciences released a report today that puts the full weight of the country's most respected scientific institution behind extreme weather attribution science, affirming that the field can reliably connect specific disasters to fossil fuel pollution. The three-year review comes as nearly two dozen states and municipalities sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages, while roughly a dozen states advance climate superfund legislation that would force the industry to help pay for climate-related damage. Legal experts say the report could significantly strengthen both efforts.

Fossil fuel companies aren't waiting to find out. Congress is weighing legislation, and several states have already passed laws that would shield oil and gas companies from climate liability altogether — including model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council for other states to adopt. In response to the report, the Make Polluters Pay campaign released the following statement.

Statement from Cassidy DiPaola, Communications Director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign:

"The National Academies just gave courts, cities, and communities something they've long needed: the full weight of the country's most authoritative scientific body behind attribution science. It affirms what researchers and international bodies like the IPCC have long recognized — that we can say, with real confidence, which extreme weather events were made worse by fossil fuel pollution, and how much damage that pollution caused.

The fossil fuel industry understands exactly what this means. That's why they've spent years trying to discredit attribution science as a field, and why they and their allies in Congress and state legislatures are racing right now to pass liability shield laws. They can't out-argue hundreds of peer-reviewed studies backed by the country's most respected scientific institution, so instead they're trying to make the law immune to the science. They know this research doesn't just describe a hotter world, but draws a line from their products to specific floods, heat waves, and deaths, and from there to who should pay for the damage.

Attribution science now underpins how cities plan for disaster, how insurers price risk, how public health officials prepare for heat deaths, and how courts weigh accountability. The only people with an interest in pretending otherwise are the ones being asked to pay for the damage they caused."

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by SFMTA’s Director of Transportation, Julie Kirschbaum, who oversees San Francisco’s public transit system, Muni. She discusses system improvements, rising customer satisfaction, lessons from the pandemic on ridership and operations as well as Muni’s cultural connection to the city.

Listeners can enjoy the audio with the player embedded below, scroll a little further for a partial edited transcript or peruse an AI-generated transcript of the entire episode.

Jeff Wood: Muni was at the front of a lot of innovation during the pandemic across the country, and I’m curious, since you were on the front lines of that, if there’s anything that you or your agency learned specifically from that time period, about what transit agencies can do, what they can’t do — or what we tell ourselves that we can or can’t do.

I’m interested in that kind of story because it’s interesting to think about then and now, and this is different than that ridership discussion. It’s more about operations and thinking about what agencies are set up to do well — or what is harder for us just generally.

Julie Kirschbaum: We learned to learn, I think. COVID allowed us the space to try a lot of different things. Some worked better than others, and being willing to stick with what was working and walk away from — or have some clear parameters for calling it — things that were not working, was a big part of our success. We really used the fact that we had to so significantly change the way our system looked during COVID, to bring service back in a much more deliberate way.

Prior to COVID, we really had more service on paper than we were set up to deliver every day, and that essentially represented a broken trust with our customers because if we could fill all the trips on a route each day, you might have a 20-minute wait time. But on a bad day, you might wait 40 or 50 minutes. But if, if you have to get to your job or an appointment or school, you’re planning that extra time whether you end up needing it or not, and so it can be really frustrating. So it was hard, and we had a lot of really strong policymaker support.

But bringing back the service only at the pace where we could hire operators to deliver every single trip was a huge key to our success, and then trying new things like new transit lanes, using technology instead of a traditional paper schedule to deliver the service, shutting down the subway early one week every quarter so that we could do all the hard maintenance jobs, all proved to be key to our success. But underlying all of that was just not being overextended.

Jeff Wood: Can you tell me a little bit more about that maintenance? The system is old. It’s been around a long time. There’s a lot of little things that can go wrong or need fixing before they do go wrong, and so I’m curious about that process of going in and making sure the system is maintained so you’re not having a computer that could operate Pong on it operating the subway.

Julie Kirschbaum: In a typical weekday night, our window to do maintenance is only about two and a half to three hours long. And then, if you add into that the amount of time it takes to safely power down the system so you can do the work and then have time to power it back up, that two and a half to three hours becomes 45 minutes to an hour, and 45 minutes to an hour is not a lot of time to do deep maintenance work.

We found, through our Fix It Week program, that we could take that same concept of overnight work, but instead of having 45 minutes to an hour of work time, we could get hundreds of labor hours in just a very short time period by having an eight-hour work window instead of a three-hour work window by bringing all of our day crews to work overnight.

And by planning out the work so that every part of the tunnel, and the stations, and the fan rooms all have work going on simultaneously. It’s been a great opportunity for us to do proactive maintenance work on our infrastructure, which mirrors what we do on our buses. But because our buses are modular, it’s always been a little bit easier to plan that.

Meteorologists warn that this year’s El Niño may be one of the strongest on record. As communities around the world brace for more extreme weather events, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is helping farmers build resilience.

Every two to seven years, El Niño causes widespread disruptions around the world, from drought to heavy rains. Past ones “have left economies devastated,” Sara Mbago-Bhunu, Director of East and Southern Africa Division at IFAD, tells Food Tank. 

The U.N. agency works with governments and development partners to put prevention measures in place before a crisis hits. Seasonal climate forecasts and early warning systems can inform planning, identify vulnerable areas, and establish preparedness measures.

“All regions really should be willing to prepare for this,” Mbago-Bhunu says. Because El Niño will look different across geographies, mapping helps IFAD understand the likely impacts and how to adapt accordingly.

Ethiopia, northern Uganda, Zambia, and Mozambique, for example, are likely to see less rain during their main growing season. In these regions, water capture technologies must be scaled up. Meanwhile in Tanzania and coastal Kenya—likely to experience higher-than-average rainfall—flood-resistant roads, warehouses, and markets are needed.

Mbago-Bhunu says that governments across the continent understand the importance of building more resilient systems, not only to respond to El Niño, but also to the broader effects of the climate crisis.

“They understand if they don’t invest in their water tables, in their water towers, they will not be able to have productive capacities to feed their populations in the future,” she tells Food Tank. “They also understand that supporting soil fertility might not see immediate gains, but will definitely have future returns.”

But funding for climate adaptation in Africa remains inadequate. “We get a fraction of global funding as it is,” Mbago-Bhunu says. “So [governments] have to mobilize cheaper sources of financing domestically and then…channel those into longer term solutions.”

This approach pays off, Mbago-Bhunu argues. She points to the last El Niño in 2023, which affected more than 1 million Zambian households. Around US$900 was required to provide life-saving aid and early recovery assistance—far more than the cost of preventative measures.

“Investing in resilience is cheaper than responding to disaster.”

Listen to the full conversation with Sara Mbago-Bhunu to hear about the unique vulnerabilities women and girls face from extreme weather events, how IFAD leverages resources from its projects to respond to urgent needs, and what the private sector can do to support farmers and governments.

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 courtesy of Richard Nyoni, Unsplash

The post Investing in Resilience Will Help Farmers Weather the Super El Niño appeared first on Food Tank.

With a target completion date of 2029, the project is expected to deliver 2.5 GW of generation and 2.9 GWh of battery storage to the regional grid, the tech giant said.

The June 18 show cause orders finally take aim at the load interconnection mess. But the customers who get power faster will be the ones who show up ready to flex, writes Shalin Savalia, a senior electrical engineer.

Horne 5: A Sword of Damocles Hanging Over a Heavily Polluted Urban Area Quebec, Canada

Abstract

The Cultural Landscape of Rouyn-Noranda

Horne 5 – A Sword of Damocles

Timeline of Resistance

The turning point

Portraits of the activists

The systemic oppression of extraction

And to what end?

Endnotes

Download

Image: Horne 5. Credit: Ressources Falco Ltée, Rouyn-Noranda. (1)

Abstract

Our emblematic case of resistance to extractivism concerns the reopening of a mine in the city of Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec (Canada). Falco Resources Ltd’s Horne 5 mining project aims to extract a polymetallic deposit whose primary economic value lies in gold. The project is located in the Notre-Dame neighborhood and beneath Glencore’s Horne Smelter, which, since its opening in 1927, has drastically polluted the air in Rouyn-Noranda. The Horne 5 project ranks among the most dangerous, unacceptable, and harmful mining projects in Quebec in recent decades. In addition to posing significant psychosocial risks, this project entails catastrophic dangers for public safety, socioeconomic stability, and environmental protection.

Image: The Horne Smelter – A symbol of pollution in Rouyn-Noranda, 1978. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. (2)

 

Image: Workers at the Noranda Mine—photo taken between 1962 and 1978. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Noranda Mine workers on the picket line during the 1946–1947 strike. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Anti-pollution march organized by the Théâtre de Coppe, themed around the “burial” of Lake Osisko, 1985. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Glencore’s Horne Smelter under snow and toxic waste, photo taken between 1962 and 1978. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Glencore’s Horne Smelter continues to pollute to this day. Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2019. Rouyn-Noranda.

 

The Cultural Landscape of Rouyn-Noranda

Rouyn-Noranda is a city of 42,000 residents, located on Nitakinan, Anicinape Aki, unceded Anishinaabe territory. The political context of Rouyn-Noranda has been marked by critical social and legal struggles and including a long legacy of tensions with extractive industries. This city is an island of culture (music, visual arts, performing arts, theater, etc.) within the boreal forest. Rouyn-Noranda is the home of a multicultural, resilient, activist, and family-oriented community. The Horne 5 project is located notably on the ancestral territory of the Long Point First Nation. Industrial activities have been a central part of Rouyn-Noranda’s development since the city’s founding 100 years ago this year.

Image: Facebook page of Collectif 33 (3) , Rouyn-Noranda.

If approved, the Horne 5 mining project would be situated at the very heart of this dynamic city, in a vibrant residential area, beneath an area already weakened by numerous abandoned mine tunnels. The literature also reflects a lack of data on mining in urban areas, as there are few such case studies.

Horne 5 – A Sword of Damocles

Image: Falco Resources Ltée. (4)

The Horne 5 project, which plans to extract 15,500 tons of ore per day from depths of up to 2,000 meters and generate 80 million tons of mine tailings, was entrusted to the BAPE (Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement) for a public review in 2024. As is standard procedure when the government grants such a mandate, the BAPE president formed a commission of inquiry to evaluate the project’s impacts. This formal examination brought to light several critical issues including:

1. Land subsidence and induced seismicity: Even before considering the risks associated with ground subsidence and induced seismicity, it is worth noting that the project is located beneath the Horne Smelter—an industrial complex with outdated infrastructure—where ponds of sulfuric acid and other toxic substances could cause major environmental disasters and pose significant risks of fatalities to workers as well as the general population. Rouyn-Noranda has, in fact, already witnessed a sudden ground subsidence in 2013, right in the heart of Mouska Park—a family recreation and playground area. The hole, over 3 meters wide, was located above the site of the former Chadbourne Mine, one of the many abandoned mines beneath the city. (5)

2. Ancestral Rights: The apparent violation of the ancestral rights of Long Point First Nation is a major issue in this mining project. Indeed, during the commission of inquiry, the government’s responses raised “reasonable doubts that the constitutional obligation to consult Indigenous peoples holding ancestral rights was not respected for all communities whose territory is affected by the Horne 5 mining project, starting with the Long Point First Nation.” (6)

3. Water Protection: In addition to threatening the integrity of numerous water bodies through the installation of freshwater intake pipelines, the Horne 5 project poses numerous risks of serious contamination of Lake Dufault, the lake that supplies the sole pumping station in the drinking water supply of the city of Rouyn-Noranda. This contamination could result from leaks in the 17-kilometer pipelines transporting mine tailings or from leaks in the tailings pond dams.

4. Greenwashing: The company uses greenwashing rhetoric regarding actions related to its project’s mining liability management plan, even though its plan for handling mine tailings poses a serious threat to the environment and human health. Indeed, after selecting an unreclaimed site to store the planned tailings, the developer is trying to convince the community that adding acid-generating, leachable, and cyanide-containing materials to the environment could be a beneficial option.

5. Air Quality: The industrial activities carried out by Glencore’s Horne Smelter in the city of Rouyn-Noranda generate alarming levels of heavy metals (arsenic, barium, cadmium, copper, nickel, and lead). The company’s unacceptable levels of air pollution from the smelter and the government’s complicity in allowing it are one the most persistent and controversial environmental scandals in Quebec. The literature shows that the population of Rouyn-Noranda is exposed to an increased incidence of lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, neurological problems, and intra-uterine growth retardation. The Horne Smelter is still authorized to operate by smelting waste from all over the world to extract copper, provided that arsenic levels in the air in Rouyn-Noranda remain below 45 ng/m³. The company was granted an extension until 2030 to meet an interim threshold of 15 ng/m³, notwithstanding the Quebec standard of 3 ng/m³, and may maintain this threshold until 2033. However, the Institut national de santé publique du Québec stated in 2022 that while the 15 ng/m³ threshold protects vulnerable groups (such as children) from certain effects, the only target to be considered safe remains the 3 ng/m³ standard. The Horne 5 project thus seeks to operate in an environment where standards are already being exceeded, violating the enforcement regime of Section 197 of the Clean Air Regulation. Authorizing a new mining project would therefore only exacerbate an illegal situation that has been tolerated for far too long.

Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2019, Rouyn-Noranda.

 6. Multiple social and economic costs: The socioeconomic impacts include, first and foremost, the aggravation of the housing crisis. The arrival of new workers and their families will lead to an increased demand for housing. This demand occurs despite an extremely low vacancy rate of 0,9 % recorded in 2025 (7), which is significantly below the 3% balance threshold recognized in Quebec. In other words, Rouyn-Noranda is already facing a severe housing crisis that will be further exacerbated by the arrival of new workers. “Furthermore, the gradual relocation of residents to create a buffer zone near the Horne Smelter — a measure to be implemented after 2028 — underscores the scale of the environmental and health challenges that the city and its population must (already) contend with.” (8) Added to this are the population’s anxiety and social fatigue, as well as threats to Rouyn-Noranda’s long-term attractiveness and vitality.

Timeline of Resistance

Here is an overview of the timeline of citizen mobilization related to the Horne 5 project.

• May 17, 2024 | Call for citizen mobilization

Release of a press release inviting the residents of Rouyn-Noranda to attend the first information meeting regarding the Horne 5 project. 

• May 21, 2024 | Official letters sent to the Minister of the Environment and the President of the BAPE 

An official letter was sent to the Minister requesting that the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE – Office of Public Hearings on the Environment) hold public hearings regarding the Horne 5 project, along with an official letter to the President of the BAPE requesting a preparatory meeting for the public prior to the public hearing. The preparatory meeting took place on August 13, 2024.

• June 27, 2024 | Invitation to a community engagement planning workshop

Release of a press release inviting citizens to a free workshop on July 7, 2024, on planning participation in the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) hearings for the Horne 5 mining project.

• August 14 and 26, 2024 | Participation in strategic meetings with residents of Rouyn-Noranda

Two strategic meetings just before the start of the public inquiry.

• August 27, 2024 | Start of the BAPE hearings in Rouyn-Noranda: Several crucial questions to ask about the troubling Horne 5 mining project

Release of a press release stating: “Civil society is ready for the process. Despite the case being launched in the middle of summer and the company’s chaotic and unannounced presentation of documentation, the groups managed to study the case in detail by pooling their resources.”

Image: Rouyn-Noranda during the Bureau d’audiences publiques de l’environnement (BAPE) hearing on the Horne 5 project. Credit: Radio-Canada / Lise Millette (9)

• August 27–29, 2024 | Participation in the five sessions of the first part of the BAPE public hearings in Rouyn-Noranda.

Period for providing information and presenting the ins and outs of the project as well as environmental issues. Citizens may, in particular, ask questions of the proponent.

Image : BAPE in the works, café-bar L’Abstracto, Rouyn-Noranda. Credit: Guy Leclerc 

• September 16–26, 2024 | Period set aside for the submission of views orally, via a brief, through comments, or via annotated images.

September 26 was the deadline for submitting briefs. The Coalition Québec Meilleure Mine and MiningWatch Canada submitted a joint brief regarding Falco Resources Ltd.’s Horne 5 mining project. 

• September 30 to October 3, 2024 | Second part of the BAPE public hearing for Falco Resources’ Horne 5 mining project.

This second part allows individuals to speak on the subject. It is an opportunity to, for example, make recommendations or even present one’s brief orally. 

• Fall 2024 | Recommendation by regional health authorities to commission a seismic risk analysis.

Regional health authorities (the CISSS-AT) recommended that the ministry require in-depth studies on the risks of earthquakes caused by the mine. The primary concern is the radiation oncology center—also located in the Notre-Dame neighborhood—in Rouyn-Noranda, where vibrations could damage medical equipment.]
 

• December 23, 2024 | Submission of the BAPE report to the minister

The turning point

It was through the process of the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) that the Commission of Inquiry officially concluded, on January 7, 2025, that the Horne 5 project is unacceptable. The report states that the project does not meet minimum requirements for safety, public health, and environmental protection. A large network of organizations came together to stand up to Ressource Falco Ltd. before and during the BAPE-led Commission of Inquiry.

Image: Large demonstration in Rouyn-Noranda organized by Mères au front and their allies, October 13, 2024, on 9th Street | Enough is enough. Credit: Williams Nourry

Portraits of the activists

First Nations

• Long Point First Nation (LPFN) : Following the inquiry, the First Nation has raised concerns about the project’s impact on air and water quality, as well as on the local economy. It is demanding that environmental and socioeconomic studies be conducted directly by the community to protect its ancestral rights. The LPFN spoke at the BAPE hearings, asserted its rights over its traditional unceded territory, and emphasized that the project must obtain the LPFN’s prior and informed consent, as detailed in its press release: “No Consent = No Project”.

 Environmental Groups

• Abitibi-Témiscamingue Regional Environmental Council — A non-profit organization (NPO) dedicated to promoting environmental conservation and improving environmental quality. They submitted 162 recommendations to the BAPE, criticizing the lack of consideration for the project’s cumulative effects. The CREAT highlights the health risks illustrated by the “simple measures” (vacuuming with HEPA filters, specific dietary guidelines to limit lead and cadmium absorption) suggested to the public by provincial public health authorities, reflecting an environment already saturated with contaminants and environmental stressors. 

• Eau Secours — a Montreal-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the protection and responsible management of water in Quebec. Eau Secours has pointed out to the second part of the BAPE the glaring lack of consistency in the company’s proposal to create a mine tailings pond (projected to hold 40 million tons of highly reactive and acid-generating tailings) directly within the watershed of the city’s drinking water source, Lake Dufaut. The organization also points out that the developer has not presented an emergency plan in the event of a facility failure. 

• Action Boréale — a non-profit organization based in Abitibi-Témiscamingue dedicated to promoting the preservation of Quebec’s boreal forests. They have consistently reminded the government, following the release of the BAPE’s scathing report, of its responsibility for the environment. Action Boréale asserts that the project has more negative impacts than benefits for the community. 

• Société pour vaincre la pollution (SVP) — a non-profit organization working to defend citizens’ rights to a healthy environment: Offers support and states that “this is one mine too many for Rouyn-Noranda.” 

• MiningWatch Canada — an Ottawa-based non-governmental organization acting as a watchdog for the mining industry. They continue to call on the government to cease all investment in this harmful project and to publicly confirm its opposition. 

• Regroupement vigilance mines de l’Abitibi et du Témiscamingue (Revimat) — a non-profit organization advocating for improvements to the Mining Act and environmental protection. They have consistently reiterated their opposition to the project in a joint press release, noting in particular that “the possibility of seismic activity could damage the smelter’s structures and release toxic substances into the air.”  

• Comité Arrêt des rejets d’émissions toxiques (ARET) — a citizens’ group advocating for the reduction of air pollutants. They refer to air quality issues in the same press release: “We therefore expect these recommendations to put an end to the project, as the population is already unacceptably overexposed to toxic emissions.” 

Health, Social Justice, and Community Solidarity

• Mères au Front (Rouyn-Noranda) — a local chapter of the pan-Canadian Mères au Front movement, which brings together mothers and grandmothers driven by a desire to act to protect our children’s future and life on Earth in the face of the climate emergency. This group, acting solely out of a duty to protect future generations, places the right to health, safety, and a clean environment at the heart of its struggle. They believe that the mining industry is incompatible with urban areas and oppose the Horne 5 project because it would increase the vulnerability of a population already overexposed to numerous neurotoxic contaminants.

Image: Protest organized by Mères au Front on October 13, 2024, in Rouyn-Noranda to remind the Legault government that the ongoing situation in Rouyn-Noranda is unacceptable. Credit: Maude Desbois (10)

• Centre Entre-Femmes: Active in the community for over 30 years, this organization works to improve women’s living conditions. Its opposition to the Horne 5 project centers on poverty and economic inequalities: since the jobs created are primarily male- , the center condemns the widening wage gaps in industrial regions and calls for a gender-based impact analysis, also fearing an increase in the risk of violence and issues related to alcohol and drug use. 

• Coopérative d’habitation Boréale: Opposing the developer’s 15-year vision, the housing cooperative advocates for a 40-year urban development cycle to secure the neighborhood’s future. Its struggle highlights the invisible social costs: it points out that communities bear the brunt of the hardships (suicides, domestic violence) linked to fluctuations in the price of gold—human tragedies for which no budget provides to absorb the consequences. The Cooperative has received a very high volume of demand in recent years, a demand it cannot meet. 

• The Abitibi-Témiscamingue Tenants’ Association also opposes the Horne 5 project and participated in the BAPE, raising concerns in particular about the pressure this project would place on this “sacrificed zone.” This association considers housing to be “a place where everyone should be safe day and night.” The city of Rouyn-Noranda has been in a housing crisis for nearly 15 years. Their argument also emphasized that, in addition to all the dangers raised by the project, the community more often than not bears the burden of finding solutions and accommodations for the population. This additional pressure is absolutely undesirable for Rouyn-Noranda’s community organizations.

The systemic oppression of extraction

In Quebec, communities affected by mining projects are oppressed by a glaring lack of oversight by the government regarding the massive investments it grants to the mining sector, as well as by the acceleration of mining projects at the expense of communities. 

For its part, Falco Resources Ltd. engages in the constant withholding and distortion of information, in addition to failing to listen to the public’s concerns and to take environmental assessments seriously. The recent filing (released to the media in late May 2026) of the expert report commissioned to analyze the risks associated with seismic activity supports this view. This report, so eagerly awaited by the public, has failed to clarify the uncertainty that persists regarding the safety of people and the radiation oncology center. A freedom of information request yielded only a heavily redacted version of the report, making it impossible to access nearly all of its content. 

At the same time, the community of Rouyn-Noranda is enduring a historic cycle of threats of industrial closure from Glencore, creating deep polarization within families and the population, and placing citizens in a constant false dilemma between economic survival and the protection of the environment and overall health. 

Everyone has been holding their breath for a long time now.

A year and a half after the BAPE report was submitted, the Horne 5 project is entering the final stages of its environmental impact assessment. At this critical juncture preceding potential mining operations, communities are awaiting the final decision regarding the authorization decree, which is reportedly scheduled for June 2026, according to the company’s latest Advisory Committee meeting dated March 18, 2026. The city’s cultural landscape now hinges on this government decree, which will determine whether authorities choose to ignore or respect the BAPE’s finding of unacceptability. The community is sincerely holding out hope that the final decision will serve the best interests of the local population and the Anicinape First Nation, while ensuring the protection of the environment as well as water and air quality.

To date, however, the network of activists remains mobilized. 

Image: Large demonstration in Rouyn-Noranda organized by Mères au front and their allies, October 13, 2024| Enough is enough | NO TO HORNE 5 ! Credit: Williams Nourry

And to what end?

A victory would mean the rejection and permanent stop of the Horne 5 project in order to ensure the safety and health of the citizens of Rouyn-Noranda through a realistic assessment of the project’s cumulative impacts, the carrying capacity of the project site, and the relentless pace of the pro-extractive agenda of companies targeting the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region. In the meantime, we are proud to say that the people of Rouyn-Noranda are a great inspiration to the Coalition Québec meilleure mine, and that their efforts serve as an example to follow for other mining struggles throughout the province. The measures taken by the community to mobilize against all these extractive giants are “admirable on a global scale.”

Image: The Horne Smelter at sunset. Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2020, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Notre-Dame neighborhood at night. Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2019, Rouyn-Noranda.

Endnotes 

1 – Company Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RessourcesFalco/

 2-  Rivard, J. (December 2021). Démarrage de l’usine d’acide sulfurique de la fonderie Horne – 20 décembre 1989 | Héros sans panache | Société d’histoire de Rouyn-Noranda.http://shrn.ca/des-jours-qui-ont-fait-rouyn-noranda/20-decembre-1989-demarrage-de-lusine-dacide-sulfurique-de-la-fonderie-horne

3 – Collectif 33 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122104798005292317&set=pcb.122104801341292317&locale=fr_CA

4 –  Cotnoir, J.-M. (May 25, 2026).Horne 5 : le flou persiste quant aux risques sismiques. Radio-Canada.https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2256119/horne-5-mine-risque-sismique-cisss-at

 5 –  Luneau, A.-C. (2013, February 6). Rouyn-Noranda : le sol s’affaisse au parc Mouska. Radio-Canada.  https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/599141/trou-parc-mouska

 6 –  QMM and MWC. (2024, September 26). Mémoire | BAPE projet minier Horne 5 de Ressources Falco à Rouyn-Noranda | Mining Watch Canada. https://miningwatch.ca/fr/blog/2024/9/26/memoire-bape-projet-minier-horne-5-de-ressources-falco-rouyn-noranda

 7-  OBVAT. (2026, 4 juin). Taux d’inoccupation des logements, Abitibi-Témiscamingue et Québec, 1996 à 2026p – L’Observatoire de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue. https://www.observat.qc.ca/statistiques/taux-dinoccupation-des-logements-abitibi-temiscamingue-et-quebec-1996-a-2026p/ 

8- BAPE, Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement. (2024).Projet Horne 5 à Rouyn-Noranda par Ressources Falco ltée: rapport d’enquête et d’audience publique. Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement. https://www.bape.gouv.qc.ca/fr/dossiers/mine_horne5/

 9- Millette, L. (2025, March 4). Projet Horne 5 : Québec freine l’élan de Ressources Falco. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2145532/falco-horne-fonderie-rouyn-noranda-mine

 10-  Fortin-Rondeau, I. (2025, November 18). Le Pudding à l’arsenic : une version industrielle signée Fonderie Horne. https://www.meresaufront.org/billets-de-blogue/le-pudding-a-larsenic-une-version-industrielle-signee-fonderie-horne 

 

How we say YES to LIFE YLNM Position Paper (July 2026)

Image: Covas do Barroso Credit: Salva La Selva

 

1. Introduction: Saying Yes to Life

 

Yes to Life, No to Mining (YLNM) is a global solidarity network of and for Indigenous Peoples, impacted communities, local organisations, and networks who are standing up for their right to say No to Mining and to advance life sustaining and post-extractive futures.

 

In one of our earlier position papers, we laid out the reasons why we say “No to Mining.” These include the widespread and often unregulated destructive impacts of mining on environments and communities; and the pressures from companies and governments upon communities to accept projects often in the absence of people’s rights to free, prior and informed consent. 

All communities have the right to self-determination of livelihoods and futures, and to defend their territories, livelihoods and the wellbeing of the people and the earth. All communities have the right to say no to mining. 

At the same time, across the world, communities resisting mining are not only saying no to destruction, but yes to life. This paper is an articulation of how communities protect their territories and build lives of connection and thriving – for both present and future generations.

2. Defending Life: The Context of Extractivism 

Extractivism is a term which describes the logic of large-scale resource extraction to serve national and transnational corporate and economic interests, at the expense of local territories and communities. 

“(Extractivism) is a logic of violence that includes abuses to life, health, land, food, and water; displacement of people; violations of Indigenous Peoples rights; gender-based violence and discrimination against women; criminalisation of workers and human rights and environmental defenders; and the use of military and security forces to protect natural resources and corporate interests.” Nat Lowrey and Anisa Rogers writing for Chain Reaction (Friends of the Earth Australia), 2021.

Dron Alliansi Sulawesi – Toxic Tour 2023. Credit: Alliansi Sulawesi

Mining is one of the world’s most destructive forms of extractivism because of its scale and the wide range of impacts caused by its processes, not to mention the ever-increasing expansions for critical minerals under the banners of green energy transition, energy security, the “digital transformation” and defence. 

Expansions in the name of the “green transition” are not driven by care for people and environment, but by market factors – the economic values of key minerals and the geopolitical competition to control supply chains. The underlying logics of most “sustainable” or “green” mining enterprises are extractivism, capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. Saying yes to life means breaking free from these long-binding blights on our world and not falling for their new guises.

Another underpinning and prevailing myth is that of  “development as progress”. This has governed the agendas of the Global North over the Global South for decades. It is tied to the categorization of countries into developed and developing, the imperative of economic growth, and the false idea that transnational investment in resource extraction is the solution for poverty – an idea that not even its authors truly believe. 

It is time to take back the narrative. We assert that people and communities affected by mining and extractivism should have the right to define their own well-being, livelihoods and development pathways.  

The many justifications invented for mining expansions are creating a global profusion of “sacrifice zones”. These are geographical areas where the rights and health of people, lands, water and biodiversity are prioritised below capitalist interests. All over the world, mining frontiers are hotspots for human rights abuses, land grabbing and violence. 

Meanwhile these are often the very same areas where people are practicing sustainable and life-giving alternatives to extractivism, and are stewarding and safeguarding some of the most important ecosystems on the planet. 

In our previously published paper, “Towards Just Transitions for People and Planet”, we articulate the following:  “A truly just transition must be popular, inclusive, and grounded in the Right to Say No, and a right to choose non-extractive ways of life … This includes the amplification of alternatives to mining and extractivism, and empowering new paradigms of global justice that restore balance between peoples and the Earth.” In other words – a just transition is about defending life. 

3. What does “Yes to Life” Mean?

 

In a world where all futures are at stake, and where we cannot rely on top-down, capitalist and market-driven solutions to our intersected crises, it is essential to bring forth stories from the grassroots and extractive frontlines which help us to collectively imagine post-extractive futures. 

These are our “Yes to Life” stories: examples of surviving, thriving, growing and celebrating which demonstrate pathways and possibilities for pursuing a life-sustaining future at local and global levels.

Yes to life means centering land, water, forests and oceans as living systems with their own intrinsic rights to exist, persist and thrive, as well as to be healthy habitats for all living beings, including people who call these places home and depend on them for survival. 

Yes to Life means understanding communities as being Stewards of Life. It recognises the authority of Indigenous and community governance, and centres life-ways which are based on reciprocal relationships with nature.

Yes to Life means nurturing and supporting systems of Interdependence and Care, centred on the wellbeing of people and ecosystems and on our collective futures – human and other-than-human.

Yes to Life means protecting old ways and innovating new ways of living, which are regenerative and sustainable for generations into the future. It means imagining and bringing about a post-extractive future in which “many worlds fit” – a pluriverse, rather than a hegemony. 

“To say yes to life …

To create in order to reconnect” is, at its core, a collective affirmation:

Yes to autonomy.

Yes to caring for territory.

Yes to creativity as a form of resistance.

Because to create is also a way to resist.”

Claudia Alavez, coordinator of UNIR – Haiti

4. Principles for Saying Yes to Life

 

4.1 Territorial sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination

Globally, mining expansions disproportionately impact on Indigenous lands. In 2020, according to a report by the World Resources Institute, industrial and illegal mining together affected 450,000 hectares (over 20%) of Indigenous lands in the Amazon region. In Australia, a 2024 study found that 57.8% of critical mineral projects lay within formally recognised Indigenous lands. This went up to 79.2% when including land subject to undetermined native title claims. 

Indigenous stewardship is recognised to be one of the most important ways of preserving critical ecosystems and mitigating global warming. This is because the lands of Indigenous peoples largely contain critical ecosystems and carbon sinks; because many Indigenous traditional practices offer effective climate solutions, such as sustainable agriculture and water management systems; and because Indigenous peoples are custodians of unique knowledge and worldviews that emphasise deep kinship between humans and nature. 

Therefore, Indigenous self-determination over their lands and the extractive activities that affect them are fundamental to the principles and practice of Yes to Life.

4.2 The Right to Say No

The “Right to say No” is an essential balance of “Yes to Life” – one cannot exist without the other. In order to thrive, communities must be able to self-determine and set their own boundaries with regards to extractive projects that affect them. 

When unable to do so, communities are locked into uneven power dynamics with interests whose primary goal is to pursue projects in order to maximize investment returns for shareholders. This power dynamic makes the pursuit of life-sustaining economies and activities challenging, and sometimes even impossible – because when local energies and resources get sucked into survival efforts (firefighting), they are made less available for life-sustaining pursuits (growing green shoots). 

On the other hand, where possible, engagement in local actions that are positive and oriented towards thriving is one of the most important strategies used by communities to assert their sovereignty and to reject projects and influences that are not in their best interests.

4.3 The Rights of Nature and Earth Jurisprudence

Rights of Nature and Earth Jurisprudence movements are founded upon the recognition (understood by many Indigenous cultures) that Nature is a living community of interrelated and interdependent beings with inherent rights. 

As a legal tool for defending not only ecosystems but the communities which depend on them, Rights of Nature gained global attention in 2008 when Ecuador defined nature in its constitution as a living being (Pacha Mama) with rights to “exist, persist and thrive”. These revolutionary laws have become increasingly useful in supporting Ecuador’s grassroots struggles against state-backed oil and mining exploitation. The Los Cedros case, where the inherent rights of a cloud forest were successfully defended against a transnational mining company, is an emblematic example of how local and international networks can work together to bring forth the permanent protection of a biosphere.

Rights of Nature and Earth Jurisprudence movements and initiatives now spread around the world. They champion visions and strategies which challenge the colonial extractive power hegemony in both the Global South and North. The Rights of Nature has recently been recognised as an essential element of a “Just Transition” to a life-sustaining future – see our position paper for a slightly deeper dive on this topic. This is a powerful assertion of the principle of “Yes to Life” – not just for humans, but all species who share planet Earth with us.

The extraordinary biodiversity of Los Cedros Reserve in Ecuador, protected in 2021 by constitutional laws for Rights of Nature. Photo Credit: Liz Downes

 

4.4 Protection and regeneration of ecosystems

Mining expansions pose an ever greater threat to the world’s most vulnerable and biodiverse ecosystems. A 2026 analysis has revealed that more than 3,267 active mining operations are located within biodiversity hotspots – these operations account for almost 5% of the global mining industry’s total footprint. 

Mining is a key cause of deforestation – a 2024 study indicated that mining resulted in 1.4 million hectares of tree cover loss between 2001 and 2020. This only included extraction operations for five minerals (bauxite, iron ore, copper, gold and silver) and did not include the flow-on deforestation from pollution and infrastructure. Of this forest loss, 260,000 hectares were in Indigenous lands and areas around communities. 

More recently, the devastating impacts of massive industrial and illegal mining expansions can be seen across primary tropical rainforests and Indigenous lands in the Amazon, African, Asia and Pacific regions. Mining also impacts on ocean ecosystems: by pollution from land-based mines, dumping of toxic wastes, and the expansion of experimental explorations for metals in the deep sea. The protection and regeneration of ecosystems are vital to protecting what is left and rebuilding what is lost for a world where ecosystems and communities can thrive.

 

4.5 Community wellbeing over profit

Industries pushing “socially responsible mining” can never realistically prioritise community wellbeing over, or indeed as well as, investment. Even where companies claim they respect the needs of communities they operate in, there is a dynamic of corporate greed which is inherent to the practice of business under the capitalist model. The bottom line is always profit. 

For this reason, voluntary “environmental, social and governance” standards and schemes claiming to improve the due diligence of mining companies (such as certification schemes) fail by default to protect communities from harm. For communities to be able to ensure their own life-sustaining futures, their rights and wellbeing must be centred first and foremost over those of corporations. This means autonomy, sovereignty, the right to say no, and democratic decision-making power over any project that affects them. 

 

4.6 Solidarity and collective responsibility

It is difficult for projects building towards life-sustaining futures to be scaled up from the grassroots without global support and networks. Communities fighting mining are often living and working under direct threats of persecution, as well as struggling with food insecurity, threats to livelihoods, destruction of their lands and possibly poverty and other social injustices. 

To make our struggles visible is a call to action: it is to say that extractive frontlines cannot sustain themselves alone. People cannot survive and thrive and defend life against threats when they are isolated. We have a collective responsibility to support and advocate for those who are living under systems of oppression.

 

4.7 Intergenerational justice

The adverse impacts of extractivism are often intergenerational. In the case of mining projects, operations may last decades – which means decades of tailings accumulation, toxic runoff, land degradation, and soil, water and air contamination. Impacts may continue for decades, centuries or millennia after a mine is closed; and sometimes the damage is irreversible – as in the case of species extinctions, destruction of ecosystems, or the permanent displacement of communities.

So in terms of intergenerational justice, “Yes to Life” means creating and defending the conditions that make it possible for life to continue into the future. It means protecting lands, water, biospheres, and the communities which depend on them for the sake of all generations.

5. Pathways: How Communities Say Yes to Life 

We stand in solidarity with local communities resisting extractivism and uphold their right to decide in respect of all decisions that affect their lands, waters, and futures. This includes autonomy, self-determination, and territorial sovereignty of Indigenous peoples everywhere, and affirm the right of all communities to protect and care for their territories according to their own values and knowledge systems. And we stand for the rights of communities to forge alternatives to the industrial extractive model which help them not just survive, but thrive on their own terms. 

This section, the core of our paper, presents a tapestry of alternatives: ways in which communities are saying yes to life and sowing and tending the seeds of a future without mining in their lands.

 

5.1 Defending Territories and the Right to Say No

Private property sign expressing no to mining interests, Intag, Ecuador. Photo Credit: Liz Downes

Almost all struggles against extractivism start, and are sustained, at the local level. Mapping tools like the Environmental Justice Atlas paint a sobering picture of the sheer number of communities fighting for their lands across the globe, particularly in the Global South. At time of writing the EJ Atlas contains 4524 cases centred around mining, water justice, land clearance and waste disposal issues; and of course, many cases are not mapped. 

As the intensification of mining puts pressure on ever more local frontiers, communities are defending their Right to Say No in every possible way available to them – through organising, assemblies, solidarity networks, legal struggles, direct action, and much more. These struggles often involve long and gruelling campaigns which, sadly, are ultimately unsuccessful in stopping projects or preventing damage. 

However, whatever the outcome, the act of protecting life does not lose its value. And there are cases around the world where resistance has succeeded in defending life. It is vitally important to make these wins visible and celebrate them in the spirit of “Yes to Life.” 

Sulawesi, Indonesia, hosts the world’s largest nickel mining industry. Enormous, open-pit Chinese, Brazilian and Australian-owned mines funnel ore into a “hellscape” expanse of processing plants and smelters – the Morowali Industrial Park – which stretches along the coast of Central Sulawesi. The environmental and social impacts of this industry are nothing short of catastrophic. And recent expansions further threaten the livelihoods of rice and pepper farmers, who provide thousands of jobs in their regions and protect large tracts of biodiverse rainforest.

Some communities have responded by forming female-led resistance collectives – such as the Loeha Raya Women Fighters of Lake Towuti. These women are organising a campaign to protect their air, water and land from a new mining concession owned by Brazilian company, Vale. Despite intimidation and threats from both company and state, they continue to push back against Vale with a strength that defies the scale of what they are up against – a strength rooted in their conviction that no mining “jobs” can replace the loss of their homes. 

Image: Loeha Raya Women Fighters with YLNM and Rainforest Rescue, 2024, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo credit: YLNM

In Colombia in 2017, the citizens of the mountain district of Cajamarca voted with a 98% majority to ban a huge gold mining project owned by South African company AngloGold Ashanti. The popular consultation was led by grassroots youth activists and small-scale farmers. The victory helped inspire a movement of similar democratic consultations across the country, all soundly rejecting planned mining, oil and gas projects.

“By saying ‘no’ to mining, communities are not saying no to development. They’re saying we need to transition to new forms of development that are not based on exploiting non-renewable resources. People in Colombia are calling for a new paradigm and a new development model that includes alternatives that are rooted in and serve the well-being of the planet and the people.”

YLNM coordinator Mariana Gomez, quoted in The Gaia Foundation.

For over 14 years, communities in Cajamarca, in the highlands of Peru, have fought to hold back the Minas Conga gold project – a planned expansion of Newmont’s massive Yanacocha open-pit mine. The Yanacocha mine itself has an appalling record of air, soil and water contamination and water depletion; the Minas Conga project is projected to be three times the size and threatens to dump its waste in the source lands of five major rivers. Despite being met with violent oppression by the state, civil society groups have remained defiant and have fought several legal battles against the company’s attempts to manufacture environmental and social licence. To date, the multi-billion-dollar project remains stalled.    

Large-scale popular resistance can galvanise the voice for “No to mining” and achieve the blocking of projects that would otherwise devastate lands and livelihoods. In Serbia, a national people’s movement has to date prevented Rio Tinto from developing the huge Jadar lithium project in a historic district. In the Solomon Islands in 2020, the remote community of Wagina Island won a seven year legal battle to stop a Chinese-owned bauxite mining project which would have affected the livelihoods of up to 60% of the population. 

 

5.2 Practising Indigenous Sovereignty 

Indigenous communities, as prior mentioned, suffer the brunt of contemporary mining expansions for so-called critical minerals. “Yes to Life” for most Indigenous communities is deeply grounded in connection to land, sacred sites, and place-based cultural heritage.

In Ontario, Canada, the Eagle’s Nest nickel project – owned by Australian company Wyloo Metals – is a huge mining operation proposed on Treaty 9 territory on what local First Nations call ‘the breathing lands’. The area covers wetland and peatland ecosystems which form one of the world’s most important carbon storage sinks. In 2021 several First Nations declared a moratorium against mining on these territories: 

“This MORATORIUM is urgently required because, as the caretakers of this part of the Earth where the Creator put us, we have a profound and sacred duty to ensure that this part of the Earth is not so wounded from Ring of Fire development that it can longer support our relations and ways of life, or help protect the world from catastrophic climate change; as the James Bay lowlands stand as one of the last and most important bastions of defence against climate collapse.”

At the end of 2025 an access road was  approved to go ahead by the Government of Ontario, which is pushing the project as a multi-billion-dollar investment in renewable energy resources. Despite this setback, First Nations remain firm in defense of their lands, alongside allies such as the Friends of the Attawapiskat River, the Land Defense Alliance, and the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network. 

In the Philippines, indigenous communities have asserted their rights to defend territories against mining for decades – often while facing serious persecution from the government, corporations and private interests. In the province of Palawan, nickel mining expansions are threatening a once-pristine UNESCO biosphere reserve and the lands of the Pala’wan, Tagbanuwa and Batak peoples. The Coalition Against Land Grabbing (CALG), a coalition of indigenous campaigners, are urging a moratorium on mining based on damage already done to ecologically sensitive areas and agricultural lands, and on the “illegitimacy” of the Free Prior and Informed Consent process employed by the mining company.

On 18th February 2023, to save Brooke’s Point biocultural diversity paradise from ruthless incursion of mining development in the island of Palawan (Philippines) indigenous peoples and local residents put up barricades. People perceive these as one of their last remedies to halt ongoing destruction. Photo credit: Coalition Against Land Grabbing CALG

Indigenous peoples often have to resort to protracted legal battles to defend sacred sites and territories. Occasionally there are wins or milestones worth celebrating – with the caveat that there is often a long fight to continue. In May 2025, nine tribes of the Lakota Sioux of Black Hills, South Dakota, won a lawsuit which cancelled the permit of a graphite drilling project threatening their sacred grounds of Pe’Sla. 

During the same week, Yindjibarndi traditional owners were awarded $150 million in the latest iteration of their twenty-year legal fight against an iron ore mine owned by Australia’s second richest person, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest. For the Yindjibarndi, this is nowhere near a “win”, or the end of their struggle: the amount represents a fraction of the $1.8 billion they asked for, and more importantly will never make up for the destruction of up to 250 cultural sites by mining operations. Nevertheless, the result highlights the urgent need for accountability for mining companies who operate with near impunity when it comes to Native Title laws in Australia.

In Sweden, Saami reindeer herders filed a petition to the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, complaining that three metals mining concessions had been granted on their land, in violation of their Free, Prior and Informed Consent and of national laws protecting their territory and traditional way of life. After five years of legal process, in 2025 the UN finally ruled in favour of the Saami. 

 

5.3 Protecting and Regenerating Ecosystems 

Around the world mining-impacted communities are engaged in ecosystem protection and regeneration activities, in order to restore damaged environments, defend territories, and develop and protect local livelihoods as a preventative measure against mining incursions. 

In the Finnish Boreal, the small community of Selkie has not only stopped decades of destructive peat mining through a spirited campaign, but has undertaken to restore the fragile river catchments and wetlands which had been polluted by the mine. Through a restoration programme bringing together traditional knowledge and science, this wetland has enjoyed a dramatic return to health, with many key species of birds and fish reviving their populations. Read their incredible story, Landscapes of Renewal, here.

In Myanmar, Indigenous Karen people created the Salween Peace Park – an initiative to protect their land, livelihoods and extraordinary biodiversity, and to assert their right to self-determination. During over 70 years of armed conflict, hundreds of thousands of Karen people have experienced genocide, torture, sexual violence, and displacement at the hands of the state armed forces. Karen lands are threatened by logging, private agribusiness, infrastructure projects and gold mining. Karen communities have resisted these threats  through public celebration of their culture, identity and nature stewardship. And so the Salween Peace Park came into being. 

 

“The Salween Peace Park empowers our indigenous Karen communities to guide local development and conservation in line with traditional knowledge and cultural practices. By basing local governance in the hands of the community, the Salween Peace Park enables the conservation of nature and Karen culture, and the pursuit of a peaceful and stable life for local communities, something that is denied to them by Myanmar government laws and military ambitions.” 

 

These hopes and dreams have been challenged by ever-increasing militarisation – in 2021 after the coup, and again in 2023, state military-led airstrikes bombarded villages. These assaults have forced hundreds of people to flee and live deeper in the forest, terrified of the next attack. Despite this, conservation and territorial defence activities continue. In 2024, Karen people embarked on a new campaign of self-determination – to register their own land titles without government approval. This process has involved an intensive mapping and documenting of ancestral lands, registering the data in a database, and handing out titles to locals. 

 

5.4 Defending Food Sovereignty and Land-Based Livelihoods

The term ‘food sovereignty’ was first coined in 1996 by the global peasant movement, La Vía Campesina. This is the right of communities to define their own food and agriculture systems, and to produce healthy and culturally appropriate food through ecologically sustainable methods. 

Food sovereignty is not just food security – it is a much broader political concept which asserts food as a human right rather than a commodity. It centres justice and solidarity over profit. It puts the needs and aspirations of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than market demands. It defends the interests and inclusion of future generations. It offers strategies to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers and users. Defending food sovereignty is a powerful way for communities to say “no to mining” and “yes to life”. 

Covas do Barroso is a mountainous rural region in Portugal famous for its traditional agro-silvo-pastoral food production, which has been recognised as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Local communities have very strong ties to the land, which is administered as a system of communal lands covering approximately 2000 hectares, called baldios. 

Unfortunately the region also contains lithium resources. In 2023, after years of aggressive encroachments to conduct explorations, UK-based company Savannah Resources was given the green light by the Portuguese government to develop its mining project. Most of the mining area covers the baldios. Local communities have reacted by conducting vigils, blockades, filing lawsuits, hosting international protest camps, creating street theatre, among other tactics. They argue that economic value cannot be assigned to communal lands; and furthermore, the mountains themselves are alive and cannot be quantified:

“When we allow ourselves to be truly present in the mountains, with all our senses immersed in it, listening to its sounds and its silences, seeing its colours, its shapes, its species; when we allow ourselves to feel its soil; when we quench our thirst in its waters or eat its fruits; when we feel the heat of its wood or the breeze of its breath on our skin; when it makes us feel fear or joy; we realise once again that the mountain is alive, that the mountain is part of us and we are part of the mountain.”

From New Tales of the Barroso Mountains, published by YLNM.

In Cajamarca, Colombia, food sovereignty is at the core of “Yes to Life” initiatives and non-extractive livelihoods being developed since civil society resistance stopped AngloGold Ashanti’s huge proposed gold mining operation in 2017. Communities and their local environmental youth collective, COSAJUCA, have built partnerships with local agronomists to teach people pathways towards developing their own sustainable businesses. Cooperative agribusiness has flourished. But the most inspiring story of all is that of the arracacha – a native Andean parsnip of which the Cajamarca region is the world’s biggest producer.  

In 2017, soon after the victory against the mining project, a local arracacha producing association, APROSAN, formed a partnership with the socially and environmentally conscious Colombian restaurant chain, Crepes&Waffles. The partnership assured a stable, generous market price for APROSAN’s products and supported the association to develop less chemical-intensive and more ecologically friendly farming systems. Crepes&Waffles has since expanded its buying of products from Cajamarca to some fruits and raw sugar. APROSAN has also moved into upscaling the processing of arracacha with new cooperatives and selling the raw vegetable as well as products like arracacha chips all over the country, transforming the vegetable from a “peasant food” to the real gold of Cajamarca.

Arracacha: The “real gold” of Cajamarca, Colombia. Photo: Federico Pardo for We Feed The World, The Gaia Foundation, 2019.

Farming communities in northwestern Haiti have collectivised to generate creative solutions to poverty, environmental degradation, and other pressures brought on partly by threats of gold mining in the northern territories of the country. While Haiti currently does not have a visible government and there is no mining legislation, transnational companies are expressing interest, and people are speculating that processes are occurring behind closed doors to allow projects to progress with no consultation. They are preparing.  

A grassroots collective, UNIR, runs workshops and educates affected rural communities in a participatory way, using games, flash cards and trivia to make people aware of the mining being proposed. Their campaign, “Create to Reconnect” has four highly successful initiatives in environmental education and action: Reducing plastic use and designing eco-friendly sanitary towels for women (led by a young woman from the north of the country); installing composters in northern Haiti to revive the use of natural fertilizers in planting; home gardens, integrating more than 15 crops in a single space; and school programs making “eco-bricks”.

“It is a very significant process for us, because we are supporting four community initiatives which promote something special: to create, imagine and inhabit our territory from our own solutions which come from our daily life and the real needs of our communities.”

Claudia Alavez, coordinator of UNIR and member of Yes to Life No to Mining

Ecological restoration and the strengthening of food sovereignty through collective reforestation and food production initiatives in southeast and north Haiti. Photo credit: UNIR Haiti, 2026

5.5  Water sovereignty

Water is essential for all life. But humans and many other species can only survive on fresh water, which makes up less than 2% of the water on earth. Of this, only 0.5% is immediately available to us, the rest being locked up in ice caps, groundwater systems and soil. Yet we are witnessing uncontrolled expansions of an industry which uses vast amounts – not just at the extraction stage, but to an even greater extent in ore processing and refining.

Some of the world’s biggest mining operations are located in arid lands where water is either scarce or exists in finite quantities, such as BHP’s operations in the Atacama desert of Chile, and Glencore’s huge nickel plant near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. Mining also contaminates water supplies depended on by people and ecosystems. Hence, struggles against mining are often themed around water, its defence and its protection.

Through the Andes region, spanning Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, communities have used campaign slogans like “Water is Life” and “Water is worth more than lithium, gold, copper” to push back against mining expansions. In the highlands of Ecuador, the resistance against mining expansions have been largely built around the defense and sacredness of water. In 2018, a national “March for Water” involved hundreds of Indigenous people marching 600 kilometres from the country’s south to the capital, Quito, carrying swathes of blue material representing their sacred rivers.

“Water is Life” National March, Ecuador, 2018. Photo provided by Carlos Zorrilla

The arid region of Puna de Atacama spans parts of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. It is erroneously known as the ‘Lithium Triangle’ because of its perceived richness in resources for the “green energy transition”. In reality it is a sacrifice zone where mining expansions for lithium brine in high-altitude salt lakes (salares) are having dire impacts on water, fragile ecosystems, and Indigenous livelihoods. Communities are fiercely resisting, because any more damage to water systems will mean death for their cultures and the entire landscape.

“Friends and farmers, with whom I shared a transcendental part of my life, generously explained to me how the collective use of water makes the existence of farming lands, forests, and wetlands possible amid the desert. The presence of farmers and shepherds, I understood, not only depends on these hydro-agro-ecosystems but also produces the conditions for their very existence … Mining stories are, when all is said and done, water stories.”  Ramón Balcázar, OPSAL (Plurinational Observatory for Andean Salares)

 

5.5 Building Community, Solidarity Economies and Intergenerational Justice

Local communities are strengthened in their resistance against extractivism when they share identities grounded in place. In Covas do Barroso, Portugal, communities are knitted together by their connection to the baldios – their traditional system of land stewardship. In Ireland, people have been resisting gold mining threats by Canadian company, Dalradian Resources, to the ecologically significant Sperrin Mountains for over ten years – as well as other mining concessions covering 25% of the land mass of Northern Ireland and 27% of the Republic of Ireland. Local groups are empowered and united by the spirit of duchás – the Irish concept for belonging or connection to land which is communal, ecological, and points to an identity shaped by place.

2024: Knitting community. During the camps in Covas do Barroso, a range of activities were organised, such as this crochet workshop led by one of the local residents. Photo: Guadalupe Rodríguez/ Salva la Selva

5.6 Protecting Defenders and Strengthening Collective Resistance 

Environmental defenders around the world get disproportionately targeted and persecuted by governments and corporations protective of their investments. According to Global Witness (2024) most assassinations each year are related to mining. Some statistics from recent years are covered in our paper “Why we say No to Mining.”

From 2012, the Philippines has been ranked as the deadliest country in Asia for people protecting land and the environment. More than 120 environmental campaigners have been murdered over the past 15 years, according to the grassroots organisation Coalition Against Land Grabbing (CALG) – with mining linked to a third of all killings. Through the years of persecution has emerged a tapestry of support for environmental defenders comprising grassroots organisations, Indigenous and rural communities. In the Asia Pacific region, these include Kalikasan, a network of environmental organisations advocating for persecuted defenders; and APNED (Asia Pacific Network for Environmental Defenders). 

In Ecuador, the numbers of environmental defenders being persecuted by corporations and government has increased sharply since 2016, when the country changed its mining investment laws and invited dozens of transnational companies to snap up mining leases across two million hectares of land – mainly Indigenous territories, biodiversity hotspots, and farmlands. As explorations and projects got underway with next to no environmental oversight and zero consultation, new local resistance groups sprang up everywhere. In 2021 several of these groups formed the National Anti-Mining Front, which continues to support a broad swathe of struggles, often with limited resources at their disposal. 

The Intag region of the northwest of Ecuador has a decades-long history of struggle against mining – the longest continuous resistance in Latin America. As a result the region has developed a tightly-linked network of civil society groups, which have collaborated in recent years to declare Intag a “Mining Free Zone”. Citizens have defended their lands in a wide variety of ways – from setting up chain blockades across roads to stop mining companies entering, to community assemblies, to conservation, reforestation and environmental education projects, to legal interventions against criminalisation of defenders, to court battles, and even a national referendum. Emblematic outcomes such as the court wins for the rights of nature in Los Cedros and Llurimagua would not have been successful without these strong civil society alliances. 

 

5.7 Collective decision-making, governances and convergences 

Strong local collective decision-making and community governance systems are critical in building up the power of civil society resistance and expanding solidarity networks.

The Karen people in Myanmar have constructed a regional coordination of governance to present a strong, united front in defense of their lands. This is grounded in local, grassroots governance bodies and a charter of principles; these local voices are then added together and channelled into a regional General Assembly. In this way, community voices are strengthened in relation to those of neighbouring stakeholders. Members of the General Assembly, in turn, work consistently with representatives of each community. 

“The Salween Peace Park empowers our indigenous Karen communities to guide local development and conservation in line with traditional knowledge and cultural practices. By basing local governance in the hands of the community, the Salween Peace Park enables the conservation of nature and Karen culture, and the pursuit of a peaceful and stable life for local communities, something that is denied to them by Myanmar government laws and military ambitions.”

Popular referendums have in many areas proved to be a powerful and decisive way to galvanise community resistance. In northwestern Ecuador, a campaign called “Quito Sin Minería” brought together rural communities in a campaign calling for a national referendum on mining in the mega-biodiverse Chocó Andino region. In 2023 over 60% of Ecuadorians voted to ban mining in that area. Just a couple of years earlier, the city of Cuenca similarly achieved a referendum at the provincial level, in which over 80% of voters said “no” to mining in the region’s highland watersheds. This win continues to bolster the resistance movements of Cuenca today, even in the face of increasing pressures from the state and corporations to advance grand-scale mining. 

Regional and global networks and convergences are a key way to articulate and solidify collective action, reflection and strategy. The Foro Social Panamazónico (FOSPA) is a biannual regional platform bringing together Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, social movements, and civil society from across the Amazon basin. Similarly, in the Asia-Pacific region, the Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN) provides a collective space for civil society organisations to tackle shared social and environmental concerns and elevate the voices of frontlines. 

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) is a rapidly growing network now with members in 40 countries. GARN’s organisational structure is grounded in and centres the authority of Indigenous peoples and stands for transforming systems in vision of a regenerative society for all beings on planet Earth. La Via Campesina is an international movement of peasants defending and building food sovereignty across the Global South and North. The Thematic Social Forum on Mining and Extractivism is a solidarity network of people from mining-affected communities which has so far held three global assemblies – Johannesburg (2018), Indonesia (2023) and Brazil (2025). While the Global Tapestry of Alternatives weaves anti-capitalist, post-capitalist, localised democracy groups committed to transformative alternatives.

Bringing people face to face in international convergences around official events like the United Nations COP climate summits has helped to forge cross-sectoral alliances of civil society groups working in different thematic areas of the “just transition.” In November 2025 tens of thousands, including YLNM, converged around the COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in a huge show of unity for a liveable future:

“Our process brought together more than 70,000 people who make up local, national, and international movements of indigenous and traditional peoples, peasants, Indigenous Peoples, quilombolas, fisherfolk, traditional peoples who live from sustainable forest extraction, shellfish gatherers, urban workers, trade unionists, homeless people, babassu coconut breakers, terreiro peoples, women, the LGBTQIAPN+ community, young people, Afro-descendants, the elderly, and peoples from the forest, the countryside, the peripheries, the seas, rivers, lakes, and mangroves.”

People’s Summit March in Belém do Pará, Brazil, November 2025. Photo: Liz Downes

5.8  Celebration of Life

Yes to Life involves the celebration of life in all its diversity – creating movements and resistance that cannot be stamped out. 

The struggle in Tolima, Colombia against mining giant Anglogold Ashanti has gradually evolved, and since 2011 has brought together diverse parts of civil society to flourish into an annual celebration: a protest of art, music and political-environmental education in the city of Ibagué. The colourful Marcha-Carnaval, held on World Environment Day, draws thousands of people together in defense of Life, Water and Land and in opposition to state extractive policies in the name of the “green energy transition”. With national and even international participation, this event makes resistance against mining both attractive and joyful – a flame that cannot be easily put out. 

In Toronto, Canada, a bi-annual event called the River Run is held by the Grassy Narrows First Nation and allies in protest against the diverse extractive industries which impact their lands. The Grassy Narrows community has suffered many traumas including forced displacement, destruction of sacred sites through hydro damming, mercury contamination, logging, and mining expansions. They have also held a long-running blockade against extraction that functions as a language school and cultural center. Mercury poisoning in particular has a multi-generational impact on health within the community. Hence this family-friendly event is both about political action and celebrating survival. 

In Western Australia, a powerful initiative called “Reclaim the Void” was launched in 2022 by elders of Ngalia communities near Leonora – a town in the infamous “Goldfields” region where mining has occurred for over 150 years and which currently hosts over 60 operating open pit mines, some among the largest in the world. The region is riddled with the scars of old mines. The project brought people together in crafting “camps” in town and on Country (Ngurra) to weave huge brightly coloured rugs from discarded fabrics which were then exhibited in significant cultural and meeting places as a celebration of survival and reconnection to Ngurra and Tjukurrpa (law). 

 6. Transforming the Global System

Thematic Social Forum convergence in Indonesia, 2023. Photo: Guadalupe Rodriguez

Making local alternatives possible requires global structural change. As we have said in another position paper on the Just(ice) Transition, “we can’t mine our way out of the climate crisis — but we can build post-extractive futures that sustain life with dignity for all, and the inherent rights of Nature to exist, thrive and regenerate everywhere.” 

This means changing the entire way we conceptualise our political and economic systems at a global level, as well as supporting democratically owned energy transition initiatives at the grassroots level. At the very least we must decentralise the production of renewable energy, demand the reduction of consumption by the world’s richest and most industrialised countries, and centre the imperative to stop creating sacrifice zones in the name of climate action, energy security, national security or AI. 

 

6.1 Degrowth: Reducing Demand for Extraction

The demand for extraction is created by production for the sake of profit, not need, and for the manufactured consumption patterns of the Global North and its industrial imperialism. This occurs at a relentless cost to the Global South and the marginalised communities within richer countries. 

Degrowth is an increasingly accepted umbrella term for one movement that posits scalable alternatives to the hegemonic global economic system. In a previous position paper we state: “the concept of degrowth is based on an internationalist justice-based perspective, and sheds special light on the necessity for the world’s most affluent regions and classes to reduce their (over)consumption and to tackle the unequal ecological exchange (extraction) of materials and labour from the poorer regions of the world.” 

Degrowth is rooted in anarchism. While propagated to some extent in academia, the concept is rarely mentioned in top-down, hierarchical climate mitigation discourse. It has largely (and rightly) fallen on grassroots groups to do the cutting-edge work of developing degrowth models and practices which have real social benefits.

Often these same groups are also doing justice work supporting the frontlines of extractive sacrifice zones. For example, the Australian Degrowth Network – which has emerged over the past few years in one of the world’s biggest mining jurisdictions – works in alliance with First Nations and anti-extractive networks while supporting community-building and local economic initiatives.

 

6.2 Just(ice) Energy Transitions 

What does a Just Transition mean to us? As we expressed in our previous paper on this topic: 

“A Just Transition means a transition shaped by peoples and communities, not imposed on them. It must centre the right to say no to destructive projects and the right to self-determination over territories, livelihoods, and ways of life. A just transition must also honour the Rights of Nature, recognising that ecosystems are not resource banks for human use, but living relatives whose well-being determines our own.” 

Farming communities in the “food basket” of southeastern Nigeria have for decades been fighting unscrupulous, mostly state-owned coal mining companies. In 2022, a prolonged action by women of the community of Owukpa resulted in the closing down of the coal mine operating right on their back door. However, by this time the mine and other regional operations had caused years of accumulated damage, particularly air and water pollution, which continues to impact on people’s health. 

Despite this, and despite a serious regional conflict which has made the area unsafe to live in for many and caused significant displacement, farming people are resilient and determined to resurrect their livelihoods. In January 2025, YLNM, in partnership with the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, distributed multifunctional solar power systems to 40 women in Owukpa. The beneficiaries noted that these systems would help improve their homes and businesses.

“We advocate for an energy transition that is both ecologically and socially just. Harnessing Nigeria’s vast solar and wind potential would provide clean, renewable alternatives to coal, offering communities like Owukpa a way forward without the environmental and health hazards associated with coal mining.” 

 

6.3 Corporate Accountability

We live in an age of economic imperialism and global corporate hegemony. Both must be dismantled in order for a life-sustaining future to be possible. Most attempts at regulation of transnational corporations come from within the power structures that maintain corporate hegemony (eg. so-called certification schemes). However, from the grassroots it is possible to address the impunity of companies and call out, or even directly disrupt, supply chains that cause harm. 

Since genocides such as that in Gaza and Congo and the increasing geopolitical and military tensions around the world, organisations such as YLNM have worked hard to draw attention to the money flows and mines-to-weapons pipelines which make these wars and conflicts so lucrative, as well as the impacts of mining expansions at all stages of the supply chain. Once these patterns are identified, strategic activism can bring accountability to the supply chain. This may include boycotts and sanctions, targeted protests and actions, market and shareholder actions, and legal cases. 

Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is a highly problematic international system of secretive tribunals that allows corporations to sue states outside of domestic and international law. The grassroots is gaining traction in challenging this system. In April 2026, over 340 civil society organizations called for a “global coalition to break free from ISDS” ahead of the Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. 

The international food sovereignty network La Via Campesina says: “People’s sovereignty, dignity, and justice cannot coexist with corporate impunity. The challenge before us is not just to document violations but also to interrupt the systems that make them profitable. To do that, we must reclaim the language of law, the tools of economics, and the principles of international solidarity—not as abstractions, but as weapons in the struggle for liberation.”

7. The Importance of Global Solidarity

Local mining and extractive frontlines often find themselves facing a perfect storm of challenges – corporate bullying and divide/conquer tactics, greenwashing and corruption, aggressive state-driven economic campaigns, environmental and social impacts, and – last but not least – violence and militarisation, which may be associated with any of these other factors.  

Communities struggling against violent conflict often find themselves isolated from outside resources and wider advocacy and support networks. This may be because areas are considered too volatile or dangerous; because state or corporate powers actively try to prevent anyone supporting frontlines; or because whole regions are impacted by violence and political conflict, causing overwhelm among human rights and environmental defence networks. Grassroots networks may be too stretched or under too much threat of persecution themselves to be able to support all the frontlines in crisis. 

Bigger NGOs often have comparatively more resources, but their hierarchical structures, competitive business models, funding conditions and self-censorship often create restrictions on the kinds of struggles they can or are willing to support. Without strong local connections, international NGO resources risk being detached from reality, or channelled simply to the most “charismatic” struggles which can attract media and donors – leaving less visible communities struggling on their own. 

For these reasons, when frontline communities are in crisis, it is the grassroots civil society organisations with strong global partnerships who are often best placed to connect struggles, amplify voices and enact timely responses. Global solidarity networks play a key role in making struggles visible, channeling resources to the frontlines that need them the most, supporting life-sustaining local economies, and celebrating alternatives to extractivism. 

Global networks are also well placed to amplify local issues of human rights abuses and environmental impacts, and connect these issues to activist groups who are working to dismantle the root problems and create alternatives at the systemic level. This means tying local struggles to the wider picture of growth-based economies, the imperialist ambitions of the Global North, and the global military-industrial complex. Local voices and stories no longer remain contained, isolated or unheard – they help to focus the energies of those with the most resources to act, and to create a world where extractivism, war, violence and militarisation are alien.

This is exactly why YLNM started twelve years ago from solidarity connections between Latin America and Africa. Now, we are a network of communities and organisations that span the globe.

8. Conclusion: A Future Rooted in Life!

 

As we have seen through this weaving of stories, “Yes to life” means a diverse range of concrete things that communities around the world are demonstrating and implementing in order to ensure a liveable future. 

 

Yes to life means … 

 

• Yes to post-extractive, local economies and livelihoods; 

• Yes to grassroots- and Indigenous-led solutions to the climate crisis;
• Yes to a truly just transition for people and planet; 
• Yes to protecting and restoring environments on which livelihoods depend;
• Yes to protecting and restoring biodiversity and waterways for the sake of the rights of all life to exist, persist and thrive;

and

• Yes to empowering economic models and practices based on kinship, collaboration and reciprocity with nature! 

 

We know that a fully just and sustainable transformation towards a better future cannot emerge from the same extractivist system that caused the collective crisis we’re in. Such a transformation must dismantle corporate power, challenge neocolonial dependencies, and redefine our relationship with nature based on care, solidarity, and ecological balance. 

 

As YLNM, we stand for and strive towards the nurturing of a global, systemic socio-ecological transformation which is empowered and led by the grassroots. 

 

We work together across the Global South and North to envision and forge the conditions for a human society that:

• Upholds the right of local communities and Indigenous peoples to say NO to mining and other destructive projects, on the basis of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent;
• Ensures protection for environmental and human rights defenders (EHRDs); 
• Advances post-extractivist and decolonial alternatives which are guided by planetary limits, peoples’ sovereignty and ecological justice;
• Promotes degrowth and reduced production within industries and sectors which are driving our planetary ecological and social crises;
• Promotes limits on over-consumption, particularly in the Global North;
• Dismantles imperialism;

and

• Recognizes and enforces the Rights of Nature and Earth Jurisprudence as foundational models for sustainable and democratic life on Earth.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report today synthesizing decades of climate attribution research that underscores how heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels makes different types of extreme weather more likely and/or severe. NAS conducted an overview of events like extreme heat, drought, wildfires, tropical cyclones and convective storms. They also touch on event impact attribution, the leading edge of the field that quantifies how climate change has contributed to specific harms like increased human mortality and economic losses.

The report and its contributors have been attacked by the fossil fuel industry in the lead up to today’s release, the latest in a coordinated campaign by Big Oil to undermine climate science and intimidate scientists. Companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell are facing mounting lawsuits aiming to hold them accountable for the climate damages caused by their decades-long disinformation campaign. In April, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Harriet Hageman introduced a bill offering sweeping immunity from liability to these major climate polluters.

Below is a statement by Dr. Carly Phillips, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and co-author of multiple attribution studies, including on forest fires in the western United States and global sea level rise.

“Attribution science confirms what billions of people around the world have experienced firsthand—deadly events like extreme heatwaves are occurring more often and tropical cyclones are more intense due to climate change. Despite efforts by the fossil fuel industry and its cronies to intimidate panelists and misrepresent the research, the Academies’ report affirms the scientific consensus: attribution science is based on rigorous peer reviewed methods and provides critical information about how climate change is driving increases in the frequency and/or severity of extreme events.

“This robust research field provides key evidence to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in driving climate change. Congress must not grant Big Oil immunity for climate deception and the harms they knowingly caused that attribution science makes evident. Communities deserve their day in court and no one—including fossil fuel companies that have profited at the expense of people and the planet—should be above the law.”

The attack on attribution science is part of a larger effort supported by the Trump administration to eliminate states’ and communities’ ability to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis, particularly through the courts.

EPA Administrator Zeldin’s attack on the Endangerment Finding, a foundational scientific finding that global warming emissions endanger public health and the environment and thus must be regulated by the EPA, also included baseless attacks on attribution science.

To speak with Dr. Phillips, please reach out to UCS Communications Officer Daela Taeoalii-Tipton at dtaeoaliitipton@ucs.org or 801-808-0759.

Additional UCS resources:

• Peer-reviewed study tracing fossil fuel companies’ contribution to climate change and ocean acidification
• Peer-reviewed study attributing climate change and sea level rise to fossil fuel companies
• Blog post explaining attribution science
• Blog post on accurately communicating about attribution science